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put in a black suit and wasn’t allowed to leave the house or attend the funeral the following week.

Linde
    I cannot remember my father’s hands without dirt under his nails. He was a small, wiry man with a shiny scalp that he protected with a handkerchief in the summer. My parents’ marriage was not happy, largely because he never made much money from keeping the grounds at the von Kamphoffs’ manor. Our house was a rickety one-story affair with hardly enough yard space for a few flowers.
    “At least they could have put you up at the Big House,” my mother, Therese, said so often that my dad and I would finish that sentence aloud for her. This, I see now, could have been a moment of harmony, one in which he could have acknowledged his shortcomings as a provider, and she her futile aspirations. They could have laughed at themselves. Yet my mom’s face grew so hard at our antics that the lightest touch would have caused it to crack and fall away. It was the end of any conversation, any meal, any warmth.
    Of my earliest trips to the Big House, I remember next to nothing, but after I turned four I spent every summer with my father, and every morning I ran along the hedges and bushes and inhaled the strangely heavy scent of the still-closedblossoms. Even though I wasn’t technically allowed to wander the grounds, the von Kamphoffs liked my father well enough not to say a word. They knew that no one else would have done so much work for so little.
    When I turned seven, however, I had to braid my hair and attend school, and let Dad do his work without my good cheer and companionship. Instead of lending him a hand, I sat in the classroom, next to my best friend, Anke Hoffmann, and learned how to write and do math. I felt very important with my new books and my large schoolbag, and instead of collecting acorns or raking leaves I spent my afternoons at Anke’s house. I spent so much time with her that I started to feel like a stranger in my own home.
    The winter after I started school was no winter at all. In the fall Martin Schürholz had often played with Anke and me, but since our Thanksgiving celebration his visits had become less frequent. When he came to Anke’s room, it was only to braid our hair and put his face in our laps. Or we played wedding, and he was the groom and had to kiss us.
    The Vierksen family had been buried on a sunny September day, and at the end of October the sun still made us sweat when we went in our black dresses to Ingrid Bobinski’s funeral. Then the November storms never came, and even on the first Sunday in Advent the windows of our houses were still open and the candles on the pine wreaths put no one in a festive mood. The boys in our village met at night to go swimming in the Droste River.
    That December the villagers got quickly used to the warm weather, but when it was almost Christmas and they still hadn’t rummaged through the dark corners of their closets to retrievetheir mothballed winter coats, they started to get worried. They enjoyed the mild days and even tolerated the flies, which sat on their doors and windows and crept into their bedrooms and hummed around their sleeping babies, but how long could such a blessing last? Winter had to come after all. It had to snow; the canals had to freeze over. The warmer the days got, the more worried the farmers became. Had Helga Vierksen put a curse on Hemmersmoor? Was it time to pay for our sins? The trees blossomed, grass and grains started to push out of the soil—a sudden frost would cost them their harvest. My father shook his head and sighed. In winter he often came home early; the gardens could do without him. Yet the warm weather would not allow him to rest.
    The only woman in the village wearing her black coat was the widow Madelung. She wore black all year, and it was her only coat. Even though the woolen fabric had to be too warm, she wore the coat whenever she left the von Kamphoff manor to walk into the village.
    After the