PROLOGUE
Chicago, Illinois
Spring 1961
There are eight beads, one for every year of her daughter’s life. Under Bettina’s thumb and forefinger, some of them are rough and some smooth, a few with sharp edges that catch on her skin. They’re cheaply made, bright pink and blue and green and yellow, like sweets. They hang on the soft leather of her camera strap. Bettina has rolled them between her fingertips so often—hundreds of times, thousands, maybe—that each one seems to have its own personality.
As she makes her way through them one by one, she falls into a rhythm of thinking, a kind of reassembling of scenes from Annaliese’s childhood. It’s total immersion, being steeped in the texture of a regular life, the wondrous light of ordinary moments flooding Bettina’s mind.
First bead.
At one year old, Annaliese has the full cheeks of a healthy baby, pinkened by sharp sea breezes and her mother’s milk. She takes her first faltering steps, and when she succeeds at crossing the threshold from the kitchen to the front room, her gummy smile changes the shape of her face, sparks her eyes into knowing.
At two she loves to torment Eberle, the cat, yanking his tail until he turns on her, quick to betray the child’s trust. Anna’s damp fingers grasping at fur, pulling on bone; she doesn’t understand yet that she has the power to cause pain.
When the child is three, Bettina pictures her daintily placing the fallen petals of the old Rosa rugosa into her mouth, barely hesitating, turning the velvet petals on her tongue, willing to try anything.
Anna is bright, unstoppable, and at age four she holds court over the other children in the crèche, pretending to read stories aloud and lecturing them with a pursed mouth. Her baby belly is gone, her legs lengthening. She will be tall.
When she is five years old, she discovers the magic of the letters on the page, their clusters beginning to create meaning and momentum; words have become stories. She holds her grandfather’s dusty books in her palms, a grave look on her face. The old German script is indecipherable, but she knows now that one day she’ll be able to read these books from beginning to end.
At age six she swims with a friend off the beach in Binz, the decrepit mansions towering above the shoreline, the waters of the Baltic swirling around her thighs, her muscles pressing against the current that tries to bully her out into the ocean, carry her northward, away from her island home.
Bettina hesitates, eyes closed.
By serendipity, the seventh bead on the strap is a multifaceted one, the same size as the others but from a different manufacturer. She often pauses here, rolling it between her fingers. Should this pause lead her mind in other directions, she invariably wonders, or should she keep going on her trajectory? It is the seventh bead, so that means Anna is seven years old and it is 1960, but the child is not aware of what this means. She does not know about the Cold War—though she will have learned about the revolution in Cuba, its young socialist government. This has been celebrated all over East Germany with parades, striped flags snapping in the wind. So today, Bettina’s mind takes her to an image of the Young Pioneers, and she sees her daughter with a blue kerchief knotted at her chin. She is singing, her chest swelling with each inhalation, giving it her all, her voice warbling and high—her view of the world narrow, shaped by the island, by her history, by German history.
The last bead now. Eight.
At eight, her daughter is licking her lips as she scrapes the lead of her pencil across the checkered pages of her schoolbook, doing her homework. Does she still sleep in the little room that was once the maid’s room in better times, long before the First World War, or has she moved to a bigger room that can fit a desk? Perhaps she does her homework on the dining room table, where two generations of the Heilstroms sat to take their evening meals.
Bettina’s mind wanders like a swimmer reaching for some murky underwater spot, and she tries to bring herself back into her invented moments, grasping blindly. She has a rule when she completes this ritual: Only good thoughts, and no regrets.
She sees her daughter in the little museum in Stralsund, a hand-knit sweater hanging from angular shoulders, head turned toward an old photograph on the wall. She loves art . . .
Bettina snaps open her eyes. Maybe Anna loves art, but maybe she loves numbers?
She screws her eyes shut: Annaliese’s lips are parted, her concentration intense, just like her mother’s. She is looking at a picture, a picture of—
Outside, a car honks in the trash-strewed street. Bettina jumps up, chilled, irretrievably distracted. It’s April, and the weather in Chicago is raw. If she saw her daughter on the street, she might not even recognize her. An ocean divides them, and the years have passed unobserved but for these beads, the cheap plastic a constant reminder of what could have been and what is not.
PART ONE
1
Rügen, Germany
Spring 1943
Bettina rests her bicycle against a wall and unhooks the basket from the rear. A throng crowding the square emits a buzz like cicadas, the sound swelling and shrinking with the direction of the wind. It must be years since so many people congregated here, perhaps since before the war began. She wishes she’d brought along her father’s camera, but she was running late and forgot it on the sideboard. A haphazard regiment of soldiers sits on wooden chairs on a podium while a full band plays, but the music is barely discernible above the noisy chatter. Five or six officers wearing dark uniforms stand on the platform, hands on hips. Red banners hang from the cobbler’s and the tailor’s: DEUTSCHLAND ÜBER ALLES. People line the edges of the square, holding long poles with flags at the top embroidered with white swastikas and lined with heavy black fringe.
Yesterday someone slipped a leaflet under the door of her family’s shop, proclaiming, Die tausendjährige Eiche kommt nach Saargen—“The thousand-year oak is coming to Saargen.” In all the town squares throughout the Reich, oak trees are being planted as symbols of the Führer’s vision for Germany. Belatedly, Bettina’s island village is to get its first one that afternoon. Her father is at home in bed, unable to move about, coughing alarmingly dark streaks of blood into his handkerchief.
“Are you sure, my love?” he asked when she told him she was attending the ceremony. The whites of his eyes were the color of old egg yolk, and his lips had lost their fullness. “I don’t believe what the radio is telling us. Things seem dire, no?”
What he wasn’t saying was that he worries constantly about how she will fare once he is gone—a young woman alone in the world, a country gone to ruin. She took his hand in hers. “Oh, Papa. I’m seventeen! I’ll be fine, really.”
Searching his daughter’s face, he smiled. “Hm. You always did have a strong will. Too late to change that now. But be careful, you hear? Anyway, who knows—maybe I’ll live to see the end of this goddamn war after all.”
Now the sky is turning the color of steel as the afternoon sun sinks beyond the horizon. Bettina hugs her coat to her body and looks around her for a decent vantage point. That’s when she spots a regular customer from the fish shop, Werner Nietz. Every Friday afternoon he comes to the store, and he always chats with Papa; at least he used to. Now her father is too weak to work anymore, and Werner conducts his business with Bettina. She had long noticed the dreadful limp, his pale poet eyes. Though he is much younger than her father, he reminds her a bit of him: barrel shaped, gentle. She used to wonder why he wasn’t fighting (almost all the men from the village are gone), but over time she realized the limp, of course, explained everything.