The motorboat still lay in its hiding place, listing to one side. Winter’s frost had split the hull, leaving it a shell. Erich hunched in the water, tinkering with the rusted engine, trying to salvage something of his investment. After an hour he accomplished nothing, and abandoned it.

With spring came twenty-thousand Nazi troops in the Rhineland, in disregard of the Treaties of Versailles and Locarno. Erich officially joined Hitler Youth, along with his schoolmates. Herr Schneider, a bald spindly man who led the weekly meetings, taught them to revere Führer, Fatherland, and little else. Erich and the others practiced drills in the yard in front of village hall. It seemed a game at first, chasing down imaginary Jews, slaying the opposition, but after a time Erich began to imagine them all coated in a thin spray of blood.

“Does father believe what they tell us?” he asked his mother one day after school, sitting at their wooden kitchen table.

“Your father is a good citizen. He supports the Führer,” she replied, making him an open-faced pork sandwich—mettbröchen. “He says so in his letters, doesn’t he?”

“I could die,” Erich said, “like Uncle Dieter.”

At mention of her brother she made no reply, only turned away, gazing out the window, seemingly transfixed by the cold sun. She was probably seeing other things, Erich thought; inner things: her brother, lost to the Great War; her sister, lost to Pierre’s father; her husband, lost to the factories that supplied the armies; and he, her only child, lost in battles yet to come.

“You will do your duty,” she told him flatly. She continued staring out the window. Watching her—posture stooped, wisps of gray in her bun, her middle bulging against her faded housedress—Erich for the first time noticed how aged and downtrodden she appeared.

“I’m not good at drills,” he said.

“Then try harder, my sweet.” She placed his sandwich on the table, and swept off to the drawing room for her knitting.

Erich took a few bites before his appetite left him. He retrieved some scrap paper—old tests and homework—from his gray knapsack, along with a stick of charcoal.

He sketched: the soft curve of a neck; luminous eyes; fingers splayed across a violin. He’d drawn the woman in the paintings countless times this year. Though he’d promised Maurice, he longed to return to the secret room. To copy down a better representation than his memory provided; to transmute that woman’s very essence onto paper, for himself.

“Who is she?” His mother appeared behind him, placed a hand on his shoulder. Erich did not answer. “Someone who has captured your eye?” she asked.

“Yes,” Erich said after a moment.

“You have responsibilities,” she warned, and Erich nodded. Then, she picked up one of the drawings. “It is very good,” she said. And she began to smile, for the first time Erich had seen in recent memory.

“Wonderful,” she said.

Next Chapter: Chapter 4: Hailey