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by vines. Obelisks and mute stone angels blackened by wreaths of the city’s soot. But to the north of the Misdroyerstrasse gate they are still burying people. The graves are fresh. Mounds and mounds of newly interred German boys shipped back from the East in pine. Officers only. Lower ranks are buried where they fall, and all that comes back to the families is a letter from the Army Information Authority, and if they’re lucky, some personal items. A watch. A pipe. A photograph. Half of an identity disk. Paper flags decorate the ground beside the granite markers. Small flapping swastikas. Sigrid skirts a funeral that is in progress. A clot of family members in black, raising their arms in weak salute as a crew of laborers lowers a plain pine coffin into the earth on ropes. The clergyman in his stiff white vestment is booming out a raw-throated version of the “Horst Wessel Lied.” A dozen yards farther down, workers with spades are busy cutting out more graves from the clay.
    One day a month, she makes the trip here to discharge her responsibilities. Her mother’s grave, she finds, has fingers of dying vines clinging to the marble, and a spiky thicket of pigweed popping up at its base. She pulls out the gloves and old gardening shears from her bag and starts trimming it away, kneeling on a sheet of newspaper so as not to soil her nylons. So much overgrowth. Had she missed a month?
    There are times she thinks of her mother, lying silent in death below her, staring up through empty sockets at the darkness of her coffin. Can she see through that darkness? Can she feel the weight of the daughter above her, on her knees trimming weeds?
    All arms and legs
, she hears her mother saying.
    They were still living in the airy, garden flat in the Südgelände. Her father’s engineering practice was doing well. A turbine contract from AEG had provided for regular trips to the shops and daily stops at the neighborhood butcher.
    “Eat,” her grandmother commanded, rough as ever on the surface, but there was an urgency underneath. Her voice resilient with an underpinning of duty and . . .
what
? Concern, perhaps? Not really affection, but something of the same species. Sigrid was fourteen and skinny as a pole the three women of the house, as Poppa referred to them, were sharing the kitchen table. “All arms and legs,” her mother announced. “Remember? I was the same way before I developed,” she said, as if speaking in code. But Sigrid knew what she meant. Breasts and hips. A woman’s body like her mother’s, all curves. “Eat,” her grandmother said, repeating her command. “The both of you.” She had placed steaming bowls of her famous pea soup with salted pork in front of them, and large cuts of white bread. Sigrid eagerly picked up her spoon. Her grandmother’s pea soup was her very favorite. “Put some meat on your bones,” the old woman advised, “before people start thinking we’re starving you to death here.”
    Sigrid glanced to her mother for permission, and received a quick wink.
Let’s humor the old lady
, the wink said. The Grossmutter. A loud and cranky engine normally, a solid piece of diesel machinery that would till the fields, or plow you over. Either one with efficiency. But that day, as her mother joined Sigrid in devouring those bowls of soup with salt pork, the trio of women formed a comfortably faultless triangle.
    Suddenly, her mother leaned over and nuzzled Sigrid with a kiss. A smile ignited her face, and Sigrid felt herself blush with surprise and happiness. It was not the sort of thing her mother was likely to do. Only when she was in a perfect mood.
    A year later, the stock market crashed, trips to the shops ceased, and Grossmutter was dead. A stroke took her in the kitchen, like the drop of an ax blade. Her body was shipped off to a plot beside her husband in Hanover. They said good-bye to the old woman’s coffin on platform B of Lehrter Bahnhof, just the two of them, because Poppa