Benita held no reverence for anything old or historic. History was horrible, a long, sloppy tail of grief. It swished destructively behind the present, toppling everyone’s own personal understanding of the past.

Hitler was a lunatic, a leader whose lowbrow appeal to people’s most selfish, self-pitying emotions and ignorance was an embarrassment for their country.

Yet here they were, carrying groceries, holding children’s hands, turning their collars up against the wind. As if their moments of truth – the decisions by which they would be judged and would judge themselves – hadn’t already come and passed.

There is so much gray between the black and the white and this is where most of us live, trying, but so often failing, to bend towards the light.

There is not enough air in the room for Marianne and Elizabeth to share. They have learned this the hard way, but acceptance of the fact has made life easier. Now they see each other twice a year, for a weekend in the early summer and for the American holiday of Thanksgiving.

This music had been played and heard before and would be again, not only here in this church, but in places all over the world, by people living in different circumstances and different times.

Americans can face the world with open arms, Marianne had once said, because the world hasn’t yet come to knock it down.

The child exasperated Marianne with her endless obsession with possession. She seemed to have absorbed the national sense of aggrievement, as if she, personally, were the victim of some great unfairness.

Martin was swept up in the sound – no longer blood and bone, frozen feet and hungry belly, but an empty vessel filling with notes, carried by something older and bigger and more permanent than himself.

They had watched him make a masterwork of scapegoating Jews for Germany’s fall from power and persuade his followers that enlightenment, humanity, and tolerance were weaknesses – “Jewish” ideas that led to defeat.