But something must be left. Years of his life. People survived, even this He ordered Ron to turn at the Victory Column and aimed them down toward the flak towers at the zoo, his eyes still cataloguing the missing. The Kaiser Wilhelm Church, its steeple blown away. Kranzler’s in bits. More people now. The Kurfiirstendamm smashed but recognizable. No glass in the storefronts or the display boxes along the sidewalks, but occasional buildings, roulette winners in the bombing. Left down the Fasanenstrasse.

“This is out of our way,” Ron said.

“I know. I want to see something,” Jake said, his voice edgy, expectant.

A right past the Ludwigkirch, a route he could follow blindfolded, after all the nights in the blackout. The chestnut trees were gone, so that the street seemed in a kind of unnatural glare, clear all the way to Olivaerplatz.

“Stop here,” he said suddenly. They had overshot it, because there was nothing there. For a moment he simply stared, then got out of the jeep and walked slowly over to the pile of rubble. Nothing. Five stories, collapsed, the light brown facade lying now in slabs. Even the heavy wrought-iron-and-glass door had been blasted away. Crazily, he looked around for the caryatids. Gone. A washbasin perched on one of the mounds of broken plaster.

“Is this where you lived?” Liz said, her voice loud in the deserted street. He heard a camera click.

“No,” Jake said. “Someone else.”

They’d only come here a few times, when Emil was away. Afternoons, the leafy branches outside making patterns on the drawn shades. Sheets damp with sweat. Teasing her because she covered up afterward, pulling the sheet over her breasts, even as her hair lay tangled and moist on the pillow, as illicit as the warm afternoon, the room where they shouldn’t be, their time together.

“You didn’t mind before.”