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scraping the breast bone, she could feel her mother’s hand loosening her grip. Maman had fainted and for a moment something close to panic overtook her until she reminded herself that, unconscious, her mother was free from pain.
    The procedure took twenty minutes. There were operations that could be performed well and fast, but this was not one of them. The whole of the diseased structure had to be removed, the surgeon said afterwards, and he could not afford to miss anything. ‘I can amputate in under two minutes,’ he said. ‘But with this, no half measures will do. If the reoccurrence of the mischief is to be prevented…’
    Rosalia was so hopeful then. The surgeon assured her that the operation had gone well and showed her how to dress the wound, applying a large, thick compress of charpie to the sutures and binding it on with a flannel roller. It didn’t take long for blood to appear through all the bandages. Maman’s face had lost all its colour and her limbs all life. The assistants carried her to her bed, and Rosalia was told to change her dressings every two hours and watch for signs of infection, for the weakening of the body.
    At midnight her mother opened her eyes, but she did not seem to know where she was.
    ‘He is standing by the window,’ she kept saying.
    ‘Who is?’ Rosalia asked. All she wanted was to throw herself into her mother’s arms, to hide her face in her breasts the way she did when she was a child. Instead she could still hear the knife scraping against the bones.
    ‘He is pointing at his heart.’
    Her lips were parched and she drank a few sips of water. ‘I am going with him,’ she said. ‘I have to.’
    Rosalia tried to quiet her. The surgeon had assured her the operation was a success. The cancer was removed, all of it. ‘You must be strong, Maman,’ she pleaded. ‘You cannot leave me alone. You cannot leave your only child.’
    ‘I have to go,’ her mother whispered and closed her eyes. ‘He is waiting for me. He will take me away.’
    Seeing that the blood had penetrated the dressing again, Rosalia replaced it with a fresh one. Maman did not open her eyes, but she no longer seemed in pain. Perhaps, Rosalia thought, the crisis had passed. She promised herself not to fall asleep, but the silence and her mother’s calm, soft breaths proved too much. When she woke up, startled, it was still dark. The windowpanes were covered with the white, intricate patterns she loved to watch in Zierniki where the windows froze for most of the winter. Beautiful white ferns, branches of trees with spiked leaves, flowers of tiny petals that reminded her of figures her father drew to amuse her: pentagons, hexagons, octagons.
    The room was silent and still. Death she thought was like that. A moment of loss too profound to comprehend. A moment in which love fuses with pain. A moment from which there is no now and no future. Nothing but memories of the past, crumbling and fading with time.
    She didn’t have to touch Maman’s face to know she was dead.
    Just as she did on winter days in Zierniki, Rosalia breathed at the windowpane. When the ice petals melted, she peered through the hole and saw a boy pass by. He was carrying a lantern carved out of a turnip, slits in its side let out enough light for him to see where he was going.
    There were a few other objects in Rosalia’s travelling chest but these would remain unpacked, a testimony to the temporary nature of her stay in this Berlin palace: a smallwooden star she had found among her mother’s things; her father’s snuffbox with the Rights of Man engraved on the lid; a black silhouette of Kosciuszko’s profile and three sketches of Napoleon in a wreath of oak leaves – her father’s heroes.
    These treasures Rosalia kept locked in a mahogany box, underneath her clothes in the trunk. It was a flimsy hiding place. Any of the servant girls might want to go through her things, try on her dresses or petticoats. Smell her rosewater or