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like she’ll never forget that winter in Berlin, those walls without windows, those buildings withoutwalls, those gardens growing out of living room carpets, that horse that somebody brought home for meat, that ox attacked by the pocketknives of widows. Like she’ll never forget, worst of all, the day the mountain of bricks in the street exploded—the rubble falling back toward the sky, taking a small man with it, two kids. “Everything tossed like jacks,” she has said. “Everyone coming down in pieces.” An empty pair of shoes. Ten missing fingers.
    â€œYou have told us,” Mutti will remind her.
    â€œBut it happened,” Omi will say.
    She holds her candle very still and nothing moves except the creep of worry and the glisten on her lips.

It’s late by the time Mutti comes home on the back of Arabelle’s bike. I hear the ruckus of her, hear someone from an upstairs room calling “Shhhhh,” and now the baby on the third floor is crying. Gretchen’s face appears in the window across the way, beyond the frozen aprons. She’s tied a scarf around her yellow curls. When she opens the window to get a better look down below, I hear the wheeling rise of the reed high in the song of a zurna. Another Turkish boyfriend for Gretchen, the tattoo artist who lives across the courtyard. Another rule half broken.
    In the courtyard Arabelle presses her big face against my mother’s small one. She holds her arm across my mother’s shoulders, her wire-framed glasses snug in her dreadlocks. She wedges her bike against the wall with one hand, then helps Mutti forward. They move along, the two of them, like someone tied their legs together.
    â€œI’m fine,” Mutti is saying, her words slurred.
    â€œNothing to it,” Arabelle tells her. One door clicks and there are echoes on the metal staircase. There’s no sound, then the sluff of carpet shuffle, then the loose jiggle of the one-screw doorknob, and now they are here, Arabelle’s face like cardamom and Mutti’s pale as moonlight. The two chestnuts of Arabelle’s eyes tell me to be quiet.
    â€œWe’ll put her to bed now, won’t we?” she says, her voice like the low strings of a guitar.
    She’s done this before. She knows the way. It isn’t far, anyway, to Mutti’s bedroom. “We’re home now,” Arabelle says, and Mutti agrees. She sits on the edge of her bed, obedient. She lets me peel away her gray felt coat, her scarf as long as the bedroom. Arabelle slips the boots from her feet. Mutti lies back and we pull both crocheted blankets to her chin. She sighs as if she’s already asleep.
    The kitchen is as dark as Omi left it when she blew out the candle in the jar. Now Arabelle takes her lighter to it and flames the wick and lets her face change colors above the yellow tongue of fire. She sits there tying the yarns of her hair into their Wildstyle, the flame going orange now, now purple.
    â€œShe was down at the canal,” she finally tells me. “Too close to the edge.”
    â€œWhy? Did she say?”
    â€œWho’s Sebastien?” Arabelle asks.
    â€œNever met him,” I say.
Never want to
, I think.
    â€œI don’t know,” Arabelle says. “Really. She just kept saying ‘Sebastien.’ Like he had hurt her somehow, broken some promise.”
    I imagine Mutti out there, without gloves, without a hat for her head, walking along the icy water. I think about how she zags inside her sadness, how that is what sadness is: a zag. If she fell in, the Vopos would shoot her in a minute. If she fell in and sank, none of us would ever find her. She was born too thin, that’s what Omi says. But there’s more to her sadness than that.
    â€œI have bratwurst,” I finally say to Arabelle.
    â€œI wouldn’t mind,” she answers. She moves the jar of light to the left, then back again, as if she is playing chess, or