Epilogue
Loneliness was reverberatingly loud in the apartment next to the Brandenburg Gate. Helene waited a lifetime, but Derek, Alexander,
and Matilde never knocked at the door. They were simply “missing,” like thousands of other Germans in the war.
Helene went back to work. She and Lena rebuilt the library from ground zero, but they had the most important part already:
all the books rescued from the fire.
Mark grew up, and Auntie Amalia was there to support him every step of the way. The members of the living library got together
every five years to recite the books they had memorized. That ephemeral repository was a glimpse of paradise on earth. The
flesh-and-bones books grew old and passed away, yet the nearly immortal volumes in the public libraries throughout Berlin
waited patiently to be checked out and read over and over again.
Helene, too, grew old. Her eyes had seen too much, and they started to fail. Berlin remained divided in two by a wall that
was a daily reminder of their shame.
On her last night, when her body could no longer go on, she put her large-print book aside and stared out the window at the starry sky.
The little lights against the velvety dark had the shape of her children’s eyes, the smile of the husband for whom she had been waiting for so long, the warmth of her parents’ embrace, and the silhouette of her grandparents behind them all.
They called to her, and Helene opened her arms to go to them. Her spirit soared free.
Her body rested in the bed that had lain half-empty for years. Beside it, an open book bid farewell as she ascended into absolute
peace, where humanity’s troubles are all put to rest.