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He fished under the bedside table, fingers skimming over dust and a hairpin and then stopping when they brushed up against something hard.

Clothbound. Paper. A book, without question.

He got a hold on it and pulled it out, lips turning up when he saw the title.

Full smile breaking free when the library card was present in the back. “There, see? I’m brilliant.”

She laughed again and sat on the small chair stuffed into the corner. “And my mother is an absolute slob.”

He didn’t flip through it, afraid to find more eraser leavings that he’d just have to pretend he hadn’t seen.

Because she didn’t seem exactly surprised that he’d found it there.

And there had been swaths of clean floor in front of it before he’d disturbed the dust by pulling it out.

“Only fourteen more. At the pace of one a week, we’ll have discovered them all by the time the leaves turn. ”

She rolled her eyes. “I’ll be too busy with classes to do much searching otherwise, so fine. Do your weekly search.”

Did he wonder where it had actually come from? Why she’d hidden it for him to find? Of course he did. But he didn’t want the answers. They were bound to be things he ought to report but wouldn’t.

He settled for standing, stretching out the kink in his back. “ Aua. I’m out of the practice of crawling about on the floor, it seems.”

The pang traveled straight from his lumbar to his heart. How had that happened? A year ago, he had spent countless hours sitting cross-legged in front of the fireplace or—

Nein. Not thoughts he could afford to think. Not now. Not ever.

He turned to her instead, giving her a smile that would broadcast he was clearly fishing for information as he asked, “So what classes will keep you busy? Are they...graduate level? What degree are you pursuing?”

He was quickly coming to like that challenging glint in her eyes. “ Mais non , Professor. You didn’t answer my question about what you teach, so don’t think I’ll tell you anything about my own pursuits.”

“I am an open book,” he said, arms spread wide. It was true, once. Now...now he was more like those re-covered ones the library had been producing before the invasion. The inside and the out represented two very different things. “I teach literature, when I’m not in the library.”

He expected that glint in her eyes to turn to a sparkle.

He expected her face to light up, given her clear love of both things.

Instead, her face shuttered like windows behind blackout curtains.

“A professor of literature, sent to Paris to tell us what’s verboten .

I imagine you were one of the ones called on, then, to advise Goebbels on his list of books to ban? To burn ?”

The desire to let her see the truth of him blazed so fierce, so strong, that he knew letting it burn free would leave him in ashes.

He bit it back. Doused the yearning with a reminder of a truth far deeper than his own thoughts, his own beliefs, his own philosophy—the truth that if he trusted anyone, anyone else with his secrets, it could mean death for the only person left in the world who really mattered.

How fortunate that he had so many years of practice at swallowing back the truth. At reciting the Party line.

He selected the smile he gave his colleagues when someone from the Ministry hovered nearby. “You act as though Germany is the first country to ever burn books it didn’t like.”

A spark entered her eyes now, but not the one he’d hoped for before.

No, it felt more like one of the sparks of his own denial had drifted to her and set alight the dry kindling of her spirit.

“This is a history you’ve learned well, I suppose?

So you can teach it to your students? Tell me, Professor.

Tell me why burning books is so acceptable. ”

Her mother’s room felt too small, too close, too personal for words like these. He pivoted toward the door, knowing well she’d follow. The walls of books welcomed him, promising him forgiveness for whatever he would say. Because they knew. They knew the truth.

“It has always been a means for victors to control the cultures they defeat, for one thing. The burning of the Library of Alexandria, for instance—”

An incredulous puff of laughter. “Really? I have never in my life heard an intellectual tout that act of horror as a good thing.”

Because it had been a massacre—not of people, but of knowledge. Of the wealth of it. The preservation of it.

He set the dusty book on an end table. “The Church has banned and burned innumerable works through the years. Books that teach heresies or pagan theology—there’s even an account of it in Acts—”

“That is hardly the same—”

“More modern examples, then?” He spun to face her, now that he was certain his own false-title-and-cover were glued firmly in place.

“Perhaps one from your own beloved city? In 1242, twenty-four cartloads of Jewish writings were burned here in Paris. Pascal’s Lettres were burned in the sixteen hundreds for being too free with the secular authorities. ”

Her jaw clenched tight.

His lifted. Just a professor, lecturing a wayward student.

That was all. “Charles I of England declared the burning of books to be a way of suppressing opposition. John Milton, whose Areopagitica is so often quoted as being the ultimate denouncement of censorship, himself proclaimed that only good books ought to be above such treatment and that if a book proved a monster, who denies but that it was justly burnt or sunk into the sea .”

Her arms crossed. “Should I be taking notes, Professor?”

“Who decides what literature is ‘good,’ Corinne? Who decides what is to be censored, what is to be kept from our children, our impressionable, our easily swayed? The Church? The government?”

“The people!”

He’d known she’d say it that way—because that was the answer that fit the pattern.

His smile felt sadder than he meant it to.

He gestured out her darkened window, to the west, to Berlin.

“I was at the first book burning in 1933. Do you know who led it? It wasn’t Goebbels, wasn’t Hitler—they just showed up to cheer it on.

It was the students . It was the people .

They chose. They brought the books, they laughed as they dumped them on the pyres.

They rejoiced at the thought of getting rid of the words they didn’t want to have to consider anymore, the ideas that they said were harmful. ”

The people could be wrong. The people could get so caught up in their own ideology that they forgot that the love of wisdom wasn’t about being right .

She trembled, but he wasn’t fool enough to think it was from intimidation. She was furious. “Ideas cannot be burned . They cannot be destroyed just because a few copies of the books they’re printed in are.”

“It was never about the destruction.” Where her tone had been hot, a bit too loud, his was soft.

Quiet. “It was about the statement. That’s all it’s ever about.

The people—the ones you say have the right to make such decisions—proclaiming that decision for the world to see.

Goebbels has no impossible dreams of destroying every copy of the books they’ve banned.

If he did, we wouldn’t be issued all those stamps with the V for verboten .

The idea is simply to tell the world, ‘These ideas are bad. These ideas are useless. These authors are your inferior, so don’t listen to them. ’”

“But they’re not!” Her voice shook now, too, the fire raging in her eyes, a hand slicing toward the book he’d set down.

“Who decides?” he asked again, quietly. A shake of his head did nothing to dislodge the sorrow his own words lit in his soul.

“If it’s truly the people, then you have no right to your anger.

But I think what you meant to say was ‘each person.’ You want the right to decide for yourself. As I do. As do we all.”

Her chest rose as she sucked in a long breath, fell again as it heaved out. The fire died down as she no doubt retraced the conversation in her mind, realized how he’d led her straight into the answer that fit the pattern, rather than the one she really wanted. “That is what I meant.”

“I know.” He reached again for the book, not opening it or looking at it.

Just holding it at his side to show her he’d leave soon.

“And perhaps that’s a right that we have in nature—the right to make our own choices.

But it’s one we give up, at least in part, when we form societies, when we give governments power, when we agree to abide by the laws those governments set out in return for their defense and administration. ”

Her lips twitched, though not in a smile. “A rather broad paraphrase of Rousseau, though your point is clear. But I did not agree to your government. I did not bind myself to that social contract.”

“But your government did. If A equals B and B equals C...” He shrugged and shifted toward the door.

Paused. “In Germany, it was the people who willingly gave up that right. Who asked for censorship, who led the protests demanding it. If you’re going to rail against injustice, then at least know what deserves your ire.

Not that a few copies of books were burned—but that the people danced around the pyre. ”

He let himself out, not pausing until he was back in the safety of the library.

He should have gone to dinner with the officers. Perhaps he’d have had to play the same role, but at least then it wouldn’t have been to deceive someone he wished were a friend.