The Night Travelers

Contents Cover Title Page Dedication Epigraph Act One Chapter One: Berlin, March 1931 Chapter Two: Berlin, March 1938 Chapter Three: Düsseldorf, June 1929 Chapter Four: Düsseldorf, March 1934 Chapter Five: Berlin, August 1936 Chapter Six: Berlin, October 1938 Chapter Seven: Brandenburg-Görden, January 1939 Chapter Eight: Berlin, February 1939 Chapter Nine: Berlin, March 1939 Chapter Ten: Hamburg, May 1939 Act Two Chapter Eleven: Havana, November 1942 Chapter Twelve: Havana, April 1944 Chapter Thirteen: Varadero, December 1948 Chapter Fourteen: Havana, June 1951 Chapter Fifteen: Havana, March 1952 Chapter Sixteen: Arroyo Naranjo, December 1956 Chapter Seventeen: Havana, June 1958 Chapter Eighteeen: Havana, January 1959 Chapter Nineteen: Santiago de Cuba, March 1959 Chapter Twenty: Havana, March 1962 Act Three Chapter Twenty-One: New York, May 1975 Chapter Twenty-Two: Düsseldorf, November 1975 Chapter Twenty-Three: Düsseldorf, August 1981 Chapter Twenty-Four: Berlin, August 1988 Chapter Twenty-Five: Bochum-Linden, April 1996 Chapter Twnety-Six: Berlin, January 2000 Chapter Twenty-Seven: Berlin, March 2014 Chapter Twenty-Eight: Berlin, June 1939 Chapter Twenty-Nine: Oranienburg, January 1940 Chapter Thirty: Berlin, April 2014 Chapter Thirty-One: Pankow, May 2014 Chapter Thirty-Two: Havana, May 2015 Chapter Thirty-Three: Havana, January 1988 Chapter Thirty-Four: Havana, May 2015 Chapter Thirty-Five: Berlin, November 2015 Author’s Note Acknowledgments About the Author Bibliography Copyright Guide Cover Start of Content Title Page Dedication Author’s Note Epigraph Acknowledgments About the Author Bibliography Copyright IV V VII VIII IX X XI XII 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134 135 136 137 138 139 140 141 142 143 144 145 146 147 148 149 150 151 152 153 154 155 156 157 158 159 160 161 162 163 164 165 166 167 168 169 170 171 172 173 174 175 176 177 178 179 180 181 182 183 184 185 186 187 188 189 190 191 192 193 194 195 196 
 
 The Night Travelers
 A Novel
 Armando Lucas Correa
 Bestselling author of The German Girl
 
 
 
 
 
 To Emma, Anna, and Lucas
 
 
 
 Night travelers are full of light.
 —RUMI
 
 
 
 
 ACT ONE
 
 
 
 1 Berlin, March 1931
 The night Lilith was born, winter storms raged in the midst of spring.
 Windows closed. Curtains drawn. Ally Keller writhed in pain on the damp sheets. The midwife clutched Ally’s ankles.
 “This time it’s coming.”
 After the contraction, the very last one, her life would change. Marcus, Ally thought. She wanted to cry out his name.
 Marcus couldn’t answer her. He was far away. The only contact they had now was the occasional letter. Ally had started to forget his scent. Even his face had faded into darkness for a moment. She looked down at herself on the bed as though she were some other woman, as though the body in labor wasn’t her own.
 “Marcus,” she said aloud, her mind increasingly restless.
 After everything they’d been through together, after all they’d said and shared, Marcus had become a shadow to her. Their child would grow up without a father. Perhaps her father had never really wanted her after all. Perhaps this was always meant to be her daughter’s destiny. What right did she have to interfere?
 The night Lilith was born, Ally thought of her own mother. She couldn’t recall a single lullaby, an embrace, a kiss. She had spent her childhood surrounded by tutors, perfecting her handwriting and use of language, learning new vocabulary words and proper grammatical constructions. Numbers were a nightmare, science was dull, and geography left her disoriented. All she cared about was escaping into the make-believe stories that led her on journeys back in time.
 “Join us in the real world, would you?” her mother would say. “Life isn’t a fairy tale.”
 Her mother let her go her own way. She had sensed what Ally’s life would be, and how powerless she was to stop it. Given the direction Germany was heading, she knew that her rebellious, headstrong daughter was a lost cause. With hindsight, Ally could see her mother had been right all along.
 “You’re falling asleep.” The midwife’s agitated voice interrupted her thoughts, her hands stained with a yellowish liquid. “You need to concentrate if you want to get this over with.”
 The midwife was seasoned: she could boast of the requisite nine hundred hours of training, had helped deliver more than one