Hans falls in love with the voice of Sarah in 1905 in Berlin. She marries Hans's best friend Ernst Kroll. Because he fell in love with Sarah, Hans does not marry. In 1939, Ernst and Sarah go underground to live in the slum of Berlin. In 1943, in the south of France, waiting for an Italian ship to take them to Lisbon, Ernst decides to kill a Nazi. Before doing the killing, he has a dream of a dybbuk, a lost soul, which persuades him to do the killing. Sarah decides to return to Berlin to find the only other man she knows. She finds Hans. They marry and go to Lisbon, and then New York and then Del Mar, where Sarah's granddaughter Mary Ann lives. There she confesses that she had slept with Hans when he sculpted her naked in 1918. Hans dies. The epilogue concerns the great-grandson Jacob, who marries a woman named Carol, who kicked him out of her home three times. A year before Carol divorces Jacob, he sleeps with their maid, Mirasol. Mirasol has a child, but her husband divorces her because the child is half white. After Jacob's divorce becomes final, she appears bringing her child to Jacob, and they marry.