Summary: Chapter 4

Oskar’s grandma writes a letter to Oskar dated September 12, 2003. She’s at the airport and wants to tell Oskar everything. 

As a child in Dresden, Grandma finds a letter with no addressee while bringing in the mail. She opens it and finds a fifteen-year-old letter from a prisoner in a Turkish labor camp. Grandma hides the letter and tells no one about it. She wonders who the sender might be and why they were imprisoned. 

She asks her father to write her a letter. Puzzled, he complies, writing that he hopes that one day she experiences doing something she doesn’t understand for someone she loves. 

She next goes to the jail, where her uncle works, in order to get a handwriting sample from a murderer. Grandma and her uncle trick a prisoner into writing a letter by asking him to write an appeal for early release. 

Unsatisfied with these samples, Grandma asks for letters from everyone around her, including her grandmother. Delighted with this opportunity for connection, her grandmother writes down her life story. The letter includes an anecdote about a ruby bracelet her grandfather gave her that was too big for her. Her grandfather meant to convey the size of his love in the oversized bracelet, but Grandma’s grandmother couldn’t wear it. She promises that if she ever gets Grandma a bracelet, she’ll measure her wrist twice. Grandma tries to find connections between the letters.

Grandma moves to America. Two months later, she runs into Thomas. Thomas was a friend of Grandma’s sister, Anna. Grandma once stumbled upon Thomas and Anna kissing. She told Anna that she had seen them, and Anna made her promise not to tell anyone. Grandma asked if she could watch Anna and Thomas kiss, and Anna agreed. Thomas had also been included in Grandma’s letter collection. His letter, addressed to “Anna’s sweet little sister,” described his dream to marry Anna and become a sculptor. 

When Grandma approaches Thomas in the bakery, she asks if he is Thomas from Dresden. Though he tries to deny it, she knows it’s him. He reveals he no longer speaks. She asks if he became a sculptor like he dreamed, and he shows his “No” tattoo. Thomas asks if Grandma will pose for him, writing the question in German. Grandma realizes they’ve been speaking in English all afternoon. She agrees to using German. 

Thomas’s apartment is full of animals. Grandma removes her clothes, and Thomas scrutinizes her. He poses her body. The next few days continue in the same pattern. It becomes evident that Thomas has actually been sculpting Anna.

As the weeks progress, Thomas touches Grandma for longer times as he poses her. He writes that he’s trying to find a compromise. Grandma interjects in her letter here that she’s including this part because she knows Oskar will understand, and he’s the only one she trusts. Grandma realizes that when Thomas touches her, he’s trying to sculpt her so he can fall in love with her. Eventually, touching becomes sex. Describing the scene, Grandma asks why anyone makes love.

Grandma asks Thomas to marry her. He displays both his palms to her so that they reveal “Yes” and “No.” They agree never to have children. They marry the next day and never speak in German again.

Analysis: Chapter 4

Grandma and Thomas’s accounts of their reunion do not quite match, raising questions about whose account is the more reliable. Because Thomas does not acknowledge that he once knew Grandma in Dresden, not to mention the strangeness of his account, it is likely that Grandma’s more detailed version offers the truth. Thomas does not appear to have a desire to lie but rather a desire to avoid examining the truth. As seen in Chapter 2, when he’s uncomfortable, Thomas uses ambiguity to maintain distance from his present life, and his incomplete account of his engagement again shows this desire for distance. Similarly, his sculpting of Anna while looking at Grandma demonstrates his willingness to bend the truth in order to live more comfortably with his emotions. In contrast, Grandma states that she trusts Oskar, which means she’s willing to show him the truth even when, as is the case of her love story with Thomas, it’s not particularly beautiful. For reasons not yet clear, Grandma has not turned to fantasy to process her grief, choosing instead to focus on reality.

Although Grandma clearly plays an important role in this novel, we still haven’t learned her name. Instead, she has become defined by the roles she plays in other people’s lives. Of course, Oskar thinking of his grandma just as “Grandma” is a completely normal thing for a nine-year-old to do. His understanding of Grandma only in terms of her role in his life mirrors how Grandma sees her own grandmother at that point in her own story, as a loving fixture in her life, not necessarily having a story of her own. However, this chapter makes clear that ever since Thomas met Grandma, he has thought of her only in terms of her relationship to those around her, as “Anna’s sweet little sister” or as the mother of his son, which reveals that Thomas doesn’t see Grandma as an individual person. At the time of their reunion, Thomas understands Grandma only through her relationship to Anna, which explains his attempt to physically sculpt Grandma into Anna. He sees Grandma’s existence in his life as reliant on Anna’s and therefore tries to ignore the differences between them.

Various characters express their love for Grandma in this chapter, revealing the importance of truth in loving someone. In Grandma’s grandmother’s letter, she notes that in her father’s desire to express his love through an excess of rubies, he ignored the actual size of her wrist, making the resulting bracelet impossible to wear. Metaphorically, his love didn’t fit his daughter because it was based on a fantasy of what he found desirable, not the truth of who his daughter was. In contrast, Grandma’s father expresses his love for Grandma by writing the letter she asks for without even understanding why, an act that involves trusting his daughter’s needs. He doesn’t have to understand his daughter’s reasons to give a genuine token of love. In light of this, Grandma’s question about why people “make love” appears not to be about sex but about love that has to be effortfully “made.” As revealed by his sculpture, Thomas literally poses grandma to make her seem more like Anna. He speaks of compromise because he can only love Grandma if she’s like Anna. This fantasy doesn’t stand up to the litmus test of true, organically-created love established by Grandma’s grandmother and father.