The shell shock was thus the easy way to explain why Nadav shattered Wilhelm’s mother’s entire set of Royal Copenhagen china one evening when he returned from work and didn’t like what she served him for dinner, or why he tore up one of Wilhelm’s compositions for school—the one about explorers in the New World—because Wilhelm had left his shoes on the floor, or why he still managed to convince nearly every woman he met, with little more than a smile and a flattering remark, that he was the one thing they needed to make their lives complete—and why, from time to time, he completed them. But only selfless people keep their illnesses to themselves. Others pass them along. Which is why it was Wilhelm’s mother who wound up in a mental institution and first on the list of the doomed.

Like many undeserving people, however, Nadav had done extremely well in life, at least on paper. He was a handsome man with a Clark Gable mustache and truly captivating eyes—bright blue, though they had a certain hard edge to them that could almost cut you. Powerful eyes. After the war and a few long years of academic catch-up, he had managed to enter the university in Vienna, where he studied modern history, and after university he opened a successful business in upmarket cashmere sweaters. Much later in the game, to add insult to injury, he won the Viennese lottery. The papers, not yet propaganda machines but getting there, heralded his victory in headlines on their inside pages: RICH JEW TAKES VIENNA’S MONEY. Nadav was not interviewed for these articles, but someone who had known him from the university was on the masthead of one of the papers and had suggested this interesting angle on the usual lottery-winner story. It was still early. No one had stopped Nadav from winning the lottery. But he realized when he saw the headlines that the best thing to do with Vienna’s money was to ship it out of Vienna, so on the advice of a friend in the business, he opened a branch shop in Amsterdam. He had studied some Dutch in university, inspired by a beautiful woman from Amsterdam with whom he had promptly fallen in love. (She went back to Holland and married a minister and he never saw her again. But she left him with Dutch.) Still, when he came to work one morning in Vienna to find the windows of his main store smashed, he stuck it out.

“Barbarians at the gates,” Nadav muttered at the dinner table that evening. “We’ll see how long we can stave them off.” He had recently finished reading yet another book about his latest obsession, the fall of the Roman Empire.

“What are barbarians?” Wilhelm asked, in a moment of extraordinary bravery. He had heard his father use the word before, distinctly remembered it, but when? Where? He regretted his question as soon as he asked it. Why hadn’t he just waited until later, and looked it up in the dictionary?