“Just some—some routine stuff,” says Saul. “With Joey.” And now his heart is racing, because it’s as if Sofia knows that tonight was different, that tonight Saul crossed a line he cannot get back over. This is more an intellectual realization than anything else, because there is a blank space in his body where there should be regret, fear, empathy. Saul wants to go to sleep. He wants to dive into the place where Sofia’s hair falls down over her collarbones, to fill his hands with her breasts and his chest with her breath until there is nothing left of himself.

“Fine,” says Sofia. But she turns off the light and turns away from him, and Saul is left to stare at the ceiling.

It would be easy to tell himself that he was torn up over his actions: that the man he attacked, huddled on the floor, holding his face with shaking fingers, would haunt Saul’s dreams. Or that to do his job, Saul has developed a finely tuned emotional system for separating his home life and his work life. Or that he was damaged in some fundamental way, and his violence was a reflection of the trauma of Germany, the helplessness of losing his religion and his culture.

It is harder to know what Saul is learning: that maybe violence just isn’t as hard as it’s made out to be. Maybe there is something human about it. Maybe it is easy.

—

Sofia hears Saul’s breath stretch out as he slips into sleep. But Sofia lies awake, her eyes dry and the sheets heating up beneath her as she tosses and turns. She is not sure why she asked Saul about his work; she knows Family work is never discussed; she has always known this. She knows that her job as the wife of a Family man should be to provide a safe space, an alternative to the vague but perilous danger of leaving a man to his own thoughts. This is not the way, she tells herself, to get what you want.

And then, in an internal voice that sounds like Frankie, what do you even want?

—

Soon it is 1945. Sofia passes a sleepless winter. She is almost twenty-two years old. She begins waking up gasping for air, like there is an anvil crushing her chest. Each time, she stumbles to the kitchen and runs cold water and stares at the stream of it gushing out of the tap until her heartbeat returns to normal. She looks out the kitchen window and grips the edge of the sink and tries with all her might to remember what has frightened her out of sleep. But without fail, she lies awake for the rest of the night, heart upturned to her bedroom ceiling.