“We are partners,” Silbermann insisted.

“Of course,” said Becker, once again serious. “And so why are you talking to me as though I were still your employee?”

“Have I offended you?” asked Silbermann. His tone was part gentle irony and part mild fright.

“Nonsense,” Becker replied. “Old friends like us! Three years on the western front, twenty years working together, sticking together—you can’t offend me old fellow, at most just annoy me a little.”

He again placed his hand on Silbermann’s shoulder.

“Otto,” he declared in a forceful voice. “In these uncertain times, in this unclear world, there’s only one thing that can be relied on, and that is friendship, true, man-to-man friendship! And let me tell you, old boy, for me you are a man—a German man, not a Jew.”

“But I am a Jew,” said Silbermann, who knew Becker’s fondness for proclamations that had more pith than tact. He was afraid his new partner might go on expounding in his coarse-but-heartfelt way and so miss his train, but Becker was having one of his moments of feeling, and he wasn’t about to give up a single second of it.

“I’ll tell you something else,” Becker declared, ignoring the nervousness of his friend, to whom he had opened his heart more often than Silbermann would have wished. “I am a National Socialist. God knows I’ve never misled you about that. If you were a Jew like other Jews, a real Jew, in other words, then you might have kept me on as general manager, but you would never have made me your partner! And I’m not just the goy of record, either. I’ve never ever been that. I’m convinced there’s been some mistake and that you’re actually an Aryan. Marne, Yser, Somme, the two of us, man! So just let anyone try to tell me that you…”

Silbermann looked around for the waiter. “Gustav, you’re going to miss your train!” he interrupted.

“I couldn’t care less about the train.” Becker sat back down. “I’d like to have another beer with you,” he declared with some emotion.

Silbermann rapped his fist on the table. “Go ahead and have another then, for all I care, just drink it in the dining car,” he snapped. “I have a meeting to go to.”

Becker first let out an offended huff but then said, more compliantly, “As you like, Otto. If I were an anti-Semite I wouldn’t put up with that tone. Like you’re some lieutenant barking orders. The truth is I never put up with it! Not from anyone! Except you.”

He stood up again, took the briefcase off the table, and said, laughing, “And a man like that claims to be a Jew!” He shook his head with feigned amazement, nodded once more to Silbermann, and left the first-class waiting room.