“You’re comparing yourself to Gandhi?”

“He sat in jail a long time too.”

He sees a vein start to swell on Carl’s forehead. “I’m trying to have a rational conversation here, man to man, brother to brother.”

“The victor decides what’s right and what’s wrong. Or don’t they? A few miles away the Russians are in charge.”

“Those who are in power aren’t automatically in the right, Josef. We were able to learn that lesson all too well over the past few years.”

He feels a fire in his chest, tearing him in every direction at once.

“You weren’t even at the front, Carl.”

His brother looks at him in disbelief. “Have you ever tried to sleep when there are bombs falling on you night after night? When you’re in a bunker with water up to your waist and you have to hold your kids in your arms?”

His brother is shouting.

And he hasn’t even said everything he wants to say yet. Now he has to be quick, no doubt about it: “Just because you listened to Radio London doesn’t make you a resistance fighter.”

And Carl screams, “Who do you think you are? What are you getting at? Why would you say such a thing?”

And he hears Edith’s footsteps coming closer and then quickly moving away again. He stands up. Carl gets up too. Dishes clatter. He feels his heart pumping and suddenly a barrier has come down.

“You always were an idiot,” he hears Carl saying.

And now he rears back and slugs him. Just like long ago when Carl was a little squirt and easy to beat up—two years are a huge difference at that age. But not anymore. And yet Carl doesn’t hit back now, and he doesn’t shout either. No, Carl reaches up and touches his eye for a second, seems to be checking something, and Josef skulks over to the door and out onto the landing and almost falls down the stairs in shame. Yes, he seems to be stepping into shame, to be sinking into it, and he’s surprised, when he gets outside, in the pitch-black street, that there’s still anything left of him. He feels his face glowing red, his heart hammering in his throat. It’s painful, what kind of an idiot is he, but he doesn’t dare go back, not yet, and so he walks down the street, which mercifully swallows him up. Postwar Germany is saving energy. The darkness does him good.