Then he starts to run. He’s panting, running over the bridge, over the Rhine, then to the old buildings on the opposite bank in Düsseldorf. They stand there like they’ve been glued to each other, the ones he knows from his childhood, the ones that have survived and that now remind him of the buildings in the Bronx, which at the time reminded him of the buildings in Düsseldorf, and now he’s out in the fields, where the air embraces him, humid and warm. He drops onto some hay in a barn, and when he wakes up in the morning he gets up immediately, knocks the dust off his suit, and heads back.

He gets back to Sternstraße around noon, sweaty, sunburned, thirsty, and hungry. The boy opens the door, looks back at his mother. Edith sets down a basket of laundry, smooths the front of her blouse. “Sit. I’ll make you an omelette.”

From the far corner of the living room he hears Carl’s thundering footsteps. A knot immediately forms in his stomach. But Carl is already calling from the hallway: “I’m sorry, Josef. Come on, let’s make peace.” He turns around and throws his arms around his brother’s neck.

28

New York, November 1939

SHE GOT UP OUT OF BED, HER SHORT NYLON NIGHTIE CLINGING to her thighs, charged with static electricity. She had very white legs. He liked her white legs. She opened the window; cool air and the smell of burning leaves breezed inside. At this time of year small piles of them were swept together on the curb and lit on fire.

Frost on the dormer windowpanes, fog from the ocean. Europe was at war. Germany had invaded Poland.

Lauren walked around the room on her tiptoes.

“Why are you doing that?”

“So I don’t disturb anyone.”

“But there’s nobody here.”

“Habit.”

The landlady had broken her leg and was in the hospital, which was why he could spend the night at Lauren’s. For the first time. For him there was something slightly momentous about it.

The view from Lauren’s bed was of the sky, against which the delicate leaves of the evergreens spread out like fans. The trees made him think of Asia somehow. A neighborhood of single-family homes with front yards, barely any immigrants.

* * *

Lauren ran water in the tub, took some soap, and went to work on her underwear. “Primitive.” She laughed. Lauren had taught him that you must only eat soft-boiled eggs with a plastic spoon; to his amazement, any kind of metal, even silver, was all wrong. Once Lauren told him that, as a girl, she had attached wings to her shoulders—an image he could no longer get out of his head.

A wasp came reeling into the room, exhausted from the summer. He watched it with patient sympathy.

“Come back to bed,” he said.