She got back in bed and lay by his side so they could look at each other. She had a crooked line to the right of her nose in the morning because she slept on her side; by around noon the line would be gone.

“Don’t you want to go back to your comfortable life in the Catskills?”

She ignored the question. “Tell me again what it was like back then.”

She always seemed moved when he told her that starting when he was a very young boy he had tended cows in exchange for milk and butter. That’s what things were like. Then at fourteen he was taken out of school, and after that working for the farmer was all he did. He turned over in bed, slipped down to her feet, and started massaging them. He knew she liked that.

“Yes, I know how to milk a cow. Does that make me attractive?”

She laughed. He bit her calf. He crawled over her, his foot in her face. She put up with it—he waited for her to knock his foot away, but she put up with him. Yes, she even started giggling. Now he could feel her nose with his big toe.

“And your childhood, Lauren?”

She crawled out from under him and lay down beside him.

“I was an odd kid,” she said. “My parents told me, they said, ‘You’re an odd kid,’ but they said it lovingly and proudly. I went through a phase where I couldn’t explain anything with words. I’d say I could explain it better if I draw it, it’s simpler that way. They didn’t understand that. Because of course drawing is much harder. But it was true in a way. Back then I had the sense that words weren’t enough.”

He thought about this. Even more unusual, he thought, than the drawing or Lauren’s difficulty explaining certain things was the idea that Lauren told her parents anything at all.

The nights were different now. As soon as the war started all amateur operators had to silence their radios. On the other hand, now Lauren was in his life. As if she had walked in through a revolving door, and the radio had gone out the other side.

She recommended books for him to read.

A tall bookshelf on the one straight wall of the attic room was filled with books. Organized into sections, one of them novels by and about immigrants. He read the titles: Jews Without Money, Call It Sleep, Christ in Concrete. He wondered if Lauren had owned the books before—that is, before they’d met—or had bought them for the express purpose of trying to understand him. He couldn’t bring himself to ask.