“Can I help you, Edith?”

“Washing clothes isn’t a man’s job.”

“It isn’t a woman’s either.”

She keeps scrubbing as if he hadn’t said anything.

He doesn’t give up: “I would have my clothes picked up once a week. A boy would come by and then drop everything off again the next day, clean and pressed.”

She keeps scrubbing.

“Nothing fancy about it. Wasn’t expensive.”

Again he regrets what he said. He slips out of the laundry room without another word. Soon afterward he’s outside on the street.

There are no sidewalks. In the rubble and in the footstep-flattened dirt, children are crouched down playing marbles. The air smells of potato peels and dust.

The folded-up letter is crammed in his pants pocket. A few blocks away he stares at a pile of rubble, what’s left of a building that collapsed. When he’s sure he’s not being watched, he risks a few steps into the rubble heap, crouches down, and digs a little hole with his hands. He lights the letter on fire and waits until it has crumpled into black scraps of ash. Back on the street he knocks the dirt from his pants.

At the train station, where he means to call Dörsam, government officials are standing around checking bags. He turns around immediately, heads back to the brick house on Sternstraße.

The house casts a blue shadow over everything. At the northern edge of the property is a shed. Next to it, a chicken coop. He can hear clucking and fluttering sounds coming from inside, a strange yet comforting ruckus. He sits down on the bench in the garden and waits.

He’s good at waiting; for eight years he did nothing else. He closes his eyes and is overcome with sadness, sadness that has something to do with Carl, with the look Carl gives him, his two eyes drifting apart. He’d like to give Carl a reassuring pat on the back and say, as he might have in New York, Relax. Let’s have a good time.

Someone is shaking him by the arm. He must have fallen asleep.

“If you’re planning on staying with us for a while, you have to go get registered. It’s the law. I’ll have hell to pay if I let somebody live here who isn’t registered.”

Josef, still half asleep, looks up at Carl. Upstairs in the kitchen window he sees the curtains fall back into place.

“I don’t have papers.”

“You don’t have papers?”

Josef shakes his head.

Carl starts to say something, and then, without a word, he lets out a sigh. Takes a few steps across the yard, as far as the shed, thinking. A quick glance at Josef. “If you wouldn’t mind helping me move a table, that would be nice.”