And yet it’s all familiar to him, as if he were peering behind a curtain that artificially screened off his life in New York. At the museum in New York he had read about Dakar, had read that for three centuries slaves were sent to America from here.

The tips of his shoes are covered in dust, no matter how often he cleans them.

The money he has left isn’t enough for passage to Buenos Aires. He has someone show him the way to the shipping company’s offices and asks to sign on as a sailor. They laugh at him. “What do we want with a pip-squeak like you?” Then someone takes pity on him and they hire him for a job in the kitchen. Passage and lodging included; no wages. It’s fine with him. The next ship leaves in two days. He checks into a rooming house. Spiderwebs cling to the windows; the mattress lies on the stone floor. Outside, a network of yellow dirt alleyways. Lying down, he says aloud to himself, “Dakar, Dakar,” and feels content. He feels the periodic call to prayer trickle through his body, lies there and listens to the garlands of words, which, because he doesn’t understand a thing, take him to a place beyond all language, a place where he feels an almost physical connection with everything. He thinks of Idrie’s bean pies.

This time he writes the whole family.

Even the cemeteries have palm trees here!

He draws a little palm next to the words and tosses the card into a mailbox on the way to the harbor.

* * *

The work in the kitchen usually lasts all day. Peeling potatoes, chopping onions, running off to the storeroom, taking orders from a Spaniard who calls him José, even when Josef protests. “My name’s Joe.”

“José. Get used to it.”

José it is, then.

Despite it all he feels a rapture that he can’t explain. He is free. For the first time in years. Truly free. He’s not young anymore, true, but he’s not old yet either. He can make a fresh start, and that’s exactly what he plans to do.

The weedy Italian who works alongside him is always friendly but says only gloomy things. “Don’t get any illusions,” he says often and without any context.

“He’s going to meet up with his family,” the Spaniard tells him. “His wife and daughter made it out before the war.”

At night the sky is black and full of stars. He has never seen such a clear night sky, not in energy-saving Neuss and definitely not in New York, where the night sky glowed red.

The Italian tosses his cigarette butt overboard and says, “Tell me your story, Josef.”

Smooth black water beneath them.

“I don’t know my story yet,” says Josef. “I’m still in the middle of it.”