“You snore pretty much all night long, babe.”

She took him with her everywhere she went. Charity events, rallies, demonstrations. It wasn’t always easy. He noticed that as soon as he stepped into a room, the mood shifted. Was it because they could tell he was from Germany? Lauren always disputed it afterward: “There are enough Germans in New York who are against Nazi Germany—everybody knows that.”

“But why do they look at me like that, then?”

“Maybe because you’re so much older than me.” She was embarrassed.

That night they went to an exiles’ reading at a German bookstore. There she envied him for being able to understand the pieces the exiled writers were reading from, but he felt out of place. The smile on his face as stiff as cardboard. Toward the end he struck up a conversation with a man named Heinz, a German who had emigrated in the twenties and who was also an amateur radio operator. Pretzels were being served; when the tray came by them Heinz took the last pretzel and split it in half.

“Does it taste like the ones back home?” asked Lauren, who had suddenly reappeared at his side.

“We didn’t have pretzels. Not in the Rhineland.”

“What’s wrong with you?”

“I don’t like gatherings, just in general,” he whispered. “It doesn’t matter who’s doing the gathering.”

“You don’t like people.”

“I like individual people, just not lots of people. I like you.”

It wasn’t true. He didn’t like Lauren anymore.

That night he stubbed his pinky toe against the bedpost. For two seconds there was no pain, then it shot emphatically into his consciousness. Back in bed he pressed himself close against Lauren’s back. Sometimes that’s all he was: a body holding another body in the night. It wasn’t desperation exactly, more like this was now his one connection to the world.

In the morning Lauren pushed the newspaper toward him. “So that was the earthquake we felt yesterday!”

He read the headline: 27 DEAD, 25 MISSING, 200 HURT IN BLAST AT JERSEY PLANT.

Lauren tapped her finger on an article beneath. It mentioned the Black Tom attack of 1916, carried out by German agents. His throat tightened.

“No, Lauren. No.”

“No what?”

“The Germans aren’t capable of something like this. At least not the Germans in America.”

He stood up, knocked against his coffee cup, and was just able to stop it from tipping over. The sudden movement made Princess start barking.

“Hitler is capable of far worse in Europe, Joe.”

The barking. It wouldn’t stop.

“You have to leave now,” he told Lauren roughly.

“I have to leave?”