Buenos Aires: Two years of being stuck in a city that was either muddy from the rain or dusty from the sun. In which you couldn’t make any money if you hadn’t already brought a lot of money with you. He had torn down houses and painted the garden fences of rich exiles. Men with a past. A married couple from Austria let him live in the gardener’s shed of their vacation home outside the city. He kept their garden in good shape. Mowing the grass, trimming the hedges, pulling weeds. Sometimes on the weekends he saw the couple from a distance. He breathed, he slept, he ate beans and rice. Now I’m like Thoreau in his cabin, he thought then. And soon it had been two years. Only when an invitation came from Schmuederrich did he show himself among the Germans. When he had saved enough money, he set out. His plan was to travel to the US via Mexico. It was in Costa Rica that, for the first time, someone took a closer look at his homemade passport. He sat in prison for three days. Yes, he was German. They sent someone from the German Embassy. He believed him but needed proof, which Josef didn’t have. Finally he asked for a telephone and called Dörsam. He knew someone here. Two hours later he was free and had an address in his pocket, which led him to Maria. And then he got the job at the Geographic Institute.

Music in the ceiling fan. He hasn’t done much, just poked through the maps, spreading them over the floor, letting them get out of order, happy that he knows how to produce such things. He still hasn’t learned to deal with the dizziness in the little plane, an old three-engine sesquiplane. They work in a team; he enjoys great esteem. Americano they call him, José the Americano.

Sometimes he flips through the issues of Stern. He’s received them all by now, except for the last one; it should be coming today. He flips through the pages and he searches, even though he already knows there’s nothing in there about him. He’s happy about that. But then why is Dörsam coming?

He pauses when he sees a picture of the German American Bund’s rally at Madison Square Garden. “But they do it in good faith and with a self-evident sense of connection with the motherland.”

How touching.

And all throughout there are women hanging up laundry, demonstrating their ease of movement in advertisements for sanitary towels, and still more women showing off their waists in ads for tights, hands on their hips, legs crossed, back foot up, elegantly modest.