THEIR DAYS AREN’T YET IN ALIGNMENT. THE FAMILY IS SIX hours ahead of him. He drags after them, dead tired, and at night turns restlessly in bed while they’re already peacefully asleep.

Mornings at six he hears Carl whistling merry melodies. He briefly wakes up, rolls over again, and goes back to sleep until ten. Carl returns shortly before noon, at which point Josef has been up for just two hours. Once Carl says, “My dear man, we’re always tiptoeing around to keep from waking you.”

“It doesn’t seem like tiptoeing to me. But that aside, noise doesn’t bother me.”

The heat has made its way inside, filling each room like a thick liquid. His scalp is burning. Sweat runs down his face.

Carl gamely continues wearing suit and smock and seems to be the only one not sweating. He looks like a character from a book.

There’s a white line of salt on the nape of Edith’s neck. Josef can’t stop looking at it.

He spends the morning hours with her. It’s going better and better between them, a good reason to get up a bit earlier every morning. Little by little they find things to talk about, from the German goods and foodstuffs for sale on “Sauerkraut Boulevard” in German Yorkville (she finds this funny) to the preparations for the daughter’s birthday (sugar, butter, and cocoa need to be stored up weeks in advance!). All the while, Edith darns socks, irons shirts, peels potatoes, mops the floor. Josef offers his help, but she declines every time, amused. She sticks to her opinion that it’s all women’s work. He could tell her that having lived as a bachelor for many years, he has had to perform women’s work himself, but she doesn’t want to hear it. She shakes her head in disapproval. It’s not clear if it’s pity or reproach.

And so he watches. And allows himself to be a little bit intoxicated by her energy, the casual air with which she, like the conductor of an orchestra, exercises control over a hundred different things. Sometimes he thinks the Edith he’s watching doesn’t exist at all. She vanishes into her activity. There’s something girlish about her—not a hint of sensuality, not even innocence; rather, in all her industriousness, an air of something like sleep or a trance.