“The teacher is sending the kids off into the woods with the homeless and the unemployed. If that’s how it is, we can in good conscience take them out of school and put them to work in the business.”

He butters a slice of rye bread, adds a slice of sausage, and takes a bite. Notices the look the girl gives him—Carl couldn’t find any better way of going about it. Täubchen has also buttered a slice of bread, but has only another filling slice of bread to lay on top.

“Now you’re free and you still can’t get anything good to eat,” Edith says suddenly.

This isn’t quite true.

“The food at Ellis Island was excellent,” Josef hears himself saying. “We got everything we asked for. Hans Dörsam was our spokesman. He insisted that they honor the Geneva Convention. Starting in 1946 we got our own kitchen and our own cook, we ate sauerbraten, schnitzel, Königsberger Klopse. The food was so good that the guards wanted to eat with us. We sat in the former registry room, a giant room with chandeliers and a view of the ocean.”

It’s all true, but why is he telling them this?

“Why did you want your own cook?” Carl asks.

“It was to make sure that no Jew would be cooking for us.” Dörsam’s words.

It gets quiet, and they look at him as if they are seeing him for the first time.

“You can’t talk like that here, Josef.”

“No, no, you’ve got the wrong idea. The Germans were afraid that someone would poison them.”

Carl clears his throat, exchanges glances with Edith. “Even then, one doesn’t say that.”

He looks at Edith as well, but she stares at her plate.

“No?” he asks and grabs the last slice of bread. “What does one say, then?” This too just slips out of him. He knows he’s only making things worse.

“If you want to joke around, you’re in the wrong place.”

For a while the only sound is the clatter of the silverware on the plates. He feels ashamed. He doesn’t know what’s wrong with him. He thinks of the water that surrounded them. It sloshed and crashed, and the wind sang in their ears. Birthday cakes with swastikas made of chocolate icing. Ingesting swastikas. “Pull yourselves together, gentlemen.” Swastikas carved into doorframes. Not being able to speak. And then, when you can speak, like now, you say the wrong thing.

“They gave the kids sweets,” says Edith suddenly. “They seemed very friendly, the Americans. Didn’t they?”

Täubchen nods. If he’d been arrested just four months later he would have landed in the electric chair. Just like the people after him. Wartime law would have applied. A pure formality, the only difference between him and the dead. “Yes, the Americans are very nice,” he agrees.