At the washtub under the tree, Maria is scrubbing his pants and shirts. She gets everything done in the morning. In the morning, before the brutal heat of day has set in. Her body pitches forward and back. She scrubs with all her might, scrubs patiently. All the scrubbing makes little tears in his clothing. Granted, the clothes are old, most of them still Carl’s. From Germany. Carl’s underwear. Josef has worn them in Europe, North Africa, and South America. Carl’s underwear has traveled the world, while Carl has never left Germany. He’ll have to speak to Maria about the tears. But how? He doesn’t want to offend her. Maria irons his shirts, cleans his room, addresses him as “Don,” even though, at just fifty years old, he’s too young for that. Never a complaint, even when he leaves the maps and photos from the Institute lying around on the floor. She respectfully cleans around them. She’s even managed to match his old gray socks to their original pairs. Maria is easy to get along with. He can come and go as he pleases. A little chitchat in the evenings sometimes—he doesn’t want to have to move yet again. How many times has he arrived somewhere and had to act as though it were his home?

2

Neuss, June 1949

THE LEFT EYE DOESN’T MOVE. IT’S A GLASS EYE. JOSEF HASN’T seen it in a quarter of a century. He’d forgotten about it.

They embrace, briefly, not too tenderly—a solemn moment. Carl wears a suit despite the heat, and over it a white shopkeeper’s smock.

“Look at how thin you’ve gotten, my dear man!” Carl cries. “And we thought America was the land of milk and honey!”

Josef smiles and follows his brother into the redbrick house, photos of which he’d seen before the war, narrow and tall, but the bricks beginning to shift. It was cheap, Carl had said in his letter, but it hadn’t been Aryanized—seized from Jewish owners and resold. That Carl had refused to do. “Something like that just can’t end well.”

He trudges up the stairs behind his brother. Carl has combed his graying hair back over the beginnings of a bald spot; the ends form little curls over the nape of his neck. He stops on the second-floor landing.

“We have so much to talk about! So much catching up to do! I told Edith, ‘I do hope he stays a bit longer.’”

“Does that mean I wasn’t supposed to stay long?” Josef asks with a wink. When he sees the look on Carl’s face he wishes he hadn’t.

“No, I mean it just like I said,” Carl replies and holds the door open for him. Inside, it smells of detergent and pastry.

“Edith’s been baking. She’s just out picking up groceries, she’ll be back any moment.”