They were drawing closer to the park exit, he could tell from the mounting clamor, the sirens, the car horns, the voices. On 59th Street they fought their way through the crowds, strolled past baroque porticos and old-fashioned carriages that waited outside the grand hotels for tourists. Marble lobbies with men who disappeared completely behind their uniforms and caps. Lauren looked at a store display window. “The Grapes of Wrath,” she said, reading one title aloud, then another: “Mein Kampf.” She laughed again, an embarrassed laugh this time. Maybe it had something to do with the look on his face. “Joe, you can’t help it that Hitler’s on the New York Times bestseller list.”

Simply to be a person, he thought. Who eats, breathes, sleeps, works, sometimes flirts with women, so long as they’re over thirty. Simply to be. At some point he had reached the insight that simply being was the most difficult thing. Everyone wanted to make you into something. Even if it was just a German who couldn’t help being German.

They went on in silence, walking through empty playgrounds, bright chalk blurred from the rain, what was left of games of hopscotch. Finally she asked where exactly he was from—her family also came from Germany, she said, had immigrated in the mid-nineteenth century. He told her. She was interested, she said then, in Düsseldorf (Doozledorf)—what was it like growing up there? But he didn’t want to talk about it. It wouldn’t be able to measure up to her childhood and adolescence. Maybe she sensed this, because then she asked, “What was it like when you came here?”

He had to be careful when he thought back on that time. He could wade into these feelings like a lake whose waters slowly rose all around him. As if it were not at all long ago, and if he didn’t watch out, everything he had achieved for himself could unravel, could turn out to be an illusion, collapse like a house of cards, as if he had achieved nothing at all, just a feather-light existence that was protected from nothing.

“It wasn’t so bad. New York made it easy for me. A great city.”

“I could lose myself in this city!” Lauren cried excitedly. “Hey, where do you live, Joe?”

“I’ll be honest with you, it’s not a prestigious address.”

He thought of the crowded tenements. Of the bars, the dance clubs, where white people came like they were going on safari in deepest Africa.

“Harlem. East Harlem.”

“There’s nothing wrong with that. I’ve read about it.” She pulled the New York guide out of her pocket again and flipped through it till she found Harlem. “Look, there’s so much going on there. Negro intellectuals like Langston Hughes, jazz—”