Josef sets his bag down on a chair and notices Carl’s gaze following his hand.

“That’s all you have?”

“Just this here.” When Carl doesn’t say anything else Josef picks the bag back up, and now he doesn’t dare set it down again. Carl takes the bag from him and carries it into the next room, a kind of parlor: brown velvet curtains, dark-colored period furniture, oil paintings of landscapes, dramatic teardrop-patterned wallpaper.

“All this made it through the war with us.” Carl tries to help the conversation along. Josef is silent; he can’t force himself to utter any praise. He feels a twinge of pain and steels himself against it. “Come,” Carl says quietly. “You’ll be sleeping in this little room back here.”

The room is furnished with a sofa, armchair, and writing desk. No telephone here either. He needs to call Dörsam.

“Edith will make the sofa up for you to sleep on. What do you think, will you be able to bear it in here?”

“Of course, absolutely. How neat everything here is.”

“That’s Edith’s handiwork! A capable housewife—that’s something you won’t find so easily.”

In Carl’s letters the word “capable” appeared again and again in reference to Edith. Carl seemed unable to find any other words to describe his wife. In the photos he saw a pretty, dark-haired woman with a startled look in her eyes. He suspects that Edith might be a bit taller than Carl, assuming Carl still stood on his tiptoes when getting his picture taken, like he’d started doing years ago.

“Here, have a glass of water.” Josef drinks and looks at Carl, who paces back and forth before him, telling him now about his business as a soap wholesaler. Business is picking up more and more, he says.

Josef limits himself to helpful prompts: “So the new powdered laundry detergent is better, the customers are saying so too?”

“Yes, and I relay that back to the manufacturer. Paul is thirteen now. Helps out with the business in the afternoons. Next year we’ll take him out of school. Then he can work full-time.”

Carl pauses for a moment, straightens a picture frame on the wall.

“You’ll meet the kids any minute now. They really wanted to skip school when they found out yesterday that their uncle from America is in the country! The chocolate you sent them—they’ll never forget you for that!”

There was more than chocolate in the thirty packages he’d sent.

Package 1: coffee, lard, powdered milk, powdered butter, powdered eggs, soap, shaving cream, tobacco, cigarettes, needles, thread, aspirin, saccharin, bouillon cubes, chocolate, pepper, nutmeg, cloves, darning wool.

Package 2: oats, flour, sugar, starch, rice, gelatin, bandages, aspirin, baking powder, chocolate, thread, adhesive tape, needles, wool, tobacco, comb, socks, razor blades.

Package 3: lentils, tobacco, chocolate, lard, sugar, jerky, honey, coffee, pepper, gelatin.