He presses his cheek into the pillow. He observes himself as he cries, and doesn’t trust himself. And then the words: I want to go home. I want to go home. He doesn’t trust these words either. There is no home.

Now he hears other voices. From the kitchen. Carl is shouting at his son. It lasts a good long time, then comes silence, and then something else. He recognizes the sound. When he goes to investigate, the boy is already out the door. Carl turns and looks at him, surprised.

The floorboards creak with every breath he takes.

“What did he do this time?”

“Stole a stamp.”

“For God’s sake, that was me. I wrote a letter.”

“Why didn’t you ask me?”

He doesn’t know how to answer that. He laughs awkwardly.

“Just who were you writing?”

“Someone I knew from New York. He lives in Pulheim now.”

“Did he get deported too?”

“A year before me,” Josef says, making an effort to keep calm. The scorn in his brother’s voice gets to him nonetheless.

“And how did you know each other?”

“Through the German American Bund. A political organization. It was patriotic and was committed to the fight against Communism.”

“That sounds like a good thing,” says Carl.

Yes, it sounds good. He left out a few details.

Carl steps closer and says, “The Communists now occupy half of Germany. It’ll be fun to see how that turns out.”

“It sure will.”

“Did you ever once have to deal with kids, Josef?”

“My girlfriends were all childless.”

“Girlfriends,” Carl repeats.

“Girlfriends.”

“What’s this person’s name, this person you’re writing?”

“Hans Dörsam.”

In the evening, swallows go sailing across the sky. The bench in the garden is a good place to watch them. He shakes a cigarette out of the pack—still American—and suddenly has a feeling, as though he were capable of picking up all the world’s news, bad news too, the kind of news that always catches you unprepared, like a shot in the back. He’s in just the right mood, the kind of mood one should always be in: open, full of life and feeling. He knows now he’ll be moving on.

When he tastes the filter, he puts the cigarette out with his shoe, picks up the butt, and puts it back in the pack. So Carl won’t have to make a fuss. As he’s standing up he sees the boy in the corner of his eye. He seems to have been standing in the doorway for quite a while now, watching him. Like a spy. He has to laugh. All over the world, everywhere he goes, he is watched.

“Come here for a second,” Josef calls out to him. The boy comes closer and stops in front of him.

“Sit down.”

The boy doesn’t move.