“Care for one?” He offers his cigarettes to the boy. The boy shakes his head.

“You don’t smoke?”

“I’m thirteen.”

Josef puts the pack back in his pants pocket.

“I took the stamp. Your father knows now. I’m sorry.”

He was expecting gratitude, but the boy just shrugs his shoulders. Did he not understand him?

“Soon you’ll be grown up, and you’ll start fighting back. You’re almost as tall as your father already.”

The boy says nothing.

“Half a year at the most, then you’ll start fighting back.”

Silence. What’s he doing wrong?

“I’d like to give you something, but I don’t have any money. All I’ve got is empty pockets. In your family I’m like another child.”

“Can I go?” asks the boy.

The next day he sees Edith sawing, screwing, sanding, varnishing. She’s building a cupboard down in the basement. Edith can do things like that. Carl has gone to Koblenz—business. The children have gone off into the fields with their teacher to look for potato beetles. Restful quiet in the house. He feels like cooking lunch himself for once.

He lingers outside the door for a long time, trying to glean from her movements what kind of mood she’s in. Really it’s always the same with her. She works. Last night she dropped into an armchair with a sigh and stared at the little glass of turnip schnapps that Carl had handed her. Then, more or less indifferently, she tipped the liquor back.

He understands her. Quite well, in fact.

He himself managed to get away from him.

He could tell Edith what’s playing and set her free. In his imagination they’re sitting in his apartment in Harlem and listening to jazz.

No, he doesn’t think she should run off with him of all people, her no-account brother-in-law. He of all people shouldn’t be the one to set her free. On the other hand, men are now scarce in Germany.

“Josef, why are you hanging around like that?” she calls out.

“I can make us some lunch.”

This gets a smile from her. She pushes herself up off the floor, screws the top on a can of lacquer, wipes her hands on her apron.

“I can cook, believe me!”

Now she’s laughing, as if he’d told a really good joke. “All right, fine. But I’ll come with you and show you where everything is.”

While she looks on, he opens the doors of the pantry with both hands and feels as though he were taking a woman’s dress off. Before him are jars of beans, semolina, flour, a few potatoes, and a bottle of sunflower oil. Not much, but in the garden he saw ripe tomatoes and parsley.

“I’ll cook us something Italian!” he declares.

“What exactly do you need?” she asks.

“Tomatoes.”