She watches him in the garden, and for every tomato he picks he first has to secure her permission. Finally they pay the hens a visit. He’s able to snag two eggs, almost too much for what he has planned: gnocchi. She repeats the word after him, a question in her voice. “They’re Italian potato dumplings.”

While he chops onions, Edith applies glue to two shards of a broken cup and presses them together.

“What were your days like?” she asks and puts glue on another crack. Before now no one wanted to hear any details about Ellis Island. He grabs a big potato and starts to tell her about it.

“Our life on the island. It was like this. In the beginning they would wake us up at six o’clock in the morning. Then they realized it didn’t actually make any sense—what were they getting us up so early for? It’s not like we had anything to do. And so they started letting us sleep until eight thirty. Breakfast was served throughout the morning, but after that you had to pay.”

He looks over at Edith. She’s testing out the mended cup. “How many of you were there?”

“A few hundred. Four or five hundred. The majority were Germans. Then Italians and Japanese.”

“And none of them had committed any crimes?”

He puts some water on to boil and drops in the potatoes. The harmless storytelling approach won’t work.

“Starting in December 1941 it was enough to be German. In some cases even the wives and children were moved onto the island with the husbands. They thought it was just temporary, but they were held there for years.”

He didn’t tell her about the other men. Or that on April 20th there was cake for everyone, and on each slice Dörsam wrote “Heil Adolf” in chocolate icing.

“But why?”

“Some were interned so that they could be exchanged for American prisoners.”

She shakes her head uncertainly.

“It’s true, Edith, whole families were torn apart.”

“Well, that’s awful,” she says.