He nods and waits for the next question, but it doesn’t come. The potatoes bob in the water; he dices the tomatoes. “But they treated us well.” Edith brings out her sewing kit. Her fingers probe the hole in a sock. He tells her about the library, where they could find anything they wanted, including newspapers; about the board games, the card games, and the soccer games in the courtyard. And he tells her about the two rows of barbed wire. That from his window he could see two rows of barbed wire and beyond them Manhattan and often wondered whether he could possibly make it. It was just a half-mile swim to New Jersey. Difficult, but doable. He often went swimming in the ocean in the summer. Coney Island was his favorite beach, but you could also swim in the Harlem River, right where he lived. But she knew that. He’d told her already. The neighborhood with the jazz clubs and the black Americans.

“So it wasn’t like being imprisoned here,” she said.

“They treated us well, that’s true. But that’s a good thing, isn’t it?” He tries to meet her eye. “Right, Edith?”

“Of course it’s a good thing,” she says icily. Her slight reserve hurts him. Is she trying to suggest he should have been punished with German methods? Her expression is blank. With one hand she fishes for a ball of yarn in her sewing basket; it’s gotten tangled up with another.

The words are still with him. He’ll never forget them. They should stick you Germans in your own camps.

Whenever he thinks of these words, he thinks of everything else he saw that afternoon. The FBI had picked them up from the island in groups and taken them to the Bureau’s offices for a film screening. His face had felt very tense, and he had had to shut his eyes. When he opened them at one point, the men on-screen were just leaving a shed, handkerchiefs pressed to their noses and mouths, dogged looks on their faces. Whispers in the screening room. Someone had called out, “Heil Hitler.” Laughter had broken out. The American guards ignored both. Dörsam’s face was like stone. Later, on the ferry, as they sailed toward the stately buildings on the water in the red twilight, Dörsam said, “And the carpet bombings of our cities? The mountains of corpses in our streets? Of course they don’t show us that!”

The man could actually find a way to get outraged, even now.

Behind him someone had said, “Now, that’s how you run a prison camp!” Josef had turned around and nodded at the GI, assuming there was a measure of understanding between them. But the soldier’s eyes were cold: “They should stick you Germans in your own camps.”