On the top step he asked her to wait for a moment. Her face vanished as the light in the stairwell went out, but he could still see her nod. Since the two German agents had started coming around, the apartment was tidy in a way it had never been before. He always got rid of everything, even the cigarette butts, and washed the cups and glasses. The only exception was his bed, which was unmade, the imprint of his body visible on the sheet. He closed the door. It was unlikely that Lauren would enter this room today.

“You can come in. The coast is clear.”

She kept a firm grip on herself, her hands crossed on her shoulders, while she inspected the apartment. Princess sniffed at her legs.

“This is unbelievable!” she cried every now and then. “The way you live! I’ve never seen anything like it!”

A girl. No, a woman. A young woman, who, after she’d taken off her shoes, was the same height as he.

She looked around, clearly intent on trying to understand something about him based on his apartment. “You live very simply,” she said finally. “You don’t even have pictures on the walls. How come you don’t have any books?”

He pulled Thoreau out from under a stack of amateur radio magazines and heard a long sigh. He didn’t dare ask what it meant—appreciation?

“My mother idolizes him.”

“There was a time when he was very important to me,” he said, attempting to play down the fact that he actually had nothing here but Thoreau.

“Gandhi got his ideas from Thoreau,” Lauren said pensively. And then shook her head. “That might work in India maybe.”

“Isn’t Gandhi in prison?”

“Not at the moment. But he was just fasting again. With success. Then they do everything he wants.”

“You don’t seem to like him.”

“He suggested to the Jews in Germany that they should practice nonviolent resistance. Some people think their idea of reality is more real than reality itself.”

He showed her another book, Der Radio-Amateur by Dr. Eugen Nesper. “This book was published fifteen years ago in Berlin. Back then amateur broadcasting was just starting to take off. People thought it was a miracle!”

She flipped through the book, smiling. Stopped on a page with a drawing of a log cabin in the mountains. A man stood outside, with headphones on, a cable ran from the headphones back into the cabin.

“Could you translate this for me?” Lauren asked and pointed at the caption.

“‘With arms outstretched, his gaze directed at the stars, he receives, in the dark of night, far from the cultural centers of man, the news of the world, as if it were the music of the spheres.’”

“That’s like me in the Catskills. Completely cut off from any kind of culture. And what’s this here?”