They go to bed early. It’s just afternoon, American time, but he’s happy at the chance to be alone. On his pillow he finds a neatly folded set of pajamas, a towel, and a toothbrush. His life is over, but they make it easy for him to act as though he still has one; he just has to play along. Carl sets the rules. Even in the letters, a web of painstakingly detailed questions—though when no answers were forthcoming Carl was quick to beat a retreat, the next letter admitting that well, certainly, he of course had little sense of the political circumstances there.

In his first letters in 1946 he had had to inform his brother that since the start of the war Ellis Island had been a detention station for enemy aliens.

Enemy aliens?

I’ll explain everything later.

The room faces south, hence the heat. Even here it smells of the cigar that Carl lit up after dinner. Sharp, a bit like piss.

He opens the window and hears the train. He can only marvel. Two nights ago he was still lying in a bed always cold and damp from the sea air, all around him the rumble of the tugboats that sailed past the island and the deadening tediousness of imprisonment, a life devoid of choices. Time pervaded everything. There was only time. It was the element in which they all lived. Time as punishment. Much worse, however, were the four years in Sandstone, Minnesota—a real prison with real criminals.

Up there in the north it always felt like winter. He moved at a run. He had to, they all had to—never stand still. Don’t stop. Move! For if ever the men did stop, that’s when the fights would start.

Carl doesn’t know about Sandstone. In Germany they were busy with the war, and Carl didn’t seem surprised that Josef too was silent for five years.

3

Neuss, June 1949

NOISE WAKES HIM. SHOUTING FROM THE OTHER SIDE OF the wall. “How can he do that? Doesn’t the boy have any sense?”

So it’s about the son this time.

The clock shows 6:30. For the self he left behind in America it’s just past midnight, and so he decides to turn over onto his other side.

The next time it’s operetta music that wakes him. Carl sings along, if only to the most memorable bits. Edith says, “Try to be quiet,” and Carl says, “This is my house. I can do as I please.” But the radio is switched off. And then the door falls shut.

The next time he wakes up the clock says ten o’clock, and needles of sunlight shine in through the window. Carl’s voice again. In the short pauses in between whatever Carl is saying he hears Edith say something. He swings himself up off the sofa, hurries into the kitchen. Carl turns to him and stops speaking mid-sentence.