Over the top of his beer glass, the German Boxer eyes her with a look of polite skepticism. And it is true that no sooner has she made this assertion than her mind begins involuntarily to supply exceptions.

When, a few days later, she makes reference in a text to him showing up at her door in 1941 in leather boots, he replies that one thing he could not have done was kill innocent people. This seems in contradiction to what he so plainly asserted while walking in placid sunshine around the lake, but when she writes back to clarify which people it was that he had been so certain he could kill, her text remains unanswered, hanging in WhatsApp limbo, stamped with only a single gray check, because the German Boxer likes to turn his phone off when he feels finished with it. Later, when she meets him for dinner at a vegetarian restaurant in Mitte, he says that of course he couldn’t have knocked on people’s doors and deported or executed them. What kind of person does she think he is? When he said he could kill people, he meant in battle, since he was sure that he would have been assigned to the Waffen SS and sent to the front. She does not have the wherewithal just then to ask what makes him so sure he wouldn’t have been assigned to the Gestapo, or the Allgemeine SS responsible for enforcing the Nazi racial policies, or even the Death’s Head units that oversaw the concentration and extermination camps.

They sit in silence, waiting for their dumplings to come. After a few moments, the German Boxer suggests that he might be wrong. After all, he says, his grandfather was in constant trouble with the Nazis because he’d allowed Gypsies to stay on his land, his great-grandfather was murdered in Aktion T4, and his father was the sort of man who refused to follow anyone. No, perhaps he wouldn’t have been a Nazi after all—let’s hope as much, he says. She nods. In truth, she agrees, their conversation is an impossible one, given that whoever he was now would not have been who he’d have been back then, shaped as he would have been by different forces, and whoever he’d have been then did not exist.

Though naturally she continues to think about it.

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