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you will never break it. The people have old souls and their patience is infinite. They don’t even think of it as patience. I’m sure they have another word for it in their infernal language that you can’t understand. Germans have patience, too, but we call it thoroughness. Hamburg nights are glum. There’s a glare. The truth is, Germany is badly oversized. There’s too much of it. And I will not stay here forever because German people make bad colonists and that includes me. But I will stay for a while.
    They do?
    Not one of our colonies prospered. Not one.
    What about France?
    Ha-ha. Ha.
    Sorry. Irresistible, Harry said, realizing he had played a queen and gotten nothing for it.
    The French did not want it badly enough.
    Want what?
    Their country, Sieglinde said. They didn’t want it badly enough to fight for it. Or maybe they wanted something else. Maybe they were tired of the life they had and wanted a new one. They were halfhearted.
    I think it’s fair to say they were very badly generaled. And they were overwhelmed, superior force, superior weapons. Soldiers with fight in their blood.
    Always the Third Reich, Sieglinde said. The war is over for years and years and our Third Reich is still with us. Probably it will never go away in my lifetime. My grandparents and my father died in it. And I will say something more. It doesn’t seem like yesterday. When you mention the Third Reich I think about my mother, always. These thoughts are not good thoughts—
    Sorry, Sieglinde.
    When something is irresistible you should resist it, Harry. There is nothing you can tell me about the Third Reich that I do not already know. I think you do not study your surroundings. Also you do not listen with care. Always your own thoughts. I think your war is always inside your head. Don’t bother to deny it. I know it’s true, every minute of the day. You’re like a pianist with a head full of musical notes except your head is filled with the war. No, I do not care to have you kiss me. Kissing avoids the issue. This stupid war of yours. It’s a stupid thing to have in your head at all times.
    You, Harry said. I think about you.
    You must understand I have nothing to do with the Third Reich.
    I know that, he said.
    It’s an accident of nationality.
    I know that, too.
    I have a photograph of my father the day he went away to the war. He was roughly the age that I am now. He wore a wool uniform with corporal’s stripes. His face was full of hope, I would almost say of rapture, as if he were leaving to join a religious order, its specific rituals, chants and choirs, meditations, observances, discipline. The four last things: death, judgment, heaven, hell. He was slender but very strong, a marksman, and so handsome, with a loop of hair that fell over his forehead. Freckles, too, and a mustache that made him look older. He stood not at attention but in a kind of slouch, his rifle held butt-down as a farm boy might hold a pitchfork. My father was a hell-raiser and now he was going east, the Russian front. My mother held the camera and my father was smiling into it, a brilliant smile, the one that was full of hope. I was so young, I thought his uniform was a costume, a clown’s suit or a knight’s armor. My father didn’t last the week, but we did not know that right away. We didn’t know for months and all that time my mother was writing letters to a dead man.
    Harry was silent now, listening to the rise and fall of Sieglinde’s voice, its urgency and melancholy. This was the first he had heard of the war’s progress from the other side, the civilian side, the enemy side. She spoke slowly, her attention fixed not on him but on some distant point in the night sky. He remembered one of his university professors described the American victory as a mixed blessing. Its unambiguous result did not encourage introspection. The victory was total. After Hiroshima and Nagasaki,