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have been..."
    He threw the slice of bread down upon the table, smearing the lard across the faded alpine table cloth. "Louisa, stop!" he shouted. "I will not listen to your litany of regrets any longer!"
    "And why not?" she demanded. "Do you expect me to believe that you don’t run them through your mind yourself every day? Don’t you wonder what our lives would have been like if we had gone to join Schweitzer in Africa after you received your medical degree, like you always said you were going to do?"
    "Louisa..."
    "Don’t you feel ashamed of yourself when you hear the things that my old friend Dietrich has been saying and doing?"
    "Your precious Bonhöffer will end up in a concentration camp," he said. "You mark my words."
    "Perhaps he will, and perhaps they’ll kill him someday, but he’ll die on his feet, not on his knees!"
    "I kneel to no one!" he shouted.
    "You don’t have to," she shouted back. "You’re already lying on your face, licking their feet!"
    "Is it your great goal in life, Louisa, to be a young widow? What on earth do you expect me to do? Preach against the government from my pulpit? Try to kill the Führer?"
    "Try to do something, Gottfried, anything! At the very least, leave! "
    "I should point out, Louisa, that you talk a very good resistance," he shouted. "I don’t see you doing anything about the Nazis, other than making my life miserable."
    "At least I’m willing to say that what is happening is wrong," she shouted back. "At least I have the intelligence to want to get away from it. My God, Gottfried, don’t you see what’s happening to the world?"
    "Yes, I see what’s happening," he said coldly as he rose from the table, leaving his meager breakfast uneaten. "The world is falling apart, as it always is, and I am trying to persevere and survive it."
    "Oh, Gottfried," she sighed, her anger suddenly giving way to depression and despair. "Don’t you have any self-respect?"
    "Of course I do," he muttered, walking to the door. "And I also have common sense." He walked from the kitchen, out through the parlor to the front door, and slammed it behind him.
    Louisa closed her eyes and prayed silently for patience and self control. She was furious with her husband, as she always was. He disgusted her, as he always did. And she felt the same desperate helplessness she always felt after such conversations. And he had stung her by reminding her that, her ideals and ethics notwithstanding, she had done as little as he to oppose the Nazis.
    I could leave Germany all by myself, she thought, go to Switzerland alone. I could contact Dietrich, try to help somehow, try to do something, something. She leaned forward, resting her elbows on the table and covering her face with her hands. No I couldn’t, she thought. I suppose that I’m just as frightened as Gottfried, frightened of being alone, frightened of being arrested, frightened of being killed. Perhaps I expect too much of him, she thought. Perhaps by comparing him with Dietrich, I’m holding him up to an impossible ideal. Perhaps at this stage of our lives there’s nothing that we can do. When we were younger, when he was a young seminarian and I was a young humanities student, before Hitler was in power, before the Enabling Act that established the dictatorship, before the Nuremberg Laws that established official anti-Semitism, before the war...that was when we should have done something, that was when we should have tried to ... tried to...
    Her thought died unfinished. Should have done what? she wondered, and felt a pang of guilt at the anger she felt for her husband. We supported the correct parties, she thought, I the Social Democrats and he the Progressives, two different parties but both opposed to Hitler and the Nationalists. I was too young to vote, but Gottfried voted, and we both campaigned and rallied and handed out literature. What else could we have done, what else could he have