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Zwei”
—“Nation of Two.”
    It was going to be about the love my wife and Ihad for each other. It was going to show how a pair of lovers in a world gone mad could survive by being loyal only to a nation composed of themselves—a nation of two.
    On a bench across the path from me a middle-aged American now sat down. He looked like a fool and a gasbag. He untied his shoelaces to relieve his feet, and he began to read a month-old copy of the Chicago
Sunday Tribune
.
    Three handsome officers of the S.S. stalked down the walk between us.
    When they were gone, the man put his paper down and spoke to me in twanging Chicago English. “Nice-looking men,” he said.
    “I suppose,” I said.
    “You understand English?” he said.
    “Yes,” I said.
    “Thank God for somebody who can understand English,” he said. “I’ve been going crazy trying to find somebody to talk to.”
    “That so?” I said.
    “What do you think of all this—” he said, “or aren’t people supposed to go around asking questions like that?”
    “All what?” I said.
    “The things going on in Germany,” he said. “Hitler and the Jews and all that.”
    “It isn’t anything I can control,” I said, “so I don’t think about it.”
    He nodded. “None of your beeswax, eh?” he said.
    “Pardon me?” I said.
    “None of your business,” he said.
    “That’s right,” I said.
    “You didn’t understand that—when I said ‘beeswax’ instead of ‘business’?” he said.
    “It’s a common expression, is it?” I said.
    “In America it is,” he said. “You mind if I come over there, so we don’t have to holler?”
    “As you please,” I said.
    “As you please,” he echoed, coming over to my bench. “That sounds like something an Englishman would say.”
    “American,” I said.
    He raised his eyebrows. “Is that a fact? I was trying to guess what maybe you were, but I wouldn’t have guessed that.”
    “Thank you,” I said.
    “You figure that’s a compliment?” he said. “That’s why you said, ‘Thank you’?”
    “Not a compliment—or an insult, either,” I said. “Nationalities just don’t interest me as much as they probably should.”
    This seemed to puzzle him. “Any of my beeswax what you do for a living?” he said.
    “Writer,” I said.
    “Is that a fact?” he said. “That’s a great coincidence. I was sitting over there wishing I could write, on account of I’ve thought up what I think’s a pretty good spy story.”
    “That so?” I said.
    “I might as well give it to you,” he said. “I’ll never write it.”
    “I’ve got all the projects I can handle now,” I said.
    “Well—some time you may run dry,” he said, “and then you can use this thing of mine. There’s this young American, see, who’s been in Germany so long he’s practically a German himself. He writes plays in German, and he’s married to a beautiful German actress, and he knows a lot of big-shot Nazis who like to hang around theater people.” He rattled off the names of Nazis, great and small—all of whom Helga and I knew pretty well.
    It wasn’t that Helga and I were crazy about Nazis. I can’t say, on the other hand, that we hated them. They were a big enthusiastic part of our audience, important people in the society in which we lived.
    They were people.
    Only in retrospect can I think of them as trailing slime behind.
    To be frank—I can’t think of them as doing that even now. I knew them too well as people, worked too hard in my time for their trust and applause.
    Too hard.
    Amen.
    Too hard.
    “Who are you?” I said to the man in the park.
    “Let me finish my story first,” he said. “So this young man knows there’s a war coming, figures America’s gonna be on one side and Germany’s gonna be on the other. So this American, who hasn’t been anything but polite to the Nazis up to then, decided to pretend he’s a Nazi himself, and he stays on in Germany when war comes along, and gets to be a very