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long resisted adulterated drink, born in 1921 in Groningen—he might be dead now, as a few drops of melted snow streak the Milanese countryside behind the window, did he die in his bed, by surprise, or after a long illness, a diseased liver or a heart that gave up, or else run over by a taxi as he crossed the Avenue Qasr el-Ayni to go visit his Greek friends, who knows, maybe he’s still alive, somewhere in a home for old people or still in his immense gloomy apartment in Garden City, what could he live on, he got a little Egyptian pension fund as mechanical “engineer,” a big word for someone who had been enlisted in 1943 as a mechanic in the 4 th Brigade of Panzergrenadier SS “Nederland” the last elements of which surrendered to the Americans in May 1945 west of Berlin after two years on several fronts, Gerbens is a talkative man, one afternoon he tells me his life story, in his dark, empty lair on the second floor of a dilapidated building, above all he tries to explain to me why Nasser was a son of a bitch—what made me think of the old cantankerous Batavian off Lodi, at the time I didn’t know the “Nederland” brigade had been posted for a few months in Croatia to fight against the partisans after the Italian surrender in fall 1943, maybe he had fought against Vlaho’s grandfather, maybe, maybe I thought about Harmen at a time of choice, of my own departure for another life like him after a year of privations and indignities in a country destroyed ravaged by war had gone to seek his fortune elsewhere through the intermediary of a cousin who since the days before the war had been working in the port of Alexandria, now that Egypt is one of the images of poverty it seems strange that anyone would emigrate there as a supervisor to improve his lot, I ask Harmen if his past in the Waffen-SS had something to do with his decision to leave, he says no, or yes, or maybe, after the defeat he had spent many months in a military prison, after all I was just a mechanic, he said, and not a Nazi, I repaired caterpillar tanks and trucks, that’s not what gives you the Ritterkreuz , is it? I don’t remember anymore, they let us leave pretty quickly, it was the first time I’d been in prison—for three years he worked in the port of Alexandria, repairing and maintaining the cranes, the fork-lifts, and all the harbor machinery, he had two children, two daughters, with a woman from Groningen, in the beginning she liked Egypt fine, he said, at the outset, and I think of my mother also displaced, growing up far from her country she almost doesn’t know, my neighbor with the Pronto has folded up his magazine, he gets up and goes to the bar or the toilet, who knows where his own parents were born, maybe they emigrated from Naples or Lecce, still young, to try their fortune in the prosperous North, Harmen Gerbens had gone to the prosperous South—he had then left Alexandria for a better job in Helwan near Cairo in the brand-new weapons factory that made Hakim rifles, heavy 8mm adapted from a Swedish model, all the equipment and the machines came directly from Malmö, including the engineers: I got on well with them, Harmen says, I was in charge of maintenance, the Hakim was a wonderful rifle, better than the original, almost without recoil despite the immense power of the Mauser cartridge, it could even survive sand getting in the ejection mechanism I was very proud to make it—after Nasser’s revolution everything began to go “sideways” Harmen tells me, I was the only foreigner left in the factory, everyone left, the Greeks, the Italians, the British and then one day war broke out: the English, the French, and the Israelis intervened in Suez—they arrested me for espionage on October 31 st , 1956, the day after the bombing of the airport, and locked me up in the “foreigners’ section” of the Qanater prison, Harmen never knew either why or how, or for whom he was supposed to have spied, Harmen Gerbens was already