“It is only a tiny piece,” he said, winking. “When I was a boy, my brothers and I fed Tessa, just so.”

“But didn’t she learn to be a beggar?”

“Of course, but she was very adorable,” he said with a shrug and a look that asked, Why should we resist?

His face was remarkable, capable of all sorts of vivid, interesting things as he spoke. Straight and serious one moment, crooked and amused the next, his expression changed as quickly as his topics, which were as varied and light as clouds racing across a spring sky. He was so interested in me and Cleveland and how I’d come to be in Cairo— why, before ten minutes had passed, he made me feel as though having breakfast with a German gentleman in an Egyptian hotel was the most natural thing in the world for a lady from Ohio.

“And where is your home, Herr Weilbacher?” I asked.

“Please,” he said, buttering another crusty roll. “Call me Karl. I am from Stuttgart, in Württemberg.” When I grew thoughtful, his mobile face quieted. “You are thinking: he was the enemy.”

“Not at all!”

He smiled at my lie, and I looked down at my plate. “We Germans are not all the same,” I heard him say in his resonant, musical voice. “Germany has a north and a south as your country does, Miss Shanklin. We southerners are quite a different breed from Prussians, who love war and wish to rule.” He leaned over the table. “The kaiser came to Stuttgart when I was a child. My friends and I threw stones at his parade,” he confessed merrily. “In the beer hall, men gave us boys pretzels when we sang silly songs or recited a rude poem about the kaiser.”

“I know just the sort of boy you must have been. I was a school-teacher,” I said, and began to speak about my students back in Little Italy. I meant to tell him about how hard they studied and how quickly they learned English, but Herr Weilbacher seemed so curious, so sympathetic …