"You know what you’ve become?” Jurgen said to Otto. “A pain in the ass.”

“Because I want to be German and speak our language and hear it?”

“You’re acting like a child.”

Otto spoke only German to Walter, when Walter was here, and to the old couple who kept house and were afraid of him. They answered questions and that was all, they refused to carry on a conversation.

Jurgen and Otto sat at the white porcelain table in the kitchen having their morning coffee.

If he spoke German to Jurgen he got no response.

Jurgen said if they spoke only English and tried to think in English, there would be less chance of their being caught. He said, “You want to go out. So do I. But if you intentionally speak German and pose the way you do, daring people to stare at you- ‘Look at me, the destroyer of British tanks in the desert’-or whoever you are, they will. And if you attract attention to yourself, it won’t be long before you’re back in the camp.”

Otto said, “You want English? Why don’t you fuck yourself?”

“It’s ‘Go fuck yourself,’” Jurgen said.

Two years in the war prisoner camp and now another kind of confinement, months in a house on a farm owned by Walter Schoen: the house standing for a hundred years among old Norway pines, an apple orchard on the property, a chicken house, a barn turned into an abattoir where cattle entered to be shot in the head by a .22 rifle. Otto wouldn’t go near the barn. Jurgen couldn’t stay out of it, fascinated by the process, three meat cutters who spoke German among themselves cutting and sharpening, cutting and sharpening, reducing the thousand-pound cow to pieces of meat.