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All this I explained to Uncle Theo in the calmest voice imaginable.

He said, “I had better turn the tickets in.”

“Why?” I said. “Why do that? As you say, the girls like music. Why deprive them of an outing? I only want you to realize, for once, the possible results of your actions.”

Why is it that everyone is depressed by hearing the truth? I tell the office manager about Hausen reading newspapers in a desk drawer. His face puckers. He wishes I had never brought it up. He looks out the window; he has decided to forget it. He will forget it. I have never said a thing; he is not obliged to speak to Hausen, let alone sack him. When my brother married a girl with a chin like a Turkish slipper, I warned him what his children would be like — that he would be ashamed to have them photographed because of their ugly faces.

I say to my mother, “How can you giggle over nothing? One son was killed, the other one never comes to see you, and your husband left you for another woman at the age of sixty-three.” Half an hour later, unless someone has hurt her feelings, or changed the television program without asking, she has forgotten her own life’s story. The family say Uncle Theo is a political hero, but isn’t he just a man who avoided going to war? He was called up for military service after Stalingrad. At the medical examination he pointed out his age, his varicose veins, his blood pressure, but none of that helped. He was fit for service — for the next wholesale offering, in Uncle Theo’s view. He put on his clothes, still arguing, and was told to take a file with his name on it to a room upstairs. It was on his way up that he had his revelation. Everything concerning his person was in that file. If the file disappeared, then Uncle Theo did, too. He turned and walked straight out the front door. He did not destroy the file, in case they should come round asking; he intended to say he had not understood the instructions. No one came, and soon after this his workroom was bombed and the file became ashes. When Uncle Theo was arrested it was for quite another reason, having to do with black-market connections. He went first to prison, then, when the jail was bombed, to a camp. Here he wore on his striped jacket the black sleeve patch that meant “antisocial.” It is generally thought that he wore the red patch, meaning “political.” As things are now, it gives him status. But it was not so at the time, and he himself has told me that the camp was run by that antisocial element. It was they who had full control of the internal order, the margarine racket, the extra-soup racket, the cigarette traffic. Uncle Theo was there less than a month, all told, but it changed his outlook for life.

Now consider my situation: eighteen years with the Civic Tourist and Travel Bureau, passed over for promotion because I am female, surrounded at home by aged children who can’t keep their own histories straight. They have no money, no property, no future, no recorded past, nothing but secrets. My parents never explained themselves. For a long time I thought they kept apple juice in our cellar locker. After my father left us I went down and counted eighteen bottles of white wine. Where did it come from? “Tell me the truth,” I have begged them. “Tell me everything you remember.” They sit smiling and sipping wine out of postwar glasses. My mother cracks walnuts and passes the bowl around. That is all I have for an answer.

Sometimes on my way home I take the shortcut through the cemetery. The long bare snowy space is where Russian prisoners used to be buried. When the bodies were repatriated, even the gravestones were taken — all but two. Perhaps the families forgot to claim the bodies; or perhaps they were not really prisoners but impostors of some kind. Whatever the reason, two fairly clean stones stand alone out of the snow, with nothing around them. Nearby are the graves of Russian prisoners from the 1914 war. The stones are old and dark and tipped every way. The more I think of it the more I am certain those two could not have been Russians.

Yesterday in the cemetery, at six o’clock, there were lovers standing motionless, like a tree. I had to step off the path; snow came over the tops of my boots. I saw candles burning in little hollows on some of the graves, and Christmas trees on the graves of children. What shall I do when I have to bury the family? Uncle Theo speaks of buying a plot, but in the plot he has in mind there is no room for me and he knows it. I should have married, and when I died I’d be buried with my in-laws — that is what Uncle Theo says to himself. When you speak about dying he looks confused. His face loses its boiled-egg symmetry. Then he says, “Cheer up, Hilde, it can’t be so bad or they would have found a way to stop it by now.”

He was a guard in the prisoner-of-war camp. I forgot to mention that. In fact that was how he got out of his own camp; they were so desperate that they asked for volunteers from among the antisocial element — the thieves, the pimps, the black marketeers. Most of them went to the Eastern front and died there. Uncle Theo, undersized and elderly, became a guard not too far from home. Even there he got on well, and when the Russian prisoners broke out at the end, they did not hang him or beat him to death but simply tied him to a tree. They told him a phrase he was to repeat phonetically if Russian troops got there before the others. Luckily for him the Americans turned up first; all he has ever been able to say in a foreign language is “Pro domo sua,” and he must have learned that phonetically, too. He hardly went to school. Uncle Theo was able to prove he had once been arrested, and that turned out to be in his favor. Now he has a pension, and is considered a hero, which is annoying. He was never a member of any party. He does not go to church. “Pro domo sua,” he says, closing an eye.

Uncle Theo applied for war reparations in 1955. He offered his record — destruction of porcelain factory, unjust imprisonment, pacifist convictions, humane and beloved guard in prisoner-of-war camp — and in 1960 he received a lump sum and a notice of a pension to follow. He immediately left for India, with a touring group composed mostly of little widows. But he decided not to marry any of them. He brought us a scarf apiece and a set of brass bowls. It was after his return that he wrote “O Lasting Peace.”

One last thing: Without my consent, without even asking me, Uncle Theo advertised for a husband for me. This was years ago, before he had his pension. He gave my age as “youthful,” my face and figure as “gracious,” my world outlook as “modern,” and my upbringing as “delicate.” There was too much unemployment at the time, and so no one answered. Eleven years later he ran the same notice, without changing a word. The one person who answered was invited — by Uncle Theo — to call and see if he wanted me. I saw the candidate through a fog of shame. I remember his hair, which sprang from his forehead in a peculiar way, like black grass, and that he sat with his feet turned in and the toe of one shoe over the other. He was not really a fool, but only strange, like all persons who do not really intend to go through with the wedding. My aunt, my mother, and my uncle stated my qualities for me and urged him to eat fruitcake. My mother had to say, “Hilde has been so many years with the tourist office that we can’t even count them,” which knocked out the “youthful” bit, even if he had been taken in by it. It was a few days after a Christmas; fresh candles were lighted on the tree. The candidate turned his head, swallowing. Everyone wanted him to say something. “Won’t the curtains catch fire?” he asked. I’m sure Uncle Theo would have picked up the tree and moved it if he had been able, he was that excited by his guest. Then the man finished eating his cake and went away, and I knew we would not hear about him again; and that was a good riddance.