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things, they liked the food here. Accomplished cooks, both of them.
    And you?
    Repose is not in my repertoire. But I have no objection to it.
    She was silent. Then, after a moment, Sieglinde said, I may be an emigrant my whole life. Before she died, my mother said she hoped I would find a place in the world. And now I suppose I have, like it or not.
    A rolling stone, he said, an attempt at a joke.
    Perhaps a rolling stone, she said. You like it here. I know that.
    I like my job and my job’s here.
    You don’t miss America?
    Not yet, he said.
    I wonder why, Sieglinde said.
    Â 
    The time was now four in the morning. They were lying toes-to-head, head-to-toes, in the silk-string hammock. The night was very warm, their bodies slick with sweat. Harry’s toenails were thick and ragged, Sieglinde’s tiny, painted pink, bright thimbles of color at Harry’s ear. The hammock moved but slightly and the heavy leaves of the trees overhead did not move at all and at that moment, dawn far away, even the rotation of the earth seemed to slacken, a useless castaway lariat. Sieglinde’s eyes were closed, her hands curled up under her chin. She was lovely in the moonlight, her skin the color of alabaster. There were emigrants all over the world, fugitives from oppression or famine, disease, revolution, heartbreak, simple boredom, bad memories. He did not like to think of her as one of those now here, now there, always far from home. At first when she began to tell her story, he believed she was laden with guilt, feeling that she was somehow responsible for the calamity in her family. But it wasn’t guilt. She was furious at the turn of events in her early life. Furious at the war, the struggles, the deaths. He remembered a story the ambassador told him. The ambassador had visited the Jewish cemetery in Warsaw with an old friend, a worldly Jew. His friend took care to examine the gravestones, everyone dying in 1939, 1940, 1941, 1942, 1943, 1944, 1945—and when he came upon a grave marked 1952 he gave a little strangled laugh and said, At last, someone dead of natural causes.
    Harry was looking at Sieglinde and thinking about nationality and responsibility, always different in the old world than the new. Except for Native Americans, everyone in the United States came from somewhere else. All the nations of the world were represented in America. Homogeneous nations had a tighter fix on responsibility when things went wrong, and the result was either bloodshed or a sullen quietus with subterranean thoughts of revenge because there had been a stab in the back. Nothing had ever gone so wrong in America with the exception of the Civil War, and President Lincoln, dead from an assassin’s bullet, became the nation’s most revered figure. Harry held the thought, thinking that it needed refining. Sieglinde stirred, muttering something, and curled her hands more firmly at her throat. She said, What are you thinking about? You’re so quiet.
    He said, You.
    The streetlight at the end of the long driveway cast a wan glow. Now and again in the street, heard faintly but not seen beyond the high hedge, were bicyclists, announced by the splash of rubber tires. The police, perhaps, or workmen on their way to the early shift. Harry took no notice. He believed himself secure in the world, the silk-string hammock as invulnerable as golden-armored Orion high above in the summer sky, light years away. Sieglinde stirred once more and Harry thought of her freckle-faced father, off to the war, less than a week to live, posing for her mother’s camera. She had called him a hell-raiser, and what did she mean by that? He was good with engines. Liked to clown for the camera. None of Harry’s own family had gone to war, neither the Great War nor the one after that. He was the closest anyone in his family had come, if you call a few random and ill-aimed shots near a no-name river at dusk being “under fire.” During