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had never told him or his brothers any such thing. He had chosen medicine as hisprofession because he believed that easing the suffering of the sick was a Christian calling. When the war started he interrupted his studies in order to join his reserve unit on active service. He rose to Oberleutnant in the Reichswehr and served for three years as an infantry officer on the western front. He was wounded twice and was awarded the Iron Cross first class for bravery.
    After the war he completed his medical education and learned surgery as an apprentice to one of his professors. In a matter of a few years he was one of the most respected surgeons in Germany. He specialized in the lungs and heart at a time when tuberculosis was rampant. His practice flourished. Patients came from all over Germany and beyond to be treated by him. Often he was their last hope, and he saved many from death. His fee for a successful surgery was one year’s income of the patient he had saved. He charged nothing if the patient did not recover. He married a pretty, spirited, loving girl whose father was a learned professor of philosophy. Her Christian family accepted Kaltenbach without question. He was happy, he grew rich, tears formed in his eyes when he heard the bugle call “ Ich Hatt’ Einen Kameraden ,” the German equivalent of “Taps,” played at memorial services. He tithed his earnings to his church. He had a soldier’s contempt for politics. Germany was being killed by politics. He disliked the National Socialists but loathed the Bolsheviks, and in 1932 he voted for the National Socialist candidate for the Reichstag because he was one of his patients and because he knew for a fact that the man was not a traitor to Germany, while all Bolsheviks everywhere were traitors by definition. It had never occurred to Dr. Kaltenbach that his Germanness could be questioned, let alone taken away from him.
    “And when this happened just the same and they stamped a big red J on his papers and then confiscated his property and his medical practice and forbade him to treat any patients except other Jews, he thought it was a mistake that would soon be rectified,” Rima said. “He still thinks it will be rectified, that everything will be rectified. I think he believes that the clock of existence has struck the wrong hour or something, and that the people who now rule Germany are men from Mars who somehow got lost in the universe and ended up on our planet. Oneday God, the supreme clockmaker, will notice this mechanical error and send them back where they came from and all will be right with the world again.”
    Paul said, “Doesn’t everyone believe that, even the Nazis?”
    “Maybe. But in the meanwhile Father has no patients because he doesn’t know any Jews. He never knew any Jews except for some of his patients.”
    “Jews are informing on your father to the secret police?”
    “People who say they’re Jews. Maybe some of them really are Jews. Please let me finish.”
    It was at this moment that Paul conceived the idea of rescuing Rima and her father. They could sail to Denmark aboard Mahican , as many others had done when they had no other recourse than arrest and death. He did not hear the next few words of Rima’s story because he had started to remember what he had seen two days before on the bridle path of the Tiergarten. Memories came to him like newsreel images—pictures that were quicker than the actual events, with the sound slower and louder. When a memory was unwelcome he stopped it from forming in his mind by thinking about a sport, some good moment when he had scored a goal in soccer or made a hard shot in tennis or skied through fresh snow and looked back on a turn to see his own tracks. Now he slammed a door in his brain because he had begun to see the Daimler and the booted man in its backseat and then his mother in her riding clothes, getting into the car.
    It was almost five o’clock. The stained glass window closest to Paul