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would be back home, and my father would hand me the special roll that he had baked for me. I would sit at the counter and tell him about the characters in the village: the mother who became frantic when her twins hid beneath Farouk’s bolts of silk; Fat Teddy, who insisted on sampling the cheese at each market stall, filled his belly in the process, and never bought a single item. I would tell him about the man I had never seen before, who had come to the market with a teenage boy who looked to be his brother. But the boy was feebleminded; he wore a leather helmet that covered his nose and mouth, leaving only holes for breathing, and a leather cuff around his wrist, so that his older brother could keep him close by holding tight to a leash. The man strode past my bread stand and the vegetable seller and the other sundries, intent on reaching the meat stall, where he asked for a rack of ribs. When he did not have enough coins to pay, he shrugged out of his woolen coat. Take this, he said. It’s all I have. As he shivered back across the square, his brother grabbed for the wrapped parcel of meat. You can have it soon, he promised, and then I lost sight of him.
    My father would make up a story for them: They jumped off a circus train and wound up here. They were assassins, scoping out Baruch Beiler’s mansion. I would laugh and eat my roll, warming myself in front of the fire while my father mixed the next batch of dough.
    There was a stream that separated the cottage from the house, and my father had placed a wide plank across it so that we could get from one side to the other. But today, when I reached it, I bent to drink, to wash away the bitter taste of Damian that was still on my lips.
    The water ran red.
    I set down the basket I was carrying and followed the bank upstream, my boots sinking into the spongy marsh. And then I saw it.
    The man was lying on his back, the bottom half of his body submerged in the water. His throat and his chest had been torn open. His veins were tributaries, his arteries mapped a place I never wanted to go. I started to scream.
    There was blood, so much blood that it painted his face and stained his hair.
    There was blood, so much blood that several moments passed before I recognized my father.

SAGE
    In the picture, the soldier is laughing, as if someone has just told him a joke. His left leg is braced on a crate, and he is holding a pistol in his right hand. Behind him is a barracks. It reminds me of photos I have seen of soldiers on the eve of being shipped out, wearing too much bravado like a cloying aftershave. This is not the face of someone ambivalent about his role. This is someone who enjoyed what he was doing.
    There are no other people in the picture, but outside the white borders, they hover like ghosts: all the prisoners who knew better than to make themselves visible when a Nazi soldier was near.
    This man in the photo has pale hair and strong shoulders and an air of confidence. It is hard for me to reconcile this man with the one who told me once that he had lost too many people to count.
    Then again, why would he lie about something like this? You lie to convince people you are not a monster . . . not that you are one.
    For that matter, if Josef is telling the truth, why would he have made himself such a visible member of the community: teaching, coaching, walking around in broad daylight?
    “So you see,” Josef says, taking the picture from me again. “I was SS-Totenkopfverbände.”
    “I don’t believe you,” I say.
    Josef looks at me, surprised. “Why would I confess to you that I did horrible things if it were not true?”
    “I don’t know,” I reply. “You tell me.”
    “Because you are a Jew.”
    I close my eyes, trying to wade through the whirlpool of wild thoughts in my head. I’m not a Jew; I haven’t considered myself one in years, even if Josef believes that to be a technicality. But if I’m not a Jew, why do I feel so viscerally and personally