Once I was hiding in a potato cellar when the SS came. The entrance was hidden by a thin layer of hay. Their footsteps approached, I could hear them speaking as if they were inside my ears. There were two of them. One said, My wife is sleeping with another man, and the other said, How do you know? And the first said, I don't, I only suspect it, to which the second said, Why do you suspect it? while m heart went into cardiac arrest, It's just a feeling, the first said and I imagined the bullet that would enter my brain, I can't think straight, he said, I've lost my appetite completely.
...
Because of that wife who got tired of waiting for her soldier, I lived. All he had to do was poke the hay to discover that there was nothing beneath it; if he hadn't had so much on his mind I'd have been found. Sometimes I wonder what happened to her. I like to imagine the first time she leaned in to kiss that stranger, how she must have felt herself falling for him, or perhaps simply away from her loneliness, and it's like some tiny nothing that sets off a natural disaster halfway across the world, only this was the opposite of disaster, how by accident she saved me with that thoughtless act of grace, and she never knew, and how that, too, is part of the history of love.
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