“Please drink your tea while it’s hot, and eat your bread. We have a lot of time, there’s no hurry at all.”

And he was reading again. Obediently, she drank her tea and ate her bread, even though she would much rather have conversed with the old gentleman. But she preferred in the end to obey him in all things and not disturb the peace of his apartment. She looked around again. No, everything had to remain as it was. She wasn’t going to endanger it. (Three years later, a high-explosive bomb would blow this home to smithereens, and the sedate old gentleman himself would die a slow and agonizing death in the cellar…)

Replacing her empty cup on the tray, she said, “You’ve been very kind to me, Judge, and very brave. But I don’t want to endanger you and your home to no purpose. It’s no use. I’m going to go back to my flat.”

The old gentleman looked at her attentively while she spoke, and when she got to her feet, he led her gently back to her chair. “Won’t you remain seated a little longer, Frau Rosenthal!”

She did so, reluctantly. “Really, Judge, I mean what I say.”

“Won’t you kindly listen to me, first. I, too, mean what I am about to say to you. Let’s start with the question of danger. I was in danger, as you put it, all my professional life. I had a mistress whom I had to obey: one that rules over me, you, the world, even the world outside as presently constituted, and her name is Justice. I always believed in her, I made Justice the guiding light for everything I did.”

While he spoke, he paced back and forth, his hands behind his back, always in Frau Rosenthal’s sight. The words passed his lips calmly and unexcitedly. He spoke of himself as in the past, a man who really no longer existed. Frau Rosenthal listened to him, gripped.

“But,” the judge continued, “I am speaking of myself, instead of speaking about you, a bad habit among people who live alone. A little more now on the matter of danger. I’ve received threatening letters for ten, twenty, thirty years… And now I’m an old man, Frau Rosenthal, sitting reading his Plutarch. Danger means nothing to me, it doesn’t frighten me, it doesn’t engage my head or my heart. Don’t let’s speak of danger, Frau Rosenthal…”

“But people are different nowadays,” Frau Rosenthal objected.

“And if I tell you that those earlier threats were issued by criminals and their accomplices? Where’s the difference!” He smiled. “They are not different people. There are a few more of them, and the others are a little more circumspect, a little cowardly even, but Justice has remained the same, and I hope that we both live to witness her victory.” For an instant he stood there, rather erect. Then he began his pacing again. Quietly he said, “The triumph of Justice will not be the same thing as the triumph of the German nation!”

He stopped for a moment, then went on in a lighter tone of voice: “No, you can’t go back to your flat. The Persickes were there last night, you know, that Nazi family that lives over me.