Fidelis reunites with his family in Argus after crossing the Atlantic with his prospects reduced to a suitcase of smoked sausage and the ability to work. The reunion transforms his solitary struggle into a family life: Eva and young Franz arrive in a place Fidelis has made economically viable, but whose starkness Eva initially finds almost impossible to call a home. Their arrival makes the promise of “everything” both intimate and practical—a declaration of love that must be built out of work, food, and an unfamiliar landscape.

Building a Life in Argus

Fidelis had first recognized America as a possible destination through a slice of machine-sliced bread sent from across the ocean to Ludwigsruhe. Its exact cut and uniform crust seemed to belong to a place governed by an almost unimaginable order. He kept the name of the distant city on a scrap of paper until a small marvel became a destination. In 1922 he stepped off the RMS Mauretania into New York City carrying his father’s smoked sausage, the product that was to finance his journey west and advertise his skill.

The suitcase represented the remaining wealth of his family. Trinkets, cuff links, and their best woolens had paid for the passage and helped him keep his knives; the sausages came from wild boar he had poached with carefully saved bullets and a concealed rifle. In New York he knew only a few practical English words, including train, west, sausage, work, money, and land. He depended on watchful silence to navigate the crowded arrival and protect the family’s last resources. That quiet competence was not ease: it was a method of carrying risk without letting it overwhelm him.

In Argus, Fidelis found work immediately with Pete Kozka, the local butcher, and also took jobs in nearby towns and at farms where customers fetched him. His father had taught him that quality depended on every ingredient, down to the salt, fresh garlic, clean casings, and the finest available meat. Fidelis put the rule into practice in his first Swedish sausages for the Scandinavian trade, seeking the best local potatoes for the filling. Customers gathered on Thursdays to buy links hot from the kettle, before smoking, and the growing trade helped Pete even as Fidelis established his own reputation.

Fidelis lived frugally while saving for a larger place and for Eva’s passage. He subsisted on sausage ends, bruised fruit, stale cookies, and questionable trimmings, brewed his own beer, and washed his own shirts and aprons. The family’s eventual crossing was therefore not a sudden windfall but the result of sustained labor and careful saving, supplemented by help from his parents. The shop and household belonged to the same effort: the work that fed customers also made it possible to bring his wife and child across the sea.

The Reunion and Its Unequal Promise

Eva arrived on a wild spring day with Franz, who stepped off the train proudly carrying his mother’s purse. Fidelis had been working two or even three jobs, and exhaustion had begun to blur the boundary between thought and speech. As he met Eva, he murmured “Alles, alles” into her hair. He meant to offer everything he was and could become, but Eva, confronted by the unfamiliar surroundings, wondered what that promise could amount to.

The landscape sharpened the difference between their expectations. On the train west, Eva had watched signs of human presence thin out until the country seemed barren; near dusk she thought she glimpsed wolves among the small trees. Argus’s houses and shops did little at first to dispel her sense of desolation. The reunion that should have been a simple triumph thus carried a strain of disbelief: Fidelis had secured a place for them, but Eva could not yet see what made it worth having.

For Fidelis, seeing Eva again released a love he had not found the courage to explain. He surrendered himself to it, offering her all he was, while she answered with a kiss and a decision of her own: if nothing of interest or value was visible, she would make sure there would be. Her response did not erase the barrenness she saw. It turned the question of what their new life contained into a shared undertaking, one in which her judgment and effort would matter alongside his.

Family, Work, and the Fragility of Security

The move west began a family economy built from several kinds of labor. Fidelis’s skilled butchery and thrift created the means for the reunion; later, Eva’s practical intelligence and work helped make the business and household durable. When she was no longer alive to sustain that work, Delphine took an increasingly active role in the shop, selling its goods with conviction, judging what customers would buy, and balancing trade with both wealthy residents and people too poor to afford meat. The history of the reunion thus extends beyond the arrival scene: the family’s security repeatedly depended on adapting its labor to changing circumstances.

That security remained vulnerable to pressures the family could not simply work away. During the Depression, many Argus residents were broke or unable to buy meat, and Delphine traded carefully with poorer customers while drawing money from the wealthy and making new deals for stock. During the Second World War, demand surged, including requests from Jewish synagogues in Minneapolis for custom kosher work, even as gasoline, butter, coffee, canned goods, and eggs became scarce. Delphine worked around rationing and shortages while sending Markus books and responding to his letters from military service. The shop that had helped make the family’s reunion possible became a place where the consequences of wider economic and wartime pressures were managed day by day.

The later plan for Tante to take the boys back to Germany shows how precarious the original achievement could remain. Fidelis agreed that she might take the boys, except Franz, for a year or two, partly because the family could not readily afford their clothes and care; the plan followed earlier dangers and mishaps, including Markus’s near burial in the hill. The family’s passage from Germany to Argus did not guarantee that it could keep every child close. Migration offered a future, but economic strain and concern for the boys could make separation seem like a necessary answer.

Significance

The reunion joins a physical crossing to a more difficult act of making a home. Fidelis reaches America with no broad command of its language and little property beyond his tools, clothes, and sausage, yet his craft gives him a way to earn trust and create a place for his family. Eva’s arrival changes the meaning of that achievement: his solitary endurance becomes an invitation to build a life together, and her skeptical response ensures that the new home cannot be measured only by what he has already secured.

The scene also establishes a recurring tension between promise and material condition. The machine-made bread first makes America appear ordered and abundant; the journey to Argus instead reveals empty distances, hard work, and an uncertain livelihood. Fidelis’s “everything” is emotionally sincere, but its fulfillment depends on years of production, saving, household labor, and adjustment to economic shocks. The family reunion is therefore both a culmination and a beginning: the family is together, while the work of making that togetherness viable is only starting.