Fidelis returns home from World War I in November 1918, carrying the losses of the front into a Germany marked by defeat and scarcity. His homecoming is shaped by the death of Johannes and the promise Fidelis made to him: he will marry Eva Kalb. That return is not a simple restoration of his former life. It leads from hunger and grief toward marriage, work, emigration, and the attempt to sustain a family in a new country.

Homecoming and the aftermath of war

Fidelis walks home from the war in twelve days. Once he reaches his childhood bed in Germany, he sleeps for thirty-eight hours. When he wakes in late November 1918, the borders around him have been redrawn, and the possibility that he might now be French matters less to him than the prospect of food. His immediate hopes are modest: perhaps potatoes, soft cheese, even an egg. The contrast between the mapped political upheaval and his urgent attention to eating establishes how the war’s aftermath is experienced at the scale of ordinary survival.

The childhood bed carries a small, persistent trace of an earlier life: a pale stain on its white eiderdown, left by a nosebleed Fidelis had as a boy. His mother has repeatedly scrubbed the cover, but the mark remains. Against the unfamiliar and miserable beds of wartime, this familiar object offers continuity, even as the hunger and disorientation of postwar Germany make clear that home is no longer untouched by history.

Johannes and the promise to Eva

Fidelis’s return is inseparable from Johannes’s absence. The two had endured the war together, but Johannes is dead. Fidelis goes to the address of Johannes’s fiancée, Eva Kalb, and finds a neglected entrance: papers lie scattered on the walkway, while a leafless rose arbor frames the approach. The disrepair unsettles him because it suggests the possibility of another death. Seeing movement behind a curtain, he composes himself and goes forward to meet the household.

When Eva is brought inside and laid on a faded rose-pink sofa, Fidelis recognizes the obligation he has already accepted. He will marry her, fulfilling the promise he made to Johannes, who died on the walk home from the war. Eva agrees, and their kiss holds both the grief Fidelis carries for his friend and a distinct connection between the two of them. The marriage thus begins within mourning, but it is not presented as only an act of duty: Fidelis also recognizes Eva as someone familiar to him in her own right.

From postwar scarcity to migration

The hardship that follows the return makes survival depend on practical skill and difficult choices. Fidelis’s family gives up trinkets, cuff links, and its best woolens to pay for his passage to America; he also keeps his knives rather than selling them. His stock of bullets and a concealed rifle have helped him poach wild boar, which he turns into the smoked sausages he takes with him. In 1922, he steps off the RMS Mauretania in New York City carrying that sausage in a suitcase. Eva’s child is already three years old. The crossing is therefore not simply an individual departure: the family’s resources and labor have been converted into the means for Fidelis to go ahead and seek a livelihood.

In the crowded arrival hall, Fidelis relies on the stillness that helped him endure the war’s aftermath, including a period when he had to enter the black market. His English is limited to words learned during the voyage and chosen for immediate purposes, including asking for a train. The scene marks a change in circumstance without erasing the qualities the war has strengthened in him: restraint, attention, and the ability to act with little available to him.

Work, family, and the meaning of return

In Argus, Fidelis finds work with Pete Kozka and takes butchering jobs in nearby small towns, sometimes working directly on farms when summoned. He initially has no car, but later owns a succession of delivery trucks. His trade grows because he has inherited his father’s talent for sausage-making and learned his father’s methods before leaving Germany. The principle behind that craft is exacting: even humble ingredients must be of the finest quality, from the salt and fresh garlic to the meat and clean, fresh casings. Butchery gives Fidelis a way to turn inherited knowledge into a livelihood in his new home.

His return to family life remains constrained by economics and care. Years later, Tante persuades him to let her take the boys, except Franz, back to Germany to be raised with their grandmother. She expects the arrangement to last a year or two, until Fidelis can come and bring them back; she also believes that having fewer children to care for will allow the store to flourish. The plan exposes the costs behind the family’s efforts to establish itself: migration and business are inseparable from decisions about where the children can be raised and who will look after them.

The pressures intensify during the Second World War, when the butcher business suddenly receives more orders, including requests for custom kosher work from Jewish synagogues in Minneapolis, even as supplies become scarce. A coveted C sticker does not prevent shortages of gasoline for deliveries. Coffee disappears, butter is requisitioned, canned goods deteriorate in availability and quality, and eggs are powdered for soldiers. In a letter, Markus describes powdered eggs as a staple breakfast and says he longs for Clark candy bars and fresh fruit. The return from the First World War therefore opens onto a longer history of dislocation: Fidelis builds a household and business in America, but neither prosperity nor a new home removes the pressures of war, scarcity, and separation.