Bruce rips it off without a word, and sits down at the desk. René is apologizing for his violence. “I don’t know why, but I can’t look at it,” he says, asking forgiveness. “It looked like Gert, and suddenly that night practice, and the cry Heil Hitler, Heil Hitler! ” He is terribly pale; he trembles, terribly. “I won’t see another, I don’t want to see another swastika!” With a sharp movement, he reaches for the armband and tears it to shreds. For a moment, there is nothing but the sound of ripping.
“Now, now,” I say, from across the room, “really!”
But Till is at his side, and sweeping the bits happily into the waste-paper basket. Bruce goes back to his writing. Crossing to the desk, René, quieted, lays the dagger before him on the sheets of the finished letter. “Here, it’s yours!” he says gently.
Bruce looks at it without saying thank you; he looks at the knife as if it were extraordinarily beautiful, a delicate, rare, fragile thing.
“I know,” Till laughs, and says in his little chirping voice, with its high child’s twitter, “I know what you’re writing! Schnitzelbank, Heidelberg, auf Wiedersehen! ”
But Bruce is finished. Close to the curlicues of René’s childish signature, his name stands, and below it, in brackets, to explain to the mother who is so far away and waiting for the letter, and who cannot know what “Bruce” means: “René’s American friend, forever.”