The German stood looking on while they dug the hole, he went on repeating how hard he had jammed on his brakes, his whole back was still hurting him because of the jar that sudden braking had given him. Then he sat down in the kitchen and began playing with the little girl, the child had a little bucket full of horse-chestnuts and he started carving faces on the chestnuts with his penknife. The German was tall and young, with a long, glossy, brown head, and he told them that before the war he had been a waiter in a small restaurant at Freiburg, and after the war he would start being a waiter again if there was still a need for waiters after the war, and he wondered if he would still be able to turn and twist among the little tables with the dishes, it was a job that needed a great deal of patience and he had lost his patience in the war. He had deep white scars on the backs of his hands, Cenzo Rena asked him if they were war scars, but he explained that one day in the kitchen of the restaurant he had upset some boiling soup on his hands out of a tureen. It was the fault of the under-cook, who had knocked into him as he was coming forward with the tureen. The under-cook used to go to bed with him and she made a great lamentation over his hands. But then she had left him, because she couldn’t help weeping every time she looked at his hands. Women were like that, he said, they hurt you and then they ran away out of remorse. Men were very often like that too, said Cenzo Rena, but the waiter said no, men were different, for instance he had killed the dog and had not run away. [...]

[...] Cenzo Rena said he would have started thinking that the Germans were all waiters, poor unfortunates with some sort of a job at the back of them, poor unfortunates whom it was not really worth while killing. And this was a thought that in war-time had no sense, it was an idiotic thought but he himself might happen to have an idiotic thought of that kind. [...]

[...] Emanuele had now come downstairs, and he was all red and sweaty because he had been asleep, they had no idea of the life that he led in Rome, he said, he spent his nights at the newspaper and during the day he had all kinds of meetings and never could he spend an afternoon sleeping, In order to sleep he had to come home. But in a short time he would be giving up the newspaper and leaving Rome for good, because he did not know how to produce newspapers. He could produce secret newspapers but not newspapers that were not secret, producing secret newspapers was easy, oh, how easy and how splendid it was. But newspapers that had to come out every day with the rising of the sun, without any danger or fear, that was another story. You had to sit and grind away at a desk, without either danger or fear, and out came a lot of ignoble words and you knew perfectly well that they were ignoble and you hated yourself like hell for having written them but you didn’t cross them out because there was a hurry to get out the newspaper for which people were waiting. But it was incredible how fear and danger never produced ignoble words but always true ones, words that were torn from your very heart. [...]

[...] And they laughed a little and were very friendly together, the three of them, Anna, Emanuele and Giustino; and they were pleased to be together, the three of them, thinking of all those who were dead, and of the long war and the sorrow and noise and confusion, and of the long, difficult life which they saw in front of them now, full of all the things they did not know how to do.