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Before the presents, Maximilian and his brother Reinhard would bathe together in the smoke kitchen in a wood tub held together by iron rings. Cursing when one of them had peed in the bathwater, they would lather themselves with a bar of turpentine soap with a stag stamped on its surface, dry their lean white bodies, the genitals still hairless, with a coarse towel beside the glowing red griddle of the wood-burning stove, and put on clean underwear, ironed shirts, and gray wool socks.
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