Lights Out in the Reptile House

KOMODO

Black cars were passing through the smaller streets. You could see them beneath the streetlights. You could hear them like the wind beneath your window. This was the kind of country that took things away from you, Leda had told Karel. He lay in bed listening to the cars and remembered her telling him the story of the gardener next to her on the bus who had said, “Strict rulers don’t last for long,” talking to himself, talking about the weather, about anything, who knew? And the man opposite him, whom Leda had not been paying enough attention to, had leaned forward and cleared his throat and said with noticeable emphasis, “I don’t quite understand what you mean by that, Mr. — ?” And the whole bus had gone silent.

But Leda had seen beatings. Karel had seen his room, his father, the Reptile House. The next morning he rode into the country on the back of Albert’s truck and they stopped in a dense-canopied ironwood stand. Albert was breeding giant iguanas in a new experimental way for the Reptile House. The iguanas were arboreal and herbivorous, so they usually stayed in the trees, he explained, and since he supplemented their diet they remained in that one stand. He tore open one of the thirty-pound bags of feed and inverted it, spilling rich red pellets everywhere, and the trees filled with sound, the leaves in the canopy rushed with the movement, and while Karel watched, the six-foot iguanas rushed down the central branches and then the trunks, scrambling and sliding out of everywhere like black magic, like the invisible suddenly made visible at his wish.

His father sat in their tattered lounge chair watching him build his flybag. Some of the geckos and anoles at the Reptile House were not eating, and Karel thought he’d show a little initiative and raise some different food. It’d be a good thing to know if he ever wanted his own vivarium, besides. He had greenbottle and blowfly larvae.

Maggots, his father said. He had the one son in a forty-mile radius who spent his mornings playing with maggots.

He mixed the larvae with handfuls of bran and sawdust and shook them onto shallow dishes he hoped his father wouldn’t notice. The dishes he put inside the flybag, a muslin bag with a narrow sleeve on one end spread over a wooden box frame. The greenbottles would pupate in a day or two. The sleeve was used for catching flies (he used a little beaker with snap-on lid) and for feeding them bottlecaps of bran and milk mash to keep them going. An old sock that he’d soaked in water he set atop the bag to provide drinking water.

“The world needs more flies,” his father said. “I’m glad you’re doing this.”

“I like what I’m doing,” Karel said. “Do you like what you’re doing?” Karel’s father was unemployed.

The larvae nosed around each other blindly, coated with bran dust. His father kept watching, and Karel sensed in him some desire to share in this activity at least with his son. He thought about explaining some things — the way the extra meals increased the flies’ nutritional value or the way he’d have to cool them before taking them to the reptiles — while he worked, but he didn’t. His father got up and went into the house.

He tied off the sleeve and carried the whole assembly to the shade. His father was crashing plates in the kitchen sink. He stood in the sun wiping his hands on his shorts while the racket continued. It was already hot. He could feel on his arms and the back of his neck an old sunburn. A small whiptail took up a basking position above the kitchen window, near the roof. The roof tiles were red clay, stained olive in the interstices. The whiptail was a few inches long and spotted, and its throat fan bulged out every so often. Its colors would pale to compensate for its heat intake as it warmed up. He thought about that kind of thermoregulation as he went into the house.

His father was sitting morosely in the chair by the window. He was holding a spoon at both ends, and a large brown ant was running up the neck of it. As it reached one end his father would reverse the spoon, forcing the hapless ant to repeat the performance. Karel started the coffee.

His father tipped and tilted the spoon. He was wearing a sock as a cravat, for the dampness, he claimed.

“Why are you afraid of me?” he finally asked, his attention on something outside the window.

Karel didn’t answer. The knob on the gas stove came off in his hand. He tried to worry it back onto its spindle. He was intensely aware of his father’s attention on the back of his head.

His father asked the question periodically and Karel was always unable to answer, partly because of the fear his father was talking about.

“Did you hear me?” his father said mildly. He dropped the spoon into a dish of old soapy water in the sink. “You’re what now, sixteen? You can’t converse with your father?”

“Fifteen,” Karel was able to say. Above the stove was a calendar, with his quietly circled birthday a long way off. The calendar had a different sampler for each month. The current one read Are There Countrymen in This House Who Don’t Display the Flag on the Praetor’s Birthday?

“I’m the one should be afraid of you,” his father grumbled.

Karel got the stove working. Without turning he asked his father if he really wanted coffee in this heat, and his father said yes, he really wanted coffee in this heat. Utensils pinged and clattered, and outside some crows jabbered around on the back shed.

One night a year or two after his mother died in their old house in the city, his father had stayed out all night. Karel had slept on the balcony. By mistake he’d locked the door behind him. He’d stood facing his reflection in the dark glass before settling down to sleep. The balcony had been open to the moon, and he’d noticed in the catclaw bushes at the end of the garden the thin white face of a man. The man had been watching him. The man’s face had performed a series of grimaces. It had not gone away. Karel had stayed as still as possible, his stomach pitching and jumbling with the intentness of its gaze. His only strategy had been to wait for his father to return. He’d remained so still that pains had begun to shoot up his neck and lower back. Before dawn the spaces between the bushes had begun to pale and lighten and the figure had slipped away like a shadow on water. It had left a small branch wavering. Karel’s father had come back after sunrise, and Karel’s story had first frightened and then angered him. He had inspected the catclaw bushes and then had suspended outdoor sleeping privileges until further notice.

While his father wasn’t looking he tipped the salt shaker into the coffee grounds. His father was humming a victory march without enthusiasm. The coffee took forever. Karel kept his eyes on a print his father claimed his mother had always loved of a brook and some meadows, with a pale red sky and some brushstrokes intended as birds.

“Did you hear screaming last night?” Karel asked, as if they hadn’t yet spoken. “Off by the square?” He’d heard a shriek, while he lay there dreaming of Leda. In the darkness it had inhabited all parts of his room. It had shaken her from his mind and he’d had trouble reassembling her image in the darkness.

His father shrugged, playing with his empty coffee cup. “Lot of things go on nowadays,” he said. He trailed off. “Nowadays” was a common euphemism for the regime.

“Did they say they might take you on for a while?” Karel finally asked. His father had gone north along the foothills of the mountains for the last few days to get some spot work in the quarries. They’d been hoping he could catch on with something steady. That was one of the reasons they had moved here in the first place. It was more or less clear that that hadn’t materialized.

“They don’t want to keep us around,” his father said. He brightened when Karel brought the finally ready coffee over and poured some. “They want us in and out like phantoms.”

“What’s that area like? What did you see?” Karel asked. When his father wasn’t looking he binked a sugar cube across the table toward him.

“We were bused in, bused out,” his father said. “No stops, no talking. The only thing I saw on the whole trip was an oxcart with a dead driver alongside it. Is there any sugar?”

Karel indicated the cube near his cup.

His father put his concentration into the coffee, stirring by swishing the cup around. Karel went to the window and leaned out on his elbows. He didn’t work at the zoo today, and the morning felt empty with possibility. Near the flybag an almond-shaped horned lizard stirred its camouflage and resolved itself back into sand. Some puffballs trembled in the heat.

He turned from the sill, and his father sighed and eased up and down in his chair. He had a hernia, which had been aggravated when he’d been taken into custody. He refused to say how. He had disappeared for three days and then had been returned. He refused to talk about any of it. One of the policemen had jingled coins in his trouser pockets while waiting for him to get dressed. It occurred to Karel, standing there, that his father was always intentionally and unintentionally creating absences or leaving them behind him.

They were both looking at one of Karel’s study sheets on the kitchen table. It was crosshatched with lined columns for each reptile’s common name, scientific name, size, description, voice, range, and habitat. He could make out a column: Banded Gecko. His father said, “I’ve asked you about finding me something over there. I could handle animals. Of course, that’s too much to expect.”

It was. Sometimes he felt more guilty at not having tried to land his father a job at the zoo. But he worried too much about his own position, and they wouldn’t have hired his father anyway. There was something else, too: he couldn’t imagine the reptiles in his father’s care.

His father clearly didn’t intend to look for a job today. He spent the morning wandering the house in his shorts with the sock still around his neck, eyeing Karel and making sad clucking sounds. He was in the dark little bathroom wrestling with the window sash and talking to himself when Karel left.

The sun was blinding. In the next front garden Mr. Fetscher sat hatless despite it, scraping potato peels into a metal bucket as if scraping potatoes were precision work. They nodded to each other, and Karel walked down the street to the Schieles’. When he got there he peered over the tall and prickly hedge but did not see Leda. Her mother came into view instead with clothespegs in her mouth. She caught his eye and he ducked below the hedge line, embarrassed to be so often caught hanging around. He headed instead toward the square, reminding himself to walk with some show of purpose. His father always complained that he seemed to just drift around when outside.

He believed himself to be in love with Leda. She wasn’t really his girlfriend. When she wasn’t home on weekends she was usually in the square, trapped with other girls her age in the semicompulsory League of Young Mothers. It was organized locally by a dim-witted farmer’s wife whose main qualification to the regime, besides her ferocious belief in everything she was told, was her having had eleven children. They were all glumly present at the meetings, pressed into service to swell the crowd when they would rather have been anywhere else. The league was composed otherwise of twelve-to-sixteen-year-old girls. They stood around and itched and squinted in the heat. The farmer’s wife performed for them household chores as they’d been done before the people had lost their sense of their own heroic history, their special characteristics and mission. She beat clothes on a rock. She threshed grain by hand. The girls were not the best audience. Whatever their enthusiasm (or lack of it) for the new regime there was a universal sense that in terms of household chores the glorious old ways were backbreaking and idiotic.

Boys loitered around the square to hoot and show off and otherwise establish themselves as annoyances. Karel usually found an unobtrusive position across from Leda where he could watch her in peace. She saw him sometimes and half-rolled her eyes to communicate how dreary and pointless she found all of this. At other times she didn’t notice him. At no point did she seem to recognize or acknowledge that she was the sole focus of his attention.

She wasn’t there. She’d been missing more of these things. He admired and envied her independence even as he regretted the lost opportunities to see her.

Old men contemptuous of the regime sat under the café awnings and followed the farmer’s wife’s efforts with head shakes and derisive low comments, hawking and spitting in the dust. She was holding up a whisk, to a purpose Karel could not make out. He decided to wait around on the chance Leda would show up late, and because he had nothing else to do.

Besides the old men in the café he could see three uniformed men lounging around a table. They wore the pale gray uniforms with black-and-white trim of the Civil Guard. The one clearly in charge was a handsome man with impressive cheekbones. They seemed uninterested in the league. One of the old men bumped the one in charge, and then said something. The other two uniformed men looked away. The one in charge seemed composed. He stood, took the old man’s hand in his, and flexed it back onto itself, so that Karel could hear the cracking where he was. The old man howled and went down on his knees, and the one in charge let him go. There was a small uproar. The other old men surrounded the one in charge, who turned from them and took his seat as if he had no further interest in the incident. Karel thought something would happen but the uniformed man turned, again, and looked at the old men, and they stopped what they were doing. They helped the hurt one up. They escorted him across the square. He held his hand out in front of him and made small outcries. The uniformed man looked over at Karel and saw him watching. He did not look upset or surprised. The other two uniformed men leaned closer to say something to him, and he nodded, still looking at Karel.

Karel’s face heated, and he backed into the shade. Some children on the other side of the square were playing a game involving beating each other on the arms with whip-like reeds. The dust rose at their feet like miniature weather patterns. Where the road began to lead out of town, passersby swerved to touch a begging midget for luck. Under the awning near the uniformed men a large dog, tawny in the sunlight, placed a paw on a smaller dog’s back, as if to hold it still for contemplation.

He moved farther from the café and the uniformed man’s gaze. With Leda gone he tried eyeing other girls. He felt the uniformed man watching with him. A blonde too old for the meeting sat on a bench in the shade with a vacant expression and her hands crossed on her knees. Her lower lip was drawn slightly into her mouth. She bobbed her head every so often against the occasional flies. He looked back at the café, and the uniformed men were gone.

He had written on his last school essay that he was not unhappy never talking to anyone or getting to know anyone well. His teacher had disapproved and commented on his unhealthy attitude. He’d thought of explaining later that like everyone else he wanted to be part of things, but had not. He was not popular in school. He had his reptiles and the Reptile House, but besides Leda, no friends. He had at some point become a hesitant, stammering speaker, and he blamed his father. He was excluded from all cliques, including the outsiders’ clique. At times he would stand in a group listening to the talk and someone would say something incomprehensible or meaningless and the group would break into noisy laughter, leaving him standing there like an imbecile, like a tourist subjected to obscure jokes by the natives.

The blond girl drew her hair slowly back into a ponytail and held it, her elbows out. He envied in people like her their effortless adaptation to the world. He was always puzzling it out, trying to understand and possess by observation. He never succeeded, and he was usually left with something like a sad, studious awe for the spectacle around him.

The league meeting was winding down. He turned from the square and came face to face with the uniformed man from the café. His breath stopped, and the man lowered his eyelids and smiled. There was a badge on his chest of a sword penetrating a nest of snakes into a skull. He moved aside to let Karel by. Karel left at a trot, following two men hauling a pig by the nose and legs to a waiting cart.

He wanted to tell his father about the uniformed man, but naturally his father was gone. He spent the rest of the day in the shade of the back garden watching red-and-black diamondback beetles climb his chair leg. The street was completely quiet. The uniformed man’s gaze still bothered him, and he worked to put it out of his mind. He thought about storm surges and swelling green waves in the funnel-like bay below their old house. The houses had been packed so tightly into the cliff slope that he could spit into his neighbor’s window. The third floor on one side was the ground floor on the other. Red brick patios with weedy gardens stepped downward and dropped away to the port below. Lines of foam edged the beaches.

His new house was flat and dry and hemmed in by desert. All there was for him here was reptiles and Leda. Some ants were circling the flybag at his feet, interested in the bran and milk mash. He picked up the faint dry smell of sage and something else and thought of the sea smell from his old home, especially after a rain.

His father did not come back for dinner, and he made for himself a thick bean soup with some onions and a little meat. He ate it out in the back garden, listening. When it was dark enough that his plate was only a dim glow on his lap he went inside. At the kitchen table he drank some coffee, the sound of the metal cup on the saucer desolate and thin. He sighed and leafed through his reptile study sheets until he found a buried take-home essay he had neglected, due Monday. Across the top he had doodled the labials of the Komodo dragon, and along one column he’d drawn a desert iguana improbably perched in a creosote bush. He reminded himself with dismay that he had to erase all of this. Near the iguana’s open mouth he’d written: Karel Roeder. Standard Seven. Political Studies. That was as far as he had gotten. The questions were unappetizing. He knew what his instructor wanted — only the chronically absent or stone-deaf didn’t — but had no enthusiasm for organizing the material into something readable. He reread the questions the way he would read the ingredients on a can he had no intentions of opening. He read his notes for the answers, scribbled underneath as the question sheets had been passed out:

— man can live only as member of nation, therefore nation transcends group interests. Strong only as cohesive unit.

— Committee of Representatives institution that “expresses political agreement of Government and Nation.” “Documents unity of Leader and Nation.”

— Party inseparable from Gov.

— Party functions by finding and uniting most capable people “thru selection conditioned by day-to-day struggle.”

He flopped it over. He’d finish it tomorrow. He sat at the kitchen table listening to the clock, unhappy, and when it reached ten he got up and climbed the stairs to his bedroom. He left the lidded pot with the remainder of the bean soup and a spoon and a bowl on the table where his father would see them.

From his bedroom he could make out a policeman talking in the glow of a telephone box. The town was dark except for an occasional window and a single bulb lighting the square in the distance. He turned his light out and stayed where he was in the darkness, waiting for his father, or the Schieles, or someone. He saw no movement except the lighter tones of passing clouds. He pulled a chair over and dozed and woke to see the dark shapes of dogs standing in people’s front gardens and peering in their windows. When he fell back asleep even his dreams had become dull and bland, absorbed with packing and unpacking large suitcases from a trunk.

School was closed, Monday, with a curt sign posted on the chained double doors announcing it would reopen in a week. The official reason provided was unsafe stairways that demanded immediate attention. Karel’s father said the real reason was the realignment of the teaching staff. Whatever the reason, Karel lay quiet in his bed Tuesday morning, his arms at his sides, in gratitude.

His father knocked once and said without opening the door that Albert had called from the zoo and had asked if he wanted to work extra hours in view of his free time this week. He could hear his father’s resentment at having to pass on such messages, and he regretted it. When he came downstairs he said, “Who wants coffee?” rubbing his hands together in a parody of anticipation, but the house was empty.

He bought a small hard roll at the café and ate it on the way over to the zoo, wishing he had some juice. The zoo was on a rise along the south end of town, with a view over the square to the northern mountains. It was considered one of the attractions of the region. The new regime was enlarging its budget, and Karel hoped his apprenticeship would become a full position. The site was already bounded by an old stone wall and was being further surrounded by a moat. The moat was at that point a trench. There was to be a bigger restaurant, a concert garden, a monkey island, a new pheasantry, and expanded maintenance and administration buildings. The zoo held, besides the Reptile House, flamingos, cranes, parrots, and endless other birds, camels, llamas, tapirs, wild asses, antelope, bears, wolves, bison, ibex, wild sheep, bongos, gaurs, all sorts of deer, a mountain lion, and three monkeys. They were organized haphazardly, isolated from the looping walkways provided for visitors. In a corner of the complex a square pit represented the promised aquarium. A sign advertized its coming attractions. The centerpiece of the advertising was a lurid painting of some piranha (“the Sanitary Police of South American Rivers”). The Reptile House was next to the pit, near some neglected boojum trees. It was made of ugly yellow brick. A drab sign with an adder’s head in silhouette marked the door. As a department of the zoo it was inadequately supported. In terms of commonly shared materials it always had to make do with whatever the mammal or bird staffs had discarded or could spare. Even with that, it was a model of organization and cleanliness. It held 301 reptiles in 116 species and was roofed with louvered shutters over tessellated glass to control the daylight. There was a crocodile hall and tiers for lizards, tortoises, and snakes. The louvered shutters worked badly but were supposedly to be fixed. There were some prize exhibits: a giant tortoise, a green-and-yellow crested basilisk, an impressive poisonous snake collection, including an albino krait, and two nine-foot Komodo dragons. Karel spent most of his time helping with the feeding and cleaning cages. He had less contact with the prize exhibits but visited them before and after work and was sure a promotion would mean greater responsibilities in those areas.

At the service entrance one of the older staff members looked at him indifferently when he arrived and dumped a sack of rotten turnips at his feet. Karel checked the menial work orders at the food kitchens and storehouses, the hospital, the quarantine station, and the masons’ workshops. In the carpenters’ workshop three men and an apprentice were standing around a box trap as if it were impossibly complex or mysterious. He could hear what he guessed to be the nearby male ibex butting heads; the sound was like great rocks being driven together.

Albert passed him from behind, carrying a sack of fish heads. He said only “Good morning,” and nodded to indicate Karel should follow. They crossed to the Reptile House, white hairs atop the old man’s head waving lazily in the breeze. He was wearing a white lab coat that had a footprint on the back of it. They entered the building through the rear and stopped opposite the enclosure for the giant tortoise so Albert could scrutinize its carapace at length. He eyed one side especially critically, pointing out a stretch of what looked like mold. He didn’t say anything. In response to their attention the tortoise rose up on her feet, considered movement, and lowered herself down again.

“Ever feed her something like that?” Karel asked, to break the silence. He indicated the sack of fish heads.

She ate only vegetation, Albert said. Which was about the only type of food she could catch. He turned away from her enclosure and at a crossing hall handed the fish heads to an assistant heading toward the crocodiles.

They stopped again on the snake tier at a glass enclosure that seemed empty. Karel was all attention, trying to be the star pupil. What am I looking at? he thought. Albert tapped the glass. A snake appeared, a hognose, unnoticed in plain view by Karel because Karel was still, as Albert always told him, inexperienced at seeing. The old man’s tapping the glass made clear that he’d seen Karel’s confusion, and Karel thumped his forehead on the pane and let it rest there, despairing of ever learning anything. The hognose, a mottled brown with an upturned nose like a shovel lip, rose and hooded its neck and hissed loudly, mimicking a cobra, and then struck at the glass. When Karel didn’t move, it rolled over and played dead, its mouth agape and tongue hanging out.

At the lizard tier they stopped beside the desert iguanas. A small gecko looked on from across the aisle, waving its tail like a prowling cat. Albert gathered the long metal tube and a bag of olives left for him against the wall and prepared to enter the enclosure at the end of the row while Karel watched a brilliant yellow iguana, entranced at its way of growing torpid in intricate attitudes. Albert cleared his throat, and Karel came to himself and followed him around the back of the tier.

The old man smoothed his hair and straightened his coat, as if preparing to meet royalty, and then tapped the door loudly to clear away dim-witted individuals who hadn’t registered the vibrations of his footsteps. He opened it, gestured Karel through, and followed. They watched carefully where they stepped. Iguanas scattered in various directions and then froze as if playing a children’s game. Some froze on branches, others head downward on rock faces. A few squeezed into clefts in the piled shale. Albert was making tiny squeaking noises with his pursed lips. He had his sights set on a small brown lizard with a large head, clinging to a rock not much bigger than itself. He identified it as a crested anole. Not feeling good, he said, but she wouldn’t hold still for the noose.

The noose was the usual way of gathering specimens, a thin bamboo pole a few feet long with a string running its length and a tiny lasso dangling from the end. Few lizards seemed to mind having the pole waved cautiously over their heads, and most were gathered this way without harm, after some admittedly exasperating maneuvering of the miniature noose. When the noose tightened they always spread their legs stiffly, as if refusing to believe they were being lifted from the earth.

“So,” Albert said, “we resort to drastic measures.” He held up an end of the metal tube and fitted an olive into it. He put his mouth to it like a bugle, aimed the other end at the anole, and blew hard. The olive ricocheted off two walls and the anole bounced off the rock and rolled over limp.

A larger lizard scurried to the olive and clasped it, stopping in that position.

“It doesn’t hurt them?” Karel asked, amazed.

Albert shook his head, gathering the anole gently into a mesh specimen net. Its small mouth gaped, and Karel could see grain-sized teeth. “Ripe olives,” Albert said. “The nomads, when they want to kill them for food, use pebbles or nails.” He held the little drooping animal up for Karel’s inspection. An assistant passed by and stared at them through the glass. “How would you describe her on a field report?” he asked.

Karel coughed, immediately nervous.

“You’d start with size,” Albert said.

“Size,” Karel said quickly, and trailed off.

“Extensible throat fan,” Albert said. He pointed out the throat sac. He asked Karel if there were other distinguishing characteristics.

Karel nodded, appreciating his tone. He pointed out to Albert the coloration, the crossbands, the compressed tail with a crest supported, Albert demonstrated, by bony rays.

“She loves the sun,” Albert said fondly, and prepared to leave.

Karel asked what was wrong with her.

“That we’ll find out,” Albert said, and he smiled, and patted the anole with his forefinger as he might pat a soap bubble.

Outside the enclosure he went on for Karel’s benefit, though he’d been ready to leave. His voice was patient. He offered the information whatever Karel’s capacities. She was a member of the Iguanidae family, fourteen genera, with forty-four species native to their range. She was small for the group. Did he notice the five clawed toes? Did he notice the teeth attached to the bony ledge inside the jaw? She’d only lay one egg every couple of weeks. Her mate would defend his territorial range by elaborate behavioral signals that resembled energetic pushups. When they found a mate, Karel would see.

He left Karel to the feeding, and Karel, once he’d returned from the food kitchens, sat among the iguanas and anoles in their enclosure, watching them eat their mealworms and grapes, gazing at his reflection beyond them in the glass, and smiling at passing assistants, who smiled indulgently back.

He stopped by Leda’s on the way home. He was so inured to not finding her there that he was already backing away from the hedge, angry with himself for being so pathetic, when he realized he’d seen her. She was sitting in a lounge chair, holding a letter and envelope out in front of her like mismatched socks. He hesitated and then passed through the gap in the hedge to their garden. She said hi and smiled at him as if not wanting to forget something else. While he fumbled and made hand motions of hello, she slipped the letter into a flimsy overseas envelope with a dreamy precision. She was wearing a blue-and-white striped blouse with a gory ketchup stain that had not washed out, and her brown hair fanned across her cheeks. There was a faint vaccination mark on the tan of her arm. Her forehead looked damp. She said, “Well. I haven’t seen you in a while,” sounding like a much older girl.

“So hi,” he said. His hands described a half-wave and caught themselves.

She looked at him steadily, as if she’d forgotten something about him, and set the letter aside with an odd delicacy that stirred him. He felt again reduced in her presence, and to compensate stepped forward for no reason and tipped a planter holding some pale trumpets, flopping them dismally onto the ground and spilling dirt.

“Eep,” she said, bending close. She helped him gather the dirt back into the terra-cotta planter. She said her mother would die. She sounded pleased. Her eyelashes were longer at the outer corners, giving her eyes a special slant.

She settled back into the lounge chair while he tried to get the trumpets to remain upright. They tipped and drooped and packing the soil seemed not to help, and finally he left one hand cradled around the stems and tried to settle himself into a comfortable crouch beside them. She produced a bundled blue sweater and attached ball of yarn from somewhere and arranged them on her lap. Her shoulders and the back of her neck were red, and he worried tenderly about sunburn. She was focused on the sweater. There were shortages, and apparently it was being sacrificed for another project. She began winding, her hand a rapid satellite around the ball of wool, and in thin rumples and lines the sweater began to disappear. He was disheartened by her ability to shift in his presence to an abrupt and neutral lack of interest, the way dogs might in the middle of play.

“Don’t worry about it,” she said. “I’ll tell her I knocked it over. Sit in the chair.” She pointed to an undersized folding thing that always seemed to be waiting for him. It looked too small even for David, her little brother. He wondered at his most pessimistic if she intended it as a sly humiliation. He sat in it, and it flexed and tottered as it always did. The trumpets slid slowly over. He drummed a finger on his knee like a simpleton.

“How’s Nicholas?” he asked. Her older brother was institutionalized locally. She thought it was unnecessary. She battled with her mother about it. She said he had a learning disorder, that was all. Karel hadn’t heard her mother’s side of the story. He had tried to visit Nicholas once, unsuccessfully, and remembered small groups of patients standing at the gates, staring mournfully at passing children in shorts.

Leda thanked him and said Nicholas was fine. She was pleased he’d asked.

David came out of the house carrying a comic book and sat on the sandy ground between them, puzzled at the richer color of the spilled soil. He looked over at the trumpets with interest but didn’t say anything. He was seven years old and had round eyes and a thin face. Karel liked him. He had a way when nervous of hesitating with his eyes averted. He had no interest in the comic book and gave it to Karel.

The comic book was titled The Party Comes to Power, and featured the Praetor on the cover in armor, swinging an ax against a horde of cringing demons. Some of the demons had the exaggerated features of the nomads. They’d made the Praetor overly muscular, and he looked silly in armor. The inside had nothing to do with the cover and looked like a pretty boring account of the National Unity Party’s rise to power: the two referendums, the national vote, the Praetor’s appointment as Guardian of the Republic, and the announcement of the Emergency Revolutionary Defense of the Country. That had been the night Karel’s father had been taken away. Karel flipped through it for anything of interest until Leda took it from him and tore it in half. She dropped both halves between them.

David looked at the mess and pinched his earlobe with his forefinger and thumb. He and Karel watched Leda work.

Her hair swayed over the yarn. She was absorbed. He watched the soft motions of her head and the quiet dance of insects behind her, and he felt a fragrant stillness, filling him with expectations of what he didn’t know. He watched her expression. The yarn was speeding back and forth, the sweater vanishing from the earth.

Mrs. Schiele came outside carrying a dark brown radio shaped like an egg halved lengthwise. She said hello. She said she’d brought Leda her radio. She was a gentle and standoffish woman, full of warnings for her children about getting entangled in other people’s potentially dangerous business. She liked Karel and seemed to feel he was no troublemaker, docile and intelligent enough. He wondered if his relationship with Leda could ever survive such a blow.

She complimented his haircut, and he nodded, embarrassed, running his hand over the crown of his head. His father insisted his hair be trimmed close on the sides in the current military style. It left the hair on top in a haylike mat when he washed it.

“It looks nice,” she said.

Leda snorted. David picked something from the spilled dirt and held it to the light like a prospector. The trumpets by now hung horizontally over the lip of the planter. Karel willed Mrs. Schiele not to notice.

“Beautiful day,” she finally sighed, and went into the house.

Leda watched her go. Then she tilted her head and peered at Karel. He was growing, she said. Was he bigger?

He said he was. He was growing fast now that they couldn’t afford food. His father called him the Stork, always with some of the sadness of a poor provider. Karel thought of her questions as opportunities to talk more, and he was squandering each of them, one by one.

She asked if he wanted to hear the radio. She turned it on.

They listened to a show called The Party Has the Floor! The surrounding countries, the nation’s enemies, the whole world could go down in flames, the speaker said. Why should the nation be concerned with that? The nation’s concern was the nation, that it should live and be free.

There were bulletins from the northern border. The announcer spoke of the difficulties, the courage, and the enthusiasm of the special border patrols. They could hear singing. Some men he identified as wounded shuffled up audibly to the microphone and repeated the information that they were wounded, specifying where. One man in a preternaturally calm voice said, “I have lost my feet.”

Leda shut it off. Her smile had disappeared. She said, “I visited the borderlands once, with my father.” Her father had died the night of the Bloody Parade. He’d been crossing the street. She talked about him only as a quiet man who’d been an accountant for a gravel yard, who drank beer and read at night. She loved him very much, she said. She left that in unspoken contrast with her mother.

“Were you scared?” Karel asked. The northern mountains were supposed to be dangerous. They rose like walls on the horizon even from this distance. Every year hikers were lost. They died of cold and falls and snakebite before being discovered. The nomads, cause of the border troubles, were also beginning to be blamed.

She shook her head. It was too beautiful, she said. They didn’t go way up. They saw a few people, but everyone was so poor.

She talked to him about what it was like. There were rounded, blunt, burned hills, between which were plains of intolerable sun glare and narrow valleys up high in the haze. There were hard dry places completely empty that they called dry lakes, and ugly and bitter pools, never dry on the hottest days, dark and ashy and rimmed with crystals. There were broad wastes open to the wind where the sand drifted in thick waves. There was this terrible pure blue of the sky. Karel could see it all and had to restrain himself from touching her. He thought: She’s my age. How is it she’s not amazed at herself?

He got home uncertain of what had happened and shining with the experience regardless. The house was quiet and dark. His father was sitting in the kitchen, clearing his throat in the repeated way he did when he was upset. Karel knew immediately that something involving his job hunt had disintegrated. He said a cautious hello and turned on the light. His father winced.

“You’re sitting in the dark,” Karel said.

His father looked at him to indicate he knew that.

He went about the busy fiction of beginning preparations for supper, with no clear idea what he was making or looking for in the various cabinets. He ended up with an unlikely array on the counter before him: a cheese grater, a large spoon, a shallow pot, a can of yams. His father gazed on the assortment impassively.

“Hungry?” Karel asked. It was dangerous to ask what was wrong, and dangerous not to.

“Look at him,” his father said. The suppressed anger in the voice shook him. “Comes in like there’s nothing wrong, like the world’s a—” He gave up, unable to think of the word. He returned his attention to the table, as though it were the least repellent object in the room.

“What’s wrong?” Karel asked.

“What’s wrong,” his father said.

Karel was peeved, tired of this. He rubbed his face. “Did you get turned down for something?” he asked.

“I got turned down for something, all right,” his father said. He was very close to violence. “You’re an imbecile, you know that? How did I get such an imbecile for a son?” He rode the word with such stress his head bobbed.

Karel looked at the counter, not seeing clearly.

“Your mother was right about you,” his father said in distaste, as if that settled the matter.

The emotional swing from Leda to this was too abrupt, and Karel could not help tears. “What did she say?” he challenged. “She never said anything.”

His father didn’t respond. He seemed to have the ability to say anything he wanted and then forget he’d said it. He seemed as well not to realize Karel remembered. Karel knew when he hurt his father, he couldn’t control himself and was sorry even as he did it, but his father wasn’t sorry for anyone, either when they fought or afterward.

They remained where they were, wishing they had someone other than each other. “We don’t have anything to eat,” Karel said. “For supper.” He intended it as an indictment.

His father ignored him. He folded a paper napkin into a little boat and set it on the table. “I don’t want to have meals with you,” he said. “For the next few days, you eat before I come home.”

“Fine,” Karel said. He shoved the cheese grater into the pot with a crash and left the room.

Once upstairs he heard the pop and crackle of a radio and he shouted, his anguish making him reckless, “Where’d we get money for a radio? Who has money for a radio?”

His father walked softly to the bottom of the stairs, dangerously close to coming up. “I bought it,” he said. “I thought we were coming into some good luck.”

Karel lay on his bed without moving, terrified. After a moment his father returned to the kitchen.

A voice furry with static spoke for the Committee for Popular Enlightenment.

“You couldn’t even buy a good one,” Karel said, as loud as he dared.

There was more popping and snorting of the radio being tuned. We call on our people, the voice said, for simple enthusiasm and simple pride in their national destiny, not for melancholy and sophistication.

The voice reported, as if its limitless patience were about to be overtaxed, even more provocations to the north, and added that listeners could rest assured that the government in their name intended to brook no more nonsense and to defend the country offensively along those borders.

The radio was off. There was a muffled squeaking sound, and a dull clank. Was his father eating the yams?

“Do you want help?” he called, despite himself. “Do you want something warmed up?” His voice rang on the bare walls.

There was no answer. There was a small crash. His father rarely got cans opened without incident, never uncorked wine bottles without picking to bits half of the cork, never built things, never took things apart. Karel remembered him gazing at the flybag while Karel built it. He imagined his father downstairs, standing with dull lassitude before the yams, unable to understand the unfairness of things, unable to understand his own inertia, unable to understand at this point how his life could have gotten away from him. Years ago he’d watched his father go through the first stretch of unemployment. For whole afternoons he’d lain in bed looking at his hands or something ordinary like a chair. Karel had poked around the house, frightened and depressed, and had thought even then that if it happened again he’d leave. He hadn’t gone anywhere yet. Oh, Leda, he thought melodramatically, and didn’t finish, feeling selfish and childish.

He went up to the storage space above the house. The heat was stifling and close, and the single covered window seemed darker than the rest of the room. In a box for machine parts he found a woman’s sun hat he didn’t recognize, and a pair of shoes. His father kept his mother’s things packed away. That was another reason they had moved: his father had told him once that the city had been his mother’s place, their house had been his mother’s house, and his father had gotten tired of trying to stick it out, and for what? The Schieles had moved after Mr. Schiele’s death, and Karel, who’d been resisting his father’s periodic threats to leave the city, had performed a complete about-face. He’d spoken, with some guilt at his own deceitfulness, about the possible opportunities and the lower cost of living in the desert. He had not mentioned the Schieles.

He had very few memories of his mother. One of his earliest, possibly spurious, was of a woman in warm gray and pale blue huddled near him on a tiled floor. There were snatches remaining from her funeral — an unpleasant-smelling man leaning close and telling him not to worry, another woman saying there was no doubt where his mother had gone, but not mentioning where, and a decision on his part, staring at the coffin, that she would be back by Saturday — but most of the rest was lost. He pulled a photo from a box of train and ferry tickets — why had his father saved train and ferry tickets? — and the photo, curled at the edges like a proclamation, was of the seashore, with a grainy woman by a café table in the middle distance gazing out at some boats. Her face was hidden by a hat. She was in a perfect circle of shade. The hat was not this hat, but something about it, the brim or the spray of flowers near the band, was familiar. There was nothing else in with the tickets.

He set the smaller box aside and rummaged a little more. He thought of Leda and her mother, Leda remarking distantly once while walking with him that they were happy enough in their own separate ways. He found a postcard of the desert — his mother had visited here! — sent back to the city and his father.

He knelt beside the box and turned the card over once or twice in his hands. The handwriting was careless and very adult. It was dated with the year, and he calculated he’d been two at the time. Had she left him with his father? The card read: Simon: It’s hot and glorious here, as we expected. I find blue lizards in my overnight bag. There are mineral springs and ruins to visit and travel is arduous but very inexpensive. This drawing is of a great gate from the early Empire, not nearly so impressive in person. Hope all is well—

He sat with his back to the box for a long time, the sadness of not having been mentioned at all in a card from his lost mother growing in him like a bubble. When his father called him, he went downstairs, trailing his hand on the wall, acknowledging the truce.

Hiring was announced for a Public Works project in the area and Karel was sent to Naklo, a little town near the border, to pick up an application for his father. The zoo was not open, and he found when reporting there in the morning only a note to the staff on the outer gate: Lights out in the Reptile House. The Civil Guard has decided to carry on a political inspection. We must, they suggest, be patient. — Albert. So he had no convincing reason for avoiding the trip.

The noon bus dropped him at his stop an hour late. His father had gotten instructions by telephone on how to proceed from there, and Karel stood in an unfamiliar square peering at his father’s scrawl. He took a numbered trolley to another part of town. He found himself growing anxious as less and less of what they passed seemed to coincide with the instructions. To double-check the number he asked a man across the aisle. The man shrugged before he finished the question.

The trolley stopped with a sway and a jolt at a narrow side street to allow a small convoy of Civil Guard buses to pass. A young man scrabbled half out of the open window of the last one, hanging upside down and waving his arms to try to get his balance. Someone had him by the belt loops. He dropped lower suddenly with a jerk and then tumbled onto the road. The woman next to Karel gave an exclamation as if she’d seen something acrobatic at the circus. The young man pulled himself onto the trolley and clambered inside. He was bleeding from the top of his head. The buses on the side street were stopped and guards were trying to get off. The trolley pulled away into traffic.

They were all quiet at the conductor’s courage. He was looking at the man with his rearview mirror. The woman next to Karel took out a handkerchief and gestured toward the blood. She said, to break the silence, that it was terrible what these people thought they could get away with.

Halfway up a hill the conductor stopped the trolley. They could hear sirens and honking behind them. The young man scrambled out and disappeared between two houses.

So Karel never got to the application office. All the passengers were loaded onto another bus and driven to the local police station, where they waited to be interviewed. The trolley conductor disappeared. The woman who’d been next to Karel said, “This is terrible. This is an outrage,” while they waited. Karel was interviewed next to last — naturally, he thought — by a beefy sergeant tired of the whole business whose interrogation lasted all of four or five minutes. The sergeant asked Karel what he saw, and Karel told him. The sergeant asked if the man had any confederates, and Karel said no. The sergeant asked if he could describe the man, and Karel said truthfully he hadn’t seen him too clearly. The sergeant frowned, his pencil making edgy little anticipatory lines on a pad, and told him he could go.

By the time he reached the application office it was closed and he’d missed the last bus besides. He got a long and meandering ride home on the front of a manure truck, holding his breath futilely and swatting at flies even after it was too dark to see.

The next morning he went over Leda’s to tell her the story. Mrs. Schiele told him that Leda was busy. He could wait in the living room. She sat opposite him with a great exhalation, as though she believed it was her unhappy job to entertain him until he drifted away from boredom. She gazed at the piano, a small black upright polished and shiny with disuse. “Do you play?” she asked, though the question seemed ridiculous. She said she once had, and left the rest to his imagination. She indicated her hands — arthritis? he wondered — and rubbed her knuckles as if to remind herself of the pain.

“What an artist the world lost,” Leda said impatiently, coming into the room to flounce herself down on the fat green chair opposite him.

Her mother sniffed. “I tried to get my daughter to carry on, to have a little—”

“Oh, stop,” Leda said. “So what’s the news?”

Karel told her about the trolley. Mrs. Schiele was looking at him, and he realized he had a dirty arm on a lace doily that looked to be a hundred-year-old family heirloom or something.

Leda was appalled. She said that this was the kind of thing that everyone was supposed to be patient about. The NUP was always asking for patience while it consolidated its position and ferreted out those working against the unity of the country.

Her mother tsked.

“I don’t know what I would have done,” Leda said. “These people are such pigs!”

“Leda!” her mother said.

Leda put her hand to her forehead. She said, “What they get away with is so outrageous it makes me want to scream.”

Karel winced. She was too loud. He felt cowardly, ready to agree with anything to win her over.

Her mother got up and looked ready to leave the room. “Miss Politics,” she said. “Fifteen years old and she knows better than everybody else.”

“I do,” Leda said with some vehemence.

“So when you’re old enough you be Praetor,” her mother said.

“When I’m old enough I’ll help throw all them out,” Leda muttered.

“You shouldn’t talk like that,” her mother said vaguely. She rubbed her eyes with both hands and sighed.

“You’re scared of everything,” Leda said. “Daddy’s ghost, this place, everyone around us.”

They were quiet. Karel felt intensely uncomfortable, and politically too ignorant to know what he should be arguing.

“You listen to rumors,” Leda’s mother said. “This party’s like the rest. You don’t remember things before.”

“I know,” Leda said with that sarcastic look she had. “I’m too young for things.”

“Why do you always twist my words?” her mother demanded.

Leda was silent.

Her mother rubbed her knuckles and the back of her hand. She was still standing in the middle of the room. She said, “You talk about border troubles and things you hear about. I’m talking about things I see, things like more jobs and less fighting and not a new government every ten minutes, things like that.”

“I can’t talk to you,” Leda said, as if announcing the weather.

They sat quietly, Karel surrendering his hope of an invitation to lunch.

“They say in their own Party program, which they even published, what they’re going to do,” Leda said, sadly. “Twenty-five points.”

“Who reads programs? Do you read programs?” Mrs. Schiele asked Karel. He shook his head. “The National Unity Party is something new,” she said. “That’s all it is.”

“Well,” Karel said, standing.

“What about all the troubles, all the beatings, the people who are missing?” Leda said. “You think it’s just foreigners it happens to?”

“I think troublemakers who won’t mind their own business are getting into trouble,” her mother said sharply. “You leave trouble to the police.”

“You’re an idiot,” Leda said.

“Leda,” her mother said.

“I’m sorry,” Leda said, frustrated. “You’re awfully quiet,” she told Karel.

“Oh, leave the poor boy alone,” her mother said, working into an anger. “You have to badger him as well?”

“Do I badger you?” Leda asked.

Karel shook his head, his mouth half-closed.

“There,” Leda said, without triumph. “See?”

“There’s no sense arguing with you when you’re being impossible,” her mother said stiffly. She left the room.

“So don’t,” Leda called after her.

“You’ll just disagree with whatever I say,” her mother said from the kitchen.

“So test me,” Leda said. “Tell me the NUP are idiots.”

“I don’t like you using that word!” her mother yelled. She was standing in the doorway, brandishing a large stirring spoon.

Leda quieted, frightened. Her mother left the doorway.

Karel cleared his throat. He put his palms together in front of his mouth.

Leda swung her legs around and hauled herself from the chair and suggested a walk. “We’re going to go get into trouble, Mom,” she called from the front step, and then shut the door behind her when her mother didn’t answer.

On the walk Karel asked about Nicholas, to change the subject.

“That’s one good thing,” Leda said. “The NUP says too much aid goes to places like mental institutions. Naturally. They probably all escaped from one. I’m hoping they’ll just abolish the whole thing and send him home.”

“Where do you read all this stuff?” Karel asked. Leda shot him a look, and he didn’t pursue it. “You don’t like Nicholas’s … place, huh?” he said instead. “I thought they teach them skills and things.”

“I’ll tell you what the kids learn,” Leda said. “They learn to clean filthy things. They learn to sweep. Sometimes to count. I asked Nicholas once what he was learning and he said he was learning to be quiet.”

Karel nodded sympathetically, chagrined that this topic too had exploded. He hadn’t had any idea things were that bad there.

“I don’t know whether to cry or hit people when I go there,” she said. “It’s so terrible.”

“I’ll go with you next time,” he offered. Another, shadow part of him said, Are you out of your mind?

“You want to?” Leda asked, and stopped, and looked at him closely. “Thanks,” she said, and squeezed his arm. “That’s nice.”

He was pleased with the squeeze and nursed the feeling for a while.

They continued walking, and he asked where they were going. Leda said the cave with the bats. Did he know about it? She’d show him.

How did she know about it? Karel asked. She said David had taken her.

The sky was red and violet in streaks. He walked along thinking of the endless number of things in this town he knew nothing about. Leda stopped opposite a shallow-looking niche in an exposed rock formation. She said, “It’s late. But we won’t go far.” She sat on the ground and then lay back and edged sideways into the niche. She disappeared.

“Come on,” she called, her voice muffled. There was some scraping. Karel sank to his hands and knees and saw a much darker slot deep in the niche, through which the top of her head bobbed. He crawled in, trying to stay low, and banged his shoulder on the rock. His exclamation of pain echoed around him. At the slot he slid over sideways and his legs tumbled down onto Leda shoulders, and he apologized until she said it was okay, already.

They settled themselves in a black oblique space as big as a car backseat. He was excited at being this close to her. She was moving stones. He spread both hands on the dark rock around him and said something inadequate to express his enthusiasm. This was amazing. She was a girl. She said, “This part’s narrow,” and started in feet first on her back, using her elbows on the sloping sandy floor of the tunnel. With everything but her head and shoulders in, she hesitated, and twisted around to look back at him. “You sure you want to do this?” she asked. “You won’t be scared? The bats if you see them are pretty ugly.”

Karel made a dismissive spitting sound. He asked her if she wanted him to go first. She shook her head and slipped into the darkness, making a light scraping noise. It reminded him of a shovel being drawn over sandy soil.

He eased himself into the hole feet first when he judged her far enough ahead. It was cold on his back, and he took a last look through the entrance up at the sky, already deep blue in the twilight, and then began edging downward.

He could just make out the rock face, three or four inches over his. He could raise his head only a little, and couldn’t see over his feet down into the darkness anyway. He thought of scorpions and heavy bird spiders, and the back of his neck prickled. How was it she wasn’t scared? “Hey,” he said, trying to keep his voice level. “Hey.” He stopped.

There was a rustling ahead and then silence. “What?” Leda said.

“How are we going to see anything?” he asked.

“I’ve got a candle,” Leda said. Karel could hear her crawling again.

He scrabbled downward for minutes, trying to estimate the distance they were traveling, his rear and elbows thumping along. He wondered what sort of reptiles they might come across. Some skinks, some blind lizards, the sort of translucent, helpless-looking things he saw in books. It was stupid, he supposed, to just climb into places like this, but then he told himself that if Leda knew about it, it must be pretty well traveled. He kept crawling, not very reassured. He thought about finding and bringing back a new species of something, docile and unique. He thought he should have brought his hoop snare and specimen bag. He passed a part of the wall that was dripping, and he felt colder. He could smell guano. He hoped that that wasn’t what he was feeling along the walls and floor. “Yick,” Leda said, ahead of him.

He bumped his tailbone painfully on a ridgelike rise. He stopped, easing down off his elbows and lying flat on his back.

“Hey,” he said again. He could feel cold air sweeping up from below, over him.

“What?” Leda said, a little exasperated. She was much farther ahead.

“How much farther is this?” he asked.

“We can go back if you want,” Leda said. The guano smell was much stronger. Then she said, “You hear that?” Her voice came up the shaft like a whisper.

He stopped and rubbed his lower back, chilled. He craned his head up as far as he could and looked over his feet down into the darkness. He listened.

“What is that?” Leda asked. Karel couldn’t hear anything. He strained, frightened. He began to pick up the faintest puffs, bursts of air, chuffings, like someone in a distant room displacing air with sheets of paper. There was a scratching, and Leda lit her candle and the yellow glow radiated up the circular tunnel. Karel could see his feet and Leda’s head, and her hand cradling the flame. The walls around him were covered with long sheetlike stretches of guano. He groaned.

“It’s the bats,” Leda said, and one spiraled up the tunnel with supernatural finesse, planing over her head and looping and undulating right over Karel with a whispery sound, its tiny black eyes glittering.

He was going to remark on that, delighted, when down the tunnel a huge wind seemed to be building, and Leda gave a cry. Another bat fluttered by, faster, like some black, wrinkled fruit, and he looked down and the roaring grew louder and the bat shapes exploded out from below the darkness, extinguishing Leda’s candle and filling the tunnel top to bottom and roaring all around them. He jerked back and crossed his hands over his face. They were a torrent, unbearably thick and furious in the darkness, colliding with the walls, the ceiling, his head, rocketing and pinballing by and landing on him everywhere, piling up in confusion below his feet, climbing him awkwardly, stumbling as others buffeted them from behind. He felt them squirming into his pants legs and he shrieked and thrashed. The crawlers were reaching his head and arms, fighting for position and leaping into flight, tensing their little claws on his forehead and ears, propelled by his violent twisting. His cheeks were brushed and swept with fur and leathery flapping, and he revolted, turning left and right, slapping and clawing at his face. He could hear even through the din Leda’s sobbing. He tried to get to her and couldn’t. He turned his face to the rock and tried to submit, but they didn’t let up, and he was suffocated by the smell and the sound and the overwhelming feeling of being crawled on everywhere, and he cried out for her and for help and wanted to bang his head against the rock wall until it stopped, and he stamped and kicked the walls and scraped his hands until finally, suddenly, they began to subside. He could hear again, the volume dropping steadily, and then there were only a few stragglers flitting by, or laboring up his shirt front. He beat them off, hurting himself with his violence. They made tiny squeals.

Leda was still sobbing. He shivered and shook and furiously scratched and rubbed himself. He crawled down to her and tapped her with his foot, to reassure her, and she shrieked and started crying again. He rested a foot on her shoulder, unable to reach her with his hands. Together, after a wait, they climbed back up the tunnel. The darkness beyond the cave was complete enough now that they had to negotiate their way out slowly, sniffing and choking, by touch. Outside the cave they held on to each other, sobbing, and then Leda pulled away from him and ran home.

His father helped him clean up. He was covered with scratches and dirt and guano and acrid bat urine. He explained he’d been in a cave, and there’d been bats, but couldn’t bring himself to say any more, and he started crying, waving his arms fruitlessly and ashamed to be so childish.

His father patted his shoulder and sat back on the edge of the bathtub, looking at him glumly. “What a mess, huh?” he finally said. He got up and opened the bathroom door softly, as if out of consideration. “What a mess your mother left me with,” he said.

He dreamed that night he was swimming under a featureless white sky in a dead-calm ocean, in complete silence. The horizon was flat and smoothed in all directions, and he had little trouble staying afloat. He could faintly hear his own splashing. It echoed claustrophobically like splashing in a bath. Brightly colored ceramic balls floated by every so often, the reds, oranges, and deep blues striking. The water was completely glassy, ripples from his exertions flattening immediately. The light seemed artificial. He gradually became aware that he was swimming near the clifflike black hull of a huge ship — a theatrical prop of some sort? he wondered — and in the far distance, while he watched, a silent and giant wave swept across the horizon, hundreds and hundreds of feet high.

He stayed in bed the next day until late afternoon. He thought about the way as a child he’d collected geckos by sliding them headfirst into empty beer bottles. He thought about the speckled lizard that came every morning onto his stone table to share his breakfast on their old patio in the city. The lizard had been fond of brown sugar, and when it drank the water he set out in a shallow dish it rested its throat on the lip.

When he got up and went downstairs his father was preparing drinks for himself and a man named Holter, whom Karel had met once before. Holter had met Karel’s father while they still lived in the city and had told him about the opportunities out in the desert. Karel knew that his father hated to keep pushing Holter about it, but also resented the fact that Holter hadn’t come up with anything yet, and had more or less ignored them. Holter nodded at Karel as if he lived there. It turned out he was talking about a possible job. Karel’s father wouldn’t say what sort of job. When Karel asked Holter, the man put his finger to his lips and mimed a shushing noise.

His father was making the horrible mint-and-grain-alcohol thing he called the Roeder Specialty. Karel stood in the kitchen doorway. The sensation of the bats’ claws on his neck and arms refused to go away. He closed his eyes tightly and opened them again. His father asked if he’d seen the pestle. Karel doubted they’d ever had one. His father told Holter they needed a pestle to do the job right and then ground the fresh mint leaves into the bottoms of their glasses with a fork. The fork made an unpleasant noise on the glass.

His father held one of the drinks up to the light. The mint leaves swirled helically around the glass, creating the impression of swamp water.

Karel sat down at the table, overcome with unexpected affection and sadness. His father only wanted some purpose to his life, to be happy, to be unashamed of himself and his accomplishments. What did he lack? Some sort of energy? Will? Luck? He’d once told Karel in a café during one of his lowest periods that all he was doing was prolonging himself.

His father continued scuttling his fork around as if with enough work the drink would become appetizing. He smiled at Holter, and Holter looked at him curiously.

What sort of job was being offered Karel didn’t know. He didn’t like Holter. Though he knew it was wrong he hoped things wouldn’t work out.

Holter extended his feet and flexed them at the ankles, looking at them with satisfaction. “I work so hard that afterward I’m too tired to enjoy myself,” he said.

His father cleared his throat and asked Karel about school. He looked ready to give up on the drinks.

Karel told him flatly that he didn’t think he’d like the new subjects. The same reptile study sheet was still on the kitchen table. For some reason it depressed him.

His father said he’d study the subjects he was given and like it, but Karel recognized in his voice the tone he assumed when talking tough as a way of compensating in advance for giving in.

There was trouble in the schools, Holter told them. The schools were still a problem area. These things didn’t happen overnight. The Party was governing on an ongoing emergency basis, with the Praetor holding the government in trust until the new constitution could be worked out. It was unclear to Karel, toying with his study sheet, who was working on that problem. Holter added that anyway it was hard for anyone to imagine a constitution that would be preferable to the Praetor.

“People forget,” Holter said, “how much had to be overcome simply to unify us. We’d been at each other’s throats for years, a conglomeration of selfish interest groups, the plaything of other nations.”

Karel’s father lifted Holter’s glass and the bottom fell out. He stood with the empty cylinder raised as if in a toast.

Karel was set to work mopping up. He didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Holter eyed the mess.

His father lifted the other glass, and again with a faintly musical rush the bottom and contents stayed behind, inundating Karel below with a fresh wave. The grinding had been too much for the glassware.

Holter was only with difficulty persuaded to stay.

They sat in silence, Karel squeezing out great patters of mopped-up liquid into the sink. Holter started in again: everyone had taken advantage of their good nature and internal division; for too long this country had been satisfied with too little. Did they know twenty-one percent of their country received less than eight inches of rain per year?

That was the kind of thing it was good to know, Karel’s father said, and they hadn’t known it.

No navigable rivers, Holter said. Few forests. And meanwhile, to the north, he asked Karel, what were their nomad neighbors doing?

Karel waited, flapping the wet dishrag. “I’m not completely clear on that,” he ventured.

Holter sat back impatiently. Karel’s father said, “We need more, I’ll go along with that.”

Holter got up, shaking his head, and announced he’d overextended his visit as it was. He shrugged off protests. He thanked them and left, waving from the street.

They watched him go, and then Karel’s father sat down disconsolately, looking at the glass cylinders.

“I don’t like the Party,” Karel said, after a while. He thought about what Holter had called the preventive police measures: people around town had already disappeared magically, like the objects in the flashing reflection of a rotated mirror.

“What do I care?” his father said. “What does that have to do with this?” He indicated the wet floor. “Why am I always talking with you about this? What am I even doing here?”

Karel put his head in his hands. He was going to take another bath. He could still smell the guano.

“I don’t need lectures from you,” his father said. “You can’t be any help, keep to yourself.” He got up and turned off the light and left the room. Karel sat where he was for a few minutes and then carried the glass cylinders and bottoms to the garbage pail and threw them out. He went to his room. He lay spread-eagled on his bed, feeling the house get darker as his father switched off the lights one by one.

When he finally got back to the zoo, a lot was changed. There were new black-and-white signs in the shape of the National Unity eagle proclaiming new rules, the zoo’s history, or pertinent facts (occasionally wrong) concerning an animal group. Odd, arbitrary areas where no one would want to go such as the trash heap behind the food kitchens were now marked PROHIBITED, and walkways and benches were marked ACCESS ALLOWED. Two corners of the administration building had been appropriated for Party advisers. A huge willow older than the zoo that shaded the east end of the Reptile House had been cut down, sawn into segments, and left in a heap.

The new main sign greeting visitors was as tall as Karel and obscured the long view of the antelope and wild sheep enclosures. It read:

DEAR VISITOR: WELCOME to our National Zoo, West. We hope very much to give you an experience both pleasant and edifying during your sojourn with us. We ask of you the following:

1. PLEASE, DO NOT FEED THE ANIMALS! Many of them do not know when to stop. They spend the day begging, eat too much, lose health, and die. We desire to preserve their health and encourage breeding.

2. DO NOT TEASE THE ANIMALS. They need resting hours not only at night. Do not expect them to be active when each individual citizen passes by. Do not throw stones or verbally abuse them.

3. DO NOT DISTURB THE ANIMALS’ TRAINING. If not trained, they become bored and aggressive. They are kept chained from the evening on, since a chained animal cannot steal his neighbor’s food.

4. WE HAVE PUT UP BARRIERS FOR YOUR OWN SAFETY. If you do not respect them, you will be hurt and lose personal belongings. We will not be responsible.

5. OUR ZOO: A GREEN ISLE IN THE HEART OF THE DESERT AND AN OASIS OF REST FOR THE PEOPLE OF OUR COUNTRY. Nomads and peddlers not allowed.

A wooden sign on a humped and desolate area near the masons’ workshops marked the future site of a huge Carnivore House that would be part of the new regime’s expansion of the original “small and primitive” zoo. It would hold “exotic animals sent from all over the world, especially by diplomats serving in new colonies.”

He found Albert in his office. He was very mysterious about where he’d been for the last week — Karel had seen nothing of him, despite stopping by the zoo every so often — and finally became short-tempered when Karel persisted. Did he have to report to Karel, too? he wanted to know. He indicated the papers on his desk as a measure of the work facing him. Karel shook his head, hurt, remembering another comment Albert had once made to him: “Don’t keep after me. I’m not your father.” He considered telling Albert about the bats, but didn’t.

As if aware of his mood, Albert announced that today they’d be feeding the Komodos, and so would Karel, if Karel had any interest. It was what Karel had been waiting for, and he was disappointed the opportunity finally came this way, as a consolation prize.

The Komodos were surrounded by a new laminated-glass shield “160mm Thick to Withstand the Enormous Strength of the Animals.” Albert was unhappy about it. Previously they’d been in the open, surrounded by a deep moat and wall. He was unhappy too about a new sign that said DO NOT BE AFRAID! THE PANES ARE STRONG ENOUGH! and underneath related stories about tourists on the lizards’ home islands being killed and eaten, including one involving the discovery of an arm and shoulder blade with the hand still pathetically holding out a half-eaten roll. Albert felt the old precautions had been more than adequate. The two Komodos, Seelie and Herman, now looked out through the reinforced glass with an untroubled disdain for the excessive safety measures.

It was clear even to Karel that the two had distinctly different personalities. He looked at Seelie and Seelie looked back, with her lizard’s oddly neutral, self-satisfied smile. After an inspection she ignored him and wandered from side to side in the enclosure, examining things she’d tramped past countless times. Like all monitors she walked well off the ground, her skin in that light like fine beadwork. Her dull yellow tongue undulated out at points of particular interest. Herman lounged against a slab of rock near the door, as always, as if too bored or stunned to move. Karel stayed where he was, his nose touching the glass: Herman had once in his presence lopped a huge shank of goat meat from a tray Albert had been setting down, the ferocity and force of the lunge all the more shocking because it had come out of such stasis.

Seelie returned to the glass and regarded him. She was surrealistically large, as though he had his eye to a giant magnifying glass. In her dark eye he could read her intelligence and her reptile’s blank acceptance of torpor and violence.

Albert was preparing their meal: more goat meat, with eggs. They loved eggs. Their habitat, a reproduction of savannah grasses and brush, looked worn. It had to be maintained at a hundred degrees the year round and roofed with a special glass to allow in the enormous amounts of ultraviolet radiation the reptiles required. For all that the grass was dead in one corner.

Seelie lowered her head and scratched behind an ear opening with her foot. Her claw made a coarse scraping sound through the glass. She froze, forgetting her leg in midair. Herman lapped at nothing and tamped a patch of grass repeatedly. Seelie began to doze. Neither took any notice when Albert entered the enclosure with the tray of meat. The eggs he carried in a long-handled basket.

Karel was allowed to wait for the feeding before going back to work. It was not a small concession: it took twenty-five minutes for Seelie to work up an interest. She crawled completely over the meat and then backed up and tipped the egg basket. When Karel left she had smashed the basket and covered her face with eggshells. Herman was looking on from his sprawl.

He spent the rest of the morning cleaning the tortoise and turtle enclosures while the occupants hunkered down like sullen stones in the corners and waited with mineral patience for him to leave. He was grateful for the time with the Komodos but surprised by how little it had cheered him. While he worked he considered his last glimpse of them, their skins like polished gravel in the hazy and filtered daylight, and their clear dark eyes gazing at him sleepily and expectantly.

The next morning was Monday, and he sat staring at the corresponding date on the calendar in his kitchen, where he’d written: School again. He had coffee alone with some desolate lemons set in an earthen bowl before him. At school he kept to himself. On the playground there was a smallish audience for two boys who were setting mice on fire with machine oil. One mouse scampered free, trailing brown oil. As the students formed their lines it crouched in a corner of the courtyard under some discarded broken desks, licking its forepaws furiously. It watched Karel troop into the building.

Attention in class was focused on a kid named Sprute, who was wearing the black-and-white uniform of the Kestrels, the cub organization of the Young People’s NUP. Karel instantly knew from his face that he’d been forced to wear the uniform by a parent who didn’t know or didn’t care what it meant to be the only kid dressed that way in the entire sixth and seventh standard.

Miss Hagen, while she approved of the NUP, disapproved of the violation of the dress code and the disruption it was causing. It was not clear, given the state of things, in just what ways the old rules would be relaxed, and Miss Hagen clearly resented the confusion. The class responded independent of the politics to a difference so extreme it seemed a challenge.

While his teacher confiscated paper clips and other missiles, Sprute was mocked and thumped and prodded. His papers were knocked to the floor. He sat like a soldier throughout it all. Leda, who sat in front of him, did not turn around. The kid behind him drew, when Miss Hagen returned to the front of the room, a long, slow line down Sprute’s back with a pencil.

She finally suggested he go home and change. The class cheered, enjoying the uproar for its own sake.

Sprute’s eyes filled with tears and he stayed where he was, sitting up straight. He looked at Karel, and Karel was moved so violently by pity for this quiet kid — where was he going to go? Home to change in front of parents who had made him dress like that in the first place? — that he said, aloud, “Let him stay.”

It was suddenly quieter. He realized what he’d said and took another horrible second to realize he’d succeeded Sprute as the object of attention. He looked down in an agony of self-consciousness and stammered that it was school; who cared what people wore?

The class digested the surprise slowly. It seemed to be considering whether Karel’s outburst represented common sense or an attempt to ally himself with Sprute against them. The kid behind Sprute was caught slingshotting a rubber band and was told that as punishment after school he’d have to pick the nettles out of the small rectangular lawn around the flagpole.

Karel felt bad for him but preferred their system of punishment to the one for the lower standards, where children caught misbehaving were made to wear a sign which read I AM A BAD INFLUENCE until someone else was caught and the sign passed on to that person. Whoever wore the sign Friday afternoon at the end of school was beaten. The arrangement created from Wednesday on a sense of unbearable suspense, complete with last-minute rescues and catastrophes.

They got on with the lesson. There were snorts and sneezelike sounds and badly stifled laughter.

“I’d better not see misbehavior when I turn around,” Miss Hagen remarked.

“You won’t,” someone promised. There were more giggles.

They watched her make vigorous and glossy arches across the blackboard with a wet sponge. She outlined new subjects: The Nation as a Community of Fate and Struggle. The Soldier as a Moral Force. Heroism. Women in War. The Community and the Struggle for Unification. Hygiene.

Leda made a disparaging, hissing sound. No one reacted to it.

They would study the Great Trek, the march across the desert plateau to Karel’s home city. It had been undertaken by the leadership of the Party in its infancy to dramatize its struggle for recognition. They would study also the example of Bruno Stitt, the fourteen-year-old who had decided to die beside his father rather than abandon him to the foreign marauders overrunning the family farm. Leda sighed audibly. There was no mention of the take-home assignment, which Karel had obviously done for nothing.

He took some listless notes, wondering what the sixthstandarders were making of this. Answer not in material Egoism, but in joyous Readiness to Renounce and Sacrifice. Do not Stand Apart!

Her inconsistency with capital letters struck him as evidence of sloppy thinking, though he couldn’t say why. He wrote without comprehension, as usual, he thought grimly. He glanced over at Leda. She wasn’t writing, and she eyed the board with a critical tilt to her head. He considered her intelligence with envy and frustration. Was she going to fall in love with someone who didn’t understand what was going on half the time? Was she going to fall in love with someone who couldn’t keep up? Even if he at times made the effort he learned almost nothing, and waited for the moment when a simple question or quiz would expose his ignorance in all its vastness for everyone to look upon, stupefied, as if having opened a kitchen cabinet to reveal a limitless and trackless desert.

In literature they studied Mystical Forebears, whose chantings were transcribed from rock fragments dragged from various archaeological sites. They were so stupid that everyone changed words here and there in the workbooks to mock them: “The skin of our race is roseate-bright, our complexion like milk and blood” became, in Karel’s workbook, “The skin of our race will nauseate, right, our soup will be milk and blood.”

They were instructed to clip and remove foreign writers from their anthologies — the new anthologies had yet to arrive from the printers — with the explanation that they as a people were the only ones capable of profound and original thought. The foreign spirit, Miss Hagen explained, was like the bee, which worked efficiently and had its place, while their spirit was like the eagle, which with its strong wings pushed down the air to lift itself nearer the sun.

Karel, irritated and lost, wrote on his paper Bee — Eagle.

Miss Hagen read from the booklet Do Not Stand Apart! There were those, she read, who found it comfortable and soothing to withdraw in a sulk to their own little chamber, to nurse their holy wounded feelings and say, “You needn’t count on me anymore; I don’t give a hoot about the whole thing.” Because their tender sensitivities had been offended by one thing or another they spoiled the joy of achievement for the whole group. Who were these people who refused their obligations? Who were these people?

When she saw their faces she apologized for getting too complicated and promised to talk more about all of this later.

He received a note from Leda which read: I’m glad you like the Kestrels so much, and when he tried to catch her eye she wouldn’t look.

They watched a filmstrip involving polite members of the Civil Guard teaching methods of terrace farming to grateful and simpleminded nomads. The nomads provided comic relief by doing things like attempting to eat the fertilizers. The day ended with Miss Hagen telling the story of a young boy from a school much like theirs who’d had the courage to turn in his parents, both of whom were working for outside interests. The class reaction was muted. They went home without even the enthusiasm that came from their release at the end of the day or the new opportunity to torment Sprute.

He changed and went over Leda’s. When he peeked through her hedge she was sunning herself in a faded canvas deck chair. Her skirt was raised in a lazy S across her thighs. Her elbows were lifted to the sun. She seemed not to recognize him immediately. She did not move her skirt, and he imagined he saw underpants, of a dreamy pale blue.

On the ground nearby were discarded oil paints, tumbled across a palette like undersized and squeezed toothpaste tubes. David sat near the mess reading with his back to the sun while the breeze turned the pages of his book every so often, in anticipation of his progress.

She asked how things were at the zoo, and Karel told her. She said her skin temperature was about a thousand degrees. She asked if he wanted any mint tea with shaved ice. She said she had started a painting for him, and had given up. She held up as evidence a forearm crisscrossed with blue and yellow paint.

He was thrilled, and sat near the palette and examined the paint tubes for traces of his unrealized painting. The names on the tubes pleased him. Where some of the paint had bubbled out it was still moist, and the skins were resilient and yielding like the skin on boiled milk.

Leda said she hadn’t gotten over the bats, and wanted to know if he had. He shook his head. She hadn’t told her mother, and asked if his father had helped. Karel said he hadn’t, much. She shivered, thinking about it.

She turned the radio on. It was hidden below her in the shade of the deck chair. After some staticky popping there was a howling wind, and then the overheated music of Adventure Hour.

“This thing,” Leda said.

Karel followed along, dandling a paint tube. The story was about mountain climbers, one of whom announced hanging over a crevasse that he was doing all of this for the people. He went on to describe the mountain he was mastering, which he called the Ice Giant. An arctic blizzard whistled behind his voice. The Ice Giant was supremely beautiful and supremely dangerous, a majestic force which invited the ultimate affirmation of, and escape from, the self.

“This is a mountain climber?” Leda said. Her eyes were closed to the heat.

“I don’t understand any of these shows,” David said.

A fanfare indicated the climber’s triumph, which he confirmed by shouting, “Thus I plant our nation’s flag in this wild place.” There was a sound effect of the flag going in, sounding macabre, like something being stuck with a knife. Leda changed the station. She waved away an inquisitive fly.

Karel was moved by the notion of the almost-painting and felt a rush of feeling for her, a surge of excitement and longing that could have been audible as he watched her drowse. He shaded his eyes from the sun. She turned on the canvas chair and smiled. She had at that moment the face of a placid, intelligent child, someone younger than David. He was so filled with tenderness that it was only with difficulty that he restrained himself from announcing it whatever the consequences. She sighed and said she couldn’t have mint tea alone.

More and more he connected unrelated elements of his life in unexpected ways to her; more and more she would appear, magically, inside a disconnected thought, slipping by without turning her head. They’d been friends since childhood, but she had had many friends, and he felt as though he’d had just her. Around her as he was now he felt the same unreasonable contentment he felt in the presence of old dogs comfortably asleep.

Most of all he wanted to talk to her about it, and couldn’t. He spent so many nights burrowing through the whole thing that he was bewildered by the sight of it. Once he’d almost had the courage, walking with her in the shade of an anonymous whitewashed house, but when he’d said, “Leda,” and she’d turned to face him, the directness of the clear look that returned his stare had seemed to him so adult and sensual that all he could think to say at that point was “You have nice hands.” She had looked at him strangely.

Leda said, “You’re quiet today.” He focused on David, attempting to induce him telepathically to leave. Mrs. Schiele came out of the house in a sundress and bonnet of a matching peculiar green, carrying a glass of ice water and filling him with impatience.

“I guess I am, too,” Leda said.

Her mother greeted them and settled herself into the other chair beside Leda, remarking to David that if he continued reading like that he’d grow up a hunchback. She asked rhetorically if her daughter the princess was speaking to her today, and then said to Karel, “What a battle you missed.”

“That’s some outfit, Mother,” Leda said.

“Such a battle,” her mother said.

Leda sighed and said, “We had an argument.”

“Arguments like that I hope to have once in a lifetime, thank you,” her mother said. The two of them were positioned identically, arms and legs straight out, eyes closed.

“What about?” Karel ventured. He nursed a crazy hope he was the cause.

“The Population Registration Act,” Mrs. Schiele said, as if talking about it once again was inevitable, and talking about it the first time had been a terrible mistake.

“Oh,” Karel said, and then realized in an awful and dim way that he sounded like a simpleton.

“Karel gets worked up about these things,” Leda said.

“No, I know about it,” he protested, but only weakly: he knew some details. The act required registering at the post office. It assigned everyone to a racial group and said that everyone who was one quarter or more nomad had to register that way. What had they been fighting about?

Leda looked over at him. Mrs. Schiele said, “My daughter can argue about the Population Registration Act.”

He was curious, but mostly he wanted her mother and brother to go away and for Leda to say “Karel,” the way he’d said her name, near that whitewashed wall.

“You young people never see nomads anymore. There are a few who live outside of town,” Mrs. Schiele said. “That’s a shame, Leda’s right. When I was her age we lived closer together. Now you have to make an effort to get to know them.”

“Mother,” Leda warned.

“Leda doesn’t like the idea of renegotiated borders and their getting their own areas,” Mrs. Schiele said.

“Now who’s twisting words?” Leda asked. “I said they’ll get the horrible places no one else wants.”

“You’re an expert, of course,” her mother said. She sipped from her ice water and rolled the glass on her cheeks. “Considering all the troubles, especially after the elections, I’m sure they’re happier with their own kind.”

Leda made a scoffing noise. A coasting bicycle passed by beyond their hedge, whirring. Her mother was quiet.

Karel cleared his throat. “I don’t see anything wrong with giving them some land of their own that they could work,” he said. It was something his father once said.

They both were looking at him. “Then you’re an idiot, too,” Leda said, with extra heat.

“Leda,” her mother said sharply, and the blood rushed to Karel’s face. “Say you’re sorry.”

“Why?” Leda said. “If he talks like an idiot?”

Mrs. Schiele sighed theatrically and looked over at him with a what-can-you-do? expression. Leda lay back, flushed and fidgety. Karel raged inwardly at himself, at that familiar granite feeling of stupidity.

“When I get old,” Mrs. Schiele said, as though changing the subject, “I want to be taken care of by a nomad. I wouldn’t want somebody else to see me that way.”

Leda said nothing.

“Leda had a woman who was half nomad as a nanny,” Mrs. Schiele said. “Did she ever tell you that?”

Leda made a bitter, hissing noise.

Karel shook his head, unwilling to anger her further.

“She did,” Mrs. Schiele said. “She was wild about her nanny. Told her secrets she wouldn’t tell me.”

“You can see why,” Leda said.

He experienced an odd, powerfully erotic image of interracial contact in a darkened theater, with Leda as nomad. You’re depraved, he thought. You really are.

David stood and arched his back painfully, for his mother’s benefit. He remained where he was. Mrs. Schiele gave no indication of intending to leave, either. It seemed to Karel that in terms of all he cared about he was moving backward.

“In the early days of my marriage we had to concentrate just on survival,” Mrs. Schiele began, and Karel thought in frustration, Now why’s she talking about this? “My father didn’t approve of Leda’s father, and didn’t give us a bean. Still, it was exciting, we were determined to have a house, determined to have children,” she said.

Leda sat up, rubbing her arms. “Mother, you must have made sense once,” she said. “But it was so long ago—”

“Oh, hush,” her mother said. “Karel’s interested, even if you’re not.”

Go in the house, Karel thought fiercely.

“When I grew up, love and marriage were big things,” Mrs. Schiele said. “You were told what you were doing by your parents. And it was your parents’ privilege and duty to do that.”

Leda announced she couldn’t stand another minute of this and they were going for a walk. Her tone made it clear that Karel’s comment had not been forgotten and that he was at this point the lesser of two evils. He followed her through the gap in the hedge, waving goodbye. “Have a nice time,” Leda’s mother called after them.

Her walk had a fluidity and purpose that suggested she knew where she was going. He found it hard to fall into her rhythm and imagined someone seeing the two of them: her glide and his uneven, constant adjustments.

“God,” Leda said, “look at that,” without indicating what.

“I’m sorry about what I said,” Karel told her. “It was stupid.”

Leda looked at him and made a lump under her cheek with her tongue. “You’re so fake sometimes I don’t know what to do,” she said.

The comment was more crushing than the one in the backyard, and he knew what she meant: his losing efforts to keep track of her nuances and formulate strategies to win her over.

“I just like you,” he finally said. At least it was honest.

“I like you, too,” she said. They passed an enclosed courtyard where a black-and-white cat with an eye stitched shut stealthily climbed a ladder to the second story. He had a feeling she was waiting for him to go on. So why didn’t he? Did he have any idea what he was talking about?

They passed a stone bench overhung with carpenter bees, and a terrier puppy sleeping in the sun with its mouth ajar, exhausted from a day’s hysterics. “I don’t know if we’ll ever be really good friends, Karel,” Leda finally said, looking at the dog, and he felt as though he’d watched a door close on him, locking him out of happiness.

Along the road two women sat unloading baskets of gourds and chatting. On one of the gourds an anole perched, turning his head to examine the vibrations. Leda talked about a friend from school, Elsie, and the night her mother had dozed on the couch and the two of them had drunk sweet fermented wine that Elsie had smuggled in. Elsie kept threatening to throw up and that would make them start laughing all over again, though they had to be quiet. And Elsie’s boyfriend came over and tried to get in, but Elsie didn’t like him anymore, though he didn’t know it. He just stood at the window saying, “Let me in, let me in,” in a voice muffled by the glass. Of course, her mother had missed the whole thing.

“Who was her boyfriend?” Karel asked quietly. “What happened to him?”

“I don’t think you knew him,” Leda said. “We shut the sunshades at one point, and when we remembered them he was gone.”

They walked to the very edge of town. The dry brush in front of them extended to the hills in the distance. They turned and headed back. Leda told him more about Elsie, who was always talking about marriage and supported the regime because she liked the colors and because she’d gotten picked as a flower-bearer for the local celebrations of the Great Trek.

Leda asked if he was so quiet because of what she’d said, and he said he guessed so. She apologized.

He smelled flowers somewhere, and sage. Leda said that actually she was worried about Elsie and he said he thought it was a phase, and that Elsie would probably grow out of it. Leda said she thought that was really true and a good point.

She indicated a cloud she thought was shaped like the outline of their country, and not only could he see no similarity but they couldn’t even settle on exactly which cloud they were looking at. She talked about a dream she kept having involving a tunnel inset with luminous windows. In the windows she could see coral, sea urchins, and champagne bubbles. She asked him why he supposed blue was a common color among reptiles but not among other animals. She asked him if he thought he wanted to work with reptiles when he grew up. He talked to her about exploring someday in the plateau deserts, about finding new species and setting up a Reptile House where they had everything they needed. She asked what sort of things they needed. He told her about gravels and drainage and vivarium design and food storage, registering her responses and noting with pleasure the way she opened her mouth a little the instant before laughing.

She told him her mother admired his steadiness and devotion to the Reptile House. She said she really liked her mother more than it seemed sometimes. She told him about her nanny, whom she remembered as having a beautiful voice and being magical with injuries and animals. Not an old woman at all, pretty, with dark eyes and hair and a coffee smell. She used to tell Leda she was working to make money for her family. She talked along with the radio to improve her language and told stories about her brothers in the desert while she folded sheets and pillowcases. Leda’s mother just fired her one day, to save money, it turned out, though no one told Leda. Her mother said later she hadn’t considered the change important enough to merit discussion. Leda had been home sick from school for two weeks afterward and no one could figure out what was wrong. Everybody had been worried. She figured all the money her mother had saved firing the nanny had been turned over to the doctors. She loved her nanny and told her everything, as her mother said, all her secrets. Now all she had was her journal. When Karel asked what kind of secrets, she said she couldn’t say, or they wouldn’t be secrets.

An article in The People’s Voice interested him: in the southern swamps the Civil Guard was using snapping turtles tied with rope to retrieve corpses. He tore it out to show Albert. It got him thinking about his old life in the city. It was in the city that he’d first seen a snapping turtle, in a traveling exhibit. It had had a big effect on his growing love of reptiles.

Summers he and Leda played as often as he could talk her into it at the beach. She had other friends but liked him too. They were walloped by breakers when the waves were good, after storms, and scavenged along the shoreline when the sea was calm. Their favorite place was an underwater rock shelf filled with jellyfish slipping by on the action of the waves. They swam furiously with no style but a lot of splashing. Leda thought it was very funny to carry starfish out of the surf on her arms. The sand dried immediately after a wave’s departure. When they buried each other they would leave their faces bare, and arrange crosses of pebbles atop their chests.

He remembered the pointed gables of the beachfront hotels and the green cypresses, and one hotel, the Golden Angel, with a painting they both loved in the common room. The subject was a cavalry charge they couldn’t identify. It involved a chaotic spread of chargers all in near-collision and all about to burst the plane of the painting and trample the viewer. Whenever they’d had too much sun, the hotel manager, a tubby man with a bald and sunburned head, would allow the two of them, sandy and barefooted, a few moments in the room on the condition they sit on none of the furniture in their damp suits. They’d crouch or kneel on the thick red carpet in front of the painting. The horses’ nostrils were dragonish and the eyes oversized with fear and excitement. The dragoons riding them were as relaxed as strollers in a summer garden. The dying or about to be trampled infantry below looked thoughtful and melancholy, as if overrun while unexpectedly drowsy.

Behind the Golden Angel through an alley of oyster shells and cat droppings they found the Seaman’s Hostel, where they could get free fish broth and sermons about children alone in a world like this, and farther up the hill the Sea’s Trade, a little open-air restaurant that looked down into the harbor where the gulls pecked garbage from around the ships, and where when they had some money they could eat pastries stuffed with pink shredded fish and prawns sprinkled with lime juice and crayfish and young eels that Karel always swallowed in too-large pieces, and a weak wine with some melon that made them feel like teenagers. At night there was a fair and a wheel of fortune with a leather flap slapping against nails and they could buy warm fried fish wrapped in newspaper, and ride on wooden bulls with gilded horns on a merry-go-round in and out of the harsh lights of the ticket booth.

And they loved a place his father called a junk store that featured bins of sheet metal with low glass dividers separating tiny toys: hand-painted soldiers, tin buses, rubber lizards, tiny puzzles, miniature knives and pliers, ocean liners with wavering hand-painted waterlines. White horses, golden dice, purple dolphins.

He had a dream in which Leda led him into a beautiful emerald darkness and talked to him about underground rivers far in the earth, dark caverns dripping with crystal-line water. She whispered something so close to his ear it tickled. She pointed to the volcanically unstable island on the horizon known to them popularly as the Roof of Hell. He could see waterspouts like great spirals of glass taking the sea into the clouds. In the harbor she pointed out enormous whirlpools, racing cavities like inverted bells, pulling the sea down into the earth, leaving the surrounding waters weirdly domed.

After that dream he lay there trying hard to remember more, especially about Leda at that age, but found that the details had started to disappear and that he could no more make her return that way than he could have altered elements of the cavalry’s charge in the painting they loved. Ultimately all that came back was pieces: her shout, her bare shoulders on the merry-go-round, a yellow shirt he wanted, until he was left only with the dark reach of shadow in the troughs of waves and a glimpse of their discarded shoes on the beach.

The house was quiet. He looked at the newspaper photo of the snapping turtle. I might as well not have a father, Karel thought. He went downstairs and his father was hungover and reading the rest of The People’s Voice in search of temporary jobs, wincing at the noise when he rattled the paper. He was holding a pen in his teeth and looked blearily over at Karel and said good morning.

“It’s afternoon,” Karel said harshly. “I’ve been home from school for hours.”

His father looked hurt and returned his attention to the paper. “I think I got into some trouble last night,” he said.

Karel didn’t answer. He noted the coffee cup still in the sink, alone, and said, “Didn’t you eat anything today?”

Something large upstairs groaned and clanked.

“I think the pipes’re gone,” his father said. “We’re not getting any water.” The plumbing shrieked and roared hollowly in response like prehistoric animals in the distance.

Karel went over to the window and looked out. Sprute was leading a group of six or so small boys down the street. One of them was also wearing a Kestrel uniform, with an additional white sash. David was in the group. Karel went outside.

When they reached him he stopped David. The group stopped with him, to wait. Karel asked what was going on. David said he’d been invited to the party following Harold’s initiation. Harold was the other boy in uniform. The party had been outlined in great detail by Sprute, who’d been recruiting at the playground. There were going to be picture cards in color with the Party eagle on them and little bundles of white almond candies and for each guest a statue of a boy and eagle together lifting the flag, and cakes and juices and games. Harold’s parents and the Party together were paying for it. David had already learned the virtues of the Kestrels: Undoubting, Undivided, Rock-Ribbed, Stern, Simple, Brave, Clean, and True. He showed Karel two pennants he’d already been given just for agreeing to come along: one involved yet another eagle; the other read, in script, We Are a Universal People; There Will Always Be a Springtime for Our Greatness. A small bird — representing springtime? — was stitched onto the corner of the second one. No, his sister did not know where he was.

Karel pulled him out of line. He told Sprute that they had to go home and that Sprute had plenty of kids anyway. He mollified David by not only explaining how much all of this would upset his sister but also by taking him for candy and buying him a week’s worth of sugared violets and waferlike crackers covered with powdered sugar.

He marched him home, stopping every so often when David dropped something and had to pick it up, and presented him to Leda. She was beautiful. She stood in the doorway in a dress of red linen. She’d been about to go to a friend’s birthday party. Karel registered wistfully that he hadn’t been invited and then explained everything.

Leda took in her breath and clasped David with his back to her as if he’d been saved from savages. His front was a snowfall of powdered sugar.

While Karel spoke she listened intently, and when he stopped she didn’t say anything. Her hair was swept up and pinned back and there was a black ribbon around her neck. When she moved her dress flared at the bottom. Instead of thanking him she leaned over her brother, who ducked his head, and kissed him, her kiss tasting familiar and faintly sweet.

He got home much later, having dawdled through half of town touching his tongue every so often to his lips in the dreamy hope that some of her flavor would return. His father was gone. The kitchen chair was on its side, but the house was otherwise undisturbed. Mr. Fetscher appeared at the door of the adjacent house slowly when Karel knocked, and gestured him in, where he told Karel with a mix of sympathy and irritation that the police had come, or the Security Service — somebody — and had taken his father away.

At the station the local police seemed genuinely ignorant of what had happened. At home he went from room to room, from the storage space under the kitchen to the attic, searching for his father or clues or anything at all. He found nothing and couldn’t tell how much clothing or what personal effects were missing. He sat on the bed in tears and turned on the radio on his father’s folding bedside table and listened to a lot of garbled, excited talk and fanfare before he realized that what they were saying was that war had been declared.

With nowhere else to go he returned to the zoo. On the way he checked in again at the police station, which was a madhouse, and the café. The café owner hadn’t seen Karel’s father and wondered if he’d enlisted, or had been called up as some sort of worker. He took Karel inside off the patio and gave him a bitter drink tasting of lime. Karel sipped it while gazing around at a place his father spent time. Did he drink things like this when he wanted to get away from Karel? Was he friends with these people? Were they looking at Karel and thinking, This is the kid he told us about?

The café owner had his back to him and shifted a bottle along the mirrored glass as if transmitting significant information. He had no answers to whatever question Karel asked. Karel’s leg bobbed independently on the stool and he wanted to break something. He touched his glass to the dark wood between them and made patterns of condensation rings: a seven, a lazy S.

At the zoo only Albert was working. Albert’s assistant, Perren, told him that the nomads, not content with systematic abuse and provocation, had staged a major raid on a customs hut near the border. They’d killed an elderly official who had been simply tending his pitiful little garden when they struck. Eleven nomad bodies were available as evidence. How they had been killed was not clear. Exactly what their strategic thinking had been was not clear. But the incident had been the last straw and was being handled, the government announced, with grim resolve.

Perren was playing with two creamy white slowworms, small, legless lizards. They twirled and wound around his fingers like a caduceus. He lifted one to each earlobe while Karel watched, and they clamped on with their tiny jaws and hung like earrings.

Perren said twelve divisions of the army that had been in the area on maneuvers and four squads of the Special Sections behind them had struck at six that morning and were already encircling the only large city, which he called “the capital.”

While Karel waited for Albert to give him a few minutes the old man offered a cotton swab of medicine with maddening patience to a recalcitrant pit viper. Karel made tsking and peevish noises with his tongue on his teeth and crossed and recrossed the hallway next to the viper’s glass enclosure with his hands on his head and his elbows out. Opposite them the puff adder struck at the same spot on the pane over and over with his nose and then shot up to the wire netting and down again.

When he finally heard the news, Albert expressed his sympathy so dryly that Karel was forced to conclude with surprise and dismay that this sort of grief was not transferable. Albert said he thought Karel’s father was probably all right, but as to where he was, who knew? In this mess he’d be untraceable, at least until things settled down. He really couldn’t have picked a worst time to disappear, Albert remarked. He led Karel down the hall. When he reached his office he turned and saw Karel’s face and seemed genuinely sorry. He said that Karel should come back with him, to his house. Maybe they’d think of something; if not, at least they could have lunch. Had he eaten anything? Karel hadn’t, and was hungry.

Karel had never seen Albert’s house. He’d barely spent time in his office. The house was on the other side of town. A block or two before it they came to a roadblock, staffed by two soldiers. What the roadblock was supposed to be guarding was anybody’s guess. Albert misunderstood at first and thought the road closed. He led Karel a few streets over to an alternate route, which was also closed. Puzzled, he returned to the first roadblock. He stood looking at it as if to verify its existence while Karel waited in a misery of impatience. The soldiers at the barrier looked at them suspiciously now that they were back. When they finally crossed to the striped sawhorses, one of the soldiers, a thin teenager with a swollen eye, leveled his weapon at Albert’s chest and left it there.

“What is this?” Albert asked pleasantly.

“Do you have identification?” the older soldier said. He was a corporal and had his breast pocket lined with candy bars.

“To go home?” Albert said. He began halfheartedly to fumble through his pockets.

“You live here?” the corporal said.

“You saw me go by this morning, when you were unloading these things,” Albert said. “I wondered what you were doing. The gun is unnecessary.”

From his wallet he extracted a card, his membership in the Herpetological Association.

“What is this?” the corporal said, after a pause. He held the card as if it were an attempt to humiliate him.

“It’s the Herpetological Association,” Albert said. “I’m an officer. We study animals, reptiles. Lizards?”

“Why are you loafing near here?” the younger soldier said. Karel speculated on his swollen eye.

“Everything can be explained,” Albert said. “I work at the zoo—”

“If you move rapidly like that my friend’ll kill you,” the corporal said. Karel felt a chill at the back of his head. The corporal handed the card back. “And who’s this? This is your son?”

“I was looking for more identification,” Albert said. “No.”

“This is not your son?” the corporal said. This seemed to open whole new vistas of problems.

“He works for me,” Albert said, near despair. “He was coming over for lunch. I’m very tired.”

“Is that a hobby of yours?” the corporal said. “Inviting young boys over for lunch?”

The younger soldier guffawed.

Albert was silent. He peered down his block. The corporal looked over another identification card and speculated to the younger soldier what Albert would do or had already done with Karel. The younger soldier turned his head to use the good eye to listen. He said to Karel, “What are you looking at?” The corporal laughed.

The younger soldier hawked and spat and then moved aside and let Karel and Albert pass.

“Happy hunting,” the corporal called. Albert turned back to look, and then led Karel to his house.

In the entryway Karel cleared his throat and commented, to change the mood, on a fat, flowered tea cozy half covering the telephone. The flowers had smiling faces.

Albert turned on the radio and sat at the kitchen table. He rubbed his eyes with his palms. He said, “You want to know about the tea cozy. So. There’s a man named Kehr. From the Civil Guard. He knows many surprising things about me, it turns out.” He got up and went through the cabinets and pulled out a box of crackers and a jar of olives, which Karel hoped wasn’t his idea of lunch.

“People have been here to look at my phone,” he said. He pointed to his ear, and Karel gaped at the tea cozy, amazed.

“Or it could’ve been a neighbor,” he said, sighing. “I was supposed to have been listening to foreign broadcasts, and the idiot next store could’ve said something. We go at it every so often. She beats her rugs over the fence while I try to nap.”

“You listen to foreign broadcasts?” Karel said.

Albert made a disgusted noise and refused to answer.

Karel considered the tea cozy. Suppose his father had said something stupid or wrong somewhere? The more he thought about it, the more miraculous it seemed his father had stayed out of trouble this long.

“What would they do to you?” he asked. “If they thought something like that?”

Albert dumped the olives into a dish and brought out bread and cheese. When he lifted the bread from the cabinet the shelving lifted with it and Karel saw that it had a false bottom, a secret space. Albert glanced at him, and Karel had looked away in time. “Turn me over to somebody like our friends at the roadblock,” he said. “Or one of the centers.”

“To be reeducated?” Karel asked.

Albert looked at him sharply. “That’s one way of putting it,” he said.

“Suppose that happened to my father?” Karel said.

Albert sliced the bread and then the cheese, and arranged the slices with a hurried sense of the right way to do things. “Your father didn’t seem particularly opposed to this regime,” he said finally.

That was true, Karel reflected. He felt better.

Albert indicated the food and took a piece of cheese to demonstrate.

Karel laid some of the thicker cheese slices on a piece of bread and ate standing up. The cheese was very sharp and the bread was dry, a day or two old. He was thirsty. He asked what Albert thought about the war, and Albert said only that the war was obviously what the majority wanted.

“You think?” Karel said.

“By the majority I mean the Praetor,” Albert said.

When Karel asked him after a pause what he thought the nomads wanted, he said, “To be left alone.”

One of the olives tasted horrible, and he wasn’t sure if he should spit it out. It made him more thirsty. He sat down without being asked, chewing endlessly and eyeing the water faucet. Albert poured himself a glass of water while Karel watched and drank the entire thing and put the glass in the sink.

After lunch they went into the shaded and gloomy living room, and Albert surveyed his sofa. It looked like he was getting ready to nap. He suggested Karel try his neighbor, who was working for the new transportation board and might have issued Karel’s father a travel pass. She’d be home now, for lunch.

So Karel went next door and followed her around like a dog waiting for an answer to his question. She was directing workmen laying in plaster sculptures in her rock garden. When she finally put her attention to Karel she announced she had no idea what he was talking about, and that no Roeder had been through her office, and how had he found out where she worked in the first place?

On the way back he could see from the street Albert talking intently with a young man in the living room, the two of them sitting forward on the sofa and nodding. Albert had his two index fingers together and moved them apart to demonstrate something. When Karel knocked and came in the young man stood up and looked at him and then thanked Albert for the directions. Albert wished him luck, and the man left.

Trying to find the square, Albert said. He asked how things had gone. He said again not to worry, the thing to do was to check at home and give it a little time before getting excited. He’d written a number on his palm, and when he saw Karel notice it he made a casual fist.

The house smelled of mildew. Albert settled back on the sofa and closed his eyes and draped an arm over his face. Karel could see his nose in the crook of his elbow. He said things were a mess everywhere and transportation was impossible. Karel’s father was probably sitting in a café somewhere worrying about him. He brought up the Komodos, which were refusing to reproduce in captivity. He asked Karel if he had any ideas. When Karel didn’t answer he guessed that all of this clumsy coming and going by the Civil Guard wasn’t helping. He talked about Seelie as now so aggressive that the prospects of artificially impregnating her were fading fast. He frowned, finally, and abandoned the subject.

He lay silent for a while, perhaps hoping Karel would leave. He seemed relaxed, but his foot jiggled impatiently. Karel felt he had nowhere to go after this, and looked around the room hopelessly. There was a plaque above the sofa framing a silhouette of a rattlesnake’s head. There was a mounted photo on the lamp table of Albert kneeling beside a netted tortoise. Some skeletons were jumbled together across the room in a breakfront. He’d imagined endless interesting things in Albert’s house, and none of these gave him any pleasure. He stood uncertainly beside the sofa, unhappy where he was and with no idea where he could go.

Albert outlined some of the characteristics of the anguid family of lizards. Karel wondered if he thought it therapeutic. He talked about individuals who were willing to give up part of their tail to an attack, or would smear the attacker with excrement. He moved to the differences between the snake families Elpidae (fixed fangs) and Viperidae (retractable fangs). He gave the Helodermatidae one last try. Did Karel know that they tracked prey by tasting the ground with their tongues?

Karel sighed so Albert could hear him. Albert gave up, his arm still over his eyes. He sighed as well and lay still.

“I’m going to go,” Karel finally said.

Albert made an approving noise.

“You think the government needed him for some special secret job?” Karel asked. He thought there was a better chance his father was on Mars.

Albert cleared his throat and made an unhurried chewing sound. He said, “There are a lot of people you meet who can get a penknife and some string and rewire a house. Fix your watch. Build a birdcage. Your father is not one of them.”

Karel felt the heat on his cheeks from the harshness and truth of the comment. He was ashamed of feeling shamed. He said, “You shouldn’t say that. You don’t know. How do you know?”

Albert shrugged, as much as he could lying on his back. He apologized. Outside a small translucent gecko pressed itself against the glass of the living-room window. He could see light through it, and its pale palms and belly somehow suggested to him both vulnerability and mercy.

Albert explained that he was under a lot of pressure recently and was upset because he’d been notified that the zoo as a newly designated Educational Institution would be under the jurisdiction of the Committee for Popular Enlightenment, which was under the jurisdiction of the Civil Guard.

Karel rubbed the back of his neck. He thought now that Albert had never really been considering his problem. It occurred to him that possibly no one was going to help.

Albert said, “I’m getting too tired to be careful. I’m sitting here in my house with a tea cozy over my telephone. I’m sitting here worried about what I can say to a boy who works for me.”

Karel blinked. He had the impression the house was settling, easing apart. “Do you think I’d get you in trouble?” he asked.

Albert said, “They’re taking so much away I’m wondering what I’m trying to save.”

“You mean the zoo?” Karel said.

Albert finally took his arm off his face and rubbed his eyes with his fingertips. It made a faint and unpleasant sound. “Whatever I’m doing now won’t undo all the time I was doing nothing,” he said. “How long ago was it I knew there was a hundred percent turnover at the centers? What did I do then? How sure did I have to be?”

“What’s that mean, hundred percent turnover?” Karel asked, frightened.

“It means bad things have been going on,” Albert said. Karel resented his tone. “And your boss here took a long time to figure it out.”

In the kitchen there was a clinking, as though the dishes were taking care of themselves.

“I have mice,” Albert said.

“You didn’t know then,” Karel said. “About what was going on.”

“It’s sad, is what it is,” Albert said.

“I’m going home,” Karel said. He made show of moving his feet on the rug. “I have to find my father.”

“We should have a new motto, on the flag,” Albert said. “‘We Are Mute. We Are Shameful. We Are Miserable.’ That’s how it should go.”

Karel let himself out. Albert told him to take some olives with him. At the blockade, the two soldiers laughed at him and told him his shirt was on inside out, a comment he did not understand.

His father was not home. The radio announced the nomad capital had fallen. There were few casualties and fewer prisoners. The nomad armies had melted away before their forces like snow beneath the sun, and now were broken and scattered through the mountains. A passing officer was apprehended and asked about the nomad situation.

“They’re broken,” he said. “And scattered through the mountains.”

The radio announced the anniversary of the Bloody Parade, and Karel winced, for Leda’s sake. The festivities planned for their town included a parade, band concerts, and orations. These would be expanded to celebrate the victory. The Bloody Parade had been the first coup attempt by the Party. It had been a measure of the Republican government’s unpopularity, Albert had told Karel, that an abortive coup was seen for years as the NUP’s greatest achievement.

He spent two useless days banging on doors in the neighborhood and rechecking with the police. On the evening of the second day he sat in his kitchen with the lights out listening to the groans of the plumbing and the parade cranking up in the distance.

There was not going to be any question of avoiding the thing. He got up and banged his chair against the table and went out, unable to sit still any longer and hoping to come across his father maybe having simply and miraculously lost track of the time.

The Schieles’ house was dark. Poor Leda, he thought. He walked to the square. They’d put up a lot of new flags of thin cloth that flailed around in the wind. He hit the crowds and started working his way through them. Booths created standstills every few feet where hawkers told fortunes with dolls of little girls that rose or sank in jars of water, or white mice that dragged string through various chutes marked “Yes” or “No” or “It Needs More Thought” or “He/She Loves You.” He was taken by the crush past a booth involving a blind violinist and a bald baby in a smock and was unable to figure out what they were doing — selling? begging? entertaining? — even after hearing suggestions from other puzzled passersby. Along the parade route people began holding their positions on the side of the road whether or not they blocked access to the booths. He stopped for a while at a table rooted like a breakwater and looked at a large multicolored parrot whose entertainment value seemed to be based only on his ability to shift his weight from foot to foot. Behind the parrot a vendor was selling plaster busts of the Praetor and auto parts.

Farther on, cheeses carved into likenesses of the Praetor were displayed in delicatessen windows. Sausages were arranged around them. He watched the crowd for his father but still felt he was wandering around stupidly, like a puppy who’d been smacked on the ear. He passed Holter, and Holter said that that was some news about his father. They were separated in the crowd and Karel said “What?” and Holter nodded and smiled and said he thought so, too, before disappearing. Karel fought his way after him in a frenzy of anxiety and frustration. He’d been wearing a light bluejacket. At an intersection of two alleys a lieutenant in the Civil Guard blocked the way, stooping over to examine the arm of a little boy who seemed lost. The lieutenant asked the boy if he knew what happened to little boys who stole things, and the boy said no.

The alley emptied back into the square, where stages had been erected around the central well. A band on one struck up the old drinking song the Party had adopted as its anthem. It sounded to Karel like a horn section falling down the stairs.

The people behind him started shouting and air horns sounded on the side streets: something else was going on. He fought his way to a streetlamp, pulled a younger boy down, and shimmied up. He scanned the crowd in all directions. There were three people above him higher on the pole, and it swayed and lurched. His palms were skinned. He could not find Holter.

The parade had started. It took a few minutes to reach him. While he waited he sucked on one palm and then the other. Both were burning. A cart passed, carrying a bust of the Praetor covered with flowers. It was followed by ten of the town fathers portraying the Old Guard and one the Praetor. They marched along reenacting the Bloody Parade every thirty yards or so by walking into a hail of tossed flowers. When the flowers hit, the Old Guard staggered and lay down, while the Praetor marched on. He paused every so often to allow the group to re-form. Behind them young men with glasses and uncertain expressions carried a banner that said JUNIOR SCHOLARS OF THE HOMELAND. Behind the banner two men rolled a large silver-and-glass thing on wheels shaped like soup tureen and said to contain the Praetor’s legacy to the future, a short autobiography in verse. It was topped by a silver baby kicking up its heels. A small band followed, identified as the Flutes of the Political Orphans, and then jugglers, and more local officials, and at the end rowdy unofficial marchers. Karel checked everybody. At the very end two members of the Young People’s NUP called to each side over and over: We are a universal people—

We are a rersle-rersle riesle, the crowd responded, tailing off.

There will always be a springtime for our greatness—

There will always be a ringtine rerer rateness, and they were past, a lot of the crowd following, with or without Holter, he wasn’t sure, and then there was only one more person, bringing up the rear: the mayor’s small son in army fatigues, sitting reverently on a tiny pony.

He had a last chance, though: the races and contests. He worked his way over and squeezed into a spot high on the largest temporary grandstand, feeling it tremble from the weight of the numbers scaling it. People near him were shouting at everyone else to stay off. Fights started at the bases of the aisles. The stands collapsed regularly and Karel remembered an engineer saying in the newspaper after one of the bigger disasters that as a people they just weren’t very good with wood.

Nobody could hear the opening. It was a reenactment of the Marta Siegler story. Siegler, played by a young girl, was seduced by a foreign grain salesman, killed him with a threshing machine, retired to a nunnery, spied for her country, and was stabbed to death resisting the advances of a crazed youth who was actually her half brother. She reappeared to her murderer in his jail cell with her arms full of lilies, offering forgiveness and causing him to repent. He then became a member of the Civil Guard. The three parts of the story were titled Purity, Forgiveness, and Repentance on easels beside the action.

Afterward the regional Party head gave a speech. Karel didn’t follow it. His palms still hurt and he figured with his luck they were probably infected. He tried to keep scanning the crowd. The speaker said that the great issues of the day were settled not with words or speeches but with iron and blood. The crowd’s applause had some sarcasm to it that the speaker didn’t seem to catch.

After that there were poetry contests — one of the Praetor’s most despised innovations — and races of cripples around the stages, which some in the crowd seemed uncertain about. During the pauses the Kestrels led them through the cardinal virtues. The stands swayed and creaked. On the main stage there was a boxing match between two women and then fireworks, and gifts were shaken down from nets stretched above the grandstands — fruit and papier-mâchè eagles — and hundreds of birds were released, pheasants and guinea fowl and smews and ravens, with a thunder of flapping wings from cages below the stage. In the uproar Karel slipped down from the grand stand and rushed around with lights booming over his head and birds exploding up before him like the bats from Leda’s cave. He slipped on plums and cherries rolling underfoot. He checked all of the light blue and near-bluejackets he could find, and never found Holter.

On the way home he looked in on the Schieles (still no lights) and then found himself staring blankly at his dark front door. Occasional fireworks were still booming in the distance. Mrs. Fetscher called him from next door. She was silhouetted against her lighted doorway. When he got there she nodded him into the house, something she’d never done before. He thought, She has terrible news about my father. But in the foyer he saw with a shock the uniformed man from the Civil Guard he’d seen in the café. The same supporting officers were with him. They all looked at Karel as if they expected him. The uniformed man was looking at him as well. Karel took a closer look, despite himself, at the badge with the nest of snakes and skull. They stood around Mr. Fetscher in a semicircle.

“You are—?” the uniformed man said.

“This is a neighbor,” Mrs. Fetscher said. “He can swear my husband was home yesterday, working in the garden.”

Karel blinked, not sure he could.

“That’s true,” Fetscher said. “I waved to him. I remember thinking, that poor boy.”

“Umm-hmm,” the uniformed man said. “My name is Kehr,” he said to Karel. “You are—?”

“Karel Roeder,” Karel said.

Kehr nodded. He said to Mrs. Fetscher, “Why is he a poor boy?”

“His father’s disappeared,” Fetscher said. “Though it might be anything—”

Kehr looked back at Karel. “What’s your father’s name?” he asked.

“Simon,” Karel said. He thought about the old man’s hand from the café and the cracking sound. “Do you know anything about him?”

“No,” Kehr said. “Mr. Fetscher, get your things.”

“But Karel can swear,” Fetscher protested.

“I’m not interested in what he can swear,” Kehr said. He was absorbed with his cuff. “You’ll only be gone overnight: Collect your things.”

Fetscher continued to protest and was led away by one of the supporting officers. The family dog, a small black-and-white mongrel with rumpled ears, followed them into the bedroom. The supporting officer opened a small suitcase on the bed and began to demonstrate how to put clothes in it. Fetscher relented and began packing, still pleading his case. The dog stood on the bed and unpacked things — folded undershirts, shorts, an eyeglass case — as fast as the harassed Fetscher could pack them.

“Stop that, Eski,” Mrs. Fetscher scolded.

There was a cautious knock on the door and the neighbor from across the street, Mrs. Witz, peered in.

“What do you want?” Mrs. Fetscher said. “Can’t you see enough from across the street?”

“I came to see if there was some trouble I could help with,” Mrs. Witz said, wounded. She had dressed up. Her five-year-old, Sherron, stood behind her and kept peeking around. “If you’d like me to leave—”

“Who is this?” Kehr said. “Is this your son?”

Mrs. Witz looked at Karel in horror. “Oh, no,” she said. “This is my daughter, Sherron.” She brought Sherron out in front of her, holding her by the shoulders. Sherron’s feet left the ground when her mother maneuvered her. “And you are—?”

“A servant of my country,” Kehr said. He stroked an ear with some weariness.

“I didn’t catch your name,” Mrs. Witz said.

“Would you please leave my house?” Mrs. Fetscher asked. Her voice was heading toward shrill.

“What’s going on out there?” Fetscher called. He was told to keep packing. There was the muffled sound and yelp of the dog being cuffed.

“Is there any sort of trouble?” Mrs. Witz asked.

“None whatsoever,” Kehr said. He looked at Karel briefly and turned his attention to the bookcase and two knickknacks, ceramic crocodiles with open mouths. One held stick candy and the other matchsticks. Kehr’s jawline and collar were perfect, and Karel felt shabbier in his presence.

Mrs. Fetscher asked if Mr. Kehr would like some of the sugared wafers she’d been making when he arrived, which, she remembered with a worried look toward the kitchen, were probably ruined by now.

Kehr declined. Mrs. Witz suggested Sherron might like some. Sherron looked toward the kitchen dubiously.

Sherron was fat enough as it was, Mrs. Fetscher snapped. Mrs. Witz glared at her.

“But this is some kind of mistake,” Fetscher called from the other room. There was the brisk sound of clasps being shut.

“We do not hunt for crime,” Kehr said. “I do not have the details.” His subordinate looked aimlessly around the room, arms folded.

Fetscher returned with a small plaid suitcase, trailed by the other subordinate and Eski, who wagged her tail festively.

Kehr checked a pad and repeated Fetscher’s name. Fetscher nodded. His wife touched his arm. Eski stood, with her front paws on his thigh.

The escorting subordinate asked if he was a salesman and Fetscher cried out, new hope breaking over him. See? he said. There was a mistake! He was a butcher.

“Do you often take walks, Mr. Fetscher?” Kehr asked.

Fetscher looked around the room, dumbfounded. He looked at the others, and Karel, as if it were their responsibility to help. Everyone backed up a step.

“What kind of question is that?” Mrs. Fetscher finally said, after a silence.

“Please come with us,” Kehr said.

But he was a butcher, Fetscher said frantically, repeating himself to avoid making another mistake.

They made way as Kehr and the others led him out. Sherron stood straight with her feet together, as if at a ceremony. “Where will I reach you, Tommy?” Mrs. Fetscher wailed, and no one answered.

Eski, sitting now in the middle of the foyer, looked at Karel with an excited and irritating expectancy, as if he were the one who was supposed to do something. The last Civil Guard officer when he passed said to Sherron, “See that you’re a good girl,” and in response she smiled and showed him a handful of marbles.

For a week he met with Mrs. Fetscher over their fence each morning to exchange the fact that they hadn’t heard anything; then she disappeared, not answering the door for three days, and Mrs. Witz when she caught him passing the house told him that Mrs. Oertzen had made a mistake, turning in the wrong Fetscher, and that this Fetscher had on top of everything else had a fatal accident. He’d lost his head and had fallen against the wall. They hadn’t been able to wake him. Mrs. Fetscher was in a bad way. They were going to bring her something later. The funeral was on Thursday, if Karel was interested in attending.

School was suspended again. He roamed the neighborhoods during the day. At night he listened to the radio, which didn’t help but at least broke the silence. He entertained the hope he’d learn something of use. The war was at a standstill and the news concentrated on fifth columnists and shirkers. The head of the Civil Guard promised that when final victory occurred the. Party would return its attention to all those of that sort who had slipped by. Karel stopped listening. He ate some mealy peaches. He turned the radio back on and suffered through a long playlet involving a simpering character who made trouble for every-one and who was finally identified as a profiteer and a corrupting intellectual spirit. They shot him and after the theatrical sounds of the gunshots he made a surprised ‘Oh!’ as if he’d found something in his shoe. Somebody else gave a talk about saving wood palings. The only concrete news Karel heard was the announcement broadcast on all channels that for the duration of the emergency the administration of justice was now out of the hands of civilians and entrusted to the bureaus of the Special Sections of the Civil Guard.

He slept in his father’s room. He rummaged through the closet, kneeling on the floor, setting aside piles of shoes and old newspapers. He found things he could not have said belonged to his family: folded brightly colored table-cloths, a musical instrument made from a gourd, copies of Guardian of the Nation, a magazine “dedicated to the preservation of civilization and race,” a chessboard of copper and dark wood, a cigar box full of chess pieces, a loop of wire, a photo of a desert path, a leather shoe repair kit. There was nothing in all of it that seemed like part of his life, and he remembered his mother’s letter, and imagined desolately a historian peering into his parents’ history and finding no trace of him whatsoever.

The next morning he found a letter without postage from his father under the front door. He looked up and down the street as if it had just been dropped off, and then opened it. It said his father was well, and that Karel shouldn’t worry. There was great news. All would be explained soon. There was more money for food under the top step below the landing. It added in a P.S. that Karel should call a plumber if he hadn’t already.

He sat slapping the letter against his cheek, mystified and angry. Had his father dropped it off? Had a friend? He checked beneath the step and found more money than his father had ever claimed to have had. He stood staring at it. How long had his father been lying to him? What was he saving this for? Where had he gotten it?

He almost destroyed the letter. He was considering it when Albert showed up. Albert poked around the house as if looking for someone and then said he’d just stopped in to see what the news was. He’d never visited before.

Karel showed him the letter. Albert took it and before opening it mentioned that the zoo was once again shut down. He shook his head while he read. He refused to speculate on what was going on. He agreed Karel had a right to be angry.

They sat in Karel’s kitchen contemplating the letter until Albert finally asked if Karel was going to offer him anything to eat.

Karel laid out a few things — a hard-boiled egg, some carrots, some fennel — after giving the old man an incredulous look. He was determined not to apologize for not having anything else. What did I get over there? he thought. Olives? Old bread? Albert looked at the vegetables and egg and made a disappointed chewing noise and then went to the sink to wash up. He noted the water wasn’t working.

“I know that,” Karel said, banging a dish down. “I live here.” The egg rolled onto the table.

He should have that fixed, Albert told him.

They ate without speaking. Karel thought, If I could go to a country where there were no people, I’d go.

Albert asked him if there was any salt. They looked at each other. It occurred to Karel that he was in a country like that now.

“Pretty quiet next door,” Albert observed.

Karel crunched his carrot.

“A newspaperman I admire,” Albert said, “or admired, from your home city, wrote in one of his last columns the day after the Party took over, ‘Are we a joke? Are we a bad dream? Whoever hears our speeches has to laugh. Whoever sees us coming had better reach for his knife.’”

Karel nodded. The egg and the carrots were gone. Albert was acting peculiar, and Karel had the feeling he wanted to ask something.

“Well, I’m still here,” Albert said finally. “After some of the indiscreet things I said in your presence the other day. I assume that means you don’t aspire to National Greatness.”

“I don’t aspire to anything,” Karel said bitterly.

“Very wise, in our country right now,” Albert said. Karel wished he would leave. He had a headache, he was out of food, and he was having trouble imagining a subject that wouldn’t depress him.

Albert said, “Perren joined the Party.”

Karel suddenly realized that Albert’s earlier remark meant he thought Karel was capable of turning him in.

“Said it was something he had to do,” Albert said. “That it was in the best interests of the zoo.”

They were silent, Karel toying with the rhyme in his head: had to do, of the zoo. “So will it help?” he finally asked, out of some sense of obligation as host to extend the conversation.

“Hey,” he said when Albert didn’t answer. “You really think I would’ve turned you in?”

Albert looked at him closely. He gave a small shrug. “Before today I would’ve said that Perren wouldn’t’ve.”

Karel looked away, and then got up and cleared the table. When the old man didn’t move, he was forced to sit back down.

“And they go on about uniting the country,” the old man said.

Karel tipped the empty dish to show everything had been finished. You should talk, he almost said. His father was gone. Albert was turning into a jerk. He had no friends. He had a fleeting image of Leda with her head turned to listen more acutely to something, and then an image of her lips lifting to his, and then she faded entirely.

He was sad and frightened and upset about his father. Albert was going on about the regime. The white hairs in his ears moved when he talked. Karel didn’t want to listen anymore and asked suddenly if he remembered the beaches from the city. Did he remember the beachfront hotels? The huge trees, and the way the gables would stick out?

The old man looked at him, a little miffed, and then put his mind to it. He did, he said. He remembered especially the tall white one.

“The Golden Angel,” Karel said.

The Golden Angel, Albert repeated. Rebuilt. Destroyed years ago with the rest of the cove by the tidal wave after the eruption on that island, part of the volcanic archipelago.

“The Roof of Hell,” Karel said.

“Right, the Seprides, the Roof of Hell,” Albert said. He drummed his fingers on the table and cast around the kitchen for food.

“What happened?” Karel said. “When it blew up?”

Albert lifted salt from the plate with his moistened finger and ate it. “You don’t know this story,” he said, as though that were news to him.

“I don’t know this story,” Karel said.

Albert made a face as if his life lately were an endless string of small surprises. One June morning, boom, he said. The entire cove of the city had been destroyed, two thirds. There’d been the usual warning phenomena: tremors, water levels in wells changing, domestic animals refusing food and getting excited, birds and rodents migrating inland. Cattle moved to high pasture. The tide went out completely and abruptly. A lot of people knew at that point but hoped the high ground would protect them. What else was there to hope? There’d been a grammar school right on the waterfront, and Albert imagined the children at the classroom windows, awed, looking at the stranded fish and the muck of the exposed harbor bottom, amazed by the beached and listing ships. And then the wave came in piling up on itself, shoaling and rearing on the shallow harbor shelf to sixty or seventy feet. Albert’s father had told him all this. His father had been on higher ground. His father, Albert said, had never forgotten things: the way whole buildings were driven through the ones behind them like parts of a collapsing telescope, the thunder of the walls disintegrating booming up the cove, the far-off screams, the wash of bodies and debris back down the harbor.

His father dreamed about the wave the rest of his life, Albert said. In the dream they were all whirling and singing, shouting and falling, his father, his brothers, an elderly aunt, his mother, with the wave rising behind them like a curtain. His father, Albert said, lost his whole family to that wave. He’d been playing where he wasn’t supposed to be playing, in one of the high quarries, and their house had been lower down. He used to say he could still hear the sound of their roof going. He used to say, Oh God of mercy, all those roofs and all those people just like that.

On Saturday he found Leda folding sheets and towels in her kitchen. Her mother and David were out and her mother had given her two thousand things to do. She suggested a walk.

On the front step she slipped out of her sandals and laced up some light ankle boots: He watched the lacing proceed before asking her where she’d been. He hadn’t seen her since he’d brought David home. And they kissed, he wanted to add.

He couldn’t see any difference in the way she acted toward him. Maybe she’d forgotten it already. Here he was mooning about it even with his father gone.

They’d gone away, she said, to stay with their aunt. It was hard on everybody. It brought back her father and all. Karel summarized for her disconnected parts of the parades and performances.

She got up and rocked back on her ankles to display her tied shoes. “I thought you could show me how you go noosing,” she said. “Catching little lizards with the fishing pole.”

He agreed. He said while they walked to his house, “I don’t think I’ll ever be able to predict what you’re going to say.”

She seemed flattered. The street was crowding for the market day. He didn’t know how to tell her now about his father. He’d waited so long it would sound funny.

“My father’s missing,” he finally just said.

“Oh,” she said, and stopped so suddenly in the street that people behind them shied away in alarm.

“Well, I got a note from him — he’s all right,” Karel said, stumbling. “He’s not in any trouble. I don’t know where he is.”

Oh, Leda said, annoyed he’d scared her for nothing.

Before, he’d been worried, he tried to explain. There’d been no note or anything. He still didn’t know what was going on.

She nodded, peering at him. They were at his house and she stopped. Oh, forget it, he thought in disgust. I’m never going to make myself clear to anybody.

While she waited outside drawing shapes in the dust on the side of his house, Karel rummaged around upstairs for the nooser. He tested the action in front of her before they left, pulling the metal loop so the tiny hangman’s knot of string shrank and grew. She arched her eyebrows to show she was impressed.

“How does it work?” she asked, as if determined to be interested.

“This is it,” he said. “This is all it does.”

They walked to the south end of town. They avoided the street that led to the cave with the bats. Leda appreciated the sunlight beneath the wild olives and remarked on the smell of the dusty gravel. Where the town ended some barren hills began, at the foot of which refuse was dumped. Jackals and mangy dogs picked and haggled over the piles and watched them climb the first slope. It got steeper quickly, scree and larger rocks giving way in short cascades beneath their feet.

“Yuck,” Leda said, watching one dog carefully. It was watching her as well. Something filthy and limp was hanging from its mouth.

“They’re all right,” Karel said. As they got higher the rocks increased in size.

“Are there scorpions here?” Leda asked, holding a foot in midair.

“I guess,” Karel said. “I haven’t seen one during the day.”

She completed her step. “I don’t like scorpions,” she said.

They climbed, leaning forward and making huffing noises, until they reached another steeper slope abutting theirs.

“Here,” he said, and in a minute or two, flipping over flat stones, he found a lesser earless lizard, gray with pale blue along its spine. It skittered a foot or so away and froze with a quizzical expression.

Leda was facing the panorama of the town below them. She said, “It’s pretty up here.”

“I thought you wanted to watch,” he said, and lowered the noose slowly over the lizard until it looked condemned by a tiny lynching party. He yanked the noose and his hand must have jerked: the lizard was magically gone.

“Huh,” Leda said.

“It usually always works,” he said. His armpits were sweating and the sun was hot on his back.

“Well, keep trying,” Leda said. “It looks hard.”

“It isn’t, really,” he said, irritated with himself. “It’s not supposed to be.” He crouched beside some chia blooming in indigo clusters above the slope. There was something there, too, maybe a horned lizard, but as he maneuvered the bamboo rod through the tangles it disappeared.

“Huh,” Leda said again.

When they’d disappeared they were right nearby, often downslope, Albert had taught him. While he searched the area in a crablike crouch she gazed back at the town again, shading her eyes with her hand.

“Did you hear about Mr. Fetscher?” she said.

“I was there,” he said. He overturned a rock slab to confront a Jerusalem cricket, tomato red and enormous, grotesquely humpbacked.

“You were?” Leda said. She turned, shadowed by the sun. “Oh, God. Look at that thing.”

He shooed it away, and it left unhurriedly, dragging itself audibly over the shale.

She watched it clamber over a rock with distaste. “So?” she said. “What happened?”

Karel shrugged. He piled some rocks. “They took him away.”

She made a face.

“Did you hear what happened after that?” he asked.

“I heard what they said.” She watched him ease a fan-shaped rock up. Nothing underneath. “What do you think happened?” she asked warily.

“Right here,” he said. “Look.”

She crouched immediately beside him. Her face was more tanned with shade and he could see the tips of her teeth as her mouth opened slightly in anticipation. He held the noose over a head-sized stone concealing a tiny horned lizard smaller than the first. He could hear her breathing through her mouth while she watched him maneuver the rod.

She said, “You never answered.”

He lowered the loop and the horned lizard’s head turned, as if listening for far-off music. “I think they killed him,” he said.

“So do I,” Leda said. She was looking at him intently, and her eyes had the directness of the eyes of figures he’d seen in old mosaics. He could pick up the sun smell of the hairs on the back of her neck. It was as if as a child she hadn’t been spared anything, as if her mother had never changed the subject when she’d entered the room.

“I may want to run away,” she said.

“Where?” he said. Not: With me?

“The city,” she said.

He closed his eyes at a horrible thought. He said finally, “Are you with me only because you want me to help?”

She told him no as if that were a peculiar notion, and the simplicity of her answer flooded him with relief. He waited for her to go on, unsure what to say. “You can’t get on the train without a seat reservation and a permit to leave our area,” she said. “I need three.”

“Three?” he asked.

“David and Nicholas and me,” she explained.

“What about your mother?” He sat on the scree, but she maintained her crouch.

“If my mother would go I wouldn’t need to run away,” she said.

“Do you think it’s going to get worse?” he asked. He still didn’t know where his father was, and now all this was happening. His unhappiness had crystallized into that one thought, run away with Leda, and he worked on the courage to ask her if he could go.

“My mother was talking with my aunt,” Leda said. “Near Naklo they found eighty people, women and children. The Special Sections are killing everybody after the army passes.” Naklo was on their side of the border.

“Maybe they were …” Karel said. He trailed off.

“They’re just killing people,” Leda said. “And we say, ‘Oh, that’s awful. What do you think happened?’ And we don’t do anything.”

Karel dangled the noose, squeezing and relaxing it. Leda put her finger through it and started a gentle tug-of-war. “Everybody thinks they don’t have to do anything and this’ll pass, like the weather,” she said. “Stay quiet and let everything happen and it’ll turn out okay in the end just because the days are going by.” She slipped her finger from the noose and examined it. “Well, every time the days go by I hear something worse.”

She looked up at him for confirmation, and he nodded.

“You want to keep walking?” she said. “My knees hurt.”

She stood and stretched. They walked carefully back down the slope.

What would she do after she ran away? he wondered. What do you do after you run away? How would she live?

She couldn’t talk to Elsie or Senta about it, she said. Kids in their class just sat there, like little birds with their mouths open, waiting for worms. Elsie memorized even what she didn’t understand.

They did believe a lot in memorization, Karel said, meaning the school. It was a principle or something.

“Habit’s our principle,” Leda said. She cupped her hand over a stalked puffball as she passed it. “Our first habit is not asking questions.”

He trailed his nooser as though trolling and thought, What good is asking questions? but then remembered the number of questions he’d wanted to ask his father, and Leda.

“We have to fight them,” she said. “To do that, we have to fight ourselves.”

He nodded, openmouthed. He said, “Where’d you get that?”

“I read it,” she said. “In a newspaper you get in certain places that the NUP hates.”

He was impressed. This was another of those times he felt four years younger.

They were on a road skirting the town and leading through dry scrub. A black-and-red bird darted and swooped over their heads — they were probably near a nest — and a family of jackrabbits still far away were spooked into flight, leaping as they ran.

“I get scared,” Leda said. “People are doing what they’re doing because they’re scared, so they’re not doing the right thing. It’s like they didn’t pay enough attention and then they weren’t brave enough, and now they don’t know what to do.”

We could go back, Karel was thinking. We could go back to the beach and the Golden Angel.

“Does your mother think the same thing?” he asked.

“My mother’s waiting,” Leda said. “Sitting there like a lump waiting for someone to change everything or tell her what to do.”

Karel was quiet.

“It’s like she’s caught in this — box, of just being pleasant about everything and hoping for the best. I said to her at Elsie’s birthday party, ‘Just say what you think. Go ahead.’ You know what she said? She said, ‘Leda, that’s impossible.’ She said, ‘I don’t even think I’d know what to say.’

“So,” Leda added, and then stopped. They sat under a gnarled and peculiar tree he couldn’t identify. She found a clump of long-leaved phlox and took the pale, star-shaped flowers between her fingers.

“Tell me about your father,” she said.

He didn’t know where to start. He tented his sweaty shirt away from his chest to cool off. He found himself in the shade of the strange tree telling her of the times they’d gone to the beach. He’d been five or six. He remembered the bathing huts with their damp pine smell and changing and not liking being barefoot on the splintery and unsteady boards, and the sound at the end of the day of the wet sandy suit dropping onto the wood. He remembered his inability to copy the swimming strokes that his father demonstrated for him in front of the whole beach. It occurred to him while he talked that his father’s power came just from being his father, not from anything he’d earned. He told another story, of his father buying him wafer candies, as many as he wanted.

Leda had her chin on her knees and the hem of her skirt stretched between the two. She said that it didn’t seem so bad, just sad. He was taken aback by the mixture of compassion and perspective.

She said as she got up and they kept walking that she thought starting a family, taking care of kids and showing them what was right, was the biggest accomplishment that anybody could do, and that most people didn’t really do it as much as it just happened to them with their being around at the time.

He agreed. He was happy with how much better he felt, and moved to tenderness by the patience with which she tossed her hair back with a turn of her head. On the outskirts of town they knelt in a stranger’s open back garden like saboteurs, hidden by a screen of shrubs and grunting along the furrows of a strawberry patch. They edged along keeping an eye on the neighboring houses, gobbling the berries and smelling the plants and earth under the hot sun while an irrigation hose trickled uselessly into a culvert.

They came into town on an unfamiliar street. A dog foamed and snarled at them along the length of a ram-shackle corral. Nothing seemed to be keeping it where it was except its own sense of where it could or couldn’t be. Leda gave it as wide a detour as possible.

The street led to the Retention Hospital, where Nicholas was kept. Leda was pleased with and Karel skeptical about the coincidence. She suggested they visit.

“Can you visit on Saturday?” he said. “Just like that?”

That’s when you visit, she told him. She was going to go later anyhow.

The hospital was walled the way the zoo was. There was an iron gate. The ironwork read WORK AND USEFUL THOUGHTS ARE THE HOMES OF FREEDOM AND HAPPINESS.

They rang the bell. A boy with his leg in a complicated harness of wood and leather, all straps and slings, watched them carefully. Two other girls who looked to be twins stood by and seemed to be exchanging information about the boy. He knew it was unfair that he expected exotic horrors here, pinheads who would say “Why aren’t you like this?” or frightening people who would feel better only if they knocked him down and sat on his chest. He was ashamed.

“Come on,” Leda said, and rang again.

A nurse crossed the yard to the outer gate as if demonstrating how to walk erect. Leda mentioned in a low voice that this woman, Mrs. Beghé, was a jerk.

They smiled like conspirators. Mrs. Beghé was almost beautiful, with dark blue eyes and straight blond hair. Her chin was too small. Above her breast a plastic pin said Beghé, with the accent drawn on.

“Call her Mrs. Begg,” Leda whispered, while the woman opened the gate with an impossible key the size of a spatula. “She loves it.”

But as they passed by the woman rested her eyes on him and he had a fleeting sexual fantasy: an abandoned room white with bedsheets or towels, Mrs. Beghé arching her back, reaching with her hand spread behind her to scratch herself.

He followed them to the reception area. While you’re visiting the sick brother of the girl you love, he thought dismally. His mind was a sinkhole, the mesh trap in the filthy steel tub in the back of the butcher’s.

Mrs. Beghé asked them to sit, and left. Leda said, “She hates me. I’m always giving her problems.”

The right half of the reception area was roped off under the slogan from David’s Kestrels pennant: WE ARE A UNIVERSAL PEOPLE, etc. On a freestanding placard there was an architect’s drawing of a proposed new National Museum, to be erected on this site.

“Hey,” Leda said. “Maybe they are going to shut this down.” She got up and walked over to the sign and peered closer.

In the drawing over the front of the building he could read the words IN OUR CREATION THE WORLD SOARS.

“What’s that mean?” he asked.

Leda had already moved to the next exhibit. “Some of these things people think make sense just because they’ve heard them a thousand times,” she said.

He followed her a little way, hoping they weren’t going to get in trouble.

More drawings showed what the museum would look like. Until a solution was found for the inmates, the National Museum of Folk and Art would share the building with the hospital, occupying the east wing.

“That makes more sense than they think,” Leda said.

Along the corridor there were sample exhibits: the various Armed Forces in Ceaseless Motion and a marble family group with the family kneeling around the sitting father, who spread his hands over them, palms downward. “Must’ve been just passing through,” Leda said bitterly.

Mrs. Beghé was waiting for them with Nicholas. He had a long face, like David’s, but otherwise didn’t appear to be Leda’s brother.

“How are we, Nicholas?” Mrs. Beghé said, in the encouraging way people address invalids. “Are we happy to see Leda? And so early?”

“Hi, Leda,” Nicholas said.

Leda hugged him. Karel felt stupid standing around the reception area. Leda introduced them. Mrs. Beghé explained that because of the work for the museum they’d have to have their visit in the dining room, which was quiet this time of day. Leda agreed. Nicholas was clearly disappointed at the lost opportunity to get outside.

“We could come back,” Leda said. She stopped and looked at him closely. “Nicholas? Do you want us to come back, later, and we can all go outside?”

Nicholas rubbed the back of his neck and gazed at Karel helplessly. He thought about the question while they all waited and finally said no. Mrs. Beghé led the way through the inner doors. Karel scanned Nicholas furtively for differences.

A harassed orderly in the corridor was mopping at a large stain and rinsing his mop with water dirtier than the floor. Writing on the walls extended all the way down the hall. It looked to be one long story or message. The corridor smelled of urine. A young man in olive pajamas followed them and pressed his hands to his head and asked for sweets.

The NUP might be doing a lot of good things for the country, Mrs. Beghé said, but not for this hospital. Leda and Karel didn’t respond.

They were led into a dining room filled with long rows of splintery pine tables covered with clear plastic. Mrs. Beghé said she’d return when they’d had a nice visit and left them alone, shutting the door with annoying care in an effort to be silent.

Color photographs of food were hung around the room: roast lamb with pineapple rings, mounds of cherries, white asparagus in butter, pastries, lingonberry tarts, kiwis and cream. Some of the pictures had old thrown-food spatters on them. Leda gave Nicholas some chocolate biscuits she’d brought, and he thanked her.

He offered one to Karel, who said no. He considered them conclusive proof that their stop at the hospital had been no coincidence.

A small group entered and sat on the opposite side of the room: a girl riding a tricycle with orthopedic attachments on the pedals, and two older boys. The tricycle squeaked and creaked until she got off. One of the boys was blind and being steered by the other. He didn’t have glasses on his eyes. Karel closed his and practiced being blind, touching the plastic sheeting in front of him. Another nurse brought the three children a tray of food.

Leda was talking to Nicholas about the museum. She said she hoped now he’d be able to come home. “Mom wants you back, she does,” she said. “She just doesn’t know it.”

Nicholas thought that was fine. He leaned forward and whispered into his sister’s ear. She smiled.

“He tells me secrets,” she said. “I tell him secrets, he tells me secrets.”

Karel tried to smile. “Like your nanny,” he said.

She nodded, pleased at the connection.

She asked her brother what else was new, and he told her he’d been allowed as a special treat Thursday to flush all the toilets at once with a master lever.

The blind boy across the way was eating in big bites. It bothered Karel that the boy was so used to his situation, that he’d grown into it and was no longer conscious of it.

“They should give more money here,” he said finally. “Somebody should complain.”

Leda looked at him and made a face.

“What’s the matter?” he said.

“As long as you say ‘somebody’ it’s easy, right?” she said.

He made a helpless fuming noise. “All you do is tell me what I should be doing,” he said sullenly.

She ignored him and talked with her brother. It was as if they’d moved four seats down. Karel played miserably with the sheeting and pulled some of the tacks. A tiny boy with a shaved head passed the doorway lugging dark liquid in a pail. The weight made him walk in a hurried and stiff-legged way and the liquid slopped out metronomically.

Leda showed her brother a trick you could do by inverting your interlocked fingers. They were having fun, and Karel sat there. Mrs. Beghé at some point showed up and explained they’d had a nice visit, and that their brother would certainly look forward to the next Saturday.

Leda hugged her brother at the inner door while Karel and Mrs. Beghé looked away in opposite directions. When they passed into the reception area Nicholas waved through the glass. Leda waved until he turned and shuffled down the corridor, backlit by a window at the end of the hall in a dispiriting image of incarceration.

Karel led the way for once, into the courtyard. He mused that Leda had her answer for why she’d been born — for Nicholas, for David — and she went day to day living for the moment when they’d be happy, when the hidden justice would be found and released. They passed the deserted play area and a flopped-over bicycle. A little girl with one side of her head shaved and stitched watched them leave. Mrs. Beghé let them out. They waited, for no reason. The little girl pressed her fingertips to her mouth and signaled to them something lost and intricate with the complex movements of all ten fingers, sketching an unreadable alphabet on the air.

The local policeman handling the six-block grid where Karel lived was an elderly sergeant named Grebing. Karel knew him from hanging around the café. He was a harmless old man. He did his best to avoid trouble and cultivated a hearing problem partially for that reason. He liked to cadge fruit from the market stands.

Grebing was doing his best with what The People’s Voice called spontaneous outbursts of patriotism. The outbursts took the form of late-night vandalism. The victims were those who had been or might have been supporters of the Republic, those in the town records who had voted against the party in the very first referendums. Grebing usually arrived in time to assist in the clean-up. The newspaper openly lamented such lawlessness, however well-intentioned, and listed in its sympathetic account of the damage done to each home the home’s address, usually with the comment that it had not been entirely destroyed. Following such announcements it usually was.

The radio announced the local police were being directed by the Security Service to assist in the firmer measures soon to be instituted. Grebing, apparently, was handling Karel’s grid.

He pedaled past while Karel watched from his window. His cap sat high on his head; it looked as if he’d forgotten his and borrowed someone else’s. He coasted to a stop at the Fetschers’ front hedge. The chain rattled. He got off the bike and it fell over with a crash. He stopped and then decided against lifting it, and tore his sleeve on the handbrake straightening up. Karel could hear the sound where he was.

A light went on in Mrs. Fetscher’s house. Grebing struggled with the latch of the low gate and closed it behind him.

Karel left the window and went outside. A bat swooped and fluttered above his head in the dark. A truck engine coughed.

At her front door Mrs. Fetscher was looking at Grebing. Her eyes were flat and her expression suggested there was nothing more to say.

“Karel, come here,” she called.

Karel came around into her yard, stepping over the gate. There was a rustling in the cactus bed near his feet.

“Sergeant Grebing is arresting me,” she said. Her voice was neutral.

Grebing protested. He was trying to tuck the torn part up his jacket sleeve. It was protective custody, to keep her safe from the hoodlums.

“I thought he had news of the investigation about my husband,” Mrs. Fetscher said. She ran the palm of her hand across her forehead. “He informs me otherwise.”

Grebing, embarrassed, held out the sheet of paper for Karel to see. “I think it’s a small thing,” he said. “These people are supposed to gather at the Town Hall. It’s a small thing.”

“I’m going to call my sister,” Mrs. Fetscher said. She seemed to be looking at Karel. “I assume you’ll wait.”

“Might I wait inside?” Grebing asked.

“No,” Mrs. Fetscher said. She left the doorway.

Grebing lowered his head and stepped back and forth in place while he waited. He glanced at his bike and then at Karel. He looked as if he thought there was a chance he had something to worry about in that regard. It was colder now, and he shivered, maybe to demonstrate his unsuitability for this kind of work. He had no weapon.

Mrs. Fetscher returned. She was holding Eski up by her chest and carrying the other piece of the matched suitcases her husband had taken. Eski’s ears bobbed.

“I don’t know if Eski can come, Mrs. Fetscher,” Grebing said.

“Eski can come,” she said.

Grebing knitted his eyebrows with sadness, thinking probably of the upcoming reprimand. “Is that all you’ll need?” he asked. “You may be—”

“That’s all,” she said. To Karel she added, “My sister will be coming in a week or so. You’ll help her if there’s anything she needs?”

Karel told her he would.

“By then you’ll be back, I think,” Grebing said.

She led them to the gate. She stooped and set Eski down. While the dog urinated she cleared away with her free hand some peppergrass from the walkway. She said, “Karel, you’ll give these flowers some water?” She said goodbye. Grebing offered her his bike and she said, “You ride it.” He did, weaving slowly and erratically along in an effort to maintain a slow enough pace for her, circling her like an suitor while Karel watched. She kept walking, back straight, with Eski’s ears bobbing over her shoulder, all the way down and into the square, and out of sight.

The next morning Karel was in his kitchen early, making coffee even though there was no sugar. He washed the brown ring out of his cup and thought about things he could have done for Mrs. Fetscher. He imagined a protest that stopped everybody or his hand on Grebing’s arm, and thought these were things Leda might do, not him.

With the coffee ready he didn’t want any. There was nothing he felt like having for breakfast anymore.

Someone banged at the back door. When he opened it, Leda looked at him critically. “You just get up?” she asked.

“Yes. I just got up,” he said. He wiped his eye. “It’s early.”

“We have to go back and see Nicholas,” she told him.

“You want some coffee?” he asked. He didn’t remember if there was another cleanable cup or not.

“We have to go now,” she said.

He looked at her, conscious of horrible early-morning breath. It dawned on him that he was still in tattered shorts and a T-shirt that had egg on it. His hair, too, probably looked like a rat’s nest. What she was saying at that point formed in his mind, like letters becoming visible through disturbed water.

“You want to go where?” he said. “We were just there yesterday.”

“We have to go back,” Leda said. “My aunt called. She wasn’t going to, she told me, but she was worried. Something’s going on.”

He looked at her blankly. They stood facing each other in the doorway.

“My aunt?” she prodded. “With the son in the Civil Guard? My cousin?

“Yeah,” he said. “What’s going on?”

She rolled her eyes. “I don’t know. She said her son told her that one of their units had gone to Nicholas’s hospital, the whole thing was supposed to be very secret, last night.”

“What would they go there for?” he asked. He tried to tuck in his shirt.

“Karel,” she said.

She waited for him to dress right where she was, in the doorway, and called out, “Can’t you find your clothes?” when he didn’t reappear immediately. He barely had time to lock the door, and he followed her in silence for a while, feeling taken for granted and peevish. He told her finally about Grebing and Mrs. Fetscher.

She nodded, ahead of him. Had she already known? She walked faster.

At the iron gate they were told by a new nurse with no nametag that Mrs. Beghé had had an accident and was recuperating. The news increased Leda’s agitation geometrically.

“Where’s my brother?” she said shrilly. “Where’s Nicholas Schiele?”

“Hsh,” the nurse said. “You can’t visit anyone today.”

“Where’s my brother?” Leda demanded.

The woman winced and made conciliatory petting gestures at the noise. She suggested they come back Saturday.

“Where is he?” Leda shouted. The woman looked over her shoulder and back at them, biting her lip, and then produced the spatula key and opened the gate. She stopped Leda when she tried to push by. “I’ll fetch him,” she said. “You wait here.”

“What happened here last night?” Leda asked.

The woman looked at her carefully. “You’re concerned, I know,” she said. “I’ll fetch him. I’m sure whatever happened, happened.” She was one of those adults Karel was always meeting who believed if they said something it had to mean something.

They waited in the courtyard. Leda said to herself, “I should go in there,” but stayed where she was.

A few of the patients were out, standing around, and looked at them curiously. Windows of the reception area were broken, and there was a tricycle wheel near the door. Otherwise things looked the same.

Karel looked at the patients, full of doubts. Suppose something had happened? What could they do about it? Make things worse?

An impossibly short girl walked up to them and stared, holding her doll by the foot. The doll’s head thumped through the dirt. Why was she in here? he found himself wondering. He could see nothing wrong with her.

“Did some men come last night?” Leda asked her, bending over. “Did something happen last night?”

The little girl smiled, and righted the doll and twisted its head decisively, as if she knew all about it.

“Here we are,” the nurse said, leading Nicholas out of the reception area. He looks as tired as I am, Karel thought. Probably got him out of bed, too.

Leda flew to him and hugged him. He hugged her back with one arm, rubbing an eye with the other hand.

“Hi, Leda,” he said. “You must’ve made a big stink.” He smiled.

Leda looked over his shoulder at the nurse. “Can we talk for just one second?” she asked.

The nurse, with an expression meant to convey that there was no end to the extent to which she could be taken advantage of, withdrew to a safe distance and remained there, wounded.

“What happened?” Leda said. “You’re all right?”

“I’m okay,” Nicholas said. “I don’t know what happened. I was asleep.”

“You don’t know anything?” Leda said.

“A lot of people are gone,” Nicholas said. “Mrs. Beghé, both Willems.”

“Who took them? Where’d they go?” Leda said. “Are they coming back?”

“Willem’s brother said the Civil Guard,” Nicholas said. “I don’t know, because I was asleep. Willem’s brother said he was pretending. They took the girl they just operated on. Andrea.” He pointed to his head.

Karel said, “The one with the head that was shaved? Like this?”

Nicholas said that was the one, and Karel felt his stomach shift.

“Are they coming back?” Leda said. To the nurse, who had come closer, she said, “What happened here? Is he safe?”

“Everything’s fine,” the nurse said. She seemed to feel that was her signal to come back. “And you’re to get out of here now, before I get into more trouble.”

But Leda was not to be budged until two orderlies appeared and carried her out of the courtyard. A third escorted Karel by locking his arm behind his back. Nicholas waved to them before being led back inside.

She watched her brother disappear from outside the gate and told Karel they were going to the police. He asked why.

“You don’t understand anything, do you?” she demanded. “Don’t you get it? The Civil Guard took them, I don’t know why. But suppose nobody says anything? Suppose it’s a test? Suppose they want to see if anyone cares what happens to these people?”

“I thought of that,” Karel said, but he hadn’t. “I just meant what’s the point of going to the police.”

Leda didn’t answer. Then, halfway there, she said, “I don’t know what else to do. At least they’re not the Civil Guard. Maybe they can do something. Maybe they know something.”

But his hopes in that regard sank immediately when they entered the station. The crush he’d seen following the declaration of war was gone. The local police’s supersession by the Civil Guard and Security Service had clearly turned the station house into a backwater. The waiting room had one other customer, a shy fat man sitting as if hoping he was camouflaged by a nearby potted plant.

The sergeant on duty was eating either an early lunch or a late breakfast. It was spread before him on a sheet of waxed paper, and he eyed them when they came in as if part of his daily routine involved having his meals ruined.

Leda walked up to his desk and said, “I’d like to find out what’s going on at the Retention Hospital.”

The sergeant gazed over at Karel as if trying to connect him to an unpleasant memory. He had an unappetizing way of rinsing his mouth with milk before he swallowed it. He said, “Is it about the stolen plants?” He motioned for Karel to sit down.

“No, it’s not about stolen plants,” Leda said. “It’s about missing people.”

“A girl was in here before about stolen plants,” the sergeant said. He folded a small wedge of sandwich into his mouth. “With everything else that’s going on,” he said, mouth full.

“It’s not about plants,” Leda said, exasperated. “People are missing, kidnapped, from the hospital.”

“Kidnapped,” the sergeant said. “Hold on, here.” He moved his lunch aside by lifting the corners of the waxed paper and shifting the square over. He scanned papers that had been beneath it. Leda waited.

The fat man, as if a host, indicated for Karel a bowl of nuts on the table. Karel shook his head.

The sergeant looked up sharply and shot Karel a look. Karel attempted to return it or straighten out any misunderstanding until he realized the stupidity of what he was doing and stopped.

“Kidnapped,” the sergeant said with a little more feeling, as if it were one of those familiar and tragic stories one was always hearing: placid dog attacks baby in crib.

Karel paged through a glossy photo magazine called Community Life. It was full of beautiful black-and-white pictures of well-oiled and gleaming machine parts and thighs and backs, dramatically lit. There was a two-page spread of a woman high diver in a black bathing suit, her body an arcing T over a tiny pool below. He shut the magazine, and the fat man gestured that he’d like to see.

Leda was explaining the situation to the sergeant, who said finally, “You’ll want to speak to the lieutenant,” and left to fetch him.

The lieutenant was thin and deferential and conscious of his posture. It looked as if he resented being called out here for this. He gave the sergeant looks while he listened to Leda. The sergeant, settling back down to his lunch, refused to notice.

“So,” the lieutenant said, pleased it was only a girl, “this isn’t about a plant?”

“No, it isn’t about a plant,” Leda said, and her voice rang through the room. The lieutenant made the same patting conciliatory motion the nurse had made. He asked what was going on then, and Leda, grimly, her teeth set, explained it again.

“Ah,” he said. “The Civil Guard.” He nodded. Leda stared at him. He was sorrowful, as if this were all a regrettable local custom or inevitable process that couldn’t be prevented. The Civil Guard just did things, he said, and informed the police afterward, if at all. Relatives complained, the police had to write to them, fill out forms, it all took forever. He said he’d complained many times and could show Leda the correspondence on the subject. He said they’d do their best in this case. He asked exactly who in her family was missing.

“No one,” Leda said.

“No one?” the lieutenant said. The humor left his face in a way that frightened Karel. “What’re you doing? You think we have time for games?”

“My brother says people were taken from the hospital,” Leda said stubbornly. “I’m not related to them.”

“Concerned citizen,” the lieutenant said. The sergeant grunted.

Leda looked at him. Everything was quiet. “I think you know what happened to them,” she decided. Karel thought, Oh, God.

The lieutenant looked at her a moment more, and then made a show of arranging papers on the counter, indicating the interview was over.

“I could go to the mayor,” Leda said helplessly. The mayor was notorious for his timidity.

The lieutenant gazed around the room for the next citizen in trouble. The shy fat man lifted a hand hopefully.

The lieutenant said quietly to Leda, “You know, a town of three thousand, a country fighting for its life — all that doesn’t stop because someone’s crying about a missing person.”

“You know something, don’t you?” Leda said.

The lieutenant stood. He returned to the back room. Leda left without waiting for the sergeant to get up. Karel stared into the eyes of the fat man opposite him and thought, How am I ever going to keep her out of trouble?