Lights Out in the Reptile House

BASILISK

David caught up to them on their way to the mayor’s office and told Leda that their mother was worried and angry and wanted Leda home now. Karel was relieved. Leda told him she’d come by later to plan strategies. David asked to plan strategies for what and Leda asked him how he got so dirty.

There were four trucks and a donkey cart around Karel’s house when he returned. The trucks were open-backed and empty and the cart was being unloaded by a few privates from the Civil Guard.

His house was filled with boxes. It smelled like a rabbit hutch. The privates were unpacking cartons marked FRAGILE in the living room and straw and excelsior were all over the floor. There were stacked cages of rabbits and chickens in the hall, and the chickens were making a lot of noise.

The uniformed officer from the Fetschers’, from the café, was sitting at the kitchen table. Parts of Karel seemed to constrict as he stood there. He flashed on the way he and Leda used to invent the scariest possible nightmares while safe on the beach in the sun, and had the sense that that was what this was: some sort of play nightmare.

The man was considering a deep open box in front of him. Two chickens were bumping and scraping around inside. Karel remembered his name but the man introduced himself anyway, as Special Assistant Kehr of the Civil Guard.

“Who do you assist?” Karel asked, and the man smiled.

“I should explain,” Kehr said. He started peeling the white inner skin from sections of an orange. Each section took a while. When he judged one properly stripped he eased it into his mouth with an in-the-sun squint at its sourness.

He was going to be billeting himself at Karel’s house on national business. He hoped it would not inconvenience Karel seriously. He had laid in some supplies. He reached into the box in front of him to demonstrate, and one of the chickens screamed. In the hall cages the rabbits padded sideways, nervously.

“There’s no room,” Karel said. “I live here with my father.”

One of the subordinate officers from the Fetschers’ and the café stopped into the kitchen to listen. The other came into the house and remained in the background in the living room. He lit a cigarette on the window seat. The smoke hung around him in a gauzy and unpleasant way.

“Your father’s not going to be using his room,” Kehr said. When he saw Karel’s face he raised a hand against foolish assumptions. “Right away,” he clarified.

“What’s happened to him?” Karel said. “Is he in trouble?”

“None whatsoever,” Kehr said. “At some point we can talk about him. Of course, I asked his permission to make these arrangements, and he granted it.”

“You talked to him? Where is he?” Karel asked. “Where is he? How do I know he said that?” He realized that that was stupid question.

Kehr looked at him. The officer in the kitchen leaned against the lintel of the doorway and guffawed quietly. “You don’t,” Kehr said.

The rabbits rummaged and tumbled around in their cages, the sound like someone’s drumming fingers. “What are you going to be doing here?” Karel asked.

“That’s the nation’s business,” Kehr said. “Unfortunately, not yours. We’ll expect you to do the cleaning you normally do.” He looked around the kitchen. It was a mess. “And help a little with the dinner. That’s at seven.”

Through the window Karel could see neighbors outside, standing around and speculating. “Why are you letting me stay?” he asked. “Why don’t you just kick me out?”

“If you’d like, we will,” Kehr said mildly. He was becoming more interested in some papers on the table. “Do you have a place you’d go?”

Karel thought of presenting himself to Leda, and her mother: The NUP threw me out. He didn’t think he had the courage.

“Of course, I assured your father you wouldn’t be displaced,” Kehr said. “In these troubled times.”

“What am I supposed to do?” Karel said.

Kehr leaned back and brushed his palm down his chest like a man sweeping away crumbs. His tunic was lighter than his trousers, and there was a golden pin of a winged hammer on his collar and another of a winged anvil on his breast pocket. The embroidered oval beneath with the sword penetrating the nest of snakes into the skull Karel had seen.

“You have nothing to do but not interfere,” Kehr said. “Which in these times is not easy.”

The interview seemed to be over. Karel hesitated in the doorway. The officer leaning on the lintel regarded him levelly.

“It’s a particularly bad time to be a vagrant,” Kehr said. “With the turmoil in the streets and the various bureaus and Special Sections in such competition with each other, and no clear lines of jurisdiction.… I should introduce you to my assistants,” he said. “They’ll be staying as well. Assistants Stasik, here, and Schay at the window.”

Neither made any gesture. This seemed to be a joke to them. Karel maneuvered through the boxes and went up to his room.

It looked unchanged. His reptile study sheets and the long-abandoned scraps of a letter to Leda were the first things he checked. They hadn’t been moved. From two canteens he kept near the bed since his father had left he drank a cup of water, a cup of warm pineapple juice, and another cup of water. He thought he should get one of those sweating metal pitchers with removable caps. He lay on his bed and listened to boxes and furniture being moved below, the noises punctuated by the occasional chicken in distress sounding like one of the laugh boxes from the amusement shops of his old city.

He went back downstairs after a half hour or so wait. “I need to know about my father,” he said.

“Why are you bothering me already?” Kehr said. “Do you want our relationship to get off on the wrong foot?”

Karel sat down. Everything was going wrong. “It’s just that I haven’t heard anything from him at all,” he said. “I don’t know what’s going on.” He realized with some horror that he was close to tears.

“You didn’t get a letter from him?” Kehr asked.

Karel looked up guiltily. “No,” he said.

Kehr raised his hands as if standing figurines on his palm. “You feel you’ve been badly treated,” he said. “And maybe you have.”

Karel felt the self-pity well up in him and had to look away. Most of the boxes and both assistants were in the spare room off the living room and the door was shut.

“It’s now one-thirty,” Kehr said. He laid two papers carefully over one another as if matching the edges of puzzle pieces while Karel watched. “The animals have been stacked in the back near your storage shed, which you will clear out for them. At three we’ll talk.”

So Karel spent an hour and a half piling the junk from the shed into a heap behind it and arranging the rabbit and chicken cages so they’d get the most of the light and breeze from the doorway. The rabbits hunkered down and watched him with a blank alertness. He caught Mrs. Witz peeking over at him from across the street, but when he stood up to talk to her she went inside.

At three he came back to the kitchen. Kehr was still sitting at the table. They were alone in the house. There was a large olive field telephone dangling a bundled and corded tangle of wires on the kitchen counter. Beside it there was a stack of thin blue books tied with string. They were titled Psychological Operations in Partisan War. On the cover of the top one the words were placed one under the other with rows of heads between each. The heads had holes in the foreheads.

Kehr was finishing up with some papers held down with a paperweight that looked like a small hipbone. While Karel got a drink of water and then sat opposite him he rearranged other objects on the table (a set of files, the notepad from the Fetschers’, a small cup) as if they were required for what was to follow.

So, he said. Karel put his glass down. Kehr picked it up and took a sip himself. What were Karel’s politics?

Karel said he didn’t have any.

“Tell me the story of your mother,” Kehr said.

Karel stared. His temples and cheeks felt cold. He felt a vista had opened to afford him a view of just how little he understood what was going on.

“What do you know about her?” he said. “Did you talk to my father about her?”

“She left you when you were very young,” Kehr said. “She had artistic ambitions. She died young.”

My father talks to him about her and won’t talk to me, Karel thought.

“She was, I’m to understand, a very intelligent woman,” Kehr said. “Strong-willed.”

“How do you know all this?” Karel asked.

“I know a good deal,” Kehr said. “You talk. Then I’ll talk.”

So Karel talked about his mother, to this Special Assistant from the Sixth Bureau. He told him what he could remember. He withheld his most specific memory, of his mother embracing him on the tile floor. He was surprised how much it distressed him to talk about this.

Kehr sighed, looking at him. He seemed sympathetic. “Your mother was associated with one of the groups opposed to the NUP in the early days,” he said. “Artists’ political collective. Not very astute, not very dangerous.” There were other details, he added, they could talk about some other time.

“That’s it?” Karel said. “That’s all you’re going to tell me?”

“Some other time,” Kehr said. “As I said.”

They sat in silence, looking at each other.

“What are you doing here?” Karel asked. “What do you want from me?”

Kehr explained he was organizing Armed Propaganda Teams for the area. He had other duties as well. The patch Karel was staring at with the sword and the snakes was an antipartisan badge.

Karel looked back at his eyes. “Where’d my father go?” he said. “Did you take him away?”

“Your father has not disappeared,” Kehr said. “As far as we’re concerned, no one disappears. We maintain a comprehensive criminal registry. All citizens are recorded there. No one loses himself.”

“The radio’s always talking about somebody you’re looking for,” Karel said.

“They’re like beans in a coffee grinder,” Kehr said affably. “They get stirred around, and sometimes the big ones displace the little ones, but they all move into the grinder.”

Karel pondered the image.

“Your father,” Kehr said, “happily for everyone, chose another route. Your father chose to serve his country and joined the Party. He joined, in fact, the Civil Guard.”

Karel’s mouth was dry. “Why would he do that?” he asked. “Why wouldn’t he tell me?”

“You’re asking me to speculate,” Kehr said. “As for the first question, I imagine he wanted to be part of a movement in which somebody like him — a failure in the eyes of his social class, in the eyes of his family, in his own eyes — can start from scratch. As for the second, I have no idea. But maybe he explains.” He produced a letter from the pile and held it out to Karel.

While he read it Karel felt the same shame he’d felt when Albert had criticized his father. His father’s letter was hand-written, and the penmanship if anything was worse than he remembered:

Karel,

I know I didn’t handle this in the best way possible but it had to be done this way for reasons you will soon see. Special Assistant Kehr has been good to me and you should cooperate with him. I’ve discovered two things I can do well: organize and facilitate. Right now I spend a lot of time outside town. I’ll try to visit soon. I’ve given Special Assistant Kehr some money to buy a quarter of a ham or better. Make sure you eat right or you’ll get sick. See you soon—

Your father S. Roeder

“The ham we already bought,” Kehr said.

“This letter was sealed,” Karel said.

“Magic,” Kehr said. He shrugged.

“He didn’t tell me anything,” Karel said. “He didn’t tell me why he did it.”

“He did it for the reason people like him do it,” Kehr said. Karel could hear the impatience and contempt in his voice. “To get a job, to keep a job, to get a better job.”

“He didn’t have to,” Karel said.

“No, he didn’t,” Kehr said. “No one has to display intelligence or ambition. He certainly hadn’t before that.”

Karel stood up. “I don’t want to talk anymore,” he said. Stasik and Schay came out of the spare room and looked in on them both. Kehr nodded at them and they left the house.

Karel was fingering the edge of the table. “He just left,” he said. “He made all sorts of promises, that he wouldn’t do what my mother did, that he’d get a good job. Then he just left.”

Kehr was looking at him silently, as if he’d expected something like this. “Broken promises helped make this country what it is,” he said.

They remained where they were. Karel occasionally sniffled.

“Sometimes I think it’s my fault,” he said. Why was he telling Kehr this?

Kehr looked unimpressed with his generosity.

“Why’d you hire him?” Karel said. “If you think he’s so dumb?”

“He doesn’t work for me,” Kehr said. “And I certainly didn’t ‘hire’ him. He works for the Party. He’s in a different bureau. Your father I assume impressed people with his mediocrity the way others do with their talent. You know him as well as I do.” He sat forward. “It’s important we see these things with clarity. Your father when we found him was working for a brick manufacturer and had just dropped a load of bricks four stories. He was available.

“Since then he’s been working for the Fifth Bureau,” he said. He shrugged. “I’m told he’s had surprising success. The details of which I won’t burden you with.”

He went on about himself. The information did nothing to lift Karel’s spirits or clarify his sense of what was going on. Kehr described himself as an idealist, which he defined as a man who lives for an idea, and not a businessman. This set him apart from many of his rivals in the Party, including his chief rival in the Security Service, a man he didn’t name but characterized as a hedonist and a shopkeeper. When Karel contributed that he thought the war was against the nomads, Kehr agreed that that was in fact the problem. Karel was very astute, he said: what had been conceived of as a healthy competition that would foster competitive spirit and loyalty to one’s outfit had in fact gotten out of hand. But power in these matters had not been strictly delegated yet, or set, Kehr said, and it remained to be seen over the next few months and years just who would control what in terms of the security of the nation. But that was neither here nor there. He asked Karel why it was, he thought, that he was not involved in any way with the Party.

Karel was taken aback. “I don’t know anything about it,” he said.

Kehr opened his mouth and poked around his molars with his tongue.

“You know, on the radio they talk about the program and everything, but I don’t follow it,” Karel said. Why was Kehr bothering with him? What did he want?

“Mmm-hmm,” Kehr said. He seemed to be in no hurry. Karel rubbed his hand over his face as if he wanted the skin to come off. Here he couldn’t get ten minutes of talk out of his father and this complete stranger who looked busy and important enough to Karel seemed to have all the time in the world.

Kehr suggested that Karel in the future ignore the Party program, since it was conceived largely as a public relations gesture to those outside the Party. This was a movement, not a Party; it wasn’t bound to any program. Karel nodded blankly. Kehr sighed and indicated that the interview was over and that they’d talk again soon.

It was hot and sticky that night and flies crisscrossed the kitchen under the light. He stood over the stove and made a dinner of broiled chicken and fried broad beans. He’d gotten the instructions and ingredients from them. Schay stood around beside him the whole time. He spoke once, to warn him that Kehr didn’t like that much oil.

Karel didn’t eat with them. When they were finished he said he was going out, and Kehr let him go. He headed to Leda’s to tell her what was going on and keep her from walking in on everything. He ran into her on her way over.

She announced she’d had no luck pursuing the missing inmates. He was a little insulted she’d tried without him. While they walked she said she didn’t understand people anymore, that whenever she heard the celebrating on the radio she felt like going out into a deserted field and lying down by herself.

Karel told her about Kehr and left out the part about his father. She was shocked, and then angry for him, and then sympathetic. She put her hand on his waist. They sat on the Oertzens’ stone wall. Behind them dishes clattered in dim windows. Leda seemed to be thrashing this out for herself. She asked if he thought Kehr’s being there was connected to the missing inmates. He said he didn’t know. She thought even if it wasn’t, considering who he was he’d know something. She said she thought that Karel had to be careful but this was a great opportunity: Kehr had access to all sorts of information. This was a really rare opportunity. Karel sat on the wall feeling as utilitarian as a rake or a hoe. They talked about her mother, and Nicholas, and then before leaving she kissed him for the second time ever, on the corner of his mouth. The pressure was moist and warm. The kissed spot was cooler when she drew away. He walked her back to her yard and then continued home alone, musing on the quiet fervor and unfailing warmth that she always displayed toward the Karel she thought he could be.

He didn’t see her for the next few days. He didn’t see Albert either, or tell him what was going on. He worked around the house and followed orders — what Schay mockingly called “household tips”—and had no more talks with Kehr. He registered impressions: of showing them a bad section of plumbing and being surprised at his anxiety at their lack of approval; of coming downstairs early one morning and finding Stasik in sandals and a frayed robe in the back garden, oiling his forearms and face; of passing his father’s room, now Kehr’s, and the way Kehr left the door open as he dressed, pleased to be seen at it. Kehr did the same thing at night, catching Karel catching a glimpse of him folding the edges and sleeves of his tunic away into Karel’s father’s cupboard. At one point Karel came upon Schay going through the accumulated laundry, his hands buried in a pile of socks and shorts. Kehr at meals sat and chewed for minutes, and regarded Karel, smiling, as if remembering something mischievous from long ago.

Two units of the army were garrisoned in town and just outside of town as well. They brought with them a medium-sized camp following, and the square was impassable at busy hours. An avenue of poplars where Karel and Leda walked was leveled, bulldozed, and metaled over and then surrounded by fences for reasons no one could guess. Around town Karel saw vans full of goats, wagonloads of pigs packed shoulder to shoulder, trucks with covered load beds that gave off moos. He could see cows’ eyes through the slats. Everywhere, day and night, there were sleeping soldiers, dozing against the wall, in the shade, in cafés, on piles of equipment. At night he thought he could hear them from all parts of the town and from within his house, stirring and sighing in their sleep, dreaming whatever they dreamed.

The rumors were that all of this was in preparation for a visit by the Praetor himself. Kehr refused to confirm or deny anything and only looked amused at Karel’s curiosity. The People’s Voice ran a retrospective article on the Praetor’s early years which mentioned the possibility, though it stressed that because of security considerations and the many claims on his time nothing was certain. The article was headed with a picture of him dozing under a grape arbor. Inside they ran a more official portrait: shirt open, jaw set, staring off past danger and personal concern to a distant goal. He had thin hair and dark, blank eyes. The biography provided nothing new. He’d worked laying telegraph lines as a boy and developed a passion for things mechanical. In school he’d been the leader, organizing his peers in political discussion groups. With the Republic came disorder and hunger, and he’d been unemployed at a time when “death and mess had become the natural order of things.” He never drank but had been a solitary presence, great with books. Karel hadn’t studied his life and even he knew the details by heart. He also knew through Albert and Leda the other versions everybody knew: that as a child he’d been renowned for hating everybody; that he gambled on everything and refused to pay when he lost; that he once knifed a schoolmate; that he discovered out of school that he didn’t like hard work and so went around with a gang of friends harassing shopkeepers and dressing so eccentrically, with a white yachting cap, winged collar, green army breeches, and a blue workshirt, that he was known in his hometown as the Circus Performer. He’d had a beanlike growth trimmed from his forehead. (That, Leda told Karel, was a particularly delicate secret: he was so vain that before assuming power he’d responded to charges that he dyed his hair by holding a series of public baths so the people could confirm he was a natural blond.)

According to both versions he achieved his first serious political notice when he was twenty-three and the press picked up his proclamation that the streets of his country were “fields of crime” and that the Republic was to blame. It was said that he disciplined traitors to his new movement by asking them to sing the national anthem at the top of their lungs and then shooting into their open mouths. He had killed, Albert said, more people than the typhus, and in towns that had been particularly hard hit the standard curse — when someone was alone, or felt completely safe, which was less and less often — was “May his lungs collapse.”

It turned out the Praetor was not visiting, though one of his closest friends — one of the old OAS (Secret Army) fanatics from his original entourage — was. The visitor’s name was Subsecretary Wissinger, and he had as far as anyone could tell no real role in the government. He was on a tour visiting all the towns of the frontier, The People’s Voice mentioned with a noticeably deflated lack of interest. His work was to discover the truth about morale and the spiritual ethers of the people. He would be giving an oration, presiding over a spontaneous celebration, and dedicating a new sculpture of two men on a bench whispering while a third in uniform overhears. Karel had not seen it yet.

He asked Kehr if that was one of the reasons Kehr was in town, and Kehr said no. The rival Security Service was handling the visit. He would not be attending the festivities and did not recommend Karel did so, either. Karel was surprised and a little impressed at his independence. Leda would have told him they all thought the same way and acted completely predictably.

Kehr told him that this was not an element of the Party of which he was particularly proud. In the old days they were signing people up wherever they found them. Still, the lowest agents fostered an anarchy that the higher ones were then pledged to eradicate, the way a doctor might give you a disease so he could cure it.

Karel went anyway. Soldiers formed a cordon around the square, and Security Service men, dressed in a way they hoped was unobtrusive, drifted through crowds that pretended not to notice them. They were immediately noticeable as the only people acting casual. One kept a close eye on a string of four-year-olds brought out to hear the speech. The four-year-olds hung on to a rope tied between two adult leaders and shuffled along like a miniature chain gang.

There were only a few booths, near the entrance to the square, with canvas flaps that could be tied shut once Wissinger began to speak. One advertising a butcher’s consortium said UNITED MEAT FOR ALL and featured a line of pale calves’ heads holding lemons and carnations in their teeth. One booth was called SUPPORT FOR THE MASSES and displayed a pyramid of hernia trusses tied with little flags and colored ribbons.

He recognized a lot of classmates. Besides the local NUP most of the people in the crowd were children and teenage boys. The smallest children milled around a fenced-off area entitled ORIGINAL VILLAGE OF THE RACE in which two men in blond wigs and winged helmets banged on an anvil and a woman scratched at a washboard. All of this was over-looked by a painted backdrop depicting a sunset with nomad hordes on the horizon.

Nearer the stage there were tables set up with pamphlets and Party publications that were free. Karel paged through them, keeping an eye out for someone he knew (who was he expecting to see go by? he wondered. Leda? Albert?). He kept three: a comic book called Secret Service with a naked girl in a waterfall on the cover and two pamphlets called Investigations into Science: The Nomad Race and Torture: Why Not?

Wissinger arrived in a car hooded in black cloth with its headlights painted over with blue calcimine. He saluted some children before he mounted the stage. He introduced a huge man by the car as Freddy the Crusher, his bodyguard. The crowd applauded.

He announced this would become an annual event of the Party. He added as if it followed that the Praetor was angry at the disturbances in the cities, the results of delinquents. He promised that those involved or thinking of becoming involved would feel the nation’s anger when the war was settled. The crowd applauded again. Karel started threading his way out, thinking he’d go by Leda’s on the way home. Somebody bumped him, and he felt protectively for the pamphlets in his back pocket. The Praetor, Wissinger said, like his nation, knew the emotion of anger, of being insulted. The teenage boys closest to the stage roared. Karel took a lemon from one of the calves’ mouths on the way out of the square, and had it checked carefully by a young soldier taking no chances when he passed through the cordon.

When Karel left for the zoo that morning Kehr asked him where he was going. He looked at Karel soberly over his coffee like an attentive father. He was wearing his full uniform. Karel tried to indicate by his tone that where he went was his decision. Kehr said, “The zoo is a good idea.” Stasik opened the door and held it.

Albert hadn’t left any instructions, and it took a while to track him down. When Karel found him in Maintenance, Albert handed him a flat rock and continued rinsing out a rag in a pail. Karel hefted the rock and told Albert he had news for him.

Albert nodded. It wasn’t clear he heard or cared. He had by his feet in a deep dish covered with a warped piece of screen a pair of flat-bodied lizards. He was cleaning and rearranging the emptied cage. In the dish one of the lizards placed a leg on the back of the other, gently indenting the pliable skin.

“These are granite night lizards,” Albert said.

Karel knew that. Albert had apparently given up testing him.

He was aligning the granite slabs so that the spaces between them made corridors facing the front of the cage. They liked to hide in some pretty tight crevices, he told Karel, which was fine, except then nobody saw them. Which was a bad situation for a zoo. The trick, he said, was to expose them without making them feel exposed.

Karel was interested despite himself, and got angry. He had big news. He needed advice. He could wait until he dropped for Albert to ask how he was doing.

“I still haven’t been paid for my last weeks,” he finally said irritably. Albert looked at him. “I mean, you know, the stuff I did a while ago,” he said.

Albert said, “I don’t think your heart is in this work anymore. I think you’ve got other interests.”

Sure, you do this, too, Karel thought. He was surprised at his bitterness.

“Did you hear what I said?” Albert asked.

“How would you know?” Karel said. “You ever asked me?”

Albert looked at him again and continued to shift the rocks. He leaned more into the cage. Good-sized pieces of flat rock, preferably granite, he said. Slanted and supported so the spaces were a half inch with the openings facing the front, and gravel as ground media. When you had decent gravel. The lizards stirred in the dish as if in appreciative interest.

“It’s like I’m not even talking,” Karel said. “I might as well not be here.”

Albert stopped what he was doing. “I’m trying to teach you something,” he said. “I’ve been trying since you came to me.” They were looking at each other, and Karel had the uncomfortable feeling that Albert suspected him of something. After a minute Albert went on about the lizards.

Karel shrugged. It’s my life, he thought. Why should you care about it?

“I’ve got the Civil Guard at my house,” he said. “A man named Special Assistant Kehr. They moved in.”

Albert set the granite down and continued to gaze at it. “What do you mean, ‘moved in’?” he asked. He sounded as if it had been Karel’s idea.

Karel gave him another shrug but Albert was looking into the cage. Did Karel mean they were searching his house?

“I don’t think so,” Karel said.

They were billeted there?

“That’s it,” Karel said. “Kehr took my father’s room.”

Albert was quiet, and disturbed, he could see. It gave him some satisfaction. What had they talked about? Albert wanted to know. Had they asked a lot of questions?

Not really, Karel said. They hadn’t done much of anything, as far as he could tell. He didn’t know whether to tell about his father. He was going to get some version of I-told-you-so if he opened his mouth, he knew.

“My father joined the Civil Guard,” he said.

Albert put the heel of his hand on his forehead and rubbed it as if erasing something. “Who told you that?” he asked. “Kehr?”

The question shocked Karel. “You mean you think he might not have?” he said.

“What bureau?” the old man said. “Did he say?”

“The Fifth, I think. I got a letter from him.”

“A jailer,” Albert said. “Perfect.”

“You think it’s not true? You think somebody made him write the letter?” Karel asked. “What? Nobody ever talks to me.”

“I don’t know,” Albert said. “I don’t know your father. I don’t know what Kehr’s up to.”

“Up to?” Karel said. “What’s he care about us?”

Albert lifted the bowl to the open enclosure and tipped the two lizards onto the gravel. They fell on their bellies together with a quiet plop. “He probably did,” he said. “Your father, I mean. Why wouldn’t he?”

“If he did it’s not my fault,” Karel said.

Albert finished up with the cage.

“I don’t like staying there right now,” Karel said. Albert nodded and turned and led him down the hall through one of the outbuildings to the quarantine station. Karel was uncomfortable the whole time, his hint hanging unacknowledged, and he wished there were a way to take it back. At the quarantine station Perren was working alone, humming to something slightly syncopated on the radio. He was guiding a dead mouse into a bushmaster’s mouth with a pair of forceps. On the table opposite there was a metal basin the size of a bathtub.

Albert peered over into it and made whispery clicking noises with his tongue. A black-and-red Gila was asleep inside. It was on its back with its legs in the air in the relaxed and oblivious manner of a puppy. Some egg yolk was drying in an anchored dish near its head. Albert remarked sadly that no one was eating lately, and Karel understood he was being asked to leave.

Albert mentioned Seelie, who was refusing even eggs. His bringing up the Komodos at this point hurt Karel in ways he couldn’t explain. He couldn’t quit. “Do you think I should stay somewhere else?” he finally said.

Sure, stay with me, Albert could say. You can’t live with those people. It’s not like you don’t have anywhere else to go.

Albert seemed to be aware of Perren at the other table. “I don’t see why,” he said. “It’s your house, too.”

Karel fought the humiliation and disappointment the way he’d fought surf at the beach. His face burned with it.

It wasn’t like it was a real problem, anyway, he told Albert. They got along. Kehr wasn’t like the others. And he was starting to show him things.

“I’ll bet he is,” Albert said. Perren turned off the radio. Albert said, “Maybe you’d better not come back here for a while.”

Karel closed his eyes. He felt pitiful and hated it.

“There’s no work now, anyway,” Albert said. “And you have all this to deal with. We haven’t paid you for your old work.”

“You’re not letting me back here,” Karel said. “Because of all this.”

Perren made a clacking noise with the forceps, and Karel had the impression he was being made fun of. Albert reached in and lifted the sleeping Gila like a red-and-black baby and didn’t say anything else, and Karel turned and ran out of the room and out of the zoo.

At home he found Stasik in his T-shirt and uniform pants playing with a ringtail while Kehr watched. The ringtail was on the floor in the kitchen and they were flanking it with chairs. Kehr was on the field telephone, listening, for the most part. Whoever had installed it had punched a hole through the kitchen wall.

The ringtail was curled in a crouch and jittery. They had the doorways to the other rooms blocked off with empty cartons, and it was giving each carton the once-over. It was a few feet long and had the weird amalgamated look of all ringtails, as if assembled by committee: a cat’s body, a fox’s head with huge, pale eyes, a raccoon’s fat bushy tail banded in black and white. While he watched it lifted a pink paw to him as if in greeting.

He’d always heard from his father that they could give a nasty bite, but Kehr and Stasik seemed unfazed, and Stasik was feeding it crickets. He had the crickets in a paper bag. He set them down one by one, and the ringtail would back off, its fat tail curling and undulating warily. It ignored the crickets’ first tentative hop and pounced after the second, coming down on them with both paws and stuffing them in its cheek.

Kehr cupped his hand over the receiver and introduced it to Karel as their new friend. Stasik had found it in the shed with the chickens. The ringtail backed coolly under the kitchen table at Karel’s approach and refused to come out. It cheeped when he passed through heading for his bedroom, and when he stepped over the boxes it negotiated its way along the wall in the opposite direction. Near the sink it defecated.

In his room he shut the door and lay on his bed. Why was he worrying about the house like he was caretaker? Who else cared about it? What was he looking out for? Boxes of family things he didn’t recognize? You don’t have a family, he thought. Get that through your head. What did he care about this town, this zoo, Albert, his father? Why hadn’t he run away already?

He heard someone come up the stairs and stop outside the door.

“I know somebody’s there,” he said.

There was a cough and a knock. “What?” he said. “What? What do you want from me?”

Kehr opened the door. He had a folder in his hands. He sat on the bed, and Karel moved his legs to make room.

“Our ringtail was having an energetic discussion with the chickens when Stasik found him,” he said.

“What’re you doing here?” Karel said. “All you do is hang around the house. They pay you to hang around the house?”

Kehr smiled. His skin was completely smooth, and he seemed at ease. If I looked like that Leda would love me, Karel found himself thinking. He shook it off. Kehr said, “I haven’t started working yet. I’m engaged in what we call the preliminary stages.”

Karel wasn’t even going to ask, and give him the satisfaction. He reached over and switched on the radio. Kehr opened the folder and looked inside it as if waiting for something. The radio went on about sectors in the rear being scoured of trouble, and Karel reached over and shut it off.

Kehr said, “I have something for you.” He held out the folder.

Inside was a photograph of a woman’s face. She had large eyes and dark hair under a big hat. She was looking at him with a serious expression. Her mouth was slightly pursed.

He blinked. He could feel pressure in his throat, like the impulse to swallow. “Is this my mother?” he asked.

Kehr nodded. He had had it sent, he said. It had been in one of the old files.

Karel held it before him, trying to overlay the image on his blurred and incomplete memory. Kehr put a hand on Karel’s shin and then took it away. The face was so concrete and open to study that it was disorienting and made him suspicious, even as he recognized how moved he was by its revelatory power: this is her, this is what she looked like.

“This is my mother,” he said, to himself, and while he continued to look Kehr stood up and left the room, closing the door behind him.

He stood the photo against the wall and turned off the light. The face gazed down at him whitely from the darkness. It was as if he had somebody else now to think about, his father, Albert, Leda, his mother from the tiled floor, and now this woman. When he slept that night they all mixed together in ways his dreams didn’t make clear.

The next morning he heard a banging in the kitchen and went downstairs. Kehr was on his back under the sink with a huge range of tools. The others were out. The ringtail was cowering under the kitchen table from the noise.

“Good morning,” Kehr said. “Time to fix the plumbing. I made some coffee.”

Karel poured himself a cup and sat down. The ringtail scrabbled away at his approach.

Kehr clanked and banged away unseen. Karel sipped his coffee. This was better than the stuff he made. Someone had cleaned the pot. “Time to put a little work into this house,” Kehr said.

Karel rubbed his eyes, disoriented by the attempted domesticity. “Don’t you have people who could do that?” he asked.

“Give me a hand,” Kehr said. “Hand me the wrench.” His hand waved and flopped around outside the cabinet to indicate its search.

Karel took another sip and then got up and brought the mug with him. He knelt on the floor by Kehr’s legs. He could smell urine from the ringtail somewhere when he got this low. He surveyed the tools in front of him and picked up something plausible. “Is this it?” he asked.

Kehr leaned his chin on his chest from inside the cabinet to look. “That’s it,” he said. “You know your tools.” He took it and went back to clanging. Why specific tools were important if he was just going to bang away, Karel didn’t know.

Nobody’d done anything about this plumbing for a while, Kehr remarked.

“My father always said he was going to,” Karel said.

Kehr didn’t answer. There was the high metallic wrenching sound of the threading on the pipes going.

“You’re going to have to hold the catch basin here a minute,” Kehr said. He guided Karel’s hand to the piece and showed him where to support it. Karel braced his other arm on the floor. The ringtail had curled around a kitchen chair in the far corner of the room and was working on one of the legs with its fine, saw-edged teeth.

“We’ll handle this,” Kehr said. “The two of us will straighten this out.”

“I wanted to thank you for the picture,” Karel said. He got a better angle under the catch basin. “Do you have anything else like that?”

Kehr made an appreciative noise and shifted around on his back. “Look at this,” he said. “Come in here a little farther.”

Karel shifted hands on the basin and edged into the darkness under the cabinet. He was stretching over Kehr in the tiny space. He waited for his eyes to adjust.

Kehr pointed with a hand near his cheek at the part of the wall laid open for the feeder pipe. Karel waited and then could make out coiled movement inside. He looked closer. It was a thin black snake with a long head. It opened its mouth at them, and Karel could see the pale eggs it encircled.

“Whip snake,” Kehr said. “A striped whip snake.”

“That’s right,” Karel said. “How’d you know that?”

Kehr snorted. “Zoology is a school for precise feeling,” he said. “‘The eye of the naturalist is as penetrating and as scrupulous as the eye of the sniper.’”

Karel made a puzzled face for his own benefit in the darkness. He asked what that meant.

“That means there’s a lot to be gained by doing what you do, by learning what you know,” Kehr said.

“There is?” Karel said.

“There is,” Kehr said. He was unwrapping old joint-sealing tape from an S-shaped piece he wanted to extract. “I’m always interested in people who take the time and effort to study what’s around them. They’re practicing seeing with clarity and precision.”

“I guess that’s true,” Karel said.

It was true, Kehr said. It was both a gift and a discipline. There was a thump and a light clatter, and then a tiny lapping sound: the ringtail had turned over the dish of water and was drinking off the floor. It was what his country required of him, Kehr said. And it was what his country needed: more people who could do that.

“How’d you know I knew about stuff like that?” Karel asked.

“Abilities like that are hard to hide,” Kehr said, and Karel felt flattered. Then it occurred to him that there were nine thousand books and study sheets on reptiles up in his room.

“I grew up almost completely alone,” Kehr said.

“You did?” Karel said. As close as he was in the darkness he couldn’t see Kehr’s eyes.

“I did,” Kehr said. “Nature for me was something I could learn about and lose myself in, something that demonstrated order and reason: comparative study, classification, the relations of the total design.”

“I don’t know,” Karel said uncomfortably. “I think I just think reptiles are great.”

“And so they are,” Kehr said. “Look. Look at the way her head scales are edged in white. Little crescents.” The whip snake raised its head farther, watching them with sidelong intent.

Karel saw. Kehr was not quizzing him and not judging him. “See the way she tries to distract you from the nest?” he said.

Kehr murmured he did. They were still close in the darkness under the cabinet, and Karel began to register the heat and stillness. His arm ached. He was still supporting the catch basin.

“Let’s finish this and leave Mother alone,” Kehr said.

The threads on the pipe section that was the problem were now stripped and had to be refiled. Kehr had him let the catch basin down, and they climbed out from under the cabinet. He gave Karel a part of the filing job and showed him how to use the reamer and how to smooth and clear the diagonal grooves.

“Do you work with animals?” Karel said.

“Not technically,” Kehr said. “I work with people. But the training with one helps me with the other.”

“How?” Karel said.

“I’ll tell you sometime,” he said. “What I do is a lot of questioning.” He hesitated before the word. He nodded toward the door. “If you and I walked into your shed, we could see certain things in some of the rabbits, couldn’t we? Which ones were like this, which ones were like that.”

“I guess,” Karel said. “You mean like who’s most scared and stuff.”

“That’s what I mean,” Kehr said. “And when you pick one out for dinner, you don’t do it randomly, do you?”

“No,” Karel said, realizing that fully for the first time. While Kehr worked he thought about that.

“So you had no interest in joining the Party,” Kehr said, as if summarizing an old story. He was absorbed in the pipe. “Did you ever consider joining the partisans?”

Karel was immediately alert. “No,” he said. “Nobody asked me. I don’t know any partisans.”

Kehr arched his eyebrows. “I don’t have much against the partisans,” he finally said. “They’re simply activists, like me. They act. If I weren’t doing what I am doing I’d probably be doing what they’re doing. If their fathers hadn’t been Republicans they’d probably all be in the Civil Guard right now.”

“Aren’t they killing people and sabotaging things?” Karel asked cautiously.

“They’re frustrated,” Kehr said. “It’s natural. They want to act. They want more of a voice. They feel all the exchange with their government’s one-way. It’s like the son who wants to get his father’s attention so he can explain himself. Do you see what I mean?”

“Umm-hmm,” Karel said. He put his section of pipe down and stood up. The ringtail was on the stove, its tail curled down the front like a potholder, and its mouth open in some sort of silent communication.

That night Kehr brought some tea up to Karel once Karel was already in bed, and they sat in the dark. Karel was under the covers with his back against the wall. Kehr sat at the desk. The photograph of Karel’s mother was on the table between them, illuminated by the light from the window. Karel thanked him for the tea. Downstairs in the spare room Stasik and Schay were moving things around. Here he was in his bedroom with a stranger from the Civil Guard and a picture of his mother and there was something comforting to him about even this ghost of a family. Kehr told snake stories in a quiet voice as if they’d had plenty of talks like this before. Karel cupped his tea in his hands and listened to the occasional shooting in the distance sounding like the popping of grilled corn and was glad somebody was in his house. Kehr told a story about a constrictor that had swallowed a rolled-up rug because it had been used by a dog for a bed. He talked about the Party and the way it was like something out of nature, always growing, organic. Had Karel seen all the building going on around town? It was like that all over, and in all different ways — the whole idea was to keep doing, keep growing, so that the movement itself was always changing and becoming more radical, leaving even its own members psychologically one step behind it. Could Karel recognize that kind of excitement?

Karel said he could, after a pause in which he realized he was expected to reply. He wasn’t listening well, he realized, flattered that Kehr was talking to him as an adult.

Was there anything Karel was devoted to? Anything that gave him a reason for being? What was Karel doing? What was he here for?

There were the reptiles, Karel thought. But what would that come to now? There was Leda. He imagined Kehr’s response, and winced.

“I see these people’s lives,” Kehr said, his voice coming out of the dark, “and I just don’t understand it. Their lives just go on, like lights left on in rooms when everyone’s gone.”

Karel slid down in the bed, imagining himself like that. He was saddened and angered by his own mediocrity. He focused on Leda. She was crouching on the talus slope with him, intent on his nooser. Kehr was still talking. The photograph of his mother was up there somewhere in the dark. He put his hands over his eyes and wished for another world. Kehr finished and got up and gave his leg a pat and then went downstairs. Karel heard him talking with the others in a low voice, and then they all went to bed.

School was now closed indefinitely. Leda asked to meet him somewhere other than either of their houses, so he chose the zoo. He didn’t want to go back there, but the café reminded him of Kehr and the zoo was all he could subsequently think of. Another walk south of town was out because of all the activity around there, and he was worried that if he hesitated too long she’d suggest Nicholas’s hospital. He showed up early and regretted his choice even more: he had to pay to enter. He walked around as just part of the crowd. It felt like the confirmation of his new outsider’s status.

He trailed his hand on the railings fronting the enclosures and thought about the work going on behind them. The anoles and whiptails seemed miles away. It was early and the constrictors were still not out, and neither was the tortoise. He wondered if it was having problems again.

He ended up in front of Seelie and Herman. There was a shank of something dark brown and covered with flies near the glass. He guessed that she was still giving them trouble with her eating and they were letting the meat go to see if it would tempt her.

He watched her while he waited. She was drooped along a granite lounging area on the far left of the enclosure. It was the way she got when she was unhappy or irritable. Herman was lying on his side on the opposite end, his eye fixed on the wall. It was like an illustration of reptile divorce or estrangement. He imagined the two of them in their blank matter-of-fact way having given up on each other, having registered, the way Karel imagined people did, that it had come to this.

When Leda arrived they went to the restaurant. Karel showed his work card to the waiter and asked if he still got a discount and the waiter said no.

Leda said, “My mother’s at home and we couldn’t talk at your house because of that guy.”

“So,” Karel said. He folded and unfolded his arms at the table. He was unhappy and beginning to get a little worried. “What’s up?”

“I want to get out of here,” Leda said.

Karel made his I-know-that face.

Soon, because of Nicholas, she said. She pursed and unpursed her lips in a small, affecting way.

“Your cousin again, in the Civil Guard?” Karel asked.

She nodded. Had that guy said anything about anything going on at the hospital?

“I think he’s in another bureau,” Karel said. She looked at him skeptically.

“I want to have it all set up,” she said. She began drawing lines and then boxes on the table between them with her index finger. “Then I’ll tell my mother. If she wants to go, fine.”

“It’s going to be real hard to travel now,” Karel said. She looked off, and he knew he was losing her when he said things like this, fulfilling her worst image of him. He hadn’t done much at all to find out about getting out, as she’d asked him to. Kehr he figured would know things like that, but he didn’t know if he should bring it up around Kehr, however obliquely.

“Also David says he wants to join the Kestrels,” she said morosely.

He found himself trying to trace the outline of the invisible box she’d drawn. “Can’t you say no?” he asked.

“My mother says it looks bad. And that they’re not so horrible in the first place. It’s getting so the only other kids who haven’t joined are off with Nicholas.”

There was an older couple beside them who hadn’t said anything in a while. Karel had the impression they were listening.

Here was the thing, Leda said. She wanted to know if he wanted to come, if he wanted to help. It was going to be hard, taking care of Nicholas and David and her mother.

And getting travel passes, Karel said.

And getting travel passes, she said. She looked at him and he felt nasty and cynical. Five was a lot, she said, and it would be easier if two different families tried to get them. Plus maybe his friend Albert from here could help. Leda said, “You told me they have to travel to get specimens and stuff.”

Karel said he didn’t think Albert would help. He was feeling again that she just wanted something from him, and he was fighting that feeling. She ran her fingertips tenderly over her eyes and then pulled sideways at the skin on her temples, accentuating her eyes’ slant. He had a momentary and clear sense of how much all of this was hurting her, how much the planning and worry were taking out of her. “But maybe this guy in my house can,” he added.

She looked at him cautiously. “Him then,” she said. She sounded as if she hadn’t had much faith to start in this meeting and had just lost most of that. “But we have to do something soon. I’m taking Nicholas for a walk on Saturday and I’m not bringing him back. My cousin says there’s going to be something over there again on Saturday night, Sunday at the latest. He says to get him out of there. When I don’t bring him back they’re going to send somebody, and when they do we can’t be home.”

“So you’re going to go by this Sunday?” Karol asked incredulously.

“Yes,” Leda said. “Yes.”

“What if I can’t get any stuff by then?” he said, panicked. “Information?”

“Then I’m going anyway,” she said.

“But they’ll pick you up,” he said. “How will you get anywhere?”

“Do you understand what’s going to happen to Nicholas?” she said.

The metal table rang with the question. They shifted in their chairs, and noticed the quiet. The older couple listened in for a minute more, and then the man cleared his throat.

“I better go talk to this guy,” Karel said. “I better go now.”

“Why do you call him ‘this guy’?” Leda said. She was looking at him suspiciously. “What’s his name again?”

“Kehr,” he said. “What’s the matter?”

She continued to look. “Nothing,” she said finally. Then she said she didn’t want to call and they should meet back here tomorrow.

“I need more time, I think,” he said.

“Tomorrow afternoon,” she said, getting up. “Just find out what you can. If you’re not going I have to start figuring out what I’m going to do.”

She waved, once, from across the street. The waiter came and asked if he was ready to order. The older couple at the next table chuckled together. They were sharing a piece of honey cake. He got up while the waiter waited and pushed in his chair before he left the table, to make up in a small way for his not having bought anything.

He had two days. On top of that he had to meet with her tomorrow, too. No one was home when he returned. The spare room was locked. He sat at the kitchen table with his head in his hands and looked at two spoons crossed and balanced over a coffee cup as if the configuration meant something and had been arranged for him to find. The ringtail tracked by in a jaunty trot.

It was what he wanted, to run away with her. But now he was confused and frightened, as if he’d been asked to do something terrible. He owed Kehr something. He owed his father something. He had the impression they were both out there somewhere waiting for him to make a disastrous mistake. But he remembered too Leda’s face at the restaurant: she was equally convinced he’d fail in the opposite way.

He snorted, his hands over his mouth. Was there anybody anywhere who thought he might do the right thing? The ringtail sat on its hind legs near the door and licked its paws.

What was this Kehr stuff? What about Kehr? There was nothing there. Who knew what the man wanted? But the idea of him stayed with Karel, like the idea of his father coming back. It was as if Kehr had demonstrated how even lives like his could have developed assurance and focus.

He went upstairs and dug out his father’s letter. He kept it hidden; he wasn’t sure why. He brought it downstairs and reread it.

If he loved Leda there wouldn’t be any hesitation, he thought.

That was true. And here he was hesitating. He was the King of Hesitation, he thought bitterly. That’s what he should do for his country: hesitate. He slapped his cheek in disgust, and the ringtail looked over with interest.

Kehr had cleared the table of his papers. Someone had set a dish of plums out, recently enough that they were still beaded with condensation. Against the wall there was a copy of the book he’d seen before: Psychological Operations in Partisan War. He picked it up. He had the sense the table had been arranged for him, like someone setting out milk and cookies. Outside the window something was startled into flight, the concussion of wings frightening him.

He tried to guess the idea behind the holes in the heads on the cover: bullet holes? The place the information went in? On the first page it said:

Partisan warfare is essentially a political war. Therefore its area of operations exceeds the statutory and territorial limits of conventional warfare, to penetrate the political entity itself, the political animal. In effect, the human being should be considered the primary objective in a partisan war. And conceived of as a military target, the human being has his most critical point in his mind.

He closed and opened his eyes and read the sentence again. He got frustrated after a third try and kept going.

Once the mind has been reached the political animal has been defeated, without necessarily receiving bullets.

This book is a manual for the training of low-level counterinsurgency and antipartisan units in psychological operations, with specific application in the concrete case of the current national struggle with partisan groups and undesirables, both within and outside our present boundaries. Welcome!

Stasik came in, causing the ringtail to circle on itself and show its teeth. Karel put the book back against the wall. Stasik ignored him. Karel stretched and asked about Kehr, and Stasik had no idea when he was coming back.

Kehr never did. Karel waited up, lying on top of his sheets in the darkness, listening.

The next morning Karel found him back at the kitchen table, which was again covered with papers. Someone had made hard-boiled eggs and there was more coffee.

Karel sat at the table in his shorts, and Kehr said something without looking up about the laziness of cooks and teenagers. He finally stopped what he was doing. “Can I help you?” he said.

Karel nodded, and Kehr waited.

“I had a question about traveling,” Karel said.

Kehr looked at him with stone eyes. “Are you going somewhere?” he said.

“No, not me,” Karel said. “Well, I was thinking about it. I have a friend who wants to go somewhere. To the capital. I know travel passes are hard to get right now.” This, he thought, was a real big mistake.

“I thought you were going to continue to work at the zoo,” Kehr said quietly. “I thought you liked to work at the zoo.”

“I did,” Karel said. His stomach felt as it did when he finished pots of coffee himself. “But Albert over there told me he didn’t need me for a while. Albert Delp. We had sort of a fight. Or something.”

Kehr’s expression didn’t change. Karel thought of the rabbits in his shed before dinner, watching him all the way from the door to whatever cage he stopped at. Kehr said, “Nobody’s going anywhere right now that’s not official business. Nobody’s getting travel passes. Unless somebody like me arranges it, as a special favor.” He took out a small pass card, with an antipartisan symbol printed on it, and held it up for Karel to see. Then he pocketed it, and looked back down at his work.

Stasik touched Karel on the shoulder to signal it was time to go. Karel stood up.

“A friend?” Kehr asked, his attention on his work.

“Yes,” Karel said. He waited, but Kehr didn’t ask. Stasik led him out.

He told Leda at the restaurant, and she nodded quickly and told him she’d talk to him and left. They hadn’t even sat down. She hadn’t asked if he wanted to go. He was convinced he’d lost her and broke broom-handle-size sticks on tree trunks all the way home.

He stopped by the Reptile House in desperation, but Albert was out, or wouldn’t see him.

He paced his room and haunted Leda’s street the next day, unable to approach Kehr to try again or Leda to tell her he was going. He sat in his room that night and thought, I should be packing. Saturday morning he helped Stasik and Schay unload boxes and odd folding frameworks of wood and metal that neither of them would comment on, and then made their lunch. In the afternoon they sent him to the market. At one point while dragging his baskets from vendor to vendor he held up a melon and thought, She’s doing it right now. He imagined her leading Nicholas through the gates, Nicholas looking over his shoulder at that place for the last time. He hand-washed Stasik’s uniform cap, which had a thin looping arc of a bloodstain across the brim. He made dinner. He cleaned up with water and ammonia some hard-to-reach messes the ringtail had left. Finally he got away in the early evening, and ran all the way to her hedge. Lounging soldiers watched him go by and tried to lead him with pebbles, arguing over whose came closest.

The neighbors were standing around her house under the streetlight, discussing something. There was an over-turned red wagon on the sidewalk. He recognized it as David’s. Most of the lights were on in the house, including in Leda’s room. Their front door was open. He began running again.

The collected neighbors watched him go by and into the house as if this were one of the expected developments.

The hall light was still on. Moths looped and staggered beneath it. One drawer of a small chest in the hallway was pulled out. One of the family photos atop the chest was tipped over and lying on its face. A corner of the rug was turned up.

He shouted for her and felt cold and terrified and ran from room to room. There was a half-filled suitcase on the kitchen floor. There were folded and unfolded blankets heaped on the table. He recognized empty spaces in the living and dining rooms, marked by faint outlines on the floor, and realized furniture was missing. On the dining-room table a black-and-gray spider the size of a child’s hand had centered itself on one of the dinner plates.

In her room he couldn’t tell how much was gone. Some drawers were empty and the dresser top looked bare. Her bed was unmade and the folds in the bedclothes formed a face. On the floor by the dressing table he found an abandoned blouse that kept the shape of her shoulders.

Outside one of the neighbors folded her arms and told him they were gone.

“Did they say where they were going?” Karel asked. He scanned the yard: a dishtowel hung from the prickly pear along the walk.

“No,” the woman said. “And neither did the police.”

“The police took them?” Karel asked. His throat felt closed.

They certainly did, the woman said. The whole bunch. Her companions murmured. He could see in her expression the beginnings of the notion that maybe this kid who was so interested was wanted, too.

He ran to the police station. He had to stop four different times, swaying and bent low, hands on his thighs, gasping for breath. Sweat stung his eyes.

There was an open-backed truck filled with darkness in front of the station. When he stopped to wipe the sweat from his eyes with both hands an upright piano skidded from the back of it and fell the four feet to the street. It landed with a tremendous noise and sprang open like a trick box. Two soldiers appeared where it had been in the back and threw out a full-length mirror. It pitched aerodynamically onto the piano and shattered with a spray of flashing glass. These were Leda’s family’s, he recognized them, and he rushed to the back of the truck and caught the leg of a soldier emerging from the darkness with an end table. The soldier kicked his hand away like a vine or rope and Karel grabbed for it again, idiotically, and the soldier holding the table looked down at him and he recognized then that the soldier could kill him and that that would be the end of it. He stood there, dumb with the knowledge, and while he did he could see the soldier formulate the decision not to. He understood from his expression that the decision represented what Albert used to call, when deciding which individual to choose when gathering specimens, a whim.

Someone put a hand on his shoulder and turned him around, and Kehr was standing there in full uniform. “Let’s leave our friend here alone,” he said. The soldier set the table down on the truck bed and saluted. Kehr nodded and turned Karel away, leading him with a hand on the back of the neck.

Very dangerous, very foolish, he said. He shook his head as if Karel had been caught climbing the roof of his house. Karel was still both astonished and relieved and was trying to formulate a question.

“Regular troops, recruited to help out,” Kehr said, leading him into the station. “Working under the assumption that the taking of souvenirs was allowed whenever they assisted in a mousetrap.”

“A mousetrap?” Karel said.

Kehr looked as if he’d been insufficiently discreet. A technical term, he said. Anyway, as Karel could see, they’d taken the news that the furniture was still the property of the state badly.

“Aren’t they going to return it?” Karel said.

“In some areas it’s wise not to push these types too far,” Kehr said. He signaled the sergeant on duty at the desk, and the sergeant opened the swinging gate to the rooms in the back. They were blocked by a woman with thin arms and sunken eyes who was trying to regain the sergeant’s attention. She asked him to check again on her little boy. Kehr excused himself, and when she stepped aside he brushed by her. Karel followed. The sergeant told her that there were no children here and that this was not a kindergarten.

At a blank door Kehr paused and looked down the hall at a corporal seated on a child’s chair and reading a magazine. Kehr waited for his attention and then pointed interrogatively at the door, raising his eyebrows. The corporal saluted, and nodded yes, that was the one. Karel could hear voices behind it.

Kehr mimed an “oh” and nodded thanks and then delicately turned the handle. He held the door open and gestured Karel through. He said he’d give him a few minutes. When Karel hesitated, Kehr reassured him with a puzzled look, as if to suggest he had no idea why Karel might hesitate. Once Karel was through he shut the door behind him with exaggerated politeness.

The Schieles were all in the room, with three suitcases and a bundle made from a bedsheet tied with rope. Two of the suitcases were open, and Stasik and another member of the Civil Guard Karel didn’t know were going through them, holding shirts and pants up, giving each a gentle shake at eye level and dropping it on the floor. Leda was standing against the wall. David and Nicholas were sitting beside her on a bench. Their mother was in a folding chair nearby. Leda caught his eye but didn’t change her expression, and he didn’t cross the room to her. Mrs. Schiele was looking at her suitcases as if someone were spitting in them or filling them with animal parts.

Stasik nudged the other Civil Guardsman and pointed out Karel, and they left everything where it was, and waited for him to get out of the way so they could leave the room.

Mrs. Schiele thanked God once the door closed. She’d been crying. She seemed to believe things had been turned around by his presence. “I told Leda your friend would help straighten this out,” she said gratefully. “I told her.”

“Be quiet, Mother,” Leda said. David waved a hello. He had a paper cup on the floor next to him, and a toy boat, and he was shaking iridescent water from the boat.

“What happened?” Karel said. He was talking to Leda. She was looking at him closely, and he was chilled by her expression.

“You tell me,” she said. “I took Nicholas for the walk and when I got him home your friend Kehr was already there. They had David and my mother and were loading the piano into the back of the truck.”

“More and more people kept getting into the truck after we did,” David said. “We kept having to move over.”

“That piano is an antique,” Mrs. Schiele said. “Do you think they’d just take it like that?”

“How’d they know so soon?” Karel said.

“What a good question,” Leda said.

“I didn’t do anything!” Karel protested. “I didn’t tell anybody!” He took a step toward her. Nicholas looked at him intently and then returned his attention to David.

Leda turned her head a little and kept her eyes on him. He couldn’t tell whether she believed him or not.

“Now I’m accused of kidnapping,” Leda said. She seemed fiercely calm. “And they say they found other things, publications, in my room.”

“You mean those newspapers? Those pamphlets?” Karel said, and realized from her face that she thought someone was listening.

“I told them people come and go from my house all the time,” Mrs. Schiele said. “With all the work I do for the Women’s League it’s a shock if I’m home at all. With membership drives and contribution collections they absolutely run us ragged. Who knows what’s where? Who knows how things get in your house?” She shifted in her folding chair, and Karel understood that even she realized they were being listened to.

He crossed to where Leda was standing. She was giving David and Nicholas hard candy from her pockets and they were filling their cheeks like squirrels. Nicholas had figs in one hand as well, and David had between his legs a hat-sized bag with most of his smaller toys in it. It was as if in a modest way she was spoiling them in anticipation of disaster.

While they were working on the candies she showed him a folded piece of paper by lifting it slightly above the top of her breast pocket and tapping it down again. She took him aside. “This is what convinced Mother,” she whispered. “They sent us notification of Nicholas’s death today. A day early. The date’s for Monday. He was on his way home with me when it arrived.”

“You say to yourself, be patient, act responsibly, and one of these days things’ll be quiet again,” Mrs. Schiele said. “And then — one piece of bad luck like this.” She eyed the half-empty suitcase, clearly wondering if she dared repack her things. David was reading a small book from the bag between his legs: Dr. Catchfly: Fantastic Adventures in the World of Insects. “I’m so confused,” she finally added. She seemed to be getting angrier. “You don’t know what to do. After a while you only think of the children. You think, what’ll become of the children?”

“We’re not the first family to be brought here,” Leda said.

“We’re the first family I know,” Mrs. Schiele said. “We didn’t know the other families in those cases.”

Leda turned away.

Karel put his hand on her wrist. Mrs. Schiele sat by herself on the folding chair away from them all and touched her eyes and hair and clothes in small repetitious cycles. He had a momentary sense of how put-upon and abandoned she felt. She’d always been frightened of most things, and now her fear was more comprehensive.

“Nicholas, I need to talk to David a minute,” Leda said quietly. “Can I do that?” She nodded to encourage him. Nicholas stood and walked to the other side of the room. Once there he put his hand on the wall and seemed to be studying its texture.

“David, they’re going to talk to us soon, one by one,” Leda said, her voice low. “And they’re going to want to know about my books. The books I kept in the special place. Now, Nicholas doesn’t know about them and Mom already knows what to say. What are you going to say if they ask?” She was holding him by both arms.

“The books?” David said. He was clinging to his toy boat.

“You know, the books, the secret books,” Leda said. She was keeping her voice calm, but Karel could hear the desperation in it. “Now everything depends on you. Remember what I whispered to you in the truck? What are you going to say?”

“In the truck?” David said.

“David!” she said, and shook him hard, once. He began to cry.

“David, don’t cry, don’t cry,” she said, near despair. Across the room Karel could see Nicholas looking over, unsure what was going on and sad that he had so little he could contribute.

“What will you say, honey?” Leda persisted.

“The man brought them in when you were out,” David half-wailed. She hugged him tightly.

“That’s it, that’s it, honey,” she said. “Did I know him?”

“No,” he wailed.

“Did any of us know him?” she said. She was looking up at Karel.

“No,” David said. He pulled away and rubbed his eyes.

She let him go. He sat down and focused on his boat with fierce concentration. She put her hands over her face and remained where she was, kneeling.

Karel crouched beside her. “They’re going to interrogate you?” he asked. She didn’t respond. She brought her hands down from her face. “Are you scared?” he said.

“Yes I am,” she said, without shame. “Very.”

Kehr opened the door and signaled. Karel leaned forward impulsively and kissed Leda on the cheek. “I’ll get him to help,” he whispered. “It’ll be okay.”

She made her mouth into a tight line and nodded. Mrs. Schiele stood up and gave him a hug. Kehr waited at the door with an easygoing patience.

Outside in the hall he raised a hand when Karel was about to speak. He shut the door and led Karel in silence to a small room a few doors down. The corporal was gone. The room was dark, and Kehr sat him in front of a pane of glass and then left, shutting the door behind him.

The pane glowed with light and Karel realized he was gazing in on another room. There was a bare black table centered in it with a hard-backed chair on either side. It was absolutely quiet.

Kehr interrogated them alone. They came into the room one by one. Karel could hear nothing.

Mrs. Schiele was first. Karel sat in the dark and watched her and heard nothing. She gestured and swung her arms around, leaned back as if to physically avoid certain questions, leaned forward to seem confidential. He imagined her chatter: defenses of Leda mixed in with scraps of old fights and resentments, protests against the injustice of all this, assurances that someone somewhere had made a comic mistake. Toward the end she gave Kehr a sly look and Karel figured she was attempting some sort of maneuver. Kehr looked bored.

Nicholas was next. He was there only a few minutes. He gripped the edge of the table and sat upright, making a visible effort to be alert. When Kehr stood up and dismissed him, Karel could see in his face his sense that he’d failed again to provide something that somebody wanted or would approve of.

Leda followed. He sat right up on top of the glass and he still couldn’t hear anything. She faced Kehr with the same calmness Karel knew and loved from the afternoons in her garden, that expression that was at once open and placid and intelligent. She was questioned a longer time than the first two, but when she got up he knew she was still safe.

He shook with excitement and fear waiting for David. There was some delay. He put his fingertips to the glass and they trembled across it like something dropped into hot oil. When David finally came in, Kehr acted differently, sitting on the floor in the corner as if too shy to confront him. David had his boat and sailed it back and forth across the table.

Karel waited in something that was getting to be like agony. Kehr was still in the corner, and now David was talking to him. He stayed in the corner but finally put his elbows on his knees and his chin on his fists and said something, and the boy instantly looked warier. They talked some more. Kehr stood, still shy, and approached the table. He had his hands in his pockets. He took them out. He swung both down on the table so hard the concussion made David jump and the boat flew into the air. He shouted something, and the boy started crying. Karel was up on his feet, helpless. Kehr shouted again, banged the table again. He shouted. David started to wail, though Karel could still hear nothing. Kehr lifted his end of the table and crashed it down, intent on David. He shouted. David put his hands over his ears and began shouting back.

Karel lunged for the mirror. “Don’t tell him! Don’t tell him!” he called, pounding on the glass with open palms, but he knew he already had.

“Here’s the situation,” Kehr said to him later, the two of them alone in the room. Karel was moving back and forth in agitation as if tied to a perpetually restless little animal. “She kidnapped her brother from a state institution. She’s in possession of subversive literature concerned with the overthrow of the state. There’s evidence she’s part of a group helping to produce such literature.”

“What?” Karel said.

Kehr held his hands up, as if to say he wasn’t enjoying this either. “We found ink, we found blank paper, we found boxes for the paper. And the younger brother told us strange men drop packages at the house.”

Karel’s mouth dropped open. “None of that’s true,” he said.

“She’s confused,” Kehr said, as if that were the end of the subject. “The state isn’t in the business of trying to fill its prisons. I’m not in that business. You help me, I’ll help her.”

“What? What do you want me to do?” Karel asked.

Someone in this town was running the partisan cell for the area, Kehr said. He thought Karel knew who it was.

“Is that what you’re doing here?” Karel said.

Kehr didn’t answer. Then he said, “All I want from you is a confirmation of what I already believe.”

“I told you I don’t know any partisans,” Karel said. “I don’t know any.”

Kehr shrugged, as if he had all the time in the world.

“What’ll happen to her?” Karel asked.

“There are people in our prison system who are absolutely reprehensible,” Kehr said. “I could tell you stories.”

Karel was breathing through his mouth. Sweat appeared on his back and forehead like magic.

The sort of people who believed any scruple could be overcome by a good beating, Kehr said.

“Oh, God,” Karel said. “Oh God.”

“We use the law as far as it serves us,” Kehr said. “Then we move to other methods.”

Karel stood and paced. He pulled at his hair. “I don’t know anybody who’s a partisan,” he said.

Kehr grabbed him by the shirt collar, so quickly it terrified him. They were face to face. Karel could smell mint. “Listen,” Kehr said. “Leave your hair alone and try to concentrate. You’ve been getting by without decisions. With inertia decorated with sentiment. That’s over.” He let go, calmer. Now, he said. Mistakes became errors only when persisted in. He smoothed the front of his jacket with his spread palm. He needed Karel’s decision.

Karel sat, blinking back tears of frustration and fear.

“You just want to be left alone, with this girl and your reptiles,” Kehr said. Karel nodded, after a moment. “Well, even the little man with no ambitions needs help just to be left alone. Like men joining hands in the surf against the waves.” He leaned forward when Karel didn’t respond. “Am I clear?” he shouted. “Am I coming through to you?”

Karel nodded, swallowing. He was looking straight ahead, at the glass. There was no one in the other room.

“I need your answer now,” Kehr said. He straightened up and went to the door. He put his hand on the handle.

“Albert Delp,” Karel said. As he said it he felt the earth open and himself fall into it.

Kehr sat back down. Karel felt hyperaware, as if his fingertips had gone to sleep. His head tingled. He blinked often and tried to focus. Kehr quizzed him on details. Karel told him as if he’d gotten on a slide and it was now much too steep to stop about the tea cozy, the mysterious visitor, the secret space under the false bottom of the kitchen cabinet. Kehr, after rechecking, looked him over from head to toe and then stood and congratulated him quietly. He shook his hand. He left the room.

Karel sat where he was left, not moving.

At some point Stasik came back in and helped him up and led him down the hall and into the room where the Schieles had been. They were waiting there.

Mrs. Schiele hugged him immediately, and Leda looked grateful but wary. He still felt numb. Mrs. Schiele talked about repaying him and having known Karel would help, and Nicholas told him they had train tickets to go to the capital that night. They were all hugging him goodbye. Leda hugged him and he could feel her relief and happiness and smell her damp hair and he believed as he hugged her back that everything else in his life was some sort of vanity except his love for her.

Stasik led them all outside to a car that was to take them two towns over to the train station. Karel wasn’t going. Kehr was nowhere to be seen. While they loaded the car’s trunk, David was the only one who was able to stay calm, which was only right, he said, since he was a future Kestrel. He asked if he could sit near the window on the train as he got into the car.

Stasik took the portable radio out of Nicholas’s hands as he climbed in and dropped it on the pavement and stamped on it. “No radios,” he explained.

Leda was the last one in. She turned to Karel.

“Why didn’t you tell me you were making pamphlets?” he blurted.

She looked at him in surprise and shot a look at Stasik, who was obliviously jamming the trunk shut.

“What did you tell them? What did you do for them?” she demanded. “Why are they letting us go?”

“Get in the car,” he said. Stasik had come around and stood behind them. He was suddenly terrified that it all might collapse. “Get in the car.”

“What’d you do? What’d you tell them?” she said.

“Ask them,” he said.

“You are not them. They are not you,” Leda said.

“All right, lovebirds,” Stasik said. He loaded Leda into the car like a particularly awkward plant and shut the door. He banged on the hood and the driver put the car in gear and drove away.

Karel stood where he was, watching her disappear. Stasik chuckled and went into the station, energetically cleaning an ear with his little finger. When he came back out he asked if Karel wanted a ride home. Karel didn’t. He went home instead by a shortcut he knew. He moved as if asleep and appreciated with an aesthetic detachment a far-off yellow streetlamp over the black twist of a path. Farther on he caught at a deserted intersection his own reflection sliding along the darkened glass of a passing staff car.

At home he dreamed about an old teacher taken from his house and dragged down steps covered with fruit and vegetable rinds, thrown into a snake pit (the snakes Karel couldn’t identify, and they limited themselves to disinterested coiling and the first stages of courtship). The sequence ended with a strange hybrid of anole and skink sitting on the teacher’s head and applauding with its fore-paws.

When he didn’t get out of bed in the morning Kehr came up to his room and pushed open the door and sat heavily on the patched coverlet like a dad whose patience was pretty much exhausted. He tossed Karel a nectarine and said, “I suppose we’re in official mourning now over our loss of innocence.”

Karel said, “I don’t feel good.” He set the nectarine on the mattress beside him, and it wobbled when he shifted his weight. He kept the top of his sheet where it was, below his eyes.

“This is a tragedy,” Kehr said. “It really is. Here’s a man who’s doing everything he can to bury this country and poor you had to help turn him in.”

“What happened to him?” Karel asked. “Where is he?”

Kehr looked at his watch. “I imagine he’s at the zoo,” he said. “Most people have been out of bed and busy for hours.”

“You mean you haven’t done anything to him? He wasn’t arrested?” Karel asked.

“You sound disappointed,” Kehr said. “Did you think we would hurt him?”

Karel blinked. “Yeah,” he said. “I did.”

Kehr shook his head briefly at the fancies of children and stood up. “We’d like lunch, at some point, at your convenience,” he said. “And our friend the ringtail’s been leaving exploratory turds in various places. I can smell them.”

“You’re not going to do anything to him?” Karel asked.

Kehr paused at the door. “As I told you, he is the head of the partisan cell in the area,” he said. “Who he meets, who he has contact with, is of some interest to us.”

“Aren’t you afraid he’ll get away?” Karel said.

“The only people who leave are people we want to leave,” Kehr said tiredly, going down the stairs. “How many times do you have to be told that?”

He checked. He got dressed and said he was going to the market and went to the zoo instead. He slipped in the back gate and found Albert making his rounds. He stayed out of sight. Everything seemed fine. At the gate on the way out, Perren appeared behind him. He was not surprised at seeing Karel. He said, “This area’s closed to visitors,” and demonstrated by shutting the gate and giving it a rattle.

So why did he feel the way he did? They’d known about Albert before him and everything was the same. And maybe Albert was doing something he shouldn’t’ve been. But he couldn’t sustain the righteousness because the image of himself terrified and selfish and saying the old man’s name rose up in front of his eyes while he walked, to renew his self-disgust.

He felt sorry for himself and moped and felt disgusted about that and so moped some more. He wished he’d never gone to the station, blamed Leda, blamed Nicholas, blamed Albert, blamed Kehr, blamed himself. None of it helped. He passed mirrors and scowled, as if no one should have to face what he’d seen.

Days he spent alone. Kehr and his assistants almost always now worked late. At night he lay in bed and Kehr talked. He felt lost and hopeless and didn’t protest. Kehr wore his full uniform and explained the stripes and bars and pins signifying the honors and theaters of service and the distinction displayed in training. He left a replica of the antipartisan badge he wore on the lamp table beneath the photo of Karel’s mother. He gave Karel a replica of the small ceremonial dagger he wore, with the antipartisan symbol flanking the Party letters on the hilt. He talked with patience and attentiveness while Karel toyed with the dagger or tossed and turned or lay on his stomach with his chin on the pillow and his eyes on the wall.

He talked about some of the unfortunate lapses of discipline Karel had witnessed and suggested that soldiers in such cases were unsuited to their roles, and who after all could blame wolves set to guard sheep?

Karel at one point interrupted to wonder aloud if the Party had done all it wanted to do and was ready to stop.

There was no answer in the darkness. Then Kehr said in a low voice that all they’d done so far was impose the illusion of order, as though they’d laid a slab of glass over a whirlpool.

The people, he went on after a short silence, were always more malleable than expected. They were now habituated to government by surprise, to believing the situation too complicated for the average citizen to comprehend and too dangerous to talk about. They worked hard to live by the rules, and the Party changed the rules, slightly but enough to continue to make obedience compelling work. The appropriate image, he suggested, might be the blind man who continually had to negotiate his way past rearranged furniture.

Of course, some complained, Kehr told him. Most remained where they were: removed from politics.

What about the partisans? Karel asked. He knew who Kehr was talking about: his neighbors, his father, himself, before his naming of Albert. The partisans, Kehr said, believed, as did the Civil Guard, that there was more latent opposition to the Party out there than anyone might think, ready to be agitated into motion.

The partisans understood violence, Kehr said. They understood a central point: that violence was the only way to create a hearing for moderation. And, of course, they didn’t accept the consequences of their actions unless they were caught: they didn’t stay around to take the punishment.

Within everyone there was a little man claiming Common Sense and Common Decency, Kehr said, but there came a point when people became used to even the unnecessary brutalities. Did Karel ever wonder at what point people would say, of the steps the Party felt compelled to take toward national solidarity, “No, not that”? Did Karel know that all around him people demonstrated that there was nothing they would not stand for? Karel pulled the pillow over his head. Did Karel know that feeling Kehr remembered from long ago, the feeling he’d never forgotten, when he first understood that all sorts of things that had been supposedly forbidden, impossible, and criminal seemed more and more natural, more and more possible, to this new version of himself?

Karel was standing at the stove preparing some simple pastries Kehr had shown him how to make called Prisoners’ Fingers while Kehr worked at the kitchen table, every so often taking a break to continue what he called “our discussions.” Karel rolled the dough with dirty hands and didn’t retain much of what was being said. He thought about Leda and how much she suspected. He’d asked if he could write to her, and Kehr had said that right then the mail in their area wasn’t moving in any direction.

Kehr talked about violence and aesthetic standards, and when Karel’s interest was flagging completely he asked what Karel thought should be done with Leda’s journals.

Karel turned so quickly one of the pastries made a cricketlike hop and stuck to the wall before rolling off. Kehr was incompletely successful in hiding his pleasure. He repeated the question.

“You have her journals?” Karel asked stupidly.

“We do,” Kehr said. “A search of the house turned them up. We’ll save them for her, naturally. I just thought you’d be interested.”

In the other room the ringtail was tapping on something with his claws as if working on a typewriter. “I am,” Karel said.

They were going to be going over there this afternoon, Kehr said. Karel was welcome to come.

All the way there Karel felt guilty and nervous. The house was double-padlocked BY ORDER OF THE NATION AND THE CIVIL GUARD and Kehr had the keys. While he got to work with them Karel waited on the front steps. Neighbors peeked from behind blinds and curtains.

Kehr opened the door and went in. He moved some packing boxes from the hall and led Karel to Leda’s room and hefted a shallow box off the desk and put it in Karel’s arms. Then he left the room.

This was wrong. Karel knew it. The dresser had been dragged over and the floor molding behind it pulled out. He could see the hole where she’d kept the journals. These were things she had a right to keep to herself, things she could have shared with him if she’d wanted to. But he was excited at having secret access: Leda herself answering all his questions. How did she feel about him? How much did she think about him? Was there anybody else?

And suppose this was his only chance? She was gone. Suppose this was the only Leda he’d ever get again?

Kehr seemed to be bumping around innocuously downstairs. It wasn’t clear to Karel what he was doing.

There was still time. He could leave it all, let Kehr know he knew he had no right to do this. But what if she’d gotten herself into trouble with what she’d written here? If Kehr or somebody had read it? He’d need to warn her then, or plead her case. He hefted the box higher and said, “That’s true,” as if saying it would make it so, and left the room and headed downstairs.

He spread everything in front of him on his desk and then with suppressed excitement limited himself to the first of the three spiral-bound notebooks. It was filled with pencil drawings. She had titled some of them: Nicholas, Nicholas and David, Nicholas Asleep, Sad Crow and Rabbit, Dog, and then, filling him with hope and joy, K’s Hands. That one featured three sets of hands orbiting a lizard’s foreleg and claw: one with the right hand curled inside the left (washing?), another hefting a rock, and the third operating a nooser. The design puzzled and bothered him. Was she comparing his hands to the lizard’s? Did she think of him in terms of the Reptile House? She’d done the foreleg from life: the toes ending in the sharp curve of claw, the keeled scales. He tried to push ahead but found himself flipping back to that page, unable to stop looking.

He left a piece of paper there as a bookmark and paged quickly along looking for other parts of his body. He came across an old man with Albert’s hair and tired expression, dressed in a zoo smock. He was holding a bird in one hand and a gun in the other. His legs ended at the ankles. Whether he was supposed to be standing in something or Leda couldn’t draw feet Karel couldn’t tell. It looked like Albert, and the connection disturbed him. More and more he was having the queasy feeling that his whole world was interconnected behind his back. The bird had a leafed branch in its beak. There were lines radiating out from the man’s head. Holiness? A thought? A headache? A vulture or other huge bird sat in space above him. She’d drawn NUP on its breast, the letters curved to fit.

He shut the notebook. He’d look at the drawings more later. He wanted more of her voice and thoughts.

On the first page of the second notebook it said, This is my letter to the world that never wrote to me. — Leda Schiele. A sheaf of pages following that had been torn out. The first entry remaining had no date but was numbered 17, at the top of the page.

Elsie was right: I hurt her feelings, and where did I get the right to do that? I’m never happy with anyone else but where do I get the idea I’m so great? From the bottom up I need to work on myself. I say I want to be an artist but what do I do to prove it? I hardly draw anymore and I have zero patience for my books. We learned to draw pretty well in school even though our art mistress was mediocre and very young, and what’ve I done with what I learned? At least I’ve stopped turning out complete trash like I did with Mr. G. Sometimes the other thing that cheers me up is that I think I’m learning, and that’s the main thing. The rest should come by itself.

It’s not a game anymore. My ambition should be to perceive things clearly and calmly. I’m surrounded by false information and false people. For my sake and my family’s I have to figure out the truth and act on it. And how is the truth discernible? The truth is discernible first by means of logic and second by the precise investigation of things. Nicholas’s treatment an ex.

She sounds like Kehr, Karel thought. What wasn’t a game anymore?

Why do I let what other kids think about me affect me? Don’t listen or care so much about what others say. You retain your independence when you don’t rely on what other people can take away.

Do not do yourself what you dislike in others.

Develop yourself. Develop yourself.

I have to find friends I can trust. I never feel completely happy or relaxed around people. It’s like every word I have to examine from every angle, and I always have to watch myself. I hate it. I should not close myself off. I should develop for what’s coming a hard head and a soft heart. Too many people around here have the opposite!

Every day someone I thought was half all right turns out to be an idiot. The little idiots support the big idiots. Today the radio was going on as usual about things I can’t even talk about, they make me so angry. Nearly everyone’s lost their minds. Everything runs on lies, everything generates lies, everything is so tangled and mixed up it’s getting so I can’t imagine it any other way.

My pessimism is getting worse. I feel like skepticism and cynicism are poisoning my soul. I want to save it by running away, but where to? Instead, I create a wall around me and keep adding to it. Who will climb it? Why do I want anyone to?

God, listen to me.

I have to see clearly and be stronger. For all my big talk about self-improvement I’m still working at the same old pace. I get childishly pleased with every bit of progress I make, but every day I see how far I have to go.

There was a poem entitled “Anxiety.” Most of it had been furiously crossed out. He could decipher only perhaps I will learn/perhaps I will draw them, and in the final long stanza, two phrases: never-ending, and leaves me tethered.

A mimeographed note was folded into the next page: I hereby permit my daughter Leda Schiele to use the outdoor and indoor swimming pools. __________: Father’s Signature. Someone had drawn a line through Father’s and had written Mother’s.

There was an short entry in a code, nonsense words repeating themselves in various patterns, followed by:

can’t remember

possibly

not sure

oh

There was another.

Man was CREATED to have these doubts and terrors and miseries of self-examination. I believe that. So he can’t just vegetate, like a plant or a lizard, because his mind won’t leave him alone. What the mind tells the soul we say to the state: WE WILL NOT BE SILENT. WE ARE YOUR BAD CONSCIENCE. (save)

He shut the journal and put it down. He stacked the other two on it and put all three in his bottom drawer. Then he went downstairs and outside, past Kehr, who kept an eye on him as he went by. Out away from the house he cleaned the shed in the company of the rabbits for the rest of the afternoon.

He managed to stay away from the journals for another day. He sat and watched one hundred and forty-one trucks roll through the square at noon heading for the front. The cloud of dust they raised stayed level and thick. The trucks were coated with it. His eyes watered. The canvas flaps on the trucks were tied down on the sides and back. When they were gone the dust took its time settling. It moved unhurriedly past the buildings like wandering cumuli. He thumped his clothes to produce his own clouds and tried to loiter in the square afterward, but his dread of running into Albert finally drove him home.

He thought about going over to Leda’s and worried: suppose the neighbors saw him. Suppose the police or Civil Guard were watching the house. He was passing through the kitchen in distraction when Kehr asked if he’d been listening to the radio recently.

Stasik was leaning on the stove, looking at nothing. Kehr had a file open on the table, and Karel wondered if that was all he ever did, sit at the kitchen table and look at papers. The top page was divided into three columns: names, addresses, and something he couldn’t decipher in the third column.

Here was a hypothetical for Karel, Kehr said. A partisan near the capital had thrown a bomb into the backseat of a Security Service car carrying a Special Investigator. A group of kids Karel’s age had deliberately gotten in the way of the Civil Guardsmen in pursuit. The partisan had escaped. The question was this: what would Karel have done with the kids?

Karel got a glass from the cupboard and poured himself a drink from the faucet. The plumbing still made noise. Was the Security Service man killed? he wanted to know.

“Blinded in one eye,” Kehr said. “Otherwise fine. Laid up for a while.”

Karel guessed he would have given them some sort of work detail, or something. Stasik snorted and told him they’d been flogged and given prison terms. Of course, before this they’d been good boys, he said bitterly. That was supposed to make a difference.

“My junior officer has an endearing faith in corporal punishment,” Kehr said. Karel imagined Stasik years earlier, in a place like this, standing where Karel was standing, an actor wearing Karel’s clothes.

Karel said he had other things to worry about.

Kehr smiled. “Your father,” he said. “How he’s doing, no doubt.”

Karel shook his head, a tight little shake.

Kehr continued to smile, and drew a straight, easy line through two of the names on the list. “Seems to me our friend Leda was happy to leave,” he said.

It wasn’t that, Karel said.

“It’s interesting,” Kehr said after a pause. “I had business at the station the night she left. Her train was delayed. I stopped to visit and she wanted to know, out of nowhere, if you’d assisted us in any way. I assured her you’d been as unhelpful as you’d ever been. In fact, I told her that even though we were letting you go we were not at all pleased with your performance.” He cast down the list, touching the pencil point to each name, and made rapid question marks beside a few of them. “I don’t believe in not telling the truth,” he said. “But every so often a little fit overcomes me.

Karel thought, My head’s made of glass. I might as well just walk around with signs. “What’d you say when she asked why you were letting her leave?” he said. He tried not to look as though the news had affected him.

Kehr stood the file on its edge and straightened the pages with short thumps on the tabletop. He set it down and clasped his hands over it. “Her friend Albert arranged it. Travel passes. At your request.

“She was, if I’m any judge of emotion, quite moved,” he added.

“You lied to her,” Karel said. But he was relieved. He felt better. He realized he’d now be doing things to keep people from finding out about things he’d already done. He imagined her on the train thinking of him, and his face heated with guilt at his excitement and pleasure. He had saved her, hadn’t he? He had a flashing sexual fantasy of her gratitude.

Kehr and Stasik returned their attention to what they’d been doing, in Stasik’s case, apparently, brooding. Karel got up to go, anticipating the illicit feeling of being alone with her journals again, but Kehr reminded him about dinner and pointed out the recipe on the counter for Flat Lamb Pie.

“I want you to do me a favor,” Kehr said later while they ate. The ringtail sat on its haunches by his chair and begged with its forepaws up like a dog. “After dinner I want you to pick up some packages for me. At Albert Delp’s.”

Stasik smiled and then put his hand to his mouth.

“I don’t want to go there,” Karel said, astounded Kehr had to be told that.

Kehr looked at him. “I’m asking you a favor,” he said.

“I can’t,” Karel said.

Kehr shook his head at his lamb. He sawed gently at it with his knife. He said Albert had no idea about what had happened the other day. They’d done nothing to him. As far as he knew this was a routine search. It was being handled by a member of the Security Service and they were directed to share what they found with the Civil Guard.

Karel put his hands on his cheeks and rubbed them and looked over at Stasik, who was interested only in his food.

“Which considering the imbecile in charge won’t be much,” Kehr said. “But you never know.”

“Why can’t you pick it up?” Karel said. “Isn’t it top secret or something?”

“This is not a discussion,” Kehr said. “And we aren’t errand boys.”

“I don’t want to go there,” Karel said. “I don’t want to face him.”

Kehr nodded as if he understood completely. “A favor,” he said.

The Security Service officer who came to the door at Albert’s house was Holter.

“Look who it is,” Holter announced. “Karel Roeder.”

Karel stared, open-mouthed.

“It’s Karel Roeder,” Holter called over his shoulder, as if a good party were now getting better. He held the door open. “It’s Karel Roeder, and he can’t close his mouth,” he added.

Karel came in. “I tried to find you at the parade,” he said. “Didn’t you see me? You’re in the Security Service now?” He wasn’t sure he was making any sense.

“However my country can use me,” Holter said. He wasn’t wearing a uniform.

“I have to pick up the stuff for Officer Kehr,” Karel explained, dazed. He was standing in the hall, not wanting to go any farther. The tea cozy was off the phone and the magazine racks in the living room were empty.

Holter made a series of affirmative noises and led Karel into the kitchen. Albert was at the table. The kitchen cabinets were untouched.

Karel stood where he was, awkwardly.

“You know each other, of course,” Holter said.

Albert scratched the bristle on his Adam’s apple with his fingernail.

Karel couldn’t tell, but thought Kehr was right: Albert didn’t know.

He turned to Holter. “My father,” he said. “Did you see him? Did he join the Civil Guard?”

Of course, Holter said. What a question.

“The messenger arrives,” Albert said.

Karel’s face burned. He said hello.

Holter suggested Karel sit. His group would be finished in a minute.

Karel could hear people upstairs. Albert seemed tired and disgusted, but Karel could see he was listening, too.

“So,” Holter said. “Feel free to engage in zoo talk. Pretend I’m not here.”

“I’m allowing my house to be searched,” Albert said. “Like a good citizen. Do I have to submit to this as well?”

Holter shrugged theatrically. Karel looked away. There was banging upstairs. Holter drummed his fingers on the tabletop.

Karel stole occasional fearful looks at Albert, who seemed to be contemplating something disappointing. Holter studied his fingers. He had large moist-looking fingernails that were closely bitten down. He wandered the room and then sat on the table edge between them with a leg dangling and a foot on the floor in an imitation-jaunty pose that irritated them both. “Have you been listening to the radio?” he asked Karel conversationally.

“Now don’t you start,” Karel said.

Holter knitted his eyebrows and gave up. His complexion made Karel wonder if blood could back up and pool. He said he’d been going to ask if Karel had heard about the assassination in Naklo. Subsecretary Wissinger, who maybe Karel had just heard right here in town. He’d been giving a speech about the Old Guard — what else did he ever talk about? — and asking that those executed for assassinations during the days of the Republic be commemorated from here on in as war dead. Apparently he’d been waiting for applause on that suggestion when he’d been shot.

Albert snorted, and Holter shot him a look so penetrating it frightened Karel.

It was sad what was happening, Holter said, after a pause. Everywhere it was the same. Where was the respect? Where was the order? The more they worked, the more there seemed to do.

“I need to be at the zoo before nine o’clock,” Albert said. “Some of the nocturnals need special care.”

Holter looked at him. “People don’t realize that police have a hard time of it in a police state,” he said. “And what is it, really, that we want? We’re not asking our citizens to love us, or even love one another. Just to do their duty.”

When no one answered he swung his leg down and walked to the window. He peered at his reflection. He pushed tenderly on his cheek with two fingers. “It’s always the same tooth,” he said sadly. He made a sideways squeaking noise and opened and closed his jaw. He looked over at Karel as if testing his eyesight.

“But what you got is what you got,” he said. “Life is work. In bad times you work for nothing. In good you get a little something out of it.”

They could hear the others coming down the stairs. Two young men tramped into the room. They were also in street clothes. All that was left was the crawl space, one of them said. Holter nodded, and they left. After a pause Karel could feel them bumping around beneath his feet.

A lot of false travel papers had been turning up, Holter said to Albert apologetically. Duplicate birth certificates, fraudulent work papers. He crossed the room to the kitchen cabinets and turned, his back to them. Albert didn’t have anything like that to worry about, did he?

Albert didn’t answer.

“Rude question,” Holter said. “Of course not.”

“Yesterday one of my assistants’ house was set on fire,” Albert said. “Now he and his family are out on the street. The neighbors said the men wore Party pins.”

“That sort of arson is really planned and executed by big-city types,” Holter said. “We’re fairly helpless in cases like that. It’s pointless, but who can tell them that? Or maybe they were partisans seeking to blame us. Who knows?”

He turned to Karel. “Do you?” he asked.

“No,” Karel said, startled.

Albert shook his head, and Holter looked over at him with amusement. “I don’t understand why a citizen who respects the law would support the partisans,” he said. “I mean, everyone has his passion for reform in the early going, but most of us realize we’re just wasting time and energy better spent in other directions. And who are the partisans trying to reform? Did you hear the joke about our countrymen who wanted to seize the train stations but couldn’t because they hadn’t bought tickets?”

“Couldn’t you be helping them with whatever they’re doing?” Albert asked. “Do you have to torment me?”

“One more story, not from the radio,” Holter said. He pulled a chair out and swung it around and sat on it backward.

Karel found Albert looking at him and had to look away, at his feet, at the table. What was happening here? Why had he been sent here? He understood something sadistic was going on but didn’t know what or why.

“For months we knew a lot of people who’d gotten away from here were in hiding in the capital, in bunkers and mazes built out of subbasements, wine cellars, storm drains, everything. Informers told us that much and showed us one or two. Big question: how would we find the rest? Kuding, Lenz, Kruse — remember them? — they were all down there somewhere.”

Albert looked away, agitated. “It’s eight-thirty,” he said.

“Well,” Holter said. “Finally, we hit on it. Bang: the electric bills of the businesses above! Get it? All those sites would be siphoning off electricity. Right away we found a central cell, maybe forty people. We’ve identified most of the bodies.”

Albert paled. He ran his hand up the back of his neck and let it drop.

“Kuding’s actually alive,” Holter said. “Though he won’t be a problem. As our Justice Minister says, show me a man and I’ll show you a case.”

Albert put his hands over his eyes. He was trembling.

Karel stood up, abruptly, and had no explanation when Holter looked at him in surprise. The young men returned from the crawl space dirty and empty-handed and saved him. One had cobwebs hanging from his hair.

“I’m supposed to be back,” Karel said. He couldn’t take any more of this.

Holter lifted two boxes from the hall and brought them to Karel. “Children need two things, don’t you think?” he said, addressing Albert. Karel put his arms out and he loaded the boxes on them, tilting the weight back against Karel’s chest. “If they don’t get them, the result is unhappy children. Routine and discipline: the child who doesn’t get them will have all kinds of trouble.”

Karel said goodbye to Albert over the boxes and left. He had to wait at the door for one of the young men to open it. Holter called after him as he went down the steps that what he recommended was that children be given plenty of little tasks, and then be made to do them regularly.

Today we tried to read the future by dropping melted wax and lead into bowls of water. E asked, Will Leda marry Karel? and everybody thought that was funny. Sometimes I feel so excluded from their company! and I just want to sit outside under the sky and feel sorry for myself, like mother says.

Poor K! Always around, so sure he’s in love. I’m amazed how my feelings for him have grown. Because of what? He’s very maddening and almost always strange. That time with N an example. Mom and David like him a lot. Only Nicholas seems skittish around him. I kissed him, but would he ever kiss me? I think about him often, but what does that mean? Sometimes I think it’s like I don’t love him but the world in him.

K: 1 Political?

2 Kind, thoughtful

3 Attractive

4 Good?

5 Emotions not good or bad — just up and down

6 So self-consc. — never just does something. I think that bothers him.

The People’s Voice announced that the conversion of the Retention Hospital to museum space was now fully under way. A large number of patients had been moved to unspecified centers around the region, and others had been unfortunately lost in an outbreak of typhus the hospital had surpressed to prevent panic. Those families involved in the loss of loved ones had each received an urn, a certificate, and a bill. In rare cases there had been inevitable bureaucratic errors involving notifications, and these were deeply regretted.

Karel took long walks, wanting to get out of the house. It was hot. He passed an old man walking a dog on a lead. The dog stopped endlessly, and the old man conceded the dog that right, as if any kind of delay he experienced because of it made no difference in a world like this.

He sat in the shade and read the posters on a kiosk: nomads had formed teams of stranglers that roamed the countryside at night. Victims had been found with their ankles broken and eyes put out, according, it was thought, to a secret nomad tradition: the eyes so the dead wouldn’t recognize their murderers, and the ankles so they couldn’t follow them and indicate to everyone their guilt.

In the square a band was playing, sweating in the heat. The music was nervous and worn out and the band members played number after number with their eyes on the ground, their fingers working the stops. The heat staggered drifting mongrels and cats. In a cleared field he saw hawks and sparrows panting and standing beside each other in the shadows of fenceposts, on a truce because of the heat. Their wings slanted downward and trembled in the dirt. Beyond them through a window in the cool shade of a whitewashed room a woman with Leda’s hair and eyes served something from a shallow bowl with the smooth silence of a painting come to life.

He worried that he’d gotten no letters from her and asked about the mail situation at the post office. The clerk informed him in a harassed voice that he wouldn’t predict that anything got anywhere in any amount of time. He asked Kehr if he’d heard anything and Kehr said no and added that he was not holding his breath waiting for a note of thanks from the Schieles.

He tried to ration his time with the journals. He discovered with a shock that he had a rival:

Where is your smoothness? Why have you left? Now, when others pass their hands through my hair I resent it. Dark boy, I’m hypnotized by your black eyes. So much is happening all at once! You’re four years older, four years smarter, four years better, four years worse, four years more experienced. Am I aiming too high? Oh, I want you to be happy.

The next three passages said nothing more on the subject, as if he’d hallucinated it. He was flipping frantically ahead when Kehr appeared in his room and announced that they needed the journals right away for a while, he’d get them back, there was no need to get all excited, he was going to have to call Stasik if Karel continued to make a fuss, and no, it couldn’t wait.

Karel came downstairs early the next morning and moped around the kitchen inefficiently gathering what he needed to start breakfast. Kehr eyed him from his chair. Karel asked if he was finished with the journals yet and Kehr said as if he hadn’t heard, “Do you think you’d like to do what I do someday?”

“I don’t even know what you do,” Karel said. He scooped the coffee with extra vehemence and it slopped onto the floor.

Kehr shrugged. “Fair enough,” he said. “Today you come with me.”

Kehr drove. Stasik stayed at the house. They went out of town by the southern route. Karel saw where he and Leda had walked, where she’d leaned close to see the horned lizard. The morning was already hot. He rode with his hands on his thighs, watching the sun pinwheel off the metal on the dashboard. He was rarely in cars and enjoyed the speed, though he thought this one’s ride was bumpy.

They drove through stands of creosote and shadscale that seemed like brittle clouds of thin branches lining the road. He tried not to think about the dark boy in Leda’s journal and got angrier and more frustrated as he did.

They were going to a Prisoner Assessment Center. In the Guard you called them PACs. This one was a converted animal hospital.

It was a low white building with corrugated tin roofing and a central metal gate leading to a courtyard. The front had been a circular drive with a rock garden, and all that was left was a single exhausted desert sage and a small salt-bush. Cars and trucks were parked everywhere.

They were checked through the gate by a slovenly guard in an army uniform who gave all his attention to a cat leashed to a ring on the wall. The inner courtyard was being hosed down.

Kehr gave a little tour. On the first floor there were offices, a dining room, staff lounge, kitchen, and bathrooms. On the lower floors, prisoner assessment rooms, the infirmary, and holding cells. These centers were new and were all a little makeshift but were being modernized. They’d been mandated and funded by the Statute for the Process of National Reorganization. The statute turned over responsibility in the cases of actual and potential enemies of the state to the intelligence-gathering services. Both the Civil Guard and the Security Service operated within these centers, and not always harmoniously.

But first they’d eat. Kehr took him to the dining room, set up cafeteria-style, and they sat under an overhead fan and ate Skewered Variety Meats, mostly lamb hearts and kidneys. A few officers waved hello or exchanged a little banter. No one seemed surprised at Karel’s presence.

They’d be talking today with a young man who’d been caught painting slogans over Party posters. He was probably no partisan but his activities were worth looking into. People like him thought, Kehr said, that the partisans and all opponents of the current government were like a runaway horse, leading its rider back home. His only question to such people, he said, was, where is home? Who in this country wanted a return to the old days of the Republic?

Balls clacked in the next room, and Karel could see a billiard table. A woman passed it hooded and wearing shackles on her wrists and ankles. Two men were leading her. They were wearing shorts and bright yellow shirts.

“Lot of people being talked to today,” Kehr said. He quartered a piece of kidney on his plate. “Very busy.”

He asked if Karel wanted the dessert, a rice pudding with currants. Karel didn’t and Kehr said that that was on the whole a good move. They bused their trays and went down a corridor that turned every so often at right angles until Karel understood they were circling the first courtyard. They stopped at a staircase, and Kehr opened the door with a small key and headed down. The stairs were lit by a yellow light high on the wall, and they had to step over a coiled fire hose on the landing.

Kehr asked him to wait opposite a holding cell and with another key went into the next room over. A small square peephole on the center of the door had been covered with black masking tape. Under the peephole there was a pale green poster entitled. “Regulations: Group Holding Cells, Prisoner Assessment Centers.” Karel read around in it waiting for Kehr to reappear.

1: Individuals who discuss politics for the purposes of inciting rebellion, or make inflammatory speeches, or meet with others for that purpose, or form cliques, or loiter about, or collect true and untrue anecdotes for the purposes of spreading propaganda, or receive such anecdotes in writing, secrete them, pass them onto others, or attempt to smuggle them out of the cell and so the Prisoner Assessment Center, etc., by any means, or draft secret documents, will be considered to have committed an act of violence against the state and will be dealt with according to that consideration.

2: Individuals who attack or insult a guard, who refuse to obey or incite others to do the same, who hoot, shout, taunt, spit, or make speeches, will be considered to have committed an act of violence against the state and will be dealt with according to that consideration.

The door of the next room opened and Kehr signaled him in.

A young man maybe ten years older than Karel was sitting at a bare metal table. His arms were tied tightly behind his back, and one side of his jaw was swollen as if he’d filled his cheek with nuts. He was blindfolded, and he turned his head slightly at Karel’s entrance.

Kehr put his finger to his lips. “This is a colleague,” he said to the young man. “He’ll be sitting in.”

The young man’s expression didn’t change.

Kehr motioned for Karel to sit in the available chair. There was nothing on the walls, and the floor was smooth concrete. There was no other furniture.

“Where’s my sister?” the young man asked. He had dark hair and a dark complexion.

Kehr seemed to enjoy shifting slightly in his seat so that the young man’s blindfolded head would tip and turn experimentally to try to keep a fix on him. He told the young man his sister was being assessed in another part of the center and was doing quite well so far. The young man struggled and rocked in place and quieted down.

Kehr asked a series of questions, sometimes repeating himself. He asked the young man where he’d gotten the paint, where he’d heard the slogans, who had originally given him the idea. The young man didn’t know, didn’t remember, had nothing to do with those things, and finally stopped talking altogether.

Kehr after a moment said they could go on to the next step, if that was what the young man preferred. The young man didn’t answer. Kehr leaned forward and slapped him hard on his swollen side. Karel recoiled. “Would you like to go on to the next step?” Kehr said. “Would you like to go on to the next step?” He slapped the young man again, back and forth, twice. Saliva sprayed out the second time. “Would you like to go on to the next step?” he said. “Would you like to go on to the next step?” He held his hand close to the young man’s cheek, so that the fingertips were just touching it. The young man shied away, turned his head violently.

Kehr looked over at Karel, who was frozen in his chair. He expelled a breath through his nose and stood up. The young man’s face hung forward, ready for more blows.

“Tomorrow we’ll go on to the next step,” Kehr said. “That may jog loose the occasional forgotten detail.”

The young man swallowed, his face red, his expression intent and blank at the same time. Karel imagined him as Leda’s dark boy. Kehr indicated the door, as if being silent out of deference to the young man’s feelings, and followed Karel out.

On the ride home Kehr explained to him the best methods of interrogation, which he said were no secret. The interrogator should repeat the same question many times, at unpredictable moments, and always as though it had never been asked before. Then it was just a matter of carefully clarifying the variations in the replies, and pointing out to the subject the apparent contradictions. Until the right reply, or the one suspected to exist, surfaced, he said. Everything else, including the use of force, was at least partially theater. The collared lizard lifting itself onto its hind legs, the horned lizard squirting blood from the corner of its eye, the basilisk spreading its hood. Did Karel follow what he meant?

Karel rode home through the creosote feeling hot and cold together at the slapping, and his reaction to it, and said he did.

Kehr brought an envelope upstairs to his room after dinner and flipped it to him on the bed. “Mail call,” he said.

The envelope had Karel’s name and address on it, in Leda’s handwriting. There were no postmarks or stamps.

“Hand-delivered,” Kehr said. “Some of our men shuttle between here and the capital and one of them was kind enough to do me a favor.” He smiled helpfully and nodded at the letter, as though Karel probably wanted to get at it. He left the room and shut the door behind him.

The letter was in her handwriting as well.

Dear Karel,

How are you? How is the Reptile House? Have you heard anything from your father?

I’m writing to thank you for your help in getting my family here: your house guest told me about your persistence with Albert concerning the travel passes. I didn’t believe him at first but he showed me the passes. Why didn’t you tell me? Why did you act so strange?

It dawned on me (well, my mother helped it dawn on me) how mean I’d been to you that night, considering. What kind of impression could I have left you with? I can be so nasty and sure of myself sometimes. I hereby apologize. Do you accept a long-distance kiss and hug?

We’re staying here with my aunt. We’ve got the whole third floor of her apartment and we need it! — Nicholas and David are in one room, Mother and I in another, and we have a little sitting room piled with boxes to go get away from people in. She’s happy enough to see us though Mother’s concerned about becoming independent as soon as possible and so am I. She’s hoping for a position as a housekeeper and is wearing out all my aunt’s friends looking for useful connections to wealthy families. I meanwhile was immediately signed up in the youth work study program in a nursery care center for mothers working in vital industries, which doesn’t pay much but allows discounts on food. I’m hopeful, but I don’t know what to expect from our boss, who has the brain of a chicken and considers herself a beauty. I start Monday.

Otherwise, life in the city isn’t so much right now. You can smell the sea everywhere, though, and that is wonderful.

Everyone seems meek and willing to go about their business. Nicholas and I have a game on streetcars where I try to make men blush by staring at them, because he said once that girls blush if men look at them long enough. I used to play a game like that with Elsie.

People here follow the war news more closely than they do at home. You see little crowds around the kiosks all the time after announcements are posted. Even though there’s nothing new there, either.

What else? All the big shots show off like idiots driving around in their requisitioned cars and occasionally bang into each other in the process. I think there are as many casualties here as on the front. Mostly we stand in line for everything (yesterday for a piece of cheese the size of your finger). Two days in a row the same married couple stood behind us and asked us where our Party pins were. We couldn’t stand them. When the wife got sick on the second day and started throwing up right there in line we started pinching each other so we wouldn’t burst out laughing.

You’ll have to forgive me if this rambles. I’ve lost my journals so you’re in some ways standing in for them.

Have you seen the new language rules for writing letters? You get them handed to you when you go to buy stamps. Euphemisms, and launderings of less pleasant and more precise words. All correspondence is supposed to be subject to them. Have you noticed there are no unpleasant words in this letter? Mother insisted, and I suppose she makes sense. Still, I worry daily that I’m becoming too sensible.…

Do you miss me? I miss you. Though sometimes I think it’s good we’re apart, because I couldn’t take one person’s company for too long. Don’t misunderstand, but I think sometimes if you spend a lot of time with one person he or she might exert too great an influence on you. Have you ever felt like cutting adrift from everyone? I think I get very touchy when someone makes a lot of demands on me. As you must know yourself, there are hours of solitude that make up for the days you spend pining for someone.

Anyway sometimes I think if we keep in touch it could be nice this way, with two people keeping each other company w/o promising to meet up at such and such a place or stay together forever. They travel the way they’re going together for a while, and then if their routes diverge they understand. But I suppose that’s mostly wishful thinking on my part. A lot of times everything takes a less pleasant and rational course, and there’s a lot of sadness and tiredness and inertia and hurt.…

This whole letter will probably strike you as odd in the extreme. Maybe you’re sitting there thinking, Who is this person? Do you think about me? If you do, don’t just think about me as I am — think about me as I’d like to be. We don’t know each other well enough, I think, and I’m a lot to blame. Do you know what I’m thinking? Do you know what I’m thinking about? Will you write?

Leda

The next day they went through another set of double doors past the holding cells and interrogation room. They were going to what Kehr called a prisoner assessment room. On the way he showed Karel the punishment cells they called “the tubes.” He showed him the infirmary. He showed him some of the converted kennels. They passed a grating covering a small set of stairs leading to a subbasement. Somebody had taped a paper handwritten sign next to it that read Juvenile.

The prisoner assessment room was a white room like the interrogation room, with cement floors and walls and a wooden lattice screen with small desks behind it. The overhead lights flickered and buzzed. The desk and chairs were undersized, as if they’d been taken from a grammar school. There was a long unpainted metal table with two chairs. There was a metal bedframe with shackles on its four corners, hooked up improbably to a field telephone. There was a mop and pail in the corner. There was a big wooden box like a toy chest beside it filled with instruments. There were no windows.

“This is a torture room,” Karel said. He felt the way he had when giving Albert’s name, hyperaware, and he could feel his insides racing.

“Torture is what we do here, yes,” Kehr said.

Karel backed up a step. This was like a blank wall. He’d imagined when he’d imagined anything at all dungeons and chains, fire and darkness. This was dirty, it was empty, it was ordinary. “I don’t want to be here,” he said. “I don’t want to see this. What are you going to do?”

“It’s the next step for our young man from yesterday,” Kehr said. “It’s the next step for you.”

“What’re you going to do?” Karel asked.

Kehr sat in one of the chairs. His jacket bunched and creased, and he sat forward and straightened it. Karel put his hands behind his back and leaned his shoulders against the wall and did not look around, his stomach feeling emptied and urgent. He looked at the far wall near the ceiling, at a short row of iron grappling hooks. Below them there were fanlike patterns of scratchmarks on the concrete.

The door opened. The young man from the day before came in escorted by two others. The young man was naked except for his underwear, which bagged in an oversized way like a diaper. He looked rapidly around the room and didn’t recognize Karel, but then, Karel remembered, he’d been blindfolded. Each of the other men had one of his arms.

They brought him to the bedframe and made him lie on his stomach. The springs in the frame creaked and jangled. No one said anything, and Karel had the surreal sense that he was watching the reenactment of a horrible crime.

The two men manacled the young man and shook the manacles to test them, and left. Kehr was still in his chair. He rubbed his eye with a fingertip and blinked. The young man lay spread-eagled where he was, gazing at a spot on the wall. The weight of his head was all on his chin, and he ground his molars. His jaw was still swollen. His toes curled and uncurled against the frame.

Two other men came in. One was short with heavy glasses and wore a white apron. The apron had OP printed on its upper left corner.

“This is someone we call Mr. Birthday,” Kehr said. The man in the apron smiled in acknowledgment. The other man was filthy and unshaven and looked like a prisoner himself and apparently didn’t rate an introduction.

“This is Karel Roeder,” Kehr said.

“I don’t want to be here,” Karel said. He was still against the wall. The man in the apron smiled sympathetically and crouched near the bedframe to examine wires that ran to the field telephone. The unshaven man crossed the room stiffly to the lattice screen and sat behind it at one of the desks. The shadows made patterns across his face and clothes. The desk was too small for him and it looked as if he were being made the object of a joke.

“Mr. Birthday is one of our up-and-coming experts in public safety training and civic action,” Kehr said. The man in the apron gave the wires an expert tug and nodded modestly.

The unshaven man behind the latticework had taken out a small writing pad and a pencil.

“What you’re interested in is over here,” Kehr said, inclining his head toward the bedframe. “Not behind the screen.”

The unshaven man hadn’t looked up and was concentrating fiercely on his writing pad. Kehr remarked that the prisoners here did their part to run the system; that way the customers served themselves, as they liked to say.

“It teaches them responsibility,” he added.

“I think we’re about ready here,” the man in the apron said. He was bending over the toy box with his hands on his thighs. He reached in and extracted a silver rod a foot long and a narrow length of cheesecloth. The cheesecloth he folded and refolded and then wrapped around the tip of the rod and lashed it with string from his pocket. Karel recognized the knot from camp. The bedframe made a creaking and shifting sound.

“Sit down,” Kehr said to Karel. Karel was looking at the rod. “I would suggest it,” he warned. The man in the apron indicated the chair with the rod, as if offering an open seat on a bus. Karel sat down.

“What happens is this,” Kehr said, and he took hold of the crank handle on the field telephone. “The field telephone is battery-operated and generates a current when the handle is turned. The voltage produced depends on the speed at which it’s turned.”

He turned the crank at an easy pace, the way he might grind coffee. The man in the apron reached over and flipped the switch beside the crank and the young man howled and shot from the metal frame all at once, a rigid board, a magic act. He came back down and bounced and screamed and then twisted and thrashed. Kehr stopped.

Karel pressed against the back of his chair as if he wanted to push through it. Kehr reached over and took his hand and put it on the crank over his, and Karel tore it away, trembling. Kehr turned the crank and flipped the switch as if introducing Karel to an uncomplicated but soothing craft. The young man shrieked and tore upward at his manacles, and the bedframe jumped an inch across the floor.

Kehr relinquished the crank to the man in the apron.

The man in the apron cranked at various speeds and thumbed the switch intermittently. The young man shrieked and cried and jabbered in between the shrieks. The manacles were making raw red lines on his wrists and ankles and he’d bitten his tongue.

“What’re you doing?” Karel asked. “Why aren’t you asking him questions?” He was trying to turn his head away, but he was too close and Kehr was restraining him from getting out of his chair. “Why aren’t you asking him questions?” He looked wildly at Kehr, and Kehr put his finger to his lips.

The man in the apron unhooked the wires from the bedframe and wound them through an eye at the base of the rod. He cranked the field telephone again and touched the cheesecloth tip of the rod lightly to various parts of the young man’s back. The young man screamed even louder than before. The rod made coin-sized burn marks. Karel could smell it. The man in the apron shut off the switch and adjusted the cheesecloth.

Karel had his hands over his ears and was trying to keep his eyes shut. “Why aren’t you asking him questions?” he asked. His voice rebounded around the cement walls.

Kehr gave his arm a pat and then pulled it down, freeing an ear. He said, “Is it so hard to figure this out? What we do is administer fear in small doses, which we then gradually increase. Education. We’re teaching him a story with two themes: ultimate brutality and absolute caprice.”

“I can’t watch this,” Karel said. He was starting to sob.

“In fact you can,” Kehr said. “You’re not up pounding on the door. You’re not retching. You’re not doing anything to stop us.”

“No no no no,” Karel shouted. The man in the apron walked the rod tip down the bumps of the young man’s vertebrae and the young man started screaming the same thing. He drowned them all out.

Kehr said it was like Karel’s herpetology and that Karel should’ve recognized that already. The man in the apron described a grid pattern with his prod across the young man’s back and legs. The young man screamed as if someone were pulling his throat out. That sort of study created an identity for the object being studied, provided an essence. He was talking about a kind of power over the natural world. This was about power, the power to see clearly what one was designed for. What he was talking about, he said, was the audacity he had, the audacity Karel had — he shook Karel, hard, to focus his attention, and the man in the apron poured a small bottle of mineral water onto the young man’s back and touched the rod to it — the audacity they had, to circle, as it were, like birds of prey over inarticulate suffering.

Karel was crying. Kehr was unbothered by it. After waiting for Karel to stop he got up and led him to the door and opened it for him. He said something in a low voice to the man in the apron. Out in the hall he shut the door with a clang on the young man’s shrieks and smoothed his hair and reminded Karel that he had gotten up to leave, not Karel. This was nothing, he said. This was not torture. This was a long way from what it could be. This was exercise.

Karel,

Mother says the light here will ruin my eyes and here I am writing to you anyway. I’m in bed already, and I’ve even been to sleep and had a dream. Now I can’t sleep, so I’m writing you, though I’m not sure you’ll ever write back or that you got my other letter or that you’ll even get this.

In my dream we were hiking. (I almost always dream I’m going somewhere.) We came to a big lake. It was night and there was a moon. You wanted me to swim the lake and I told you I wanted to eat first. That’s all I remember, though later you kissed me. They say dreams depend on the noises you hear in your sleep. Maybe it’s true. I always feel the same in dreams: like I live in this peculiar world where I’ll never be entirely happy, but still … It’s strange. It always makes me melancholy. Am I getting really sentimental?

I’ve been thinking of you more often than usual. Maybe because I’m always tired with work and everything. I tell myself: you’re looking for a crutch. You know you can depend on him, how he feels about you. (Leda being presumptuous.) But then I find myself thinking about you anyway. I think, What do you know about him? And I find myself going over all the good things and remembering things like our walks. Karel! If I ever get completely sappy, promise to shoot me, like a horse.

After all my talk about self-sufficiency. I do really believe what I’m saying, but how many times am I able to act that way?

Well, if you didn’t answer me before you’ll never answer me now.

Work at the center is endless and all I do is complain about it. David and Mother try to stay away from me at night, and even Nicholas starts to yawn and blink after a while. I work with ten other girls and we’re responsible for sixty-six children. (!) We waste a lot of time standing around waiting for our supervisor, etc. Even that’s tiring. The worst times are the lunch breaks when we either monitor the children (who throw everything and trade food and fight about it nonstop until the period runs out) or eat with the other girls on the staff. The children wear me out so quickly: it’s tiring having to think myself into their world and stay detached from it at the same time. And the girls on the staff are worse: I have to close my ears to their chatter. Sometimes I actually start humming to myself while they talk. Every time I join in it seems like a big concession and I immediately regret it. They come in every morning thrilled with the NUP and the war and go home just as blinkered. I usually manage to stay in the background, because of my shyness. I wish I could keep it up, but I catch myself showing off in little ways, trying to teach them. It’s awful, this craving I have to be noticed. And look: even as I write that I’m wondering how it looks on paper. Where do I get ideas like that? Who am I to think I’m too good for these people? What arrogance! Where did I get it from?

They fired off some live ammunition near the center this afternoon. My ears are still buzzing.…

Will you write? You never tell me about yourself, though I suppose I don’t ask as much as I could. I often wonder who you’re with at some point in the day, and who you’re friendly with in general. You never talked about that. Who you like best, for instance. Have you met anyone new? Are you mostly alone? Are all those questions stupid at this point?

Leda

The image of the young man would not go away from Karel. He saw the young man’s face on the window glass during the whole trip back to the Assessment Center. He didn’t speak to Kehr until they’d arrived and gone inside. The heat had let up a little and they sat in the patio off the dining room. The patio was littered with broken red and white ceramic tiles that crunched and skittered when they moved their feet.

“Thanks for the letter,” Karel said.

“It came while we were gone,” Kehr said. He looked at his watch.

“Lucky the people you know going back and forth are willing to carry those letters,” Karel said.

“Yes it is,” Kehr said. “Luck follows me around.”

Gnats had settled into Karel’s drink. “I couldn’t sleep last night,” he said. “Thinking about that guy.”

“Weakness is kicked in the teeth in this world,” Kehr said. “Which is a shame.”

Two men at the next table were explaining a long-handled metal instrument to a third man, who had trouble catching on.

“What’d he do?” Karel asked. “Did he do anything? Aren’t things like the bedframe against the law?”

The laws were iron, Kehr said. And some people were outside the law’s protection.

In the far corner of the courtyard two children were sitting on a square of cloth on the pavement and playing with rubber balls and a toy lizard. A haggard man in a prisoner’s shirt was watching them.

“Some of our officers occasionally have to bring their children,” Kehr explained. “I’ve seen days when it was like a school around here.”

“There are no rules?” Karel asked faintly. “Anybody can do anything? Downstairs?”

Not at all, Kehr said. In fact, they were cleaning up the system. That had been a big source of tension. He looked over at the children. The prisoner was pointing out to one a ball that had rolled away. Karel should have seen the conditions and methods at the Ministry of Social Welfare: Kehr had thought he could not watch such things. Much different from the sort of things Karel had seen. Another order of intensity altogether.

He saw Karel’s expression and tried to explain. By “excesses” he meant for the most part acts carried out individually, for personal goals. There’d been for example what they’d considered too much individual initiative on the part of operatives at night in the prisoners’ cells. Especially the women’s cells. This for the most part had had to stop. This was why: no one really minded what was being done as long as it was continually clear that it was being done at the instructions of the state. Because once people were clear on that, it was just a matter of finding out the rules and playing by them.

Karel looked shocked.

Please, Kehr said. This wasn’t news. Everybody knew. He surveyed his glass, which was also dotted with gnats. He said there was an argument that those who restrained their cruelty did so only because theirs was weak enough to be restrained, but that, he thought, oversimplified the situation. The political man at arms had to be a model of correctness in dress, deportment, and behavior. Otherwise where was his authority in ideological reorientation? Those who understood that had nothing but distaste for the rabid types who behaved as if they were dressed in horns and pelts. The good torturer lacked the capacity for hatred. Pain was administered the way power was to be exercised: dispassionately, from on high.

They left the patio and headed to the prisoner assessment room again. Kehr said that one could get to the point where what he did made extraordinary wine or fragrances possible, made contemplation possible, made sleep possible.

The young man was carried onto the bedframe. The man in the apron returned and did not seem to be in as pleasant a mood this time. Two prisoners set up bright lights on tripods and a third took photographs. The man in the apron introduced innovations: a horseshoe-shaped electric prod applied simultaneously to the ears and teeth that they called “the telephone,” and a small electrified metal rectangle with legs that sparked and hopped erratically around the young man’s back and that they called “the spider.” While they worked the lights created a double image behind them of their shadows gigantified on the walls.

Afterward the young man passed out and nothing could be done with him. He was carried to the infirmary.

Kehr sat Karel down behind the lattice screen and told him it was time they examined what had been going on here. He asked if Karel had any questions. Karel asked again despite himself why they hadn’t asked the young man any.

He was not ready to speak, Kehr said. With experience you understood that. Softening up was required before it was even worth the bother.

Karel wanted to know how they knew someone was telling the truth. Kehr explained that a specific tone appeared in the voice in that situation, and that again, training and experience allowed one to recognize that tone. Subjects under that sort of stress invented the most farfetched things. One woman he’d been associated with had sent over fifty people to prison, and none of them as far as he knew had provided anything yet, or seemed likely to.

The special methods were indispensable to the cause of truth; with each application another layer of deceit was stripped away, until the last truth was told, finally, in the last extremity.

Why was he here? Karel wanted to know. What did they want from him?

It was becoming clearer and clearer to the Civil Guard, Kehr said, that to do its job with maximum efficiency it would need to recruit more heavily among nonmembers of the Party, to systematically build a core of people who were not Party members or known supporters. They’d allow for greater flexibility in operations. That would do two things: it would create a more omniscient intelligence service, and it would create the impression of a more omniscient intelligence service.

And they wanted to Karel to do that?

Among other things, Kehr said. An example: there was a certain protest organization, of families that had had family members disappear. It had been particularly hard to penetrate. Kehr had proposed months ago that one of their female operatives be accompanied to the meetings by a young boy posing as her son to give her greater credibility. It could even be arranged to have the son save the day during a faked police intervention and thereby cement his position within the group.

There’d also be paperwork around the centers, more routine activities — release orders, transfer orders, final disposal orders — all such things that needed to be done and that there was always so little time for.

Karel sat upright. “I wouldn’t do that,” he said. “I couldn’t do that.”

Kehr nodded. He seemed undisturbed. “That I think is a common reaction,” he said. “But it’s a little more complicated in your case. Take for example the prisoner who was sitting here yesterday recording the session. What he intuited some time ago was that there was nothing a man wouldn’t do to save himself, and having saved himself, there was nothing he wouldn’t do for increasingly trivial reasons, and that eventually he finds himself doing these things out of duty, out of habit, out of pleasure, or for no reason at all.”

Karel shuddered.

“Strange but true,” Kehr said.

“Are you going to torture me to make me do it?” Karel asked.

“I suppose I should be more frank with you,” Kehr said. “There is in my business what we call Involuntary Recruitment. This is carried out through private consultations between the operative and the subject, during which the subject is introduced to compromising actions and situations. At some point the recruit is asked to join the struggle. Should the recruit refuse, which is likely considering the reasons for which the recruit was chosen in the first place, it is then pointed out to the recruit that he or she is already inside the movement, and that he or she will be exposed to his or her friends — as well as the partisans, who unfailingly act very badly in such situations — if he or she does not co-operate.”

Karel was thunderstruck.

“But of course you have time to think about it,” Kehr said. “We should be going. I think someone will soon be using the room.”

Karel followed him on his rounds, in shock and feeling he had nowhere else to go. They dropped in on a woman who was being released as soon as she recovered fully, and Kehr asked if she’d write down for him her full name and address. “I like to keep in touch with my girls,” he said. He told Karel after they left the cell that he’d drop her a card every so often to see how she was doing. In the courtyard they passed a file of prisoners with sticks tied to their legs who were being taught to march. The partisans would not go away and this contrary political activity would not go away, Kehr remarked as they left the center. But we’re not here to adjust to this world, he said. We’re here to adjust it.