Lights Out in the Reptile House

THE REPTILE HOUSE

The next night, while kehr and stasik were out, he heard a noise downstairs. He was in bed. The noise was weight somewhere on the floorboards; it was too large and too heavy for the ringtail. He went down the stairs expecting nearly anything. He passed the bathroom and could smell the ringtail’s droppings on the tile. The house was still dark. Something moved over the bathroom sink, and he looked closer. There was a cough and a face bloomed in the dark mirror as he fumbled and scrabbled for the light switch. He got it and flipped it on and his father was behind him, reflected in the mirror, wearing the uniform of the Civil Guard.

“Surprise,” his father said.

“You,” Karel said. “You.”

“They have an animal living in the house?” his father said. He gave Karel a dubious look and sniffed around.

“How’d you get here?” Karel asked. “How long have you been here?” His father was exploring the living room, turning on lights. Karel was trembling. He asked if his father wanted something to eat or something.

His father told him not to bother, that he had eaten at the center before coming over. He sat on the sofa, still sniffing.

“How long can you stay?” Karel asked.

His father straightened the service cap on his belt. He had fewer stripes than Kehr and no antipartisan badge. Until tomorrow night, he said. They’d put a lot of work into the house, hadn’t they? It looked good.

Yes, they had, Karel said. He sat in a chair across the room.

Had he helped? his father asked.

Karel nodded. Something skittered along the wallboard behind the couch.

“Is that the animal?” his father said.

They were both sitting in the chairs the same way, feet together, knees apart. Karel didn’t say anything.

“They told me about it,” his father said.

Karel had his hands between his thighs. He was not going to cry in front of him.

“What a guy like him wants with a filthy little pack rat I don’t know,” his father said. “Don’t ask me.” He was uncomfortable around Karel but even so seemed more relaxed than usual, and happier with himself.

“What happened?” Karel said, his voice a little hoarse. “What happened to you?”

“Fell in with the wrong crowd?” his father tried, and then looked apologetic. He explained that that had been a joke. He concentrated. He’d been picked up by the Security Service. Remember he’d told Karel that morning that he might’ve gotten in trouble? He’d been shooting his mouth off. He’d been frustrated, he didn’t have a pot to piss in, it was natural. Someone nearby, it’d turned out, worked for the Service. They’d had some talks with him, nothing rough, and then referred him to Kehr, who it turned out had been very interested in his abilities.

“Kehr was?” Karel asked. He didn’t know who to believe anymore. “Why didn’t you call or write?”

“I did,” his father said.

“You know what I mean!” Karel wailed.

“Okay, okay,” his father said. “I wanted to. I couldn’t.”

“Why not?” Karel said. He was crying.

“They just thought it was better that way,” he said.

“I looked everywhere,” Karel said, sick. “You told me you’d never just leave like that.”

“I didn’t,” his father said. “They took me away.”

Karel shook his head. He wiped his face with his hands. “And you joined the Civil Guard,” he said.

“I was told you knew all that,” his father said.

“I didn’t hear it from you,” Karel said. The ringtail nibbled at the back of the couch. It sounded like someone scratching burlap.

“You think it’s such a terrible thing?” his father said, peeved. “You remember what it was like before?”

Karel put his forefinger and thumb to his mouth and looked at the floor and said nothing.

“What should I be doing?” his father said. “You tell me. What should I be doing? Nothing? Should I be doing what you’re doing?”

Karel put his hands over his eyes. “Kehr took me to the center,” he said. It was half lament, half accusation.

“I know that,” his father said, and Karel looked up. “I know what you’ve been doing. And let me fill you in on a little something, since you’re so ashamed of your father: I never took part in any prisoner assessment sessions. The first time they asked me I refused.”

Karel gaped at him for a moment and then broke down.

He could see a blurry father sitting back on the couch, unimpressed. “Here I come back after how long and all you can do is blubber,” his father said.

“Why didn’t you call me or write me?” Karel asked. “Why couldn’t you have let me know you were there? Why couldn’t you have looked out for me?”

His father fumed. He said grimly, “So now this is Dad’s fault, too.”

“That’s not what I meant,” Karel protested. “That’s not what I meant.”

“Let me tell you something,” his father said. “I didn’t tell you because that was the way it had to operate. I didn’t tell you because Kehr told me not to. That was the way we worked it. You think all of this is coincidence? You think all of this just happened?” He spread his hands, and then gave up on Karel and looked away.

Karel could see himself sitting there, open-mouthed. “You let them do all that?” he said, with as much force as he could get into his voice.

“Please,” his father said. He raised his rear up and felt behind the sofa cushions. Karel got out of his chair and went upstairs and slammed his door.

“Very adult,” his father called after him. “Very impressive.”

Karel could hear him banging around in the kitchen. The faucet over the sink went on two or three times and he knew he was testing the plumbing.

He lay on his back in the dark and listened but there were no more sounds. He couldn’t concentrate. His shirt was humid and smelled. He thought how stupid and alone he’d been. The thought of Kehr and his father having done this together made him want to split his head open on the floor.

He’d run away. He’d find Leda. He lay on the floor and starting flexing his knee impatiently, as if leaving in minutes.

Later he heard Kehr come back. Karel’s father suggested they sit on the front steps; the house was like an oven. Ice tinkled in a glass. It was quiet.

He got up and went to the windowsill and peered over. They were just around the corner; he could see their legs.

“How’d our friend handle the reunion?” he heard Kehr say. He couldn’t make out his father’s response.

“Where is he now?” Kehr asked. His father said he was upstairs, asleep.

His father started explaining to Kehr his position, and Karel couldn’t tell if Kehr was listening or not. His father asked in a low voice what people expected him to do. The situation was the situation; was he supposed to change it? The thing to do was to try to protect yourself, keep your mouth shut and do the best you could. Karel listened with his back against the wall and his head beneath the window sill, drained of energy, a marionette.

His father said he’d even figured at the beginning that he could help the Party change for the better, become a little more reasonable, a little more, you know, reasonable. Kehr said something quietly, and Karel’s father answered that his group had had nothing to do with that; it’d been a Security Service deal top to bottom, and whoever said otherwise was lying through his teeth. That was the way it was, anyway, his father added: his group got the dirty jobs, the kind where you got decorated if everything fell right and strung up by your thumbs if it didn’t.

He could hear the ice when his father took a drink. The kid’s mother had left him holding the bag, his father said, and did Kehr think the kid blamed his mother for that? Here she was out working for her Republic without another thought for the kid, and he, Dad, the guy who had stuck around, was the one that was supposed to be worthless. Figure that.

“You have only the most glancing idea of what you’re talking about,” Kehr said, distinctly enough that Karel heard every word.

His father was quiet. He had a way of exchanging a quick smile with someone who’d insulted him, and Karel imagined it now. If he lived long enough, he thought, would he begin to be like that? Would people see through him as easily?

His father said something apologetic, and Karel reflected on his cowardice and the way he saved his courage and bad humor for Karel. There was a long silence and then his father started talking about knots. He told Kehr he’d learned them during his days on the seashore and he liked to trot one out every so often to see if he still had the knack. Karel remembered each of them — the bowline, the pistol grip, the monkey’s tail — and got even sadder, remembering how much being able to pull them off had pleased his father, remembering the way in which in their elaborateness they’d always seemed to him his father’s way of attempting to make his world safer, more controllable.

“Write your father off,” Kehr said. It was the next morning, Karel’s father was gone for the day, and Karel was sullenly cleaning the coffeepot with an abrasive cleanser he hoped would make the coffee taste like paint. He didn’t respond.

Karel shouldn’t allow himself to be so swayed by his father’s example, discouraging as it was, Kehr said. He was not limited by his father’s limitations. Kehr could tell that much even now. Did Karel think his father could’ve handled all this the way he had?

Karel rinsed out the slick residue and stacked the metal pieces to dry.

This was not an opinion, Kehr said. He was not wrong about human behavior.

Karel wiped his hands and left the room.

“I have another letter for you,” Kehr called after him. He followed Karel into the living room.

Karel was sitting where his father had been on the couch. “Where is it?” he asked.

“I’m not finished,” Kehr said. He sat where Karel had sat. Some notes were on the table between them. On top of one was a short sentence: Roeder proposes fire. Kehr collected everything into the folder and closed it. He said, “He has petty ambitions and no real feelings for you. He believes in his own sentimentalities the way third-rate executioners do. He’s denounced two of his colleagues to the intelligence services and he no more firmly believes in what we’re trying to accomplish than your mother did.” Karel looked at him. “He has no family feeling, no loyalties. You should learn from him and move on. He is going under even as he prefers to believe he’s not. You owe yourself a certain ruthlessness in this case.”

“Can I have the letter or not?” Karel asked.

Kehr stood, surveying him, and took it from his jacket. He held it out. “I was told this would be the last one for a while,” he said.

“Why? Has something happened? What’s happened?” Karel asked.

“That’s what I was told,” Kehr said. “This was a favor. I’m sure the girl’s as safe as you are. Try to remember what I’ve been saying.” He left the room, and then after a minute or two the house.

Karel read the letter where he was. The ringtail perched on the arm of the chair Kehr had vacated and cleaned its pinkish paws and blinked at him.

Karel,

Don’t go getting conceited if I write to you again so soon, but I’m bored stiff. Got your short note, which was strange and didn’t help much.

Short note? Who had written her? Kehr?

I’m writing in bed again. Praetor (our cat) is sitting on my stomach. She sits on my head in the middle of the night. Mother hates our name for her and won’t allow us to let her out for that reason.

What’s new around here? Almost nothing. We played so many practical jokes on our old boss that she’s being replaced, and our new one’s a real 150-percenter, so I guess we’re getting what we deserve. (It’s amazing to me how much I like bamboozling superiors.)

This will probably be a short letter. It’s getting harder and harder to keep our spirits up. There’s a lot of the usual whispering about horrible things. We’re no closer to getting enough money together to move into our own apartment. Four people downstairs were dragged off two nights ago and Mother still hasn’t recovered. She’s obsessed with the idea of our family being separated. She watches David all the time and won’t let him outside, either. All he has now is Praetor. At the market I was approached by a small smelly man from the Price Control Board who said I’d just been swindled at a fruit stand and asked if I’d act as a decoy for the police the next time around.

I’m less and less relaxed or patient enough to deal with the children. It’s like everything else: I’m getting too tired or lazy to take all the stupidities in stride. I’m still arguing with Mother, of course. We’re taught that you’re supposed to back your family regardless of the situation. Personally, I can’t raise that much family feeling. I think a person’s relationship to his parents is like the one with his country: respect and obedience, fine, but what if they’re doing wrong?

I’m always arguing with Mom about that, and I feel strongly about it. I never just argue for argument’s sake. (You’re probably rolling your eyes as you read that.) She seems to think I can just drop the issue, like we were talking about tastes in food. Do you? I can’t imagine two people living together and believing different things along those lines. Do we have the right to always be ambivalent just because everything else seems to be? How are things supposed to turn out right if nobody’s willing to work to make that happen?

I’m a fine one to talk. My thoughts are always flying off on tangents, and how often do I do something I really think is brave or right?

See. I always come back to myself.

Who’s done this? Who’s made us different?

I think about what we might do if you came. I’m too tired to make plans, but I do anyway. I had a daydream this morning that made me happy: we were going for a walk near the sea and had the whole day to ourselves.

I get so discouraged! Have I been any use to anyone?

You once told me you thought that because of me you knew a little better what you were supposed to do, supposed to try to be. I think about that a lot. If that were true I’d think it was the greatest thing in our friendship, and the one thing I was proudest of.

Here this was supposed to be a short letter. Now look at it.

Love,

Leda

Perren found him loitering around the turtle enclosures and asked him if he’d forgotten something. He said Albert wasn’t there. He didn’t answer when Karel asked if he’d be in later.

“He’s on his break,” someone Karel hadn’t seen before said. Workers in the area laughed in a muffled and discreet way.

Two soldiers were inside the tortoise enclosure rooting around under the straw and rotting lettuce. One tortoise was hunkered down on top of some dog food soaked in water and sprinkled with bone meal. The other followed their progress inquisitively. At another cage a soldier lifted up the albino mud turtle and inspected it closely. It hung in the air looking miserable.

At the Komodo enclosure two soldiers were tantalizing Seelie through the feeding grate. Herman was quiet against the wall, content to be uninvolved.

Karel told them to stop, and they turned to him the way they’d turn to a yapping dog and told him to move on.

Searches were underway in every section, and the animals were getting anywhere from skittish to traumatized. The anoles were wedged under rocks, and the Nile crocodile stood warily in the center of her enclosure with one of her hatchlings standing in her open mouth and the other two burrowed headfirst under her side.

The snakes were nervous. He could see mites on the hognose, around the eyes. Did Albert know about this? Beside the cobra cages someone had left the rolling tray of mice cubes, small mice frozen in water to prevent dehydration. They were half thawed. Soldiers were gathered appreciatively around a spitting cobra close to the glass, which raised and spread its hood carefully as if searching for information. Perren remarked to them that no one was ever interested in the nonpoisonous ones, and that his old boss had told him once that the wax museums in the capital charged extra for the murderers but the missionaries and reformers and statesmen you could see for nothing.

He had two soldiers lead Karel out, past the mambas, thin and graceful and gliding so swiftly through their stand of field grass they seemed to be swimming, and then past the puff adder, satisfied with its quiet life and few rats. Karel asked if he could stay, and the soldiers said no. A Civil Guardsman shut and locked the gate behind him.

He walked south to the barren hillside he’d visited with Leda. There were still mangy dogs around the refuse dump. He climbed until he reached a place he thought he remembered and then sat in the sun on the scree and looked back at the town and the Reptile House in the distance.

It was already late and he stayed where he was until after dark, watching clouds red from the sunset roll toward the town. He saw a small convoy of six transport trucks parked in an orderly line to the east. The heat from their running exhausts made them flex and wobble. When it was fully dark he could hear cicadas and night feeders starting to move around on the shale, and the convoy started moving, stringing through town like a necklace. Single points of headlights broke off onto each street leading to the zoo and crawled to a stop at the dead ends. When each stopped it went dark. There was about a half hour of silence, and then when Karel got up to go a gathering wail of sirens, and floodlights were trained on the zoo from out of the darkness, and as he ran down the slope half out of control on the loose rock there was the cracking and popping of guns.

The neighborhood around the zoo was completely changed. Soldiers and police and Civil Guardsmen manned roadblocks of oil drums and sawhorses and herded people back into their houses. Karel was turned away at three different points, one teenaged soldier hoisting a rifle butt and shaking it at him to indicate what he was capable of, and finally got through by climbing over the hoods of some transport trucks guarded by two drivers playing dice.

The zoo was on fire everywhere. He tried to shout or call — what? who? — but everything was lost in the roar and wind of the fire’s updraft and the cacophony of the animals. At the inner gate soldiers were coming and going hurriedly while Civil Guardsmen stood in groups discussing the chaos with equanimity. He could smell their coffee. He followed the wall a few hundred feet and scrambled over to get inside. The smoke choked and blinded him and was filled with diesel exhaust and burning rubber. Something collapsed with a crash nearby. There was a whirl of sparks upward and he got a clear view of the fire for the first time, and then the smoke curtained together again and the sparks showered down around him in a golden rain, bouncing and staying lit where they fell. He saw heavy black smoke pouring from the basement windows of the monkey house and saw the intensities of the separated fires and the soldiers still rolling drums away and realized that they had set this, that they were destroying the zoo.

He ran to one and began pulling at his arms and the soldier released his drum with one hand and caught Karel in the temple and ear and the ground swept up and hit him. He got his cheek off the dirt and felt around with his open palms and thought, Seelie and Herman. The side of his mouth was swelling and his jaw throbbed. He staggered to his feet. Something flashed by with a squawk and he registered it as a parrot. High above him a heron flapped into the smoke, glowing red in the reflected light. There were no firemen at work and it seemed as if everyone was on his own: one group was clubbing down flamingoes and another had herded together the wild sheep to protect them. The sheep were bleating in terror and turning in a circle like a storm cloud.

At the Reptile House he didn’t see any of the workers. The doors and windows had been shattered and the fire was mostly inside. As he ran in he was knocked aside by a soldier rushing out, squeamishly carrying at arm’s length an untroubled iguana.

The hall was empty and the fires were spreading along the walls. Equipment was smashed and scattered. Near the turtle tiers benches and tables had been piled around the tortoise enclosure and the fire there was already unapproachable. He could see the geckos and anoles pressed belly first to the front glass of their enclosures, already dying from the heat. He hefted a shovel he found on the floor and started breaking the glass, just swinging and sobbing, but when it shattered and rained around him like spray the freed lizards stayed where they fell, limp and unobtrusive in the debris. He tried to work closer to the turtles but the heat drove him back, burning his face so that he thought his skin was on fire, and he could see their dark shapes and hear their shells hissing like iron cooling in water. The hall to the iguanas was blocked too now and he could hear the teakettle hissing and whistling of their agonies.

He ran outside and around the building to get to the snake enclosures, dragging the shovel and just avoiding a sweep of fire that billowed out a side window. The cages and enclosures were smashed and everything that wasn’t dead was out; part of the wall had collapsed and taken down the front restraining grates. Soldiers everywhere were shrieking and shooting and swinging axes and shovels. The hognose fled over his foot and the bushmaster passed along the inner side of an ankle, freezing him. It was brown and six inches wide and longer than he was, and he could see the rhomboids like black felt on its back. It glided for cover under a jumble of oil drums. A second wall collapsed with a shower of sparks and embers and knocked a Civil Guardsman to his knees, spilling a king cobra in front of him. The cobra reared up to face him and the Civil Guardsman groped around with his hand at the cobra’s base and Karel understood he was looking for his glasses. The cobra’s fangs backlit were like lancets of curved glass.

He heard a voice cursing the snakes and cursing the idiots who had started the outer wall before the inner one had really taken and he knew it was his father. He turned, his body moving erratically after the double shock of that and the bushmaster, and followed the voice, and was knocked sprawling by soldiers running in the opposite direction.

He got up and kept moving, and there was Holter, out of the smoke, his face black with soot and sweaty, supervising something around a tree that was already starting to smolder. Holter was here, he thought, but it was as if he’d lost his capacity for surprise, and he kept on after his father’s voice.

A Civil Guardsman stopped him by grabbing his arm and swinging him around, and asked by shouting in his ear what he was doing there, and it was as if he had no words for such unprecedented things, so he didn’t answer, and while the Guardsman still had his arm and was hurting it he saw through the trucks and men and debris a huge gray shape, one of the Komodos, Seelie, rumble down an incline trying to get to the unfinished moat, scattering Civil Guardsmen and dragging a soldier who’d tried to collar her with a rope along behind her, and what looked like an army of uniformed bystanders plunged after her, firing, and while Karel screamed and struggled she rose into sight again on the opposite side of the ditch and he could see the bullets impacting frenetically along her side and back and she lurched sideways, a foreclaw up, and tumbled back down the embankment. He realized he still had the shovel in his hand and swung it and hit only the man’s legs with the handle, and the man clubbed him to the ground and hit him twice more, on the top of the head and the collarbone.

He awoke outside the barricades, where he’d been dragged. He was off the street near a hedge. The house was shuttered and dark.

It was quiet and the fire seemed largely out. The night was paling and he knew it must be close to morning. He could smell the charred wood and general sootiness in the air.

His head was sore in a kind of corona, and when he tried to lift it he groaned. He was aware of his collarbone, too, and he had to keep his arm still and close to his ribs. A tiger beetle perched on his calf, its antennae curled downward, like feelers, and he shook it off. He became aware that for some reason ants had filled one of his shoes.

A dog was barking a few streets away and was finally quiet. He sat up and dragged his shoe off. He’d stepped in something. He shook the shoe out, blinking fiercely to shake his grogginess. The ants tickled his foot and rained onto the ground with an audible patter. At the barricade one sleepy soldier sat with his rifle across his lap and his back to the sawhorse.

When it was lighter he got up. The soldier was asleep. He passed through the barricade, holding the shoulder with the injured collarbone lower, the pain in his head coming in gentle waves.

People were coming out. Nearer the zoo he found a small boy playing on a blackened playground. The soles of his feet and his hands were black.

Beside the playground the bakery was still standing, and still had power, and the baker was putting breakfast rolls into the ovens in the back. He was working under a single light bulb and wearing slippers and trousers and an apron but no shirt. The apron needed changing.

Closer to the zoo some houses had burned down. A girl Karel’s age was standing outside the ruins, which were still hot, and picking at what she could, dusting it off and throwing it away. Some neighbors had gathered to watch. She ignored Karel but the neighbors nodded when he stopped.

They disagreed about the fire. Two women thought the whole thing was terrible and what they were looking at unforgivable, but someone else argued that the zoo had been a staging area for insurgents, that soldiers had told them it had been destroyed by a spontaneous people’s response. Obviously no one wanted property destroyed, but law-abiding people had a right to be protected. The girl Karel’s age was writing on a blackened wall with chalk, and they all read it as she wrote: Where are you? I will be at Etz’s. — Sisi,

Most of the zoo was still too hot to explore. The soldiers were gone. He found Albert’s office, standing alone like a separate building erected in the rubble, untouched by the fire. It had been ransacked and was ankle-deep in debris. A small iguana gasped on the wall. The only undisturbed area was atop one of the file cabinets. He could see tiny mice prints in the dust. Beyond them there was a folded map of the region with holes from use worn in the corners. He took it. He groped his way back through the destruction, remembering walls and spaces that were no longer there. It was as if he’d become his own ghost.

By what had been the snake enclosures he found the bushmaster, dead, and the king cobra, though not where he’d seen it, and the boa, and the granite night lizard, and the coachwhip. The gopher snake and the lyre snake and the leafnose. Herman was still inside his enclosure, half buried and on his side, and Seelie he found at the bottom of the ditch, and he went down to her and put his hand inside her slack jaw and cried. Somebody passing by stopped and peered more closely before moving on.

At home even the ringtail seemed to be gone. The house was completely quiet. In the kitchen he hunted through the papers on the table and found nothing useful. Kehr’s leather briefcase was under the table, open and unlocked. In it he found one of the pass cards with the antipartisan symbol. Above the symbol it said, Civil Guard: Civic Action — Intelligence; below in smaller print that the bearer should not in any way be detained or otherwise identified. He sat at the table and painstakingly and hurriedly copied Kehr’s signature at the bottom, using as a model a directive on the table, and printed his own name at the top, and then took the card up to his room.

He shut the door behind him and packed what he needed or had into a canvas beltpack: the pass, his father’s money, Albert’s map, a lozenge-shaped canteen, a change of shoes, another shirt, a floppy sunhat. He added some thin rope and a clasp knife, and matches in a tin. He took the picture of his mother Kehr had given him off the wall, considered it, and hid it in the bottom drawer of his desk. He took all three of Leda’s letters.

He returned to the kitchen and filled a paper bag with a round loaf of white bread and some figs and dates and two plums. He topped off his canteen. He found some very old salt tablets in the odds-and-ends drawer. On the way out he heard a noise in the spare room. He waited, and then eased himself out the door and broke into a sprint as soon as he could.

It was still very early. He was chilly and the sun was barely up. He intended to skirt the busier streets and then head east on the national road. He passed a barefooted man sitting on a crate and reading The People’s Voice. Inside the house Karel could see a thin girl working a pump in the kitchen and could hear the sound the water made in her bucket. After that he saw no one, and he was struck by the emptiness of the roads.

The checkpoint was a sawhorse next to a shack of corrugated metal. A teenage soldier was manning it alone. Karel recognized him as the one with the swollen eye who’d harassed them before. He fought his despair and fear and kept walking toward him.

The soldier’s face and cap were coated with dirt. He leaned against the sawhorse and didn’t raise his rifle at Karel’s approach. What was this? he asked, when Karel stopped in front of him. Running away from home?

Karel took his pass card and held it out. His arm was trembling and he tried to make it stop.

The soldier did not take the card. His eye looked worse. He nudged Karel’s paper bag with the barrel of his rifle, and Karel opened it and showed him. The soldier took one of the plums.

“I know you from somewhere,” the soldier said. He peered at Karel with his good eye.

Karel held the pass out stubbornly.

The soldier took it and examined it as if he’d never seen such a thing before. “This means I’m supposed to let you pass?” he finally said.

Karel nodded. The soldier exhaled with exasperation and knitted his eyebrows and thought about it and then waved Karel through. Karel passed around the sawhorse and held his hand out for the card, and for a long terrifying moment the soldier pocketed it and clasped a hand over the pocket. Then he gave Karel a slow smile and took out the card and returned it.

When it felt as if he’d walked forever he had lunch. He was well out of town and there was nothing on either side of him but bunchgrass and creosote. He ate the figs and a piece of bread he sawed off with his clasp knife and looked back at the town. A convoy passed. There were seven or eight open-backed trucks filled with ordinary people of all ages. They were heading away from town. The trucks had wire mesh over their headlights and windshields, and the people in the back looked disturbed or thoughtful. Some of them waved or pointed at Karel.

He kept walking. He was headed for the nearest train station, at Naklo. It was too far away to walk to, he knew, but a bus from the south passed a junction that was only maybe two days’ walk by a shortcut trail, and that he could get to. From Naklo he’d take the train to the capital.

At the point the road turned north, he paused at the start of the trail, which continued east. It was a white gravelly track between spiny shrubs, and it cut across what looked like an endless number of deep washes.

It was quiet. Brush mice darted across open spaces and then sat motionless in the creosote, watching him. He was apprehensive about the desert but reassured by the map and filled with instructions, mostly from Albert when they’d traveled for the zoo. He should rest in the shade for ten minutes every hour. He shouldn’t remove his shirt because it would speed dehydration, and he needed to watch at all times for the symptoms. At night he should stay out of the washes and gullies, and watch what he picked up or handled. If he left the trail for some reason he could tell directions from the areas of plant growth along the culverts and inclines: south faces were bare, north mostly covered. There was usually water below the surface near bunchgrass, but when in doubt he should trust the rabbit and prairie dog and mouse tracks, even if they seemed wrong, because those animals weren’t guessing; they knew. He should watch coyotes at night, too, where they pawed and snuffed the ground. He could eat a lot of the berries, and some beans if they were pounded up. The one-leaf pines had edible cone-kernels. He should look for tender green shoots of other plants inside the prickle bushes and prickly pear.

On his map the trail crossed a stream and skirted a dead lake to the south like the one Leda had told him about and then climbed northeast across a low range and descended to the junction. It looked fairly simple. He remembered the stories about the northern mountains.

The sun was over his head for a long time, then behind him. The only sounds he heard were his shoes on the gravel and the swish of his shorts. His head still hurt but his collarbone felt better. As he walked he turned over memories of his father in his head the way he’d examine puzzle pieces, in search of a pattern.

He could see scavenger birds black in the distance against the treeless hills. The sunlight was so blindingly intense it seemed to be splitting the stones. The air was like breathing hot cotton wool. He walked as far as he could and finally found a fair-sized boojum tree and sank to a sitting position in its shade, stunned by the sun. Two sparrows with their beaks parted edged over in the shadow to make room for him, unwilling to be frightened in this heat. His head was buzzing and spinning, and he took some water and salt.

He woke with the colder air at night and the patter of sand against his cheek. He could feel the heat coming off him, still trapped in his clothes. When he stirred a large insect stalked a few feet away and then paused to see if it was being pursued. He stood up, sore and chilly, wrapping his arms around himself, spooked, and then continued walking, the slightly more trampled area of the trail whiter in the moonlight. He was not sleepy.

He walked all night. He passed skeletal silhouettes of dead bitter condalia trees and catclaws, and a dead lagoon that apparently had once fed the dead lake. It was filled with reeds that were gray in the moonlight and brittle to the touch. He passed more brush mice and a ground squirrel, and heard bats. In an uneven and rocky gully he found the trail alive with tarantulas moving like dull, sinister flowers.

In the morning he thought he might have seen a bicyclist off on the horizon, a small dark figure against the stillness, but he recognized that he could’ve been mistaken. He was dizzy. He walked as far as possible while it was still relatively cool and then finally lay down to rest again on the side of a steep wash overhung with peppergrass. The stream on the map was nearby, and he refilled his canteen and washed his face and eyes. He had more water and bread and ate the other plum and fell asleep with his head on his beltpack, his muscles twitchy from the endless walking, and his hands between his thighs.

He woke up terrified of the vague darkness and chill, his mind washed blank of its sense of where he was and what he was doing there. He drank some water in a wary crouch, surprised at how long he had slept, and ate the last of the bread.

The dead lake had been only a few hundred yards away. It was a huge wasteland flat, cratered and broken by traverse cracks so that it looked like an endless horrible cobblestone plain in the moonlight, with things moving distantly across it in various directions.

He changed his shoes and shirt and walked as fast as he could around it while keeping his mind on Leda, until the trail began to climb, and when he crested the ridge and looked back once more at the lake it stretched black and even and still in all directions below him.

He saw a house and a few outbuildings a short way off the trail to the south, silhouetted on another ridgeline, and after some hesitation decided to head for them. There were no lights showing.

He approached from a low draw to stay out of sight, every so often craning his head up to look for movement or danger. When he was very close he crouched low and waited. The front door had been kicked in and a piece of it swung on the lower hinge in a forlorn diagonal. There was no sound from inside, though a shutter clapped gently against its sill every so often. He threw a rock through the open door and ducked down. He got closer and threw a bigger one, and it made a disconcerting crash inside and he lay flat in mortification, but still nothing happened. Finally he got up, brushing off his shorts, and crossed to the door and looked inside.

He could see only as far as the moonlight penetrated, but the house had clearly been ransacked. The smell was horrible. He lost all interest in food, or in spending the night.

He circled around to the back. When he turned the second corner a goat standing against the wall startled him. It moved a short way away and continued grazing, relieved it was not going to be bothered.

He found himself on a rough terrace, flooded with moonlight. Beneath his foot there was a rusty old key, and on the brick wall a hanging twist of wire. He could see off to the east a slope and lights undulating slowly along its base: the national road again. He’d be there by tomorrow, he thought, and let out a small whoop in gratitude and relief.

The smell was still bad, worse than anything he’d smelled. He’d entertained ideas of hunting for food but couldn’t bring himself to and thought now he couldn’t even sleep here, either. He left the terrace to continue his circuit and kicked the body of a woman covered with flies. They rose up in a small agitated cloud. She was lying on her back and her arm was resting on the stone of the terrace as if she’d made herself comfortable. Her hair was over her face in a black sticky wing. There was another body behind her in the darkness with its legs folded and neck back at a severe angle. He ran blindly away from the house back toward the trail, sending the goat clattering in panic out of his way. The smell and the image stayed with him all the way back to where he’d turned off and longer, and he cried and swung his arms and cursed and felt revolted and horrified, and sorry for himself for ever having seen such a thing.

The bus driver waved him on without even looking at his pass card. He didn’t see any soldiers or Civil Guardsmen among the passengers. They looked at him strangely as he came down the aisle. When he settled into his seat a cricket sprang from his pocket.

His head throbbed and he was thirsty and wanted to empty the sand from his shoes. As they crested the hill in long winding turns he kept his face to the window, looking back at the dark green patterns like underwater vegetation on the desert floor below.

At Naklo the bus let him off across the street from the train station. He stood in line to buy his ticket behind a woman who held her baby up against her chest and continually apologized to it. When it was his turn he pushed his money under the slot and held his card up to the glass and again there was no trouble. He bought a pineapple drink from a sidewalk vendor while he waited for the train and drank it slowly, the cup cool in his hand.

Nothing was on schedule, but the noon train ran in the afternoon and the afternoon train at night, so that every so often a train came in right on time because it was the previous train six hours late.

The train came as the sun was setting. They passed a small factory in a narrow valley just outside of town and some small farms before he stopped looking out the window and tried to sleep. A fat man opposite him caused an epic amount of trouble endlessly getting in and out of his seat and finally disappeared before the ticket taker arrived. The ticket taker checked Karel’s ticket and pass card and left with them and returned a few minutes later with another official while Karel pretended to doze, his heart thumping. The ticket taker prodded him and returned the card and ticket and passed on.

He slept. There were creakings, snores, conversations, jolts. He woke every now and then at the water stops, hearing the trainmen murmuring. When he woke again they were stopped at a quiet station and nothing seemed to be happening. He saw moths around the light illuminating the station sign. A discarded timetable stirred and fluttered on the platform. Somebody coughed. He could make out part of a loopy painted slogan on the side wall — STAYS. Another train passed with a noisy rush and reflected his window and he saw himself spying out of a fluctuating plane of lights and then he was gone. Their train started again, giving all the passengers’ heads a lazy shake, and he watched the station and its water tower diminish around a curve with the rails crossing ties and spinning into the darkness and then he was dozing again, more exhausted than he’d realized, thinking about Leda and relaxing himself as much as he could with the steady clicking and rocking that were taking him away.

He felt the humidity and salt air in the closed compartment before he saw the sea. They came in along the high ridge of the cove, and he gazed down on the warehouses and storage tanks around the docks and the harbor glittering beyond them. There were boats, more than he remembered. The train let him out at the top of the city, and he swung his beltpack around so it rested on his hips and began his way down a road so steep the houses along it could only be entered from the top floors. He kept his eyes on the harbor.

He had Leda’s address, but it was too early, and he was hungry besides. As he got lower, shops appeared on both sides of the street. He passed garages, a butcher’s shop, a fabric store, a dealer in military antiques. At a welder’s three men were beating on a metal object with hammers and cursing. The noise stayed with him for blocks. He could smell the salt in the air and the humidity after the desert was wonderful. He passed a bakery and then a café and stepped inside.

He ate back near the kitchen and it was narrow and cluttered. A black iron stovepipe went up to the slanted ceiling and while they made his breakfast he gazed blankly out of a triangular skylight. Above the stove on racks were spices he could smell in small wooden boxes, and a dirty dishtowel hung on a peg over his table. Flies wove past him and disappeared.

For breakfast he had coffee and shredded nut pastries and then asked if it was too early to make some cuttlefish with spinach and lemon. He’d been away a long time, he explained. While he ate he watched a beautiful blond woman in a Women’s Auxiliary uniform who waved her spread hands like a fan over her tea, letting the cherry polish on her fingernails dry.

Back on the street he passed blocks he’d never seen before, and odd sights — a dwarf stopping to give some coins to a blind couple jointly playing the accordion, a pigeon perched just above a sleeping cat — but it seemed that every street, every simple corner of a house, retained a shiver of something from his past, some old tremor of feeling. He was here, he thought as he walked. He was here.

He showed a passerby Leda’s address and asked directions. He passed small trees growing out of square open areas in the sidewalks and tightly fenced gardens. Dogs occasionally raced or clawed along the fences, eager to get at him.

The Schieles turned out to live in yet another part of the city that was unfamiliar to him, and he was beginning to feel discomfited at the continued undermining of his nostalgia.

He found himself in front of a shabby and narrow house facing a courtyard where buses were apparently stored. There was a fish store on the ground floor. Their apartment, a helpful neighbor said, was the small dark place on the third floor. The house was very old and had in its keystone arch a fierce mythical lizard of some sort with a fish in its mouth. The second-floor landing was dark and filled with junk: a bicycle wheel, some sodden cardboard boxes, stacked metal pails, a tangle of rusted and broken knives.

He smoothed his hair and knocked and thought belatedly about cleaning himself up.

Leda opened the door and surprised him completely by not being surprised.

“You’re here,” she said, and her expression was so beautiful he knew he loved her completely. Her hair was lighter and finer and pinned up on the sides. She hugged him, and stood back from him, smiling. She tilted her head and smoothed her hair on one side by bringing her opposite hand all the way over the top of her head. “Come in,” she said.

Their apartment was just as she had described it. Everyone was gone.

Mother had taken Nicholas and David to the beach, she explained. Aunt was working. She’d waited here for him.

“You knew I was coming?” Karel said.

Leda looked puzzled. “Didn’t you send me this?” she asked. She showed him a printed note: Coming soon should arrive Thurs or Fri. Love, Karel.

Karel stared at it, dumbfounded. Something told him he should lie, that if he told the truth Leda would be less happy to see him.

“I forgot,” he said. She looked at him strangely.

“So how did you get here? What happened?” she said. “Are you hungry? Are you okay?”

She got him iced tea with mint while he told her about his father’s return and the destruction of the zoo. He told her about the desert and the bodies in the abandoned farmhouse. He did not tell her about the prisoner assessment room. She put her hand over her mouth. He regretted having upset her, though he appreciated her concern for what he’d been through, and he sipped his tea, aware all at once of how filthy he was.

She shouldn’t grill him like this, she said. She put a hand on his cheek. She’d been going to suggest they go to the beach and find everybody, but she didn’t think that was such a good idea anymore.

He shook his head.

He was probably tired, she said. And he probably wanted to wash up. She took the glass from his hands and set it down and tenderly helped him up, leading him to the bathroom door. She took off his beltpack and he raised his arms dumbly but she didn’t take off anything else. She disappeared and came back with a towel and a scrub brush that looked as if it was used for pots and pans. She told him to let her know when he was finished. She gave him some of Nicholas’s shorts to sleep in.

He washed himself in a small claw-footed tub. Was she in danger? Why had Kehr send the note? It had to have been Kehr. What was happening? What was Karel doing to her and her family by lying to them?

The water when he got out was gray. It left a ring, and he knelt and tried to wash it away with his hands. When he came out she looked pleased and the air in the living room was cool.

Now a nap, she said, and he was thrilled at the idea of her lying next to him, her family gone, his having braved great dangers to be at her side.

But she kissed him once on the mouth and pulled herself away from his hands, and told him it was wonderful to see him, and hugged him again. She shut the door behind her as she left.

He was disappointed but the plainness of the bedsheets in the sheer white morning light seemed paradisical. He sat on the mattress with his hands on his knees, gazing unsurprised at the extent of his own exhaustion. He lay back and thought it was possible to have kinds of homecomings without home, and fell asleep.

He woke to voices through the walls, the next apartment, and listened for a while before deciphering that the people were refugees and they were arguing over whose situation was worse. He heard other voices, too, and realized the rest of the Schieles were home.

They were all happy to see him. Nicholas pointed out that Karel was wearing his shorts and that Leda was much happier now, and the insight made him radiant. He sat across the room still wearing his bathing suit and smiled as if he knew each of Karel’s secrets.

David stood with both hands on the arm of Karel’s chair and asked about the desert and did Karel see any nomads or scorpions and said he had plenty of things to show Karel in the city. His mother hushed him and made Karel relate everything he’d already told Leda, stopping him to shake her head and then nod every so often. He knew she’d retell some of what he told her as part of her store of catastrophe tales, all of which featured her in a prophetic role, unheeded by the foolish (“I had a feeling something was going on at that zoo …”).

There was news for him. The war was as usual but there were reports of troubles inside the army and there’d been in the city alone in the last month nine explosions, set by God knew who. There had been two bombs left at municipal offices in bookbags, and in one of the markets a donkey had exploded; down by the waterfront a blond boy had walked into a hotel foyer and had blown up. They were now in a special state of emergency, which Leda’s mother confessed she thought they’d been in, though officially the explanation was still that these were not partisans but delinquents.

The hotel explosion had destroyed the front of the building housing the nursery center, so now Leda was out of a job.

When he looked at her she arched her eyebrows and shrugged.

Which didn’t help financially, but still, her mother said.

Did he have a place to stay? she added.

“Can’t he stay with us?” Leda asked. “After all he’s done for us?”

Karel looked away in genuine embarrassment. “Of course,” Leda’s mother said. “I was just curious. I’ll fix it somehow.”

“I can get a place,” Karel said. “I’ve got money.”

“Plenty of time for that,” her mother said. “For now you’re our guest.”

They were all awkward and silent and then Karel said that what he wanted most was to have some real seafood again, and would they let him take them out for dinner? Leda’s mother graciously vetoed the idea, to his relief, over the protests of David and Nicholas. She suggested slyly that the two of them go. Leda colored when he asked and said she’d love to.

In the street she took his hand. She was wearing the red linen dress and he considered it a good sign. She’d glossed her lips with something even though he’d heard her complaining to her mother when getting ready in the bedroom that there was no lipstick or anything else she could use anywhere.

She said she knew a restaurant and led the way. She asked if he was sure he could afford it, if maybe this was irresponsible of them, considering. Then she squeezed his arm and said she thought celebrating his being here was not going to hurt anything, really.

They passed cinnamon and cypress trees that made the air fresh and fragrant. Down a side street people were being made to scour slogans off a wall with wire brushes while soldiers looked on. Leda didn’t notice them and Karel didn’t point them out. They passed wide yards of washing, and ahead of them on the street from the backseat of a car a woman’s hand stretched to caress a man on the sidewalk who leaned toward her. Karel began to recognize where he was. Leda crouched and spread a finger and thumb around a cricket, but it shot ahead and disappeared into a hedge. Everything seemed suddenly touching to him, his return, the city, Leda, the shadows of the leaves on the streets, and he felt the need to stop and put his hand on his heart and look around. As they turned a corner he imagined himself imprisoned or stranded on a far-off island and remembering the ordinariness of this walk with her as the perfect walk and the perfect happiness.

The restaurant was the Sea’s Trade.

They sat in the open-air section, furnished now with new wire café-style chairs and smaller tables. They could see down into the harbor and the sun flashed off the water around the boats. The gulls he remembered still circled and settled endlessly.

“This is so nice,” Leda said.

They ordered wine and melon. Karel told her he loved her letters and quoted passages from them, and she was pleased. She apologized for always being so mopey and pessimistic in them and he said not at all, they were wonderful, and she was even more pleased. She asked him if he was getting taller and he sat up straight and said he thought he was. She asked if he was okay considering everything, and he looked away, guilty, and said he was, though he was worried he wouldn’t see her enough even here in the city.

Was that a major worry? She wished she had his problems, she said, but she smiled to indicate she was flattered.

How about her? he wanted to know. Was she okay?

Much better now, she said. The menu was on a chalkboard, and the waiter brought it by. She ordered ocean catfish with dates and turmeric and he got fried brislings or sprats, tiny and plump fish he hadn’t seen since he was six or seven.

It was hard, though, she said when the waiter went away. He could see she was delighted at the sophistication of eating out, of the two of them here alone. Today he had perked everyone up, but it wasn’t always like that. It seemed as if everyone had lost his enthusiasm for everything, which was understandable. She put her hands down and touched her silverware and plate with appreciation. It had been hard on her mother especially. Not all the girls where Leda had worked had been let go, and her mother was convinced Leda’s attitude had had something to do with it. She smiled at him. She said, “Nicholas meanwhile has gotten completely quiet, and David I really worry about — he’s getting like the dog from across the street, Eski, full of all these terrors that just come and go. He’s always waking us up, and he sits there during the day saying these little wild things to himself. But maybe the scariest thing is that I can feel it wearing me down. I’m getting slower mentally. I can feel it. Sometimes when I’m reading I have to go back and read the words aloud, and still they just lie there and it’s like I don’t absorb them or something.”

Karel stroked the top of her hand sympathetically.

“It’s scary,” she said.

They were quiet, though they smiled at each other occasionally to show they were half sorry the conversation had gone in that direction.

She asked if it had been harder than he thought seeing his father, and he was surprised by how sad it made him even now. He told her that over and over again he thought he understood how little he meant to his father, and over and over again he found out he meant even less.

“He just doesn’t like me,” Karel said. He shrugged helplessly.

He told her how much his father had always mistrusted him — him! What was he going to do? Who was he going to betray his father to? — and the way he’d always been amazed that all that suspicion had never seemed a burden for his father to carry. He gave her examples, and the food arrived. She said quietly that in the case of her and her mother she was beginning to realize how much alike they were. “My aunt says I’m turning into her,” she said.

The notion bothered him and he thought she was leading him to something, that she thought it was true in his case. Maybe she was right: if things were bad between him and his father, did he really think it was all his father’s fault? He remembered the way even as a small child when he watched his father doing something wrong he would think, I’ll always be able to use this against him. He had collected and exaggerated his father’s faults. They were always reacting to each other, and that had something to do, he realized, with their helplessness together.

Leda saw his sadness and leaned forward and whispered something he didn’t hear. He was grateful and reminded of an early memory of one of his mother’s quiet counter-demonstrations of sympathy on his behalf.

Over dessert she didn’t seem bothered by his suggestion that his father had changed. Her mother said if you lay down with dogs you got up with fleas, she said. The comment stung him. He imagined her discovering where he’d been with Kehr.

They walked home in step behind a drunk who seemed perpetually ready to topple over. They balked for a while at the riskiness of passing him and finally slipped by when he collapsed against a fence rail. When they looked back again he’d slid to a sitting position.

It was quiet and the lights were out when they got home, and Leda took off Karel’s shoes and settled him into some blankets on the floor. He realized he had drunk too much and he felt vague and slightly paralyzed. She kissed him goodnight and disappeared, and he lay back while the ceiling wavered above him in the dark. He listened to David’s breathing and Nicholas’s slight snore. He felt with some sadness that even loving Leda as he did he hadn’t succeeded in adjusting himself here, to these people, either, and that even in this city that he’d dreamed of coming back to he was still an outsider.

The next morning they went to the beach. He still hadn’t met Leda’s aunt and was nervous about that. She was out when he got up. They took Nicholas and David, and Mrs. Schiele left with them to look for work. Leda would have to as well in a few days, she warned before they split up. She told Karel in an aside that he should keep an eye on David’s cough. Leda told him as they waved goodbye that her mother was becoming obsessed with everybody’s health. She speculated that it was her way of dealing with her powerlessness in everything else.

It was a hot day. The breeze off the water made him wonder just what his favorite smell was, if it wasn’t this. Leda seemed very happy, and he wondered if in some situations thoughtlessness was justified.

The beach was a startling bone color, and in the shallows offshore the water was an electric blue. Both were crowded. They crossed a paved area to the sand and spread their blanket in the shadow of an upside-down white dory with a shattered keel. Leda warned David about splinters and he and Nicholas whooped-hooped their way across the hot sand to the water’s edge.

Leda lay on her back facing the sun. Karel lay beside her, propped up on his elbows. She took his hand. She was wearing a pale gray bathing suit, and he looked down at the water and told her she looked beautiful. Her toes waved in his line of sight, acknowledging the compliment.

The sand was powdery and made him think of hot ash. He dug around with his heels and unearthed a green wine bottle choked with sand. Adults on other blankets were bobbing their forefingers, counting children crouched over tide pools. He closed his eyes. Leda murmured something beside him. They could live here with every day the same as the day before. He’d provide for them all and they’d make him happy and drive Kehr and the image of himself in the cellars of the Civil Guard out of his mind.

They went down to the water to swim. Sandpipers milled around nervously in the glaze of the wave’s retreat, and he thought he could hear the suction of their feet on the wet sand. On the reef he could see the shadow of a sea bass lunging at nothing, and at their feet a jellyfish had washed up onto the sand. It trembled in the wind and David poked at it and dropped rocks on it. Karel dove in, and when he surfaced and looked back Leda had her arms out but instead of emulating his dive sat down suddenly at the water’s edge and began to splash herself. Her brothers surprised her from behind and threw her in.

He opened his eyes in the underwater silence while she swam to him. Below them in the hazy green light they could see scraps of a fishing net rotting over tin cans and a whelk gripping a holster. Above them the surface rippled like the ceiling of a luminous tent, and they held hands and floated with the dreaming motion of clouds leaving the world behind.

Back on the blankets they watched her brothers and other boys splashing around a tide pool to collect crabs for a crab war. They toweled off and stared at gulls perched on the dory and the gulls looked back at them as if they knew that when these people were gone others would show up and stare at them, too. Leda lay back and settled herself comfortably with her face to the sun again. Beyond her someone was swinging a baby so that its toes skimmed the sand and the baby was screaming in terror and glee. Karel lay with his hand on his cheek and looked at the wet dark hair combed back from her forehead and the grains of sand that glittered in her ears and imagined with a kind of onrushing contentment that his life was starting now, that what he could do now, finally, was figure out the ways to be happy.

When he met Leda’s aunt she told him it was nice to meet him and that he had to leave. She made him repeat the story of how he got there alone, and it was clear she thought something was suspicious about all of this and that there might be trouble in it. Leda and her mother protested and argued and claimed they couldn’t believe she was acting this way, but in the end it didn’t matter and Leda’s mother explained to him that this was her husband’s sister, and he found himself out on the street with his beltpack and a bag of food, saying goodbye to Leda while the aunt looked down at them from the upstairs window. He still didn’t know her name. He was a little frightened but he had money and he told Leda he was going to stay at the Golden Angel, at least until he could find a cheaper place, and that she should look for him there.

It took him longer than he expected to find it. The same manager, the tubby man with the sunburned head, was sitting on a wooden chair in the cool shade of the entrance. He didn’t remember Karel. He led him inside.

Karel stood taking deep breaths while the manager fussed with the register. The lobby was the way he recalled it, musty and fragrant with the scent of wood. He went into the common room and visited the painting of the cavalry charge. He had tears in his eyes. For what? he thought. Those days? The situation now? He turned to the manager, who was waiting. He realized he wanted to bring Leda back here and couple an old happiness with the present one, though he wasn’t sure why.

It turned out that all the rooms were much too expensive. The manager repeated the price. Karel stood at the desk feeling that whatever sense he’d had that he could get along in the city alone was gone. The manager added that there was one room, very small and no view, it was nice enough but no luxury suite, and next to one of the service rooms besides. He could let Karel have it for less than half the standard rate.

It was fine. It looked out on a narrow street. It had an iron bedstead, a desk, a wooden armchair, and a warped chest decorated with phlox and pale trumpets in a clay pot. The bathroom was in the hall. He set his beltpack on the desk and opened it in a parody of someone settling in with his luggage, and the manager handed him his key and left.

He sat on the bed and tried to determine what to do with himself. It occurred to him that he needed long pants, that he stood out and that it would get colder here. He decided instead to see his old house.

He found it after a few minutes’ walk. The new owners had put an addition over his porch, and there were flower boxes on the balcony. When he tried to get a better look a woman poked her head through the kitchen window and told him to get away from the house or he’d be explaining his sightseeing to the Security Service. He spent the rest of the day down by the waterfront, watching the loading and unloading of cargo.

He returned to the Golden Angel after dark and went up to his room and lay on the bed with his hands behind his head. The room had a small round clock on the desk and he watched its hands move. When it was past ten someone knocked. Leda came in and shut the door behind her as if there were wolves in the hallway. She was furious, she said, and ashamed and sorry, and she felt terrible for him. He got off the bed and went to her with no clear idea of what he was doing and put his arms around her and kissed her. She kissed him back, her hands on his head and arms and then his head again, and they reeled around the room, bumping things, putting a hand out every so often to steady themselves, and she was crying and he kissed her more passionately for that. He eased her onto the bed and she looked up at him, intent on his expression, whatever it was. The moment was frozen and detached from itself and from what seemed to have gone before. Their kisses were intent and noisy and her lips were glazed under his. He pulled at her clothing and she pulled at his. Her skin when he touched it was so delicate that he left pink spots that resisted fading. He had his clothes off, all but a shoe, and hers were in a tangle near them. She had her hands on the back of his neck and was still looking at him intently. She scratched herself so that the bed shook. That sense of a revelatory something about to happen returned, and she laughed, looking at him, at his expression, laughed at the suddenness of his own transition from not seeing to seeing the extent of her love for him.

Somebody came to the door and knocked a few minutes later. Leda pulled her legs up and covered herself with the bedspread in terror, and Karel rose to all fours on the bed and waited. There was some muttering and a voice outside the door said, “Whoops whoops whoops,” and then they heard rapid steps heading down the corridor the opposite way.

“Oh, God,” Leda said. He settled beside her and hugged her, and she shifted and got up and turned off the overhead light and switched on the little desk lamp. Then she pulled the covers back and got under them, and he followed.

She huddled against him. He was still excited but thought maybe he should just hold her. Just before, she’d been worried and careful even through her passion and had frustrated his attempts to enter her. He kissed her again, and she made a pleased sound. They were quiet for a long time and he realized she was beginning to doze. He heard the light uneven sound of rain beginning on the window, and then it accelerated, the droplets on the glass catching light against the darkness and slipping individually down the pane. He hadn’t heard or felt rain for months. The window was open a crack and he could feel the dampness in the air outside the blankets. He imagined the wet terrace of a nearby café, the waiter wiping slabs of tables. He turned to Leda, determined to watch her all night, to remember everything.

It was still raining. The window curtains bellied in the wind. He brushed a damp hair from her ear and drifted a thumb across her temple. Her hair was still slightly pungent from the sun and the ocean. He ran the tip of his tongue lightly along her bottom lip and kissed the place at the outside of her eye where he imagined her tear duct to be. She murmured something in her sleep or half-sleep about his being so nice, and he had the impression that even her hidden thoughts were innocent, that she had no secrets or only virtuous ones, and he was overwhelmed with his good fortune at being here with her. He found himself considering and reconsidering her sleeping profile with the tenderness that someone going blind would have for what he still sees.

Sometime in the middle of the night she woke up, with a quiet start. She took his face in her hands and kissed him, and when he moved up against her small noises flowed out of her with a kind of thrilling ease. He understood her reticence with certain things and so wished he knew better what he was doing in terms of pleasing her, wanted his touching to be not only tender but intelligent. She pulled him closer and he wanted to be everywhere she was, imagined himself dissolving like sugar in her mouth. She stopped him again after a while and said she was sorry, and he said no, don’t be sorry. She lay still after that with her mouth to his ear and then she said, “Listen. I was going to wait, but listen.”

He moved back on his pillow and waited. Somewhere in the distance the rain was hitting the metal roof of a shed like far-off pebbles in a pan.

She sighed. She stroked his arm and then sighed again, with more resolve. “We keep saying we don’t know what to do,” she said. “And everything we hear is a little worse than the last thing we heard. Only a little worse. That’s how it works; you wait for the next thing, and then the next thing, and then you’ll do something.”

Karel took a deep breath and blinked with shame.

“My mother sees how bad it is and still she says I’m an alarmist. I am an alarmist. Now she says it’s too late and we didn’t stop it, so now what?

“We have to do something,” she said, when he didn’t respond. “The people I talk to can’t imagine changing anything. There’s this — reverence, for what they assume must’ve existed at some point.” He felt the intensity of her desire to understand, and her frustration. He took her hand and squeezed it.

“I want you to help me,” she said.

He didn’t want to hear this. “What?” he asked.

“There’s no point in trying to put him in jail, or get people to overthrow him,” she whispered. “Everybody’s sworn allegiance to him personally.”

“What are you thinking? What are you trying to do?” Karel said.

“We have to kill him,” Leda said. “I don’t know how yet. I don’t even know if it’s possible. But I think somebody’s got to kill him.”

Karel was staring at her. The roof was going to fall in, spilling Kehr on the bed. Holter was going to break in the door and take them away.

She turned to him and took his face in her hands again, holding it the way he held newborn rabbits. “If it isn’t possible it isn’t,” she said. “But we should be finding out. We’re not infants anymore. Maybe now that we’re together there really is here somewhere a way to act, maybe all we have to do is look a little for it. I’m ashamed of myself sometimes. It’s like I think I’m just here to sit and wait. I’d like to find out if I am all just talk.”

“They’ll kill us,” Karel whispered. “Are you crazy?”

“It’s dangerous right now,” Leda said. “You think all those people who disappeared did something?”

He thought of the young man in the prisoner assessment room and put his hands over his eyes.

“They’d kill everybody,” he said. “They’d go crazy.”

“We’d only do it if we could do it,” she said. She came closer and kissed him, and then held him, his chin on her shoulder.

It was as if she held his fears a little bit, and settled them. He began to recognize a war inside him between the responsibility she was talking about and his old self, and he tried to settle back to observe it, like a spectator. He imagined himself learning to cherish what she cherished instead of just his own happiness and hers, imagined himself opening up to her, confessing his silence, his cowardice, his complicity, and being forgiven and purified. His mind wandered to the beach in the darkness and the rain, and he felt that he was unable to anticipate what was going to happen, that the future stood with its back to him.

“All the good I’ve tried to do I didn’t just do for its own sake,” Leda whispered. “I did it to look good. I did it for myself.”

He told her no and held her and decided he’d help, he’d do it even though nothing about him was heroic, because she was precious to him and it meant everything to her. She said, I won’t let anything happen to you, and it was her mothering voice, the moved, fearful one she used with her brothers, and he said, no, no, nothing’ll happen to us, and held her and prayed that whatever would come would at least spare her.

He wasn’t sure if he woke up slowly or just never slept. It was extra cold outside the blankets and the solid things in the room were darkening as the space around them paled and took on light. It was still raining and the darkness outside was blue.

He heard keys in locks and the squeak of a metal cart and imagined an old woman in black making the bed next door, smoothing wrinkled white sheets with her palm. He lay still, pondering a mysterious reflection in the mirror over the washbasin: a stripe and the corner of something wooden he couldn’t identify when he looked around the room. A swallow scissored past the window.

Leda sat up, abruptly, and wrapped herself in the outer blanket against the chill and then padded barefoot to the door and went into the hall to the bathroom. He got up and put his two shirts on and wished again he had long pants. His shirts smelled. He crossed to the window and gazed down to the street. People were up already, walking quickly with light short steps because of the rain. In a men’s shop through the streaked display window he could see little hats on pegs, only now becoming visible.

Leda came back in and crossed the room and hugged him, and then tried to get dressed while keeping the blanket on her shoulders. She spread her elbows and shivered, and the blanket tented out and flapped with her movements. Karel stayed by the window and thought of the kind of peace she brought for him to particular objects like the blanket or moments like this morning. Outside dew had frosted the hood of a parked car, and he registered two soldiers standing beside it, their arms folded. There was something else wrong and his mind was about to remark on it when the old metal washbasin near Leda rang softly and she said their first words of the morning: There, I’m finished, and the door banged and crashed open with such force that she seemed to be thrown backward not so much from the shock as the concussion of air.

Four men swept into the room wearing army shirts and civilian pants and two of them pulled the blanket up and over Leda’s head and wrapped it tightly around her and one produced some rope. Karel rushed to her and the fourth man hit him across the face with what felt like a small flat plank and a thousand stars sprayed the room, and while he rolled on the floor arms grabbed and pinned him and they put a small paper bag over his head and locked his hands behind his back with a series of sliding bars that squeezed his wrists. He felt and heard loose grains around his head in the bag and realized it was an empty sugar bag. Leda was screaming for help, muffled under the blanket, and they told her to stop or they’d kill her. He heard the grunts as they lifted her and then they pulled him up and shoved him from behind, and led him into the hall and down the stairs and out of the building at a great rush, orienting him with twists or pulls of his neck and shoulders. They were piled into a car. Leda kept calling his name and he would say, I’m here, his voice harsh and trapped in the sugar bag, and then she cried out when they hit her to quiet her down. There was something wrong with the car, it wouldn’t start, and eventually he had to get out and they unlocked his hands and told him to leave the bag on his head and he had to push with two other men at the back of the car until it started. They were quiet the rest of the way until Leda said, her voice still muffled, Why are you doing this? This is a mistake, and then the man beside Karel who was still breathing heavily from the pushing asked her angrily if she had any idea what was involved in an operation like this. Arms, civilian coordination, training centers, transports, intelligence gathering, paperwork: did she think all that operated in the service of mistakes? And the man in the front seat told him to shut up.

Then they were rushing along a corridor, with spaces he could feel opening out and closing suddenly behind him, as in a dream, and he felt a chill at his back from not knowing what was around him. Someone said Here, and he heard a heavy metal door swing open, and he touched his palm and fingertips to the rough wall beside him as a last gesture before they shoved him through the doorway.

He heard voices and had the impression of a large room and was pushed down to a sitting position against a stone wall, scraping his back. The sugar bag was removed and his handcuffs taken off.

Leda was beside him. She hugged him. They were in a huge dark cell with a low ceiling. The walls were lined with sitting or squatting people. Some had bundles and small overnight bags. The floor was cold with seepage and he felt it through his shorts, so he got up into a crouch. Leda was on her knees.

An officer of the Civil Guard sat at the table near the door, flanked by two soldiers. The officer said, “You new arrivals should turn your valuables in here, voluntarily. At the depot there’s a lot of stealing goes on.” He was addressing the group around Karel and Leda. Karel looked at the man beside him, and the man looked away timorously, like someone too shy to acknowledge an invitation. A few people got up and crossed to the table.

He could hear sobbing from around the room and realized there were a lot of women and children here. “Thank God they haven’t got my family,” Leda whispered, and he understood she’d noticed, too. She seemed both more frightened and more despairing, and he wondered if that meant he was courageous or ignorant.

He could smell moldy clothing. An older man on the other side of the room stared at him hopelessly. He tried another direction and a woman asked him sharply what he was looking at. He moved closer to Leda.

They stayed there for hours. New people were brought in occasionally. Karel and Leda shoved over to make room along the wall. A boy David’s age was thrown to his knees so hard he skidded on them. The soldier who did it gave him an apple afterward. They boy sat whimpering against his mother, holding the apple.

They heard rumors. What this was all about, who was about to be released. The officer at the table said No talking. There was the metallic sound across the room of someone urinating into a tin. On one wall there was an adjoining cell connected by a door, and someone from the other side was poking straw through the keyhole. Another officer came in and the first stood up and saluted him. The one who’d come in announced they were all prisoners of the Second Army Group in action. He crossed the room to Karel and regarded him with his hands on his hips. He didn’t say anything. Finally he turned away. All of Karel’s previous courage left him and he crouched sweating and shaking afterward. The new officer on the way out bent over a sleeping or unconscious woman near the door and asked how Madame was tonight. He saluted the officer at the table and left without waiting for an answer.

Later there was a genteel ringing the officer at the table identified as the dinner bell. Some young men in gray uniforms came in lugging pails with ladles and stacks of wooden bowls. The adults got porridge with a kind of gravy and the children something the officer called milk soup. The eating cheered up the woman who’d snapped at Karel and she said out of nowhere that they couldn’t torture her. She’d confess to being a leader of the nomads if they tortured her.

He couldn’t eat and neither could Leda. Other people took their food. While the young men in gray were collecting the bowls the officer who’d stared at Karel returned and said something to the officer at the table. Then he turned and gestured to Karel, whose stomach jumped and heaved. Karel pointed to his chest and the officer nodded and indicated with two spread fingers the both of them.

He took them out of the room and down a corridor, walking ahead of them. Leda held Karel’s hand and said this was some kind of mistake, but the officer didn’t respond.

He led them through one hallway after another and then across an enclosed courtyard that haggard men were sweeping with switch brooms. They passed through more hallways and then another courtyard, this one muddy and strewn with empty suitcases and a rotting mattress. Karel thought this prison went on forever and remembered what Albert had once told him: now we have prisons for people who’ve done things, prisons for people who haven’t, prisons for people who might, prisons for people who might not, prisons for everybody because everybody is somebody who could go to prison.

The officer turned them over to a sad man in civilian clothes at the end of another long corridor. There was one yellow light over the man’s table, and the corridor was very dark. Two cell doors on either side of him stood open. The sad man watched the officer leave and then turned to them. He had a patchy gray stubble on his cheeks and bleary eyes, and he appraised them as if they were an acquisition for the zoo while Leda asked him questions he didn’t answer. When she was finished he dug into his shirt pocket and pulled out a sugar lump for each of them. Then he put them in separate cells.

On the floor of his cell Karel remembered sharply the look of tenderness Leda had given him as they’d trooped along behind the officer, as if she’d already figured out (and he hadn’t, being an idiot) that this could be their last private moment together. He made a small noise of surprise and pain and then howled with the thought, the room echoing the sound, and then was silent.

There was one small window very high up, and the peephole on the door was shut. He called and called to Leda but he didn’t hear any answer. He strained to listen and thought he heard hammering, and distant singing. He sat there and sat there while the sky turned dark outside his window and the terror of his position poured in on him like black water: all of what had felt to him at first like a frightening misunderstanding now gaped before him like a canyon. He fought the realization that he was abandoned and lost to the world: what would happen to him now? And if something bad happened, who would know?

In the middle of the night there was a clatter of keys at the door and it opened, throwing yellow light across the wall. Two men entered in silhouette carrying a small folding table and chair and set them up and then left. Then Kehr came in, with a lantern, and set the lantern on the floor.

“Why am I here? What are you doing with us?” Karel shouted, and when he got off the floor and tried to get to Kehr, Kehr hit him in the face first with his open palm and then with his closed fist, and Karel experienced a black-redness behind his eyes and a bloom of something that turned into fiery pain. He swallowed blood. He thought: I’ve been dealt with. I’ve been guilty and now I’ve been dealt with. He’d fallen on his arm. He got off the stone floor and rose from his knees as if on a trampoline, and swayed a little in front of Kehr’s table. Kehr sat down.

“This is a turn of events,” he said. “In the future when you address me pay particular attention to your tone.” He laid out a pad of paper and a pencil and brought the lantern up from the floor. He sharpened the pencil with a clasp knife. Karel sat down, holding his nose and mouth. Both were swelling, and he swallowed the blood intermittently in small amounts.

“We didn’t do anything,” he finally said. He sounded defiant and whiny.

Kehr shrugged. “We not only punish action,” he said. “We also prevent it. If we looked only to the politically active to fill these prisons, who knows where we’d be.”

“What are we doing here?” Karel said.

“Why should you understand this?” Kehr asked. “How intelligent are you? How intelligent have you been?”

Karel snuffled and held his nose and mouth with his hand. Pain branched out from his nostrils and he wondered if his nose was broken.

What they were doing here were things that imaginations had outlined but never realized, Kehr said. He cleaned his ear with his little finger and ran a palm along his jawline. One could say no category covered their activities; that they were beyond categories, conducting an experimental inquiry into what was possible. And learning centers like these were their laboratories.

“I don’t want to know,” Karel said. “I don’t care about that.”

Kehr smiled. “See what I mean?”

He lifted the pencil with a slightly mocking anticipation. “Now,” he said. “I have some questions for you.”

“I have questions for you,” Karel said.

“I would limit myself to comments that don’t endanger your life if I were you,” Kehr said.

Karel was quiet, his attention focused on avoiding another blow.

“I need names,” Kehr said. “Albert’s associates. You were close to him; you know who I mean. It’s the fault of those people the zoo was destroyed.”

“The Civil Guard destroyed the zoo,” Karel said. “I saw it.”

“After a while one’s patience runs out,” Kehr said. “I understand the men’s feelings. If Albert’s friends had turned themselves in, the zoo would be standing today.”

Karel sat lower against the wall and looked at the blood on his hands.

“The names,” Kehr said.

“I don’t know any names,” Karel said.

“What did I tell you about tone?” Kehr said with a softness in his voice, and Karel was frozen with fear. They were quiet for several minutes. Karel could feel his heart. Kehr breathed out exaggeratedly and said, “What have these people ever done for you? Have you asked yourself that?”

“At least they left me alone,” Karel said, despite himself, and he waited in terror for Kehr’s reaction.

Kehr sat back in his chair and put his chin in his hand and gazed at Karel. “Let me give you an idea,” he said, “of what you’re playing with here, playing the hero: your friend next door. And her family.”

“You have her family?” Karel asked.

“My subordinate when interviewing the older brother asked him his rank in the organization,” Kehr said, shaking his head at the memory. “I said, ‘Organization? Mr. Stasik, he was in an institution, a home.’ On the other hand, it had been considered by many to be a possible staging ground, and that was never disproved. So on the whole the entire family would be safer outside of Mr. Stasik’s custody.”

“I don’t know anything,” Karel said. “If I knew I’d tell you. But I don’t know anything.”

“Your friend wouldn’t even have to know her family’d been taken,” Kehr said. “They could be back on the street that fast. As could she. As could you.”

“I don’t know,” Karel cried miserably.

Kehr seemed to be pondering him. Finally he arched his eyebrows, as if he’d come to some conclusion. “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world,” he said, standing up. “The unreasonable man adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on unreasonable men.” He crossed to the front of the table and leaned close to where Karel was sitting on the floor, and took Karel’s chin in his hand. Karel shrank back. “Later on, if you haven’t changed your mind, I’ll kill your friend, while you’re listening,” he said. “And then I’ll come here.” He drew his finger delicately across Karel’s belly. “I’ll open your stomach and play with your insides.”

Karel was breathing out as if getting ready to hold his breath. He said, “You’re trying to frighten me.”

“Yes, I am,” Kehr said. He stood up, and knocked on the door.

“Leave her alone,” Karel blurted as he was leaving. “Do whatever you want with me.”

That was very good, Kehr said offhandedly, on the way out. Those were admirable sentiments. He signaled something Karel couldn’t see to the man outside and shut the door behind him.

It was cold. There was a mattress on the floor but no blanket. He ran in place and waved his arms to keep warm but only succeeded in making himself sweaty and even colder. The peephole opened with a sliding sound and an eye appeared in it, blinking, to see what he was doing.

He felt better for the company. “What am I doing here?” he asked, and the peephole slid shut.

The floor was wet. He rolled the mattress into a tight tube to keep himself off the dampness, and half sat, half lay on it, but it was damp and cold and smelled and he couldn’t sleep. He stayed like that for long stretches thinking of nothing. He called and pounded on the walls but Leda didn’t seem to hear him. He held imaginary conversations with her in which he told her everything he’d done and she forgave him, forgave anything. He tried to imagine them back in the Golden Angel, but it seemed to have been shattered from within.

He heard shots and listened attentively for more, and then listened to the silence. He played a game of geography with Leda’s face. He began to be more aware of basic needs: to eat, to relieve himself, to sleep, to find the resting position that was the least painful. He lay on his side on the rolled mattress and resigned himself to being wet on that side. He thought about raisins with cinnamon, and the image was momentarily soothing.

He was dozing when the door rattled and opened and he jerked upright in alarm. The damaged part of his face throbbed with the movement and he felt some trouble completely closing his jaw. Someone was peering over him. He realized it was his father. He burst into tears and then stopped, angry with himself, and started rubbing his eyes. His father set the lantern down and reached over and patted his head and shoulder helplessly. “How are you?” he said. “How are they treating you?”

“They put me in prison,” Karel said. He sat up farther, shivering.

His father had brought a small blanket, and laid it on Karel’s lap. “What happened to your face?” he asked.

“Kehr hit me,” Karel said. “The soldiers who took me hit me.” He had to look away. He thought that this of everything was the worst; that before this moment maybe his father hadn’t known, maybe his father would’ve helped.

“They hit you?” his father said.

“Will you help me? Help us?” Karel asked, though he felt himself sliding hopelessly down the sentence as he asked it, knowing the answer.

“Of course,” his father said. “Kehr’ll listen to me. All you have to do is your part.”

“My part?” Karel wailed. “My part?”

His father made patting motions on the air, teetering in his crouch. “We’re talking about just confirming what we already have information on,” he said.

“I don’t know anything,” Karel cried.

His father nodded, and looked puzzled. “Kehr says you do,” he said.

Karel closed his eyes tightly and wanted everything different.

“Does it hurt a lot?” his father asked.

He didn’t answer.

“I can help you, but you’ve got to help me,” his father said. “Karel.”

Karel was crying silently, now, and refused to see his father anymore. He looked at the door.

“What position do you think I’m in?” his father asked. He got to his feet. “You think they’re happy with me about this?” He waited, but Karel would not look at him. “Who are you to judge me?” he finally said. He was angry again. “You know better than all these other people? You’re so sure what the right thing to do is? Which one of us is obeying the law here and which one of us isn’t? Who are you to judge me?” he shouted.

Karel kept his face to the wall.

The peephole slid open. “Everything okay in there?” a voice asked.

Everything was fine, his father said. He waited for the peephole to close and then went over to the door. Nothing happened for a minute or two, and then he sighed, as if exhausted. “I’ve never known what to make of you,” he said. He sounded drained, and Karel felt acutely sorry for him. “I’ve never known how to get any support, any …” He sighed again. “… support out of you.”

Karel was quiet. He thought that all his anger at his father’s failures had turned inward. I never hated you, he wanted to say; I only always wanted to talk, I never learned how to talk. Why didn’t I ever inspire talk? And he thought he understood his father a little and pitied him, but was ashamed of him, and ashamed of himself. He was thinking all that when his father left.

The next day no one came to see him. He didn’t get any food and his joints ached from the dampness and when he banged on the door and said he had to go to the bathroom no one answered. He relieved himself in the corner and the cell stank from it.

Some food appeared the day after that, chick peas in a bowl with water, and he realized it had been brought in while he was asleep. The eye at the peephole apologized for the day before and said they’d forgotten.

That night he had another visitor, carried in on a pallet and left there. He couldn’t see who in the darkness. He stayed near the wall at first, wary.

“Hello, there,” Albert said. He raised an arm off the palette. Karel knelt beside him and Albert said, “They’re trying everything.”

“How are you?” Karel whispered. “Are you all right? What’d they do to you?”

“They want information,” Albert said. He swallowed audibly and Karel could not look at his body.

“They think I know something,” Karel said. “I keep telling them I don’t.”

Albert nodded as best he could. “My fault,” he said. “I should have let you know what was going on.” He sniffed at himself and swallowed.

“Got you mixed up in this,” he added.

Karel took his hand and was shaking with fear and pity. The fingernails were destroyed and the fingers lolled and rolled back against the palm.

“They did something to my eye,” Albert said. He took deeper breaths.

Karel got his father’s blanket and put it behind Albert’s head. He wanted to help and couldn’t. He wanted to ask questions and didn’t know where to begin. He was afraid of being here and afraid of being hurt and afraid for Leda, and afraid of dying as ignorant and stupid as he was. His mind raced around to no purpose and the words he had were crippled and inadequate and eluded his attempts to order them into sentences.

“I’ve exorcised Kehr,” Albert said, and he breathed more evenly. “He’s shown me the instruments and I’m still here. I’ve reduced him. I’ve made him ridiculous,” he said. “I believe in miracles.”

“What are you talking about?” Karel said frantically.

“That leaves you,” Albert said. “I’m supposed to be here to show you what can happen, or urge you to avoid it. I forget which. But I do want to tell you: after me he’ll come for you.” He looked at his hand, the way he used to look at a lizard’s mite infestation. “He always believed you were closer to me than you were, he wanted to recruit you, sure, but he also wanted to get at me, at the organization. After me he’s got nobody. After me he’s got to get it from you.”

Karel felt his forehead and back chilled, and he shook Albert’s pallet. “Can’t you tell him I don’t know anything?” he asked.

“I don’t think he believes me,” Albert said. He smiled, his eyes closed. “I am in amazing pain,” he said.

He opened his eyes and looked up at Karel. “Are you okay?” he asked.

Karel nodded, though he wasn’t sure the old man could see him.

“I am sorry,” Albert said. “For everything.”

Karel was crying again. “Listen,” he said. “I need to tell you something.”

The old man waited, his breath wheezing a little.

“I need to tell you,” Karel said, in agony. “When Kehr wasn’t going to let the Schieles go, when Kehr—” The old man was looking intently at him while he fumbled for the words, as if he didn’t want to forget anything of what Karel was about to say. “I identified you,” Karel finally said. “I gave them your name.”

Albert lay there on the pallet and just looked at him. The moment expanded into an awful vacuum. “I thought you did,” he said finally. He just looked, and nothing in his expression suggested absolution.

“Please,” Karel said.

“They already knew about me,” Albert said. He lifted an arm toward Karel and gave a small wave. “I’m going to try to help the girl.”

“Have you seen her?” Karel asked wildly. The door opened and two soldiers came in and lifted Albert’s pallet. “Have you seen her?” Karel repeated, and Albert said no and gripped Karel’s hand and then they were gone.

Only a few hours later there was a noise at the door again. “I don’t even know why I bother to lock this,” he heard his guard grumble. More soldiers came in and grabbed him and dragged him into the hall. Kehr and Leda were waiting there, next to the open door of Leda’s cell. The soldiers released Karel and she hesitated and then ran to him and they embraced in the dark stone hallway, with Kehr, three soldiers, and the sad man who guarded the table all looking on.

“Oh God,” Leda whispered in his ear. He wanted to tell her about her family, tell her what he’d done, but there was no time. He covered her head with his hands. “I wish I could be more for you,” she whispered, and he hugged her more closely and gave an involuntary cry. “He wants something he thinks you have,” she whispered in his ear. “Listen to me: when he does what he does most people do what he wants. But some don’t.” She had her cheek to his and her lips to his ear and he could feel her tears. “Maybe that’s what we have now,” she added, and tightened her hug so that he would feel the urgency in what she said. “Maybe this is our life’s work.”

“I hope you’re telling him the compelling reasons he should cooperate,” Kehr said. “I hope you’re telling him where you’re going.”

Karel held her arms and separated himself from her. “Where are you going?” he asked wildly. “What’s happening?”

She hugged him again despite his resistance. “I love you,” she whispered, and holding her then was like what he felt when his eyes were closed and still he knew the sun had come out from behind clouds, a suffusion of warmth, of tenderness, and when they pulled her away before the sad man pinioned his arms he realized as she gazed back at him that he had no words or gestures for this, nothing to convey to her the extremity of his feelings but those words and gestures he used every day for everyday things.

They held him in the hall and made him listen. She was only two or three doors down, with Kehr and one of the soldiers. She shouted she loved Karel and then something else about the regime he couldn’t make out and then she screamed. He fought and tore at the arms holding him but the sad man had him around the throat and one soldier hit the side of his knee with something that made him cry out and unable to put weight on it anymore. Leda screamed again, and he could tell from her voice that she stood on the edge of something she couldn’t master, and he registered that he was breathing in and out and had to continue to do so or else he would suffocate, and the screaming went on and on until there was one more that rose above the others and seemed not to come from a human being but from some sort of terrified instrument. The stone rang with it. In the silence that followed Karel was shrieking and shrieking her name, and they hauled him back into his cell and threw him across it with such force that he hit the opposite wall and bounced back toward them.

It was warmer. He found himself gazing on an astonished cloud through the high square of his window. There was blue sky behind it. He’d been up all night and he was chilly and spent. When he closed his eyes his head reeled and he tumbled through empty space. He thought with some simplicity of the things he would never have: time, happiness, Leda. He would have told them anything at that point; he would have told them anything earlier, but no one asked.

He touched the edge of his mattress. His knee was in intense pain and swollen to twice its size. He seemed surprised by the resiliency of objects.

He sat where he was for he didn’t know how long, gazing up at his window. Transparent knots swam across his eye. He wanted Leda to know: he would have helped her, together they would have acted the way she’d wanted to.

He heard the door unlocked and someone pacing behind it, back and forth, as if that someone were the prisoner. Then his father came in and shut the door behind him. He looked terrible, but Karel felt his sensibilities had coagulated or stiffened inside of him and so just sat there, watching his father enter.

He knelt beside Karel and Karel looked at his face and saw his pain, saw the pain of someone who now could do nothing to protect his child, who couldn’t fulfill even that responsibility, and couldn’t be forgiven because of it. His father was talking to him. His father was asking for something. His father was telling him that Leda had died feeling nothing bad was happening to her, after that first part. His father was saying he had to let him help. Karel said, “I don’t want anything. I don’t want you. I don’t want help.” It occurred to him that his father had in a profound way never realized what he’d been doing; that there was an interdependence, in his father’s and his own case, between thoughtlessness and evil.

His father was asking him for something, pleading, and he had nothing to give. He was helpless in the face of this suffering. There were no words left to exchange whose value he trusted. His father said, Please, Karel, and he said again that his father had to go, and Kehr came into the cell, and looked at them both, and said the same thing.

“There is, I think, in every one of us something mineral and unteachable,” Kehr said. “You see it when all evidence — all the dictates of logic — suggest one course of action, and the individual persists in doing something else. It interests me,” he said.

They were in the room Leda had been taken to. It was different and darker than the room in the other Prisoner Assessment Center. On the wall there was tin shelving that held instruments with silhouetted long and narrow attachments. They reminded him of the mandibles and antennae of insects. The floor was concrete and had been washed and was puddled with water. In one corner a sump pump labored on and off. There was a sign embroidered like a sampler over the door: If You Know Something, Sing for Us. If You Don’t, Suffer. It brought back to him the calendar from his home.

He was led to a slanted iron rack painted yellow and spotted with rust. The bottom of the rack had a gutter. Two weak and bare bulbs burned above it. Kehr had two assistants, heavy men in bright yellow shirts who helped Karel off with his clothes and looked at him with the neutrality of old cows. They locked his wrists and ankles into shackles so he was spread-eagled on the rack, the iron cold everywhere against his bare skin. While they worked on him he said harshly to Kehr, “Is Leda Schiele dead?”

“Leda Schiele is not your concern right now,” Kehr said. “Believe me.”

“I’ll kill you if I get out of here,” Karel said. “I’ll kill you.”

“Well said,” Kehr said. “Now.” He shook out Karel’s two shirts before him. “Who are the people we’re interested in?”

Karel looked at him, breathing hard. He shook his head. “I don’t know,” he shouted, straining and banging at his shackles. “I never knew. I would have told you. I would have told you.”

Kehr nodded as if that was exactly what he’d suspected, and gave Karel’s bare shoulder a reassuring pat. Karel shivered involuntarily. Kehr folded his clothes carefully and gave them to one of his assistants, who looked around for a moment and then dropped them on the floor.

“We’re going to start with the knee, and the face,” Kehr explained. “They’re already — how should I put it — sensitive.”

“Please,” Karel pleaded. His hatred for Kehr was gone. Fear was sweeping over him like cold air after a shower. Kehr was rummaging around the shelves, and the instruments made a quiet racket on the tin.

He returned with a simple pair of pliers and an awl and a complicated something that Karel didn’t recognize that looked like a plumber’s helper.

“Now,” Kehr repeated, with an exhalation of breath like someone sitting down comfortably to a long monotonous job, “who are the people?”

“Please please please,” Karel said.

One of the assistants put a soft piece of wood in his mouth. He looked at the man’s eyes in wonder and shock and felt he was watching things happen in which he only vaguely participated, that this couldn’t be true, because no one would do what they were about to do, and no one would do it to him.

“Who are the people?” Kehr asked.

“Please,” Karel said. One of the assistants held his leg with both hands.

Kehr put the tip of the awl under Karel’s kneecap and drove it through the swelling.

Karel shrieked and jolted upward and cried out so that the sound tore his throat.

Kehr was holding the awl in place and Karel could feel it under his kneecap, probing the joint. He jiggled it. Karel howled and thrashed out of the assistant’s grip, and the awl came out.

He could feel the blood and the pain and he swept his head from side to side. This was worse than anything and he would have renounced anything to stop it.

“So who are the people?” Kehr asked.

“Please,” Karel cried. “I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know.”

“It occurred to me a while ago,” Kehr remarked, “that this for me could be an intriguing test. Do you know what I mean? What would it be like, doing someone I genuinely liked? Someone I genuinely had hopes for?”

Karel writhed on the rack, feeling only a bestial, desperate terror. It paralyzed everything in him but physical reaction.

Kehr reinserted the awl and Karel felt it get purchase on something inside his knee and then Kehr levered it outward and there was a tearing and cracking sound and Karel screamed so that he brought a blackness on himself, and when it passed the pain was a disk within his skull, tilting and oscillating, and then in his knee, flexing and spiraling outward. It rolled and pulsed and there was a grate of bone and he shrieked again. Kehr took the pliers and they clamped onto the kneecap with a wet and gritty sound and then he lifted and pulled.

The room reassembled like a pattern discovered in a cloud and Kehr was putting the instruments away on the shelf. Someone was wrapping Karel’s knee in a large loose gauzy bandage that was soaking through. Karel’s head was down and he was bringing up slaver and his chest was wet with it. He raised his head and the light through his tears prismed in concentric and iridescent circles. He couldn’t breathe and the air seemed to come back to him from a great distance.

Kehr came up close and asked him who were the people. When Karel didn’t answer Kehr hit him so hard across the face that it changed the taste in his mouth. Then he went away and the two assistants unshackled Karel and carried him back to his cell.

He lay on the floor feeling his nausea as a kind of acidic chill. He had nothing to fall back on in his attempt to understand what had just happened. He was aware of flies, houseflies and smaller flies with greenish heads. They buzzed and helixed before him when he moved his leg.

He thought, Am I better now? He was always aware of his knee, the pain like metal within it. He came to with a strange man bending over him. The man said he was the doctor and sat him up and showed him his knee. There were petals of flesh curled back from the opening and the whole thing seemed to him like meat on a plate. The man touched a white sponge soaked in something yellow to the area and Karel’s whole leg moved independently while he watched. The man held Karel’s palm open and tumbled three orange aspirins into it, to get him, he suggested, over the rough patch. He suggested when he left that Karel shake off the past and look to the future.

They brought him back to the torture room while he was still half muddled and he struggled and cried and tried to hold on to parts of his cell door like someone searching a sandy ocean bottom in murky water. Kehr asked him who the people were and he wailed and jabbered and tried everything to keep it from happening again. They leaned him back against the rack with one of the assistants supporting him since he could no longer support himself, and he tried feebly to keep his hands together so they couldn’t be shackled. The assistant patiently pulled them apart.

Kehr said, “Long ago we figured out, in laboratories like these, that certain things can be done to human beings without the sky falling in. Most people really don’t know that everything’s possible. You resist,” he said. “So you’re back again. Who are the people?”

“I’ll tell you, I’ll tell you,” Karel said, but images and information all milled around in his head and he couldn’t think of a name to give or invent.

Kehr had something metal on Karel’s thigh and sawed into it and tore back whole sheets of muscle. It was as if his leg had been inverted into fire.

He came to dizzy and weak from the loss of blood. Behind his eyes ovals and whorls of light cascaded. Somebody save me, he thought.

“Why are you resisting?” Kehr said. “There’s no one left. Do you think there’s anyone left?” But Karel couldn’t focus on the words, overwhelmed with a suffocating and implacable fear. He refused to think, tried in every way possible to preoccupy his mind: Eski, he thought, and the little dog passed untouched through the darkness.

“Do you recognize this?” Kehr asked, and he held up bloody clothing. Karel didn’t.

They started to strip the skin from the soles of his feet. He had the sensation they were trying to separate the skin at the edge of the wound with a pair of pincers. He passed out and came to and slid down a huge slippery tube where he would disappear and it would all stop. When he revived he was fully horizontal on a pallet, still in the room. His feet were on fire and he was howling and whining and his legs galloped weakly in place to make it stop. Something was holding them down. Kehr was over him.

“Let me tell you what you’re hoping for,” he said gently. “The good that saves the day, that turnaround moment when the point of light expands and drives away the darkness. If Karel was like Kehr, then why couldn’t Kehr be like Karel?

“Let me tell you what will happen,” he said. His eyes were close to Karel’s and Karel closed his own and tried to raise an arm, like a blind man groping to ward off a blow. “We’re taking everything. No one is left for you. No one will be sorry. We’re taking your life and your death. You’re resisting, but I’ve taken away the world you’re resisting for. Your martyrdom is impossible. With no witnesses there’s no testimony. Who’s going to record your gesture? Who’s going to record hers?”

“I am,” Karel whispered. He was crying and wanted only to be put out of his agony. “I do.”

You should have been born in another time, Kehr was telling him, after it had been quiet. This was a chosen time and a chosen place. What chance did you have? Kehr stood and signaled to someone, and he felt himself being lifted up. So many never fully understood, Kehr was saying from somewhere behind him, the way that in places and times like this it was just a matter of history being let off the leash.

In his cell he lay across his mattress, too weak to move, shivering violently. He thought he could hear the faint scraping and tapping of mortar and trowels and imagined his cell expanding in all directions. His thigh and knee swayed and throbbed in steady waves and he could feel his blood purling out of him. He wrote his name and Leda’s name with his finger on the floor. At times he thought to himself, Now it’s time to get ready, now’s the time they’ll come for me, or I’m not ready, I’m ashamed, I’m alone, I’m guilty, but at other times he could let feelings and sensations from his time with Leda enter him as he might enter shade, and he tried to hold on to parts of her, small memories that faded and wavered unreliably as he tried to keep them still. Maybe they won’t come, he thought, and heard them at the door, and he could feel his heart within his chest and the fear of facing this alone like a single transparent hand against his back. They cleaned his cell while he lay there, and when they lifted him to his feet his mattress was dragged away, and even supported as he was by two men he was trembling and unsteady and desired to press his heel against the stone floor to steady himself. He told himself he should be calm and controlled and lucid for this and closed his eyes to shake off the numbness and he felt he wanted to say a measured goodbye to even this world but his breathing would not allow it, and the sensation he felt as they brought him across the cell and laid him on their pallet was that of sliding slowly across warm sheet ice. They settled him into it and tied him down and he registered from the feel of the air and the paleness outside his window that it was sometime before dawn, and he began an incantation of names: Leda, his mother, his father, Albert, Eski, Seelie, David, Nicholas, Herman, Mrs. Fetscher, and Leda, the loop allowing him the sense that his past was there with him still breathing in the darkness, and as they lifted him and rocked him along he felt he was being allowed a dream, David and him at the ocean, David gone, himself on a sandbar surrounded by fog and everything silent except the lapping of waves. There was a nonvisual sense of Leda, a certainty she was there because of the weight of her arms and the warmth of her body, and because he thought Kehr was wrong and the mercy he would be granted had no conditions.

And from that sandbar they could see the offshore Seprides, the Roof of Hell, and as his body tilted on its axis and hands steadied him against the cold iron on his back and other hands fumbled with the shackles around his wrists, some part of him wanted to generate an image of retribution, a smiting and a scouring of the earth: the sea at night in front of the island churning as if stirred from beneath, an explosion, and then the wave of Albert’s father’s memory: at first a thin phosphorescent line rising higher and higher in the distant darkness, and then the clear silvery-white crest showing the wall of black water beneath it, the air pressure a rising roar before it, the whole sea piling up behind it, and when it hit the hills themselves would seem to capsize, and the ground roll like choppy waves in a rough sea, the cove itself falling away in concentric ranks to expose the bodies of all the tortured and the dead, all forgotten, all buried sitting up and facing the sea, but as Kehr came closer and the world came back to that room, in the end it was Leda, Leda, always and only Leda.