Kate said, "I ought to get up."

"Go ahead. Wash your face also. I will have coffee for you," Erica said, "in a minute."

She had made herself at home in the kitchen alcove. When Kate came back from the bathroom, shaky and churning inside but washed and combed, she was waiting with a full cup and toasted bread.

The cup rattled in the saucer as Kate took it. "I feel sort of funny," she said apologetically.

"I know how you feel," Erika agreed. Leaning against the door frame, she looked calm and relaxed. "When I came out of the camp, before I was sent to the Red Cross, I thought the buildings were going to fall on me. A very funny feeling. You want to walk down the middle of the street so they won't hit you when they topple—and you can't tell anyone because you think maybe you are going crazy." She was still for a moment. "At night, the shadows are full of things that move. Are you afraid to sleep in the dark?"

"Of course."

"It happened to me also."

Kate stared at her. "How do you get over a thing like that?"

Erika shrugged. "I don't know. Always there are some who live and some who die, and no one knows why. I guess for some people a voice says live, and they do."

Kate wanted to ask, "And is there a voice that says, 'die,' too? Not only in prison camps, but to ordinary people who have never been arrested or starved or beaten, and still find life more than they can bear?" She didn't know how to put the question. Maybe Dr. Liebermann would have known the answer, she thought. But then why didn't he tell me?

"Of course," Erika said, as though she had spoken, "there is always the fight going on in everyone. Live or die, for everyone."

And I've lost. The coffee was suddenly bitter on Kate's tongue. She put down the cup, her hand shaking.

"So have another piece of toast, and then well go for a walk. The sun is shining."

Her immediate future seemed to have been decided for her by this stranger. It didn't matter. All her life she had been hiding from people who wanted to tell her what to do. She had even run away from her father, leaving home as soon as she was sixteen and going to do housework in town. It might have been better to fight, but they beat that out of her when she was a kid.

She should have felt like running from Erika, but she didn't. She felt that whatever Erika wanted her to do would be all right. She asked shyly, "Were you up all night?"

"It's all right. I could sleep standing up. I can even sleep in that chair. Who can have made such a chair?"

She went into her own room, smiling, while Kate found clean clothes, ran a comb through her hair and then, although there was no reason why she should, reddened her lips and powdered her tear-shiny face. Erika came back wrapped in her loden coat, with a little knitted cap such as children wear pulled over her fair hair. "Come on. How far can you walk without getting tired?"