She began to sew again. "They took my clothes off and held my arms down and when I tried to scream one of them put his hand over my mouth. It wouldn't have done any good to scream anyhow, there was nobody to help. Then they did it to me, one after the other. I don't know how many there were. It went on and on—and it kept on hurting."

"Oh God," Kate said in a dry whisper. That slight body torn open, that thin little girl ravished and ransacked.

"When I was allowed to go back where we slept the other women knew what had happened. One was nice, she gave me an old sweater she had to use for a bandage. That was the first time I cried. Not because they hurt me, because I was missing my mother."

She folded her blouse and laid it neatly across the back of a chair. "It went on for two years. It happened to a lot of people, anybody they wanted they took—it was nothing to make a fuss about. If you fought back they took you out in the courtyard and shot you. Nobody ever seemed to get pregnant, isn't that funny?"

"Erika—"

"Every time they did it I wanted to die, it hurt so."

"Erika!"

"You know what was worst? The way they unbuttoned their uniform trousers and took them down. There's something so brutal about a man's pants, the hard material and the buttons. Maybe it wouldn't have been so bad if they were undressed too."

Kate lay still, thinking it over. In her mind's eye she could see the thin, starved child creeping painfully back to her place among the sleeping women. "Haven't you ever—?"

"No. I would kill myself before I would let a man touch me that way." Erika put her needle into its little flannel case. "I don't hate men. You know some gay girls say they hate men. Men are all right, they're human, I work with them. But not like that."

"How do you do it? How does anybody go on living after a thing like that?"

"I don't know." She looked at Kate, her ringed eyes dark with compassion. "I know what my nightmare means," she said gently. "Maybe it's better."

"Erika, I want to be close to you."

Erika sat down beside her. "Go to sleep now."

"Erika, I wish it hadn't happened to you."

"It happened all right," Erika said. She laid her cheek against Kate's. "But they don't matter any more."

CHAPTER 14

Mrs. Brownlee’s round good-natured face was tomato red, not so much with anger, Kate decided, as with embarrassment. She kept looking around as if Emily Post or the FBI might be hiding behind the door. Kate said coldly, "You wanted to see me. What about?"

"Miss Wood, you know I hate to ask a tenant to move." Mrs. Brownlee's flush deepened. She gave a last wild look around her neat kitchen and decided that nobody was going to save her. "You've been real nice and prompt with the rent and you always leave the bathroom nice, not like some people I've had here. But—well, it's Mister Osgood. He says you and Miss Frohmann have been making a lot of noise and keeping him awake nights. I don't know a thing about it myself."