Erika shuddered. "Let's go somewhere else. Monkeys in cages I don't mind, they act like they're having fun, but lions and tigers and all the wild things—no. It's like a prison."

"It's not much of a zoo."

"Nice for the children, though," Erika smiled at a chubby little thing in a red jacket, and the girl gave her a shy little smile in answer. "The children here are wonderful. So healthy. If I were a child I'd want to be an American." She stopped to consider. "Maybe not, though. They have too much, their parents are afraid of them, and all they do is look at television."

They sat down on a green bench and stretched their legs. Erika wiped her face on a tissue. "Such dirt."

"It washes off."

Erika nodded. Kate saw that she was still back in that park of her childhood. "My brother, Kurt—he always wanted two pastries. My father always scolded and then let him have the second one. Kurt was a delicate child and he made the best of it, if you said 'no' he kicked and screamed. So he always got the second pastry and he was always sick later."

"Erika, how can you be so calm about it?"

Erika sat silent for a little while, her thin hands wrapped around her knees. Then she smiled brightly. "It wasn't so easy at first. In the camp, I used to pretend they were still alive. It's easy to pretend when you don't get enough to eat—in fact, you soon can't tell what's real and what isn't. Our life all seemed like a dream, except when we were in pain. Then after the bad things happened with the soldiers it didn't matter any more. Nothing mattered except how much food we would get."

A blackbird hopped across the dusty grass and stopped beside her foot. She looked at it.

"And then at last, I came to see that the dead ones were lucky. Nothing else could happen to them. They were safe."

Kate's eyes widened. "But how can you feel that way, when you don't think it's right to want to die?"

"No," Erika said earnestly, "to be thankful when someone you love is dead, if there is no hope—that's one thing. To end it for yourself is different. I don't know why, but I know it's like that."

Kate said shame-faced, "I took sleeping pills once."

"What happened?"

Kate laughed shortly. "They took me to the hospital and pumped out my stomach. It was humiliating."

"Ah, when you really want to die the humiliation doesn't matter."

They sat still for a while, watching the tired young mothers and the children, the wizened little man with his colored balloons, the fat boy pushing the Good Humor cart. Teen-aged boys and girls in jeans darted through the crowd, yelling and pushing, spilling over with puppy energy and good health.

"There were people in the camp who wanted to die," Erika said. "Sometimes they found ways. Some cut their throats or their wrists. A woman in my barracks hanged herself. Very ugly, with her face all puffed up and purple. We despised her for it." Her face was cold, her voice without pity. "Some of them just gave up. In that place you had to work to stay alive—if you quit trying, then the dysentery got you, or TB or hunger. Or you got a little tiny cut and it turned into gangrene. The ones who wanted to live, they were taken out and shot or something like that."