It’s different when the lights go on in the evening all around the little gingerbread houses spared by the bombs hailing down in the fire-breathing nights of the Ice Age, as if a magic spell had protected Whores’ Alley from the fate of the respectable town that was collapsing in a fiery mass into its burst-open cellars; when those squat houses with their old-fashioned gables—still intact among the ruins that are sprouting more and more concrete cubes—stand jagged against the smoke-blue sky that soon turns inky and would swallow them up if not for the windows of the girls’ rooms, shining yellow as buttercups; when the glass boxes light up to display the half-naked girls sitting on plush sofas in tiny carpeted parlors, teasingly tricked out in black silk bodices and fire-red feather boas, thighs showing white through their net stockings; when their harem pants and plump tits in open-necked sailors’ blouses and Spanish boleros advertise the motley, wonderful, erotic as-if in the golden light that fills the narrow alley, then the hour has arrived for those who hope to press a few moments of oblivion from the last dregs of illusion, the wine of self-deception. Anyone who comes in the middle of the day has realized what constitutes redemption; he’s heading straight toward his own destruction.

The girls are mistaken. They don’t know him yet. He has only recently been released from a POW camp. Though he was born here and was a longtime resident, the business of committing genocide has estranged him. In a city where in good times everyone knows everyone else and everything about them (a truly democratic city: the mayor is the cousin of the waiter serving the soup at the banquet for the town council), now he’s just another of the countless people who’ve washed up here: refugees, forced laborers, the stateless . . .

The girls have no way of knowing that someone will write of him: