Nora still carries on her Adventure, her “Ideology of the Zero,” firm among the stoneswept hair of the last white guardians at the last stepoff into the black, into the radiant… . But where will Leni be now? Where will she have wandered off to, carrying her child, and her dreams that will not grow up? Either we didn’t mean to lose her—either it was an ellipsis in our care, in what some of us will even swear is our love, or someone has taken her, deliberately, for reasons being kept secret, and Sachsa’s death is part of it too. She has swept with her wings another life—not husband Franz, who dreamed of, prayed for exactly such a taking but instead is being kept for something quite different—Peter Sachsa, who was passive in a different way… is there some mistake? Do They never make mistakes, or… why is he here rushing with her toward her own end (as indeed Eventyr has been sucked along in Nora’s furious wake) her body blocking from his sight everything that lies ahead, the slender girl strangely grown oaken, broad, maternal… all he has to go by is the debris of their time sweeping in behind from either side, looping away in long helices, into the dusty invisible where a last bit of sunlight lies on the stones of the road… . Yes: however ridiculously, he is acting out Franz Pökler’s fantasy for him, here crouched on her back, very small, being taken: taken forward into an aether-wind whose smell… no not that smell last encountered just before his birth… the void long before he ought to be remembering… which means, if it’s here again… then… then…

They are being pushed backward by a line of police. Peter Sachsa is jammed inside it, trying to keep his footing, no escape possible… Leni’s face moving, restless, against the window of the Hamburg Flyer, concrete roads, pedestals, industrial towers of the Mark flying away at over a hundred miles an hour the perfect background, brown, blurred, any least mistake, in the points, in the roadbed at this speed and they’re done for… her skirt is pulled up in back, the bare bottoms of her thighs, marked red from the train seat, turn toward him… yes… in the imminence of disaster, yes, whoever’s watching yes… . “Leni, where are you?” She was at his elbow not ten seconds ago. They’d agreed beforehand to try and keep together. But there are two sorts of movement out here—as often as the chance displacements of strangers, across a clear skirmish-line from the Force, will bring together people who’ll remain that way for a time, in love that can even make the oppression seem a failure, so too love, here in the street, can be taken centrifugally apart again: faces seen for the last time here, words spoken idly, over your shoulder, taking for granted she’s there, already last words—“Will Walter be bringing wine tonight? I forgot to—” it’s a private joke, his forgetting, going around in some adolescent confusion, hopelessly in love too by now with the little girl, Ilse. She is his refuge from society, parties, clients… often she is his sanity. He’s taken to sitting for a little while each night beside her bed, late at night, watching her sleep, with her bottom up in the air and face in the pillow… the purity, the rightness of it… But her mother, in her own sleep, grinds her teeth often these nights, frowns, talks in a tongue he cannot admit he might, some time or place, know and speak fluently. Just in this past week… what does he know of politics? but he can see that she has crossed a threshold, found a branching of the time, where he might not be able to follow—