“You’re her mother… what if they arrest you, what happens to her?”

“That’s what they—Peter can’t you see, they want a great swollen tit with some atrophied excuse for a human, bleating around somewhere in its shadows. How can I be human for her? Not her mother. ‘Mother,’ that’s a civil-service category, Mothers work for Them! They’re the policemen of the soul…” her face darkened, Judaized by the words she speaks, not because it’s out loud but because she means it, and she’s right. Against her faith, Sachsa can see the shallows of his own life, the bathtub stagnancy of those soirees where for years not even the faces changed… too many tepid years… .

“But I love you…” she brushes hair back from his sweating forehead, they lie beneath a window through which street- and advertising-light blow constantly, lapping at their skins, at their roundings and shadows, with spectra colder than those of the astrologers’ Moon… . “You don’t have to be anything you aren’t, Peter. I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t love who you are… .”

Did she goad him into the street, was she the death of him? In his view from the other side, no. In love, words can be taken too many ways, that’s all. But he does feel he was sent across, for some particular reason… .

And Ilse, vamping him with her dark eyes. She can say his name, but often, to flirt with him, she won’t, or she’ll call him Mama. “No-no, that’s Mama. I’m Peter. Remember? Peter.”

“Mama.”

Leni only gazes, a smile held between her lips almost, he must say, smug, allowing the mix-up in names to fall, to set up male reverberations she can’t be ignorant of. If she doesn’t want him out in the street, why does she only keep her silence at such moments?

“I was only glad she wasn’t calling me Mama,” Leni thought she’d explain. But that’s too close to ideology, it’s nothing he can be comfortable with yet. He doesn’t know how to listen to talk like that as more than slogans strung together: hasn’t learned to hear with the revolutionary heart, won’t ever, in fact, be given enough time to gather a revolutionary heart from the bleak comradely love of the others, no, no time for it now, or for anything but one more breath, the rough breath of a man growing afraid in the street, not even enough time to lose his fear in the time-honored way, no, because here comes Schutzmann Jöche, truncheon already in backswing, the section of Communist head moving into view for him stupidly, so unaware of him and his power… the Schutzmann’s first clear shot all day… oh, his timing is perfect, he feels it in arm and out the club no longer flabby at his side but tensed back now around in a muscular curve, at the top of his swing, peak of potential energy… far below that gray vein in the man’s temple, frail as parchment, standing out so clear, twitching already with its next to last pulsebeat… and, SHIT! Oh—how—