There are two more turds, smaller ones, and when he has eaten these, residual shit to lick out of her anus. He prays that she’ll let him drop the cape over himself, to be allowed, in the silk-lined darkness, to stay a while longer with his submissive tongue straining upward into her asshole. But she moves away. The fur evaporates from his hands. She orders him to masturbate for her. She has watched Captain Blicero with Gottfried, and has learned the proper style.

The Brigadier comes quickly. The rich smell of semen fills the room like smoke.

“Now go.” He wants to cry. But he has pleaded before, offered her—absurdly—his life. Tears well and slide from his eyes. He can’t look into hers. “You have shit all over your mouth now. Perhaps I’ll take a photograph of you like that. In case you ever get tired of me.”

“No. No, I’m only tired of that,” jerking his head back out of D Wing to encompass the rest of “The White Visitation.” “So bloody tired… .”

“Get dressed. Remember to wipe your mouth off. I’ll send for you when I want you again.”

Dismissed. Back in uniform, he closes the cell door and retraces his way in. The night attendant is still asleep. Cold air hits Pudding like a blow. He sobs, bent, alone, cheek resting a moment against the rough stone walls of the Palladian house. His regular quarters have become a place of exile, and his real home is with the Mistress of the Night, with her soft boots and hard foreign voice. He has nothing to look forward to but a late-night cup of broth, routine papers to sign, a dose of penicillin that Pointsman has ordered him to take, to combat the effects of E. coli. Perhaps, though, tomorrow night… perhaps then. He can’t see how he can hold out much longer. But perhaps, in the hours just before dawn…

□ □ □ □ □ □ □

The great cusp—green equinox and turning, dreaming fishes to young ram, watersleep to firewaking, bears down on us. Across the Western Front, up in the Harz in Bleicheröde, Wernher von Braun, lately wrecked arm in a plaster cast, prepares to celebrate his 33rd birthday. Artillery thunders through the afternoon. Russian tanks raise dust phantoms far away over the German leas. The storks are home, and the first violets have appeared.

At “The White Visitation,” days along the chalk piece of seacoast now are fine and clear. The office girls are bundling into fewer sweaters, and breasts peaking through into visibility again. March has come in like a lamb. Lloyd George is dying. Stray visitors are observed now along the still-forbidden beach, sitting among obsolescent networks of steel rod and cable, trousers rolled to the knee or hair unsnooded, chilly gray toes stirring the shingle. Just offshore, underwater, run miles of secret piping, oil ready at a valve-twist to be released and roast German invaders who belong back in dreams already old… fuel waiting hypergolic ignition that will not come unless now as some junior-bureaucratic rag or May uprising of the spirit, to Bavarian tunesmith Carl Orff’s lively