Next evening, Morituri followed her out for the last time. Down the worn paths, under the accustomed trees, past the German goldfish pool that reminded him of home, across the golf links, the day’s last white-mustached men struggling up out of traps and hazards, their caddies standing at allegorical attention in the glow of the sunset, the bundled clubs in Fascist silhouette…. Twilight came down on Bad Karma that night pallid and violent: the horizon was a Biblical disaster. Greta had dressed all in black, a hat with a veil covering most of her hair, purse slung by a long strap over one shoulder. As choices of a destination narrowed to one, as Morituri ran into snares the night began to lay out for him, prophecy filled him like the river wind: where she had been on her absences, how the children in those headlines had—

They had arrived at the edge of the black mud pool: that underground presence, old as Earth, partly enclosed back at the Spa and a name given to…. The offering was to be a boy, lingering after all the others had gone. His hair was cold snow. Morituri could only hear fragments of what they said. The boy wasn’t afraid of her at first. He might not have recognized her from his dreams. It would have been his only hope. But they had made that impossible, his German overseers. Morituri stood by in his uniform, waiting, unbuttoning the jacket so that he could move, though he didn’t want to. Certainly they were all repeating this broken act from an earlier time….

Her voice began its rise, and the boy his trembling. “You have been in exile too long.” It was a loud clap in the dusk. “Come home, with me,” she cried, “back to your people.” Now he was trying to break away, but her hand, her gloved hand, her claw had flown out and seized his arm. “Little piece of Jewish shit. Don’t try to run away from me.”

“No…” but at the very end rising, in a provocative question.

“You know who I am, too. My home is the form of Light,” burlesquing it now, in heavy Yiddish dialect, actressy and false, “I wander all the Diaspora looking for strayed children. I am Israel. I am the Shekhinah, queen, daughter, bride, and mother of God. And I will take you back, you fragment of smashed vessel, even if I must pull you by your nasty little circumcised penis—”

“No…”

So Ensign Morituri committed then the only known act of heroism in his career. It’s not even in his folder. She had gathered the boy struggling, one glove busy between his legs. Morituri rushed forward. For a moment the three of them swayed, locked together. Gray Nazi statuary: its name may have been “The Family.” None of the Greek stillness: no, they moved. Immortality was not the issue. That’s what made them different. No survival, beyond the senses’ taking of it—no handing-down. Doomed as d’Annunzio’s adventure at Fiume, as the Reich itself, as the poor creatures from whom the boy now tore loose and ran off into the evening.