Presently they have Russian reinforcements, three truckloads of young Asiatics in fatigues who don’t seem to know where they are exactly, just shipped in from someplace very cold and far to the east. Out of their slatsided rigs like soccer players coming on field, they form a line and start to clear the street by compressing the crowd toward the water. Slothrop is right in the middle of all this, shoved stumbling backward, pig mask cutting off half his vision, trying to shield whom he can—a few kids, an old lady who was busy earlier moving cotton yardage. The first billy-clubs catch him in the straw padding over his stomach, and don’t feel like much. Civilians are going down right and left, but Plechazunga’s holding his own. Has the morning been only a dress rehearsal? Is Slothrop expected to repel real foreign invaders now? A tiny girl is clutching to his leg, crying the Schweinheld’s name in a confident voice. A grizzled old cop, years of home-front high living and bribes in his face, comes swinging a club at Slothrop’s head. The Swine-hero dodges and kicks with his free leg. As the cop doubles over, half a dozen yelling civilians jump on, relieving him of hat and truncheon. Tears, caught by the sun, leak out of his withered eyes. Then gunfire has started somewhere, panicking everybody, carrying Slothrop half off his feet, the kid around his leg torn loose and lost in the rush forever.

Out of the street onto the quai. The police have quit hitting people and begun picking up loot off of the street, but now the Russians are moving in, and enough of them are looking straight at Slothrop. Providentially, one of the girls from the café shows up about now, takes his hand and tugs him along.

“There’s a warrant out for you.”

“A what? They’re doing pretty good without any paperwork.”

“The Russians found your uniform. They think you’re a deserter.”

“They’re right.”

She takes Slothrop home with her, in his pig suit. He never hears her name. She is about seventeen, fair, a young face, easy to hurt. They lie behind a sperm-yellowed bedsheet tacked to the ceiling, very close on a narrow bed with lacquered posts. Her mother is carving turnips in the kitchen. Their two hearts pound, his for his danger, hers for Slothrop. She tells how her parents lived, her father a printer, married during his journeymanship, his wanderyears now stretched out to ten, no word where he’s been since ’42, when they had a note from Neukölln, where he had dossed down the night with a friend. Always a friend, God knows how many back rooms, roundhouses, print shops he slept single nights in, shivering wrapped in back numbers of Die Welt am Montag, sure of at least shelter, like everybody in the Buchdrucherverband, often a meal, almost certainly some kind of police trouble if the stay lasted too long—it was a good union. They kept the German Wobbly traditions, they didn’t go along with Hitler though all the other unions were falling into line. It touches Slothrop’s own Puritan hopes for the Word, the Word made printer’s ink, dwelling along with antibodies and iron-bound breath in a good man’s blood, though the World for him be always the World on Monday, with its cold cutting edge, slicing away every poor illusion of comfort the bourgeois takes for real… did he run off leaflets against his country’s insanity? was he busted, beaten, killed? She has a snapshot of him on holiday, someplace Bavarian, waterfalled, white-peaked, a tanned and ageless face, Tyrolean hat, galluses, feet planted perpetually set to break into a run: the image stopped, preserved here, the only way they could keep him, running room to room down all his cold Red suburbs, freemason’s night to night… their aproned and kitchen way of going evening or empty afternoon in to study the Δx’s and Δy’s of his drifter’s spirit, on the run—study how he was changing inside the knife-fall of the shutter, what he might’ve been hearing in the water, flowing like himself forever, in lost silence, behind him, already behind him.