Behind, pushing her, is the town’s somnolence, and at night—the strange canaried nights of the Harz (where canary hustlers are busy shooting up female birds with male hormones so they’ll sing long enough to be sold to the foreign suckers who occupy the Zone)—full of too many spells, witch-rivalries, coven politics… she knows that’s not what magic is about. The Hexes-Stadt, with its holy mountains cropped in pale circles all up and down their green faces by the little tethered goats, has turned into just another capital, where the only enterprise is administrating—the feeling there is of upstairs at the musicians’ union—no music, just glass-brick partitions, spittoons, indoor plants—no practicing witches left. You either come to the Brocken-complex with a bureaucratic career in mind, or you leave it, and choose the world. There are the two distinct sorts of witch, and Geli is the World-choosing sort.

Here is the World. She is wearing gray men’s trousers rolled to the knee that flap around her thighs as she walks by the rye fields… walking, with her head down, pushing hair out of her eyes often. Sometimes soldiers come by, and give her rides. She listens for news of Tchitcherine, of the trekking Schwarzkommando. If it feels right, she will even ask about Tchitcherine. The variety of the rumors surprises her. I’m not the only one who loves him… though their love of course is friendly, admiring, unsexual… Geli’s the only one in the Zone who loves him completely. Tchitcherine, known in some circles as “the Red Doper,” is about to be purged: the emissary is none other than Beria’s top man, the sinister N. Ripov himself.

Bullshit, Tchitcherine’s already dead, didn’t you hear, he’s been dead for months…

… they’ve had somebody impersonating him till all the others in his Bloc are taken care of…

… no, he came into Lüneburg last weekend, my mate’s seen him before, no mistake, it’s him…

… he’s lost a lot of weight and takes a heavy bodyguard everywhere he goes. At least a dozen. Orientals mostly…

… fully equipped with Judas Iscariot no doubt. That one’s hard to believe. A dozen? Where does anybody find that many people he can trust? Especially out at the edge like he is—

“What edge?” They’re rattling along in the back of a 2½-ton lorry through very green rolling country… a storm is blowing up mute purple, veined in yellow, behind them. Geli’s been drinking wine with this scurvy lot of tommies, a demolition squad who’ve been out all day clearing canals. They smell of creosote, marsh-mud, ammonia from the dynamite.

“Well you know what he’s doing.”

“The rockets?”

“I wouldn’t want to be in his place, that’s all.”