“The windows are always steamed up,” Hannah would say. “It’s as if the moisture has gotten into our systems and made us hazy. Blurry, our eyes have gotten cloudy. We’ve lost the initial vigor. We’ve established ourselves. The hunt for the people who had turned our lives into hell at some point is less satisfying than I had hoped. It doesn’t fill your day. It’s childish. We don’t talk about it. We just keep going. We make plans, yes, of course, we sit around the fire outside and think up punishments, but more the way bankers prepare portfolios for retail investors.” The person who had asked Hannah about the state of her existence would in the meantime have lost all interest, and would have had more pigeons settle on his benevolent shoulders. “So,” Hannah would continue. “We scout around a bit, move pins around the map here and there, and then lay about. Once in a while one of us will lie down next to another and paint their fingernails, we occasionally caress each other, without feeling anything. Sometimes we fall asleep together. Wake up again, because one of us has cooked noodles, we eat in bed, in the beds we’ve shoved all together. Then we turn onto our stomachs or backs, the plates on the floor, where they will stay until there are no more clean dishes. Sometimes it’s hard not having parents, you know.” The person nods, the pigeons are dead. “That is, imaginary parents, since none of us know parents like the good-hearted father who bakes cakes and cleans up after his child. When you can suddenly do anything, without any considerations, when you can suddenly do what parents do, without knowing what normal adults actually do with their lives, then it ends with you lying around on mattresses painting your fingernails gold.”

The previous night on the way outside, to look at the moon or whatever, Hannah went past Peter’s mattress, and something fluky happened. The moon shone on Peter’s blond hair and bare chest, and his biomass seemed to glow. Hannah thought: I want to protect you forever. Which, thanks to the hormones, actually meant: I want to have sex. Since last night Hannah has been out of her mind. She has spent the day trying to find a trace of Sergej, and she feels close to Peter as a result of the search, but in actuality she just walks tensely through the streets and is annoyed by people because they are there and Peter is not. Because she’s woozy as all she can think of is the sleeping Peter, and it’s almost gratifying somehow that the world can unravel and a human can operate in something approaching survival mode, numbed by horror, and yet can still fall in love, still reach this little extraordinary state.

“Quiet

For god’s sake!

Please, for once, be

Quiet, please!”

PATUK