Nachman Kipnis was busily changing into a suit of dress clothes. He put a forefinger into the air. “There is no room for sentiment in the struggle against reactionary forces. His cow! His cow! To each according to his needs! Are you with us?”

“Friends, friends—first I thought yes but now I think no. It’s a crime. It’s a capital offense. The Elder has ruled that all smuggling must cease.”

“Comrade Lipiczany, it’s too late. You, the same as us, have received your orders.”

Lipiczany, his head off-balance, looked at the orphans. “Orders?” he said.

One after the other, first Einhorn, then Kipnis, Szypper last—the boys peeled back their yellow stars in order to show the red one below.

“Red partisans,” Einhorn announced. “This is no game.”

“But the Soviet Union is an ally of the Thousand-Year Reich! They have already occupied the eastern section of Poland.”

“Ha!” laughed Szypper. “So you have also been fooled. Comrade Kipnis is able to explain everything.”

Kipnis, a thin boy, who each year had to put thicker glass into his lenses, pointed once more to the top of the barn. He had a brown mole about the size of a five-grosz piece under his eye. “This is an error often made by the liberal press and bourgeois politicians, who do not understand the workings of dialectical materialism. All progress is the result of the clash of historical forces: the bigger the clash, the more gigantic the cataclysm, the greater the progress will be. Thus the Soviet Union waits silently and confidently; it bides its time, while the stooges of Western capitalism and the running dogs of fascism tear each other’s throats. From this conflict of thesis and antithesis will emerge the synthesis of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Therefore, we see the present alliance of the Soviet Union is a correct strategical maneuver from the historical perspective. Our leader, the Man of Steel, has declared: You have to deal with Satan to drive out the Devil!”

Einhorn—he was the radical who had converted the others—began once again to squeeze Nisel’s shoulders. “It’s to make a better world, Comrade. A better world!”

At that moment the Holstein, as if she, too, wished to encourage the boy, took a padded step forward and scraped Nisel’s cheek with her tongue. This animal had damp brown eyes that stared without blinking—like Kipnis’, thought Nisel, blown up behind the spectacle glass. Then, as the cow took a second lick on the boy’s salty cheek, Szypper threw a rope on her neck. All four boys pulled upon it, urging her, black and white herself, into the black and white night.

The smugglers came to a small hill and stopped to look around. The land lay like this: behind them the darkened, stubbly fields, the barn, the mansion with its lights already out; then the wall, with its gate, its guards, and beyond the rest of the Balut. Ahead and below were the ruts, the gullies, the impassable marshland. There, in a hollow, a group of people were energetically throwing up earth for a grave.