Pipe kept throwing his hands up. “What can we do? But what can we do?”

Even Lipsky hesitated. “And if the Elite Guard starts shooting?” he asked.

Rievesaltes: “Here are the guns to shoot back. The old man controls the Guardsmen, but I am boss of the Jewish Police.”

At that moment, when the whole venture seemed to hang in the balance, one of the prisoners stepped into the light that came from the open cellar door. The sight of her made the boys pale. They shook. They moaned. This was the cannibal woman, the one who had been accused of eating parts of her son. Her hair flew like a person touching an electrical wire. In her open mouth you could see her tongue. She walked up to Rievesaltes. “The prisoners of the Balut agree to your plan,” she told him. “We shall march to Stefanska together!”

“We agree! Yes, we agree!” the other prisoners shouted.

Above the din, Edmund Trilling made himself heard. “The Bund also accepts the Rievesaltes proposal!”

Then the prisoners and their former jailers started off down the deserted road. The Strike Committee, for all their doubts, their misgivings, followed along, into the dawn of that steaming day.

Strike Day Three

The hot wind was blowing, stronger than ever. The sky in the morning was half yellow, half blue, like a gigantic armband. Overnight, in places like the Marysin district, little blades of grass had sprung from the ground. On the other side of the walls and fences, where Jews weren’t allowed, it was like summer. In front of the Hotel Europa gay umbrellas, green ones and red ones, had been stretched on their frames. Poles sat beneath them with ices. It was as if all nature had been turned upside down. No one in the Baluty Suburb could remember anything like it.

“It’s because of sunspots,” said Zygmunt, the professor. But others said they heard of a new, terrible weapon, so powerful it could blow up a mountain, and that each time it exploded it caused such a wind. The opinion of the Pshiskher’s Descendant was that the Master of the Universe had created the phenomenon on behalf of the workers, so that throughout the strike they would be warm. “No, no,” argued Wolf-Kitzes. “He who judges will smite the Blond Beast with the plague of fire. And the Lord brought an east wind upon the land all that day, and all that night.” But Trunk, of the Devout Butchers, merely smiled. “Isn’t it nice?” he asked. “Isn’t it balmy? This is what our life will be in Madagascar.”

In the heat of this day marched the newly armed Jews. Up the whole of Wrzesnienska they went, sloshing through the fresh mud. When they reached the bottom of the Piwna Boundary Road, where there weren’t so many houses, the sewage smell from the melting excrement buckets stopped—rather, it was covered over by a different odor, a real stench, from no one knew what. The farther they went, the worse this stink became. Then the orphans, out in front, noticed fresh water running down both sides of the road.