The ditch rider had moored his boat at the sluice gate and was hopping up onto dry land, encumbered with his ringed binder--in which he kept his records--and his tools for switching the gate. He wore a gray uniform spattered with mud, high boots almost brown from the dried silt. German? But he was not; when the man turned his head she saw that his face was flat and Slavic and that in the center of the visor of his cap was a red star. It was the Russians' turn, this time; she had lost track.

And she evidently was not the only one who had lost track of the sequence of rotation by the managing UN authorities. For now she saw that the family from the next house, the Steiners, had appeared on their front porch and were preparing to approach the ditch rider: all six of them, father and heavy-set mother and the four blonde, round, noisy Steiner girls.

It was the Steiners' water which the rider was now turning off.

"Bitte, mein Herr," Norbert Steiner began, but then he, too, saw the red star, and became silent.

To herself, Silvia smiled. Too bad, she thought.

Opening the back door, David hurried into the house. "Mom, you know what? The Steiners' tank sprang a leak last night, and around half their water drained out! So they don't have enough water stored up for their garden, and it'll die, Mr. Steiner says."

She nodded as she ate her last bit of toast. She lit a cigarette.

"Isn't that terrible, Mom?" David said.

Silvia said, "And the Steiners want him to leave their water on just a little longer."

"We can't let their garden die. Remember all the trouble we had with our beets? And Mr. Steiner gave us that chemical from Home that killed the beetles, and we were going to give them some of our beets but we never did; we forgot."