– hand, as it hurled the occupants into a black car that arrived in the wee hours and drove off again with its prey. Next morning they would learn that this or that apartment was now empty, "hit and sunk."

His gaze slid along to those three windows, three squares untouched amid so many vessels sunk. The old fear was gone. His present happiness was too intense to leave room for it. Alexe'i only regretted one thing: a very important phase of his life had been surgically removed by those accursed years, one that he would have found hard to define. The time of youth's first flush, an age of dreaming and exaltation, when one poeticizes woman, making a divinity of her inaccessible flesh, living in wild anticipation of the miracle of love. None of all that for him. He had the impression that, in a sudden leap, he had been catapulted from childhood, from that sidewalk shaking with the destruction of the dynamited cathedral, right over the years of terror into an already adult life, to face the nakedness of the beautiful, muscular body Lera offered him almost in its entirety, reserving that little "almost" for marriage.

He went up the stairs, and on each landing noted the number of departures and arrivals that had occurred, especially when the Battleship game was at its height in 1937, '38, '39. People dragged from their sleep, experiencing their departure as a dream that skidded into horror. There was the apartment beneath their own: a family a little girl who had met him in the street only a few days before their nocturnal departure and talked with him about a new flavor of ice cream they were selling on the boulevards…