The raids worsened with the summer. Miroslav drummed his fingers beside the radio and waited as Trn stared over the chessboard. Human beings used to live on earth, he said. Now we live in it. In the future we’ll all lead underground lives. London said that Czech pilots were bringing down their share of the Luftwaffe, more than their share. Vienna said the docks of London were a useless wreckage.

In the cool of an evening rain while Miroslav watched the boy he and Alena passed the bearded man pushing the kino cart and went on to the cinema like they used to do. The newsreel with brass blaring spun up the monumental eagle of Die Deutsche Wochenschau, and spectators rose to give the salute and shouted Sieg Heil and then more than half the theatre was standing. When the Fuhrer appeared such applause erupted that no one could hear his speech. After the parades the fires. British bombs on an oil depot in Lorient, on a hospital in Belgium demarked with the red cross, the work of the war criminal Churchill. Wehrmacht soldiers in their coal scuttle helmets trained hoses on the flames. The whole of the Thames would not suffice to quench the fires begun by the Luftwaffe in retaliation and it looked so. Aerial footage of the Tilbury docks ablaze in the night, the Thames Haven petrol tanks. London in its cerecloth gauze of smoke. He imagined the Tube tunnels, the oiled grit of their angles where Londoners crouched in their long coats, the tang of piss and crying babies and the little girls staring round for what they should do next, big eyes cringing at the next detonation. When he looked again they were all somewhere in arid Africa, an Italian tank geysering sand behind its tracks.

The projector clattered and trumpeted the studio theme and the house dimmed. No cartoons. The cone of light began to speak its German. She was beautiful, the lead, lips as glossy as her haloed eyes in the unfocused close up, great lashes closing over the aurora before the one permitted kiss. A single kiss, all that could be bestowed in wartime. Once Ufa had made wonderful films. He would leave the cinema after the matinee blinking into daylight again, half in love with all the perfect faces. More than half.

The air afterward was colder and raining again and arms folded Alena said while he looked into the sky, Are you going to put up the umbrella or not?

She hung a hand in his elbow, and they looked down into the black puddles.

Why do they keep the lights on during the newsreel?

To see who misbehaves before the Fuhrer. That’s why the policeman’s there.

He could feel his trouser cuffs go sodden round his ankles, the water squeezed from his shoes at every step. Black hulks of cars with their hooded headlamps creeped along the street with feline eyes, the slur of rainwater behind their tires.

Do you want to wait under an awning for it to let up? Or we could have a coffee. Or a drink.

I’m soaked through already, she said. When is the last tram?

It wasn’t very good, I’m afraid. I’m sorry.

Alena said, You’re the one who wanted to go.

***