We’re so shorthanded now that. Now the university’s closed.

I suppose we should be grateful they’ve allowed the libraries to remain open.

She looked left, right, nodded. The German swivel.

Thank you, sir.

Thank you. Goodbye.

The wind was down, and he carried his hat. Looked back at the torsos of the four titans shouldering the library porch, the tension in their bent necks. In the next block the rosy cherubs from their niches in the polyclinic wall smiled over the shadowed street he walked along. The tram drew up, and he climbed aboard to see a blonde looking out the window, and he sat directly behind her, the whorls of her ear, the fresh color in her cheek. In the mirror of the window her lashes blinked sleepily, blonde, Germanizable. Twenty-seven minutes, his watch said. Just time to ride the way north and get the boy from school.

***

He closed the door and pegged his coat, and Alena called from the kitchen, Did you get the sugar?

Yes. They had sugar.

He took the package from his case and stood it on the table, sat.

There is a god, said Miroslav, and just in time too.

Father.

Frowning she clinked a cup and saucer on the table before Miroslav, the little tongs already waiting in his hand for the bowl to be filled with cubes.

Do you want coffee?

Yes please.

Miroslav said, What’s wrong? What’s happened?

Where is Aleks?

Doing his homework in father’s room.

I just saw a dead man.

A dead man?

Where?

The crowd was staring at him, Trn said. He watched the steam laze from Miroslav’s cup. On Udolni. On the way back to the tram. He rubbed at a stain on the table, rubbed a hand along his brow and kept it there to lean his head against. He was stretched across the sidewalk, his head almost in the gutter.

How do you know he was dead? Alena said.

He was dead. No one was helping him. There were two policemen, but they had their backs to him. Keeping people away. Around his head the blood had pooled, like a dark glue.

So it only just happened, Miroslav said.

Trn shrugged.

Probably one of those gangs, Alena said, those little fascists running around.

They put those hoodlums down last year, Miroslav said. You didn’t know him, did you?

I didn’t recognize him.