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people. Built of barbed wire, one of our doctors likes to say. It is unnatural for a ship to be tied to a dock like a tethered bird for months and months.
    What incident?
    The usual thing. One of the orderlies and a bargirl. The orderly was rough with her and she complained and the matter died there. They gave her some money and she went away.
    And you? What about you?
    I don’t know. I may remain. I may jump ship. By the time they realize I am missing, the ship will be miles and miles away. The captain and I are friends. I can get a pass any time I want one. I will leave a note for them explaining what I have done and why. Perhaps not why. Why is none of their concern. I have no desire to return to Hamburg. Hamburg has no meaning for me. I have no affection for the ship. You have complicated things for me. I did not expect someone like you.
    It’s the same with me.
    So we are both complicated with each other.
    Seems so. If you stay here, what will you do?
    I can do something. I don’t know what.
    I can find you something at the embassy. Can you type?
    Of course I can type. I also take dictation. And operate an x-ray, if you have x-rays at your embassy.
    I’ll fix it up. But we’ll have to make up a story.
    What story?
    I can’t tell them that you’ve jumped ship and need a job. That would not do. You have to be here for a reason.
    I am my own reason. I am a tourist. I am here for tourism.
    This is a war zone.
    Is tourism illegal? Where does it say that one cannot be a tourist if one wishes to be a tourist? Tourism is a human right. Do not laugh, I am serious.
    I can see that. I’ll fix it up.
    That would be good. So, then. If I remain, can I stay with you?
    Of course.
    Such a big house you have.
    We’ll have to keep it quiet. You here.
    They don’t like you living with tourists, your government?
    They are not against tourists. They are against communists.
    I am not a communist.
    Exactly. So you have nothing to fear from my government. You should give this a moment’s thought. This place is finished. You have no future here. It is not dangerous now but it will get dangerous.
    The war has nothing to do with me.
    The war doesn’t know that. The war is closely focused, indifferent to anything outside its sphere. It’s remorseless. It works according to its own logic, its context. There will be no end of it.
    Everything has an end, Harry.
    But you don’t have to wait for it.
    As it happens, she said, I prefer beginnings.
    They stared at the stars through the leaves of the ficus tree, the leaves pendulous in the heavy air. When he first arrived in-country, Harry spent many evenings in the silk-string hammock searching for the Southern Cross, until he learned that the Southern Cross was visible only much farther south. Its anchor was Antarctica. He had read about the Southern Cross in Conrad’s books, a mystical constellation, if you could call four lonely stars a constellation. Ancient mariners swore by it. He asked her if she had ever wanted to see the Southern Cross and she replied that she had, on the voyage from Hamburg. The ship’s captain told her all about it and also about celestial navigation, but she was so caught up with the stars she hadn’t listened carefully. He nodded, thinking about the Southern Cross and listening to her bracelets click as she ran a pianist’s riff on his belly. He was unable to fathom how he and Sieglinde had found each other, beyond the prosaic facts of the matter. She had asked him for directions to the post office and he was walking in that direction, and after she had mailed her postcards they had coffee in a café and made a rendezvous for that evening, and now he had what he thought of as a normal life, one of discovery, fresh and erotic, a life apart from the war. Well, the war didn’t have anything to do with it. Anyone could have two selves, a daytime self and a nighttime self, a sort of yin and yang. He could