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trunks! What had the old man been thinking of, swimming on Monday night? Berlin had been blanketed by black clouds from late afternoon. When the storm had finally broken, the rain had descended in steel rods, drilling the streets and roofs, drowning the thunder. Suicide, perhaps? Think of it. Wade into the cold lake, strike out for the center, tread water in the darkness, watch the lightning over the trees, wait for tiredness to do the rest. . .
    Pili had returned to his seat and was bouncing up and down in excitement. "Are we going to see the Führer, Papa?"
    The vision evaporated and March felt guilty. This daydreaming was what Klara used to complain of: " Even when you're here, you're not really here. ... "
    He said, "I don't think so."
    The guide again: "On the right is the Reich Chancellery and residence of the Führer. Its total facade measures exactly seven hundred meters, exceeding by one hundred meters the façade of Louis XIV's palace at Versailles."
    The Chancellery slowly uncoiled as the bus drove by: marble pillars and red mosaics, bronze lions, gilded silhouettes, Gothic script—a Chinese dragon of a building, asleep at the side of the square. A four-man SS honor guard stood at attention beneath a billowing swastika banner. There were no windows, but set into the wall, five stories above the ground, was the balcony on which the Führer showed himself on those occasions when a million people gathered in the Platz. There were a few dozen sightseers even now, gazing up at the tightly drawn shutters, faces pale with expectation, hoping . . .
    March glanced at his son. Pili was transfixed, his little dagger clutched tightly in his hand like a crucifix.
    The coach dropped them back at its pickup point outside the Gotenland railway station. It was after five as they descended from the bus, and the last vestiges of natural light were fading. The day was giving up on itself in disgust.
    The entrance to the station was disgorging people— soldiers with kit bags walking with girlfriends and wives, foreign workers with cardboard suitcases and shabby bundles tied with string, settlers emerging after two days' traveling from the steppes, staring in shock at the lights and the crowds. Uniforms were everywhere. Dark blue, green, brown, black, gray, khaki. It was like a factory at the end of a shift. There was a factory sound of shunting metal and shrill whistles, and a factory smell of heat and oil, stale air and steel dust. Exclamation marks clamored from the walls. "Be vigilant at all times!" "Attention! Report suspicious packages at once!" "Terrorist alert!"
    From here, trains as high as houses, with a gauge of four meters, left for the outposts of the German Empire— for Gotenland (formerly the Crimea) and Theodorichshafen (formerly Sevastopol); for the Generalkommissariat of Taurida and its capital, Melitopol; for Volhynia-Podolia, Zhitomir, Kiev, Nikolayev, Dnepropetrovsk, Kharkov, Rostov, Saratov... it was the terminus of a new world. Announcements of arrivals and departures punctuated the "Coriolan Overture" on the public address system. March tried to take Pili's hand as they wove through the crowd, but the boy shook him away.
    It took fifteen minutes to retrieve the car from the underground car park and another fifteen to get clear of the clogged streets around the station. They drove in silence. It was not until they were almost back at Lichtenrade that Pili suddenly blurted out, "You're an asocial, aren't you?"
    It was such an odd word to hear on the lips of a ten-year-old, and so carefully pronounced, that March almost laughed out loud. An asocial: one step down from traitor in the Party's lexicon of crime. A noncontributor to Winter Relief. A nonjoiner of the endless National Socialist associations. The NS Skiing Federation. The Association of NS Ramblers. The Greater German NS Motoring Club. The NS Criminal Police Officers' Society. He had even one afternoon come across a parade in the Lustgarten organized by