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unless you promise. I’ll go back unless you promise. Do you understand me?”
    After an eternity, it seemed to him that his wife nodded.
    “You promise?”
    His wife nodded slowly. Her shoulders sagged.
    “I’m going to turn now and come back along the walk to the right. You turn left and come around to meet me. Don’t say anything, don’t make a sign—I just want to see you—once. Then I’ll go. If you hear nothing, it will mean I got across.”
    His wife nodded and walked faster.
    Steiner turned and went along the alley to the right. It was lined with butchers’ stalls. Women with market baskets were bargaining in front of the booths. The meat glistened bloody-white in the sun. The smell was intolerable. The butchers were shouting. But suddenly all that was gone. The hacking of the cleavers on the wooden blocks became the distant whetting of scythes. The step and face of his beloved brought with them familiar scenes—a meadow, a cornfield, birch trees, freedom, and the wind. Their eyes sought each other’s and would not part, and in them were pain and happiness and love and separation—the essence of life itself, full and sweet and wild—and renunciation like a barrier of a thousand flashing knives.
    They moved and stopped in unison and they went on without being aware of it. Then suddenly Steiner’s eyes were empty of sight and it was a while before he could even distinguish the kaleidoscopic colors that unrolled meaninglessly before him without penetrating to his mind.
    He blundered on, began to walk faster, as fast as he couldwithout attracting attention. He knocked a side of slaughtered pig off a butcher’s table and heard the curses of the butcher like the rumbling of a drum. He ran around the corner of an alley and stopped.
    He saw her walking away from the market place. She moved very slowly. At the corner of the street she halted and turned around. For a long time she stood with face upraised and eyes very wide. The wind tugged at her clothes and pressed them against her body. Steiner did not know she saw him. He dared not signal to her, for he felt she might run back to him. After a long time she lifted her hands and pressed them against her breasts. She held herself toward him—she held herself toward him in an agonized, empty and blind embrace, with open mouth and eyes tight closed. Then she turned slowly away, and the shadowy ravine of the street swallowed her up.
    Three days later Steiner crossed the border. The night was bright and windy and a chalk-white moon hung in the sky. Steiner was hard, but once he had the border behind him, he turned, still dripping with cold sweat, and, like a man possessed, whispered back the name of his wife.
    * * *
    He took out another cigarette. Kern lit it for him.
    “How old are you?” Steiner asked.
    “Twenty-one. Almost twenty-two.”
    “Well, well, almost twenty-two. No laughing matter is it, Baby?”
    Kern shook his head.
    For a time Steiner was silent. Then he said: “At twenty-one I was in the war. In Flanders. That was no joke either. This sort of thing is a hundred times better. Can you understand that?”
    “Yes.” Kern turned toward him. “It’s better than being dead, too. I know all that.”
    “Then you know a lot. Before the war very few people knew that.”
    “Before the war! That was a hundred years ago.”
    “A thousand.” Steiner laughed. “When I was twenty-two I was in a field hospital. I learned something there. Do you want to know what?”
    “Yes.”
    “All right.” Steiner drew on his cigarette. “There was nothing much wrong with me. A flesh wound, not very painful. But beside me lay my friend. Not just any friend—my friend. A piece of shrapnel had torn open his belly. He lay there and screamed. No morphine, see? There wasn’t even enough for the officers. On the second day he was so hoarse he could only groan. He begged me to finish him off. I’d have done it, too, if I had known how. On the third day we had pea