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however, also felt it her duty to take part. The editorial meeting was once a week, and you never knew if it wasn’t a Party meeting at the same time. The smaller the group, the more intricately mingled it all was: Party cell, editorial committee, management committee.
    There were still seven of them. Three of those were managers. Well, two—since Wilhelm had not been reelected.
    Charlotte found it difficult to get through the meeting, sitting bent double at the end of the table, barely able to look Radovan in the eye. Inge Ewert was talking nonsense, didn’t even know how wide the print area was, confused a column with a signature, but Charlotte suppressed any urge to intervene or make a suggestion, and she deliberately overlooked printer’s errors in the article she had been given to proofread, so that the comrades in Berlin would see for themselves how low the journal had sunk since she had been removed from the post of editor in chief.
    Removed for “infringement of Party discipline.” So Charlotte could see no alternative to sending a report of her own to Dretzky. Her “infringement of Party discipline” had consisted mainly in her publishing an appreciation of the new GDR law on equal rights for women, which she did on 8 March, Women’s Day, although the idea had been turned down by the majority of the editorial committee as “of no interest.” That was the real scandal.
    She added that Ewert took a “defeatist attitude” to the question of peace, and that Radovan contravened the policy established by Dretzky while he was here in Mexico on the Jewish question, which was a particularly sensitive one for political work in Mexico (the Demokratische Post still had many bourgeois Jewish readers).
    That was unfair, and she knew it. But was it fair to accuse her of infringing Party discipline?
    “Can you write us something for the cultural page by the beginning of February?”
    Radovan’s voice.
    “One and a half standard pages, local references.”
    Charlotte nodded and scribbled something in her diary. Did that mean she wasn’t reliable enough for the political pages these days?
    In the evening she took a bath—it had become almost a habit on the day of the editorial meeting.
    On Thursdays and Fridays she coached pupils in English and French, three hours each (earning more in two days than Wilhelm did in a week on the Demokratische Post ).
    She spent the rest of the time before Wilhelm came home lying in the hammock on the roof garden, having the housemaid bring her nuts and mango juice, and immersing herself in books about pre-Columbian history. She was reading them for the article for the cultural page, or that was the excuse that no one asked her to give.
    Over the weekend Wilhelm read Neues Deutschland, as usual. It always arrived from Germany in packages, at fourteen-day intervals. As he didn’t know either English or Spanish, ND was the only reading matter he had. He read every line of the newspaper, and it kept him occupied until late in the evening, with the exception of two half-hour walks that he took with the dog.
    Charlotte saw to the housekeeping; she discussed menus for the coming week with Gloria the housemaid, looked through invoices, and watered her flowers. She had been raising a Queen of the Night flowering cactus on the roof terrace for a long time; she’d bought it years ago, even though she never expected to see it in flower.
    On Monday Wilhelm went off to the printing works early, and Charlotte phoned Adrian and fixed to meet him at midday.
    Adrian had been wanting to show her the colossal statue of Coatlicue for a long time. He had often told her about the Aztec earth goddess, and she had seen a photograph of the terrible figure. Coatlicue’s face was strange, consisting of two snakes’ heads facing one another and seen in profile, so that each snake had one eye and two teeth. The skull-like head of the goddess’s son Huitzilopochtli looked out of her womb. Around her neck, she