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impose a tax on neighborhood merchants, who up to now had only been asked to contribute voluntarily. We discussed the matter at some length without reaching a consensus. The church bell down the block started ringing the hour. We all counted the rings in our heads. “Twelve,” Dietrich announced. He stretched his shoulders and reached to rub the back of Sonja’s neck. “Twelve,” she agreed, resting her hand on his thigh.
    All of a sudden I could imagine what they talked about in bed.
    *   *   *
    “Let’s make revolution.”
    “Ahhh.” I can picture Kim clearing his throat, a nervous tic that usually surfaced when he didn’t quite know what to say. “Yes. Let’s.”
    And we did. We smuggled seven Soviet Simonov rifles and four German Walther 41s, broken down into component parts and buried under garbage in collection trucks, to Schutzbunders (the workers’ militia of the Austrian Social Democratic Party) in Karl-Marxhof, one of the fortresslike tenement blocks. We smuggled twenty-one German Bergmann pistols and a dozen Soviet Tula Tokarev automatics, concealed in a baby carriage, to a makeshift arsenal set up in the coal bin cellar of a toy factory. We brought in ammunition for all these weapons, four or five bullets at a time, hidden in my brassiere. We supplied gunpowder wrapped in small cornflower paper satchels to a clandestine munitions factory workers had set up on the top floor of a tenement. We slipped rucksacks filled with leaflets hidden under Hartmann’s hygienic towelettes past checkpoints, with Kim blushing a shade redder than the teenage Fascist militiaman who waved a towelette aloft and cried out to his comrades, “Look what I found!” Carrying cartons labeled as Austrian baby food, we delivered medical supplies to one of the makeshift infirmaries in the massive workers’ housing projects. In the first days, Kim was bewildered by it all: the anxious faces of women and men who unpacked the weapons we brought, the preparations for violence in improvised factories, the cramped and airless cellar bins where meetings dragged on until the early hours of the morning. There were occasions when we were invited to vote and nobody could remember what we were voting on. Groggy from lack of sleep, we often got back to my apartment as Vienna was soaking up first light like a dry sponge.
    I’ll be candid: As the days sped past, I found myself waiting with growing impatience for Kim to make a move, the way men usually do when they want more from a woman than conversation. The back of a hand casually exploring your upper spine to see if you’re wearing a brassiere is as good a place as any to begin. Massaging shoulder blades is always useful. Touching thighs when you’re crammed into a café booth invariably takes the relationship to another level. A kiss on the cheek that, missing its mark like an errant arrow, grazes a corner of your lips must surely be seen as a hint of intimacies to come. The flat of a palm on your stomach daringly close to the undercurve of a breast can only be the seal on a done deal. Under ordinary circumstances all that remains to be decided is the venue: his bed or yours. But from my Englishman, nothing. Zero. He would offer me a cigarette (he smoked those dreadful French Gauloises Bleues) and even hold the flame of a matchstick to the end while I sucked it into life, or accept one of mine (a newfangled Czech cardboard filter tip) without so much as our fingertips touching. In the fullness of time I came to understand that I would have to lead this particular horse to water and make him drink if I hoped to quench my thirst.
    “Let me ask you something,” I blurted out the evening of his tenth day in my flat. “Are you…”
    “Am I what?”
    “Are you…” I grimaced and spit it out. “Queer?”
    We were emptying ashtrays overflowing with cigarette ends into the garbage pail after a late-night meeting of the district committee. Kim looked at me sharply. I thought I