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Danushka spotted Joey at the Queen's Larder that first night Gordon and Kathleen took the Russian refugee girl out on the town. They wanted to give her a taste of the freedom oozing from a London pub so shortly after the second Great War. Like saying See, this is what it's all about and Why we won and Why one day we’ll free Russia, too. It was 1947, people were poor and life was drab but free and rather hopeful again. Gordon felt warmly towards public watering holes, not because he drinks more than the others, but because he enjoys people so much. With all that light-hearted banter, those wickedly funny mock insults, the free-wheeling political talk, the shouting, the ranting and the raving of it all… absurd English closing hours the only thing people ever heard him grumble about.

Sorely missing this open style of life, he and Kathleen had only recently returned to England. They had spent the last years in or around the desert at Suez and Cairo, where besides the posh colonial hotels coffee houses were the only drinking spots, and none offering grand theatre like this. Still, this isn’t an ode to England's public houses but to how a Russian girl stole her first, slow, hesitant glances at Joey that night. He still an anonymous, insolently grinning American serviceman, drinking a bitter brand of beer he doesn’t care for and those first glances soon leading to a wide-eyed fascination even though she doesn’t really know why she’s so struck by that pock-marked military man--- perhaps the distant resemblance to a brother she left. And neither could she fathom that her subsequent encounter with this man was only one of many millions between the uprooted inheritors of those blighted post-war years, many of them with lasting consequences… on several continents.

Gordon and Kathleen the first to cross paths with Danushka, now it was Danushka crossing paths with Joey. He had come to visit her at home today, carried along by the human tide, the new times. He had just arrived on the sparsely lit landing, in front of Gordon and Kathleen's exotic rosewood door, Danushka their new adoptive daughter, come to them from Sweden, where she had ended up fleeing the Soviet Union, the Frozen Union, following a gruesome, solitary, arctic escape. Lucky Strike and the climbing of three stairways had caused Joey to be slightly out of breath, he had gone up quickly, soundlessly he thought, cat-like even, two steps at a time. But Danushka had heard him make his way up all the same, possessing an extraordinary sense of hearing, developed while growing up outside Grinyovo, a village in northern Russia, a place still wild and primitive, where the frozen earth hardly holds any odours, but where she also learnt to detect the scent of a snow-hare, hiding three dozen feet away. She opened the door before Joey had a chance to knock. She did this as silently as the brash, grinning, gum-chewing American exciting her so unbelievably, thought he had walked up.

" Hi! How are yah!" he drawled. It sounded more like a statement than a common question, but Danushka couldn’t tell the difference. She was too overwhelmed by his impromptu afternoon visit, and also her English was still very poor.  By a stroke of exquisite luck she had caught his face a second time, at the Strand Ballroom, the night before. It’s the dance hall below the Lyceum Theatre, where Gordon and Kathleen had taken her this time round. It was Kathleen who had suggested they go there for the benefit of the lonely, stateless girl. So she could meet people her own age, and despite Gordon’s complaints, who feared he would feel out of place, precisely the way it turned out. For these halls were even more vulgar than he had expected, unlike the graceful dances he and Kathleen had been invited to in Cairo and later on, in Alexandria. Here, shop-assistants, cheeks and eyes plastered with cheap make-up, laughed noisily and drank like men, servicemen or young workers having managed to stay out of the armed forces constantly on the prowl. Kathleen soon noticing many of the quick, new couples briefly disappearing after only one dance, returning with blushing cheeks and shiny eyes from somewhere behind a curtain, probably an emergency exit and a convenient stairwell. She didn’t entirely approve of this, even though she had done her own things not so many years ago, but one look at the wonder on Danushka's face making it all worthwhile for both of them. The Russian girl enthralled and beguiled by the music, the loud clothes and all the carefree smiles. It was unlike anything she had ever experienced, soon hesitantly tapping her small foot to the beat of this exciting music, so new to her. Until the moment her heart had stopped dead cold, cutting off her breath, her spine straightening, forcing Kathleen to take note and follow the girl's sudden fixed glance. And Danushka instinctively grabbing Gordon's arm after recognizing Joey in the crowd, the same soldier she had first seen at that pub, a couple of months earlier.

Kathleen had raised her glass, for only another woman knows what it feels like to see an anonymous man, a man she could fall in love with, for what couldn’t have been more than a breathtaking second time. As for Gordon, he had looked at the masses round him and seeing nothing or no one out of the ordinary, asking innocently what the sudden fuss was all about. But Kathleen couldn’t tell him, not then, not until later, at this point only kicking him under the table, in an effort to gently shut him up.

Joey had stood on the Strand Ballroom's mezzanine balcony, quite inadvertently looking down at them. A spinning mirror-ball on which spotlights were trained hanging from the ceiling, reflecting dozens of illuminated moving dots on the faces of the people below. To him it appeared as if the looks they cast, and particularly Danushka's somewhat anxious stare, switched off and on, and on and off… And then he noticed the older woman waving, signalling that he should come down. This surprised him, because he wasn’t certain he knew these people. His first reaction to ignore them, but then curiosity got the better of him and he slowly made his way through the crowd, down the broad and winding staircase, wondering what the hell this was all about.

 Danushka had been praying to catch another glimpse of the man who subconsciously reminded her of Vladimir, the brother she couldn’t be without. Once she had asked both Gordon and Kathleen to pass by the Queen's Larder with her again, the pub of her new English night, without quite being able to put into the words why she wanted so badly to go back there. The place where she had seen Joey once and only very briefly, but since unable to forget his defiant smile, rough cheeks, and that black hair of his, cut like a brush, intriguing her. She even remembered her fright when it looked as if that very same soldier was getting into a fight with another man that night, a man with long, blond hair and a flat nose. But it turned out to be a minor scuffle that nobody else paid attention to, the blond bloke running out, the soldier, her soldier, fortunately hanging round for a while, though she never spoke with him, only asking Gordon what kind of uniform he wore. It turning out he’s a Yank, a word she wasn’t familiar with, a word they hadn’t taught her yet in language class.

As a rule Danushka doesn’t like uniforms, nobody where she comes from could be expected to, but this was different. Soldiers here looked kind and knew how to smile. And so it was that this first indelible impression, the soldier's first fleeting imprint on her mind grew into something of an obsession. Getting to the point that when Gordon and Kathleen took her to the Palladium where the couple tried to get her to laugh at the comics Flanagan & Allen, she would secretly look round to see if she could find Joey, whose name she didn’t know at the time, or even during a Chelsea football match, where Gordon loved to relax, having been away from sporting events like these for more than a decade, afterwards again dropping by the Queen's Larder at Danushka's request, and with him in no way objecting, seeing if she could catch her American.

Later, finding out about these pub stops, Kathleen merely assumed the Russian girl just loved the atmosphere there. She didn't always join those two and having no idea the request was of a romantic nature. The girl obviously didn’t know a soul in London and Kathleen, normally an astute observer in matters of the heart, this time had spotted no tell-tale signs at all. Until suddenly, last night, at that ballroom, where it all come together, for all of them. Danushka having spent most of the day buying vegetable preserves and clothes with Kathleen's leftover ration coupons, even then thinking about the soldier, carrying her purchases well-packaged to the Red Cross for shipment to her mother and her brother Vladimir, in Russia. Enclosing a simple but warm and pleading letter, in which she naively begged to be reunited with them, in it also speaking at length of Kathleen and of Gordon, of preparing to go see Marx's grave, or his chair at the British Museum’s rotunda Reading Room, a stone's throw away from her flat. Short lines, about King and Queen, about newspapers, the radio and all the other new things in her life in a care-package that would unlikely reach its destination, but nobody could convince her of that. Not even Kathleen, whose good counsel on any other matter she would blindly accept.

During the last several months Danushka had been studying English, four hours each day, at the Polytechnic. An institute she could walk to alone, on new shoes with high square heels and ankle straps that made her look taller than she was and on which she still was only learning how to walk. She had begun to speak simple phrases which more often than not wouldn't have an article or sometimes even miss a verb, as in Russian apparently.

"Danushka! Man you know?" Gordon teasing her at the ballroom, imitating her, at last figuring out the source of her fascination. Kathleen, smiling radiantly, grabbing the girl's small hand, a young American musician, Benny Carter, leading the band. The reason Joey had come here, to listen to the music and to steal a dance.

In the end Kathleen had rather enjoyed the entire soirée. She had met her husband in the same building, upstairs at the theatre, before the war, during different times, a nurse still, her close friend Evelyn who would also go to Palestine but end up in New York to work at a large hospital, with her at the time. But through the terrible intervening war years they had lost touch with each other, Kathleen's letters to her always returned unopened. She often wondering if Evelyn was still alive, if she still trotted the occasional fox, boogied the woogie, or jittered the odd bug, always giggling at would-be seducers coming to fetch her, dragging her off to dance on the polished parquet floor. Unless they were ugly, or rude and arrogant, I only do Gregorian mambos, Evelyn would say to them, turning the unfortunates away as fast as she decently could. Kathleen doubted Gordon was aware of any of it at this particular point, she decided not to bring their memories up. After all, this was Danushka's night.

" Come on, Gordon! Let's take Danushka to a dance!"

" I like pubs, Darling! Not dance halls! Now surely you know that..!"

But our boy had nonetheless started getting ready, for he was a kind old sod.

" Oh dear, not that dreadful hat again?" Kathleen went on. " Darling, hats make you look so… so humourless..! Like all those men on the Kremlin balcony we see in the Times, reviewing those frightening parades. Or those silly American gangsters, in the movies! Am I right, Danushka? Say yes!"

But Danushka did not, could not understand Kathleen's comparisons and complaint, so failed to respond.

" I need to wear a hat, darling! It's quite miserable out there!"      

" But aren't we taking a cab?"

 " Cab or no cab, it's this dampness! I can't adjust to it... It feels as if the Thames flows straight through my veins!"

" Very well, then! You win, dear! Wear a hat! I only want everyone to see that lovely old face of yours!"

" Good God! I think the desert's got to her! Danushka, did you hear that?"

                                           * * * * * * * * *

Kathleen and Gordon were an emancipated couple who had worked for His Majesty from Gaza to Aden and from Amman to Aleppo, ending up with the Suez Canal Company where Gordon had been placed to keep an eye on the books and on the French. The Sumners had worked very hard and were most conscientious which didn’t stop them from partying in India or sometimes carousing from Tangier to Piraeus on a slow boat, off the coast of Tunisia or France. On leave then, and too much in love to worry about anything else, but that was before the war and it had lasted only until they were forced to view the world with different eyes. It was the moment they concluded that their mission lay in London now, where all their civilization was being blown to pieces it seemed. Where Kathleen could care for the wounded under the sort of chaotic conditions to which she had become accustomed, during her years between Euphrates and Nile. Gordon to make himself useful because of the peerless, compassionate and collected leader that he is, at any rate, that is what they felt when it became clear what that rot Hitler was up to. But they couldn’t make it back to England in time, the new war preventing anyone from crossing its Mediterranean demarcations and fronts, and soon extending itself into North Africa, less than a hundred miles away from where they lead a life.

But when that great human folly was over, and after having  it made home at last, annoyed, disappointed and frustrated, they wanted to make amends even though this wasn’t required of them. It was why they were so immensely pleased when his Majesty called on them again, through the Home Office and because they were fluent not only in French but spoke a mouthful of Arabic and Russian as well. This time asked to take charge of a wispy Russian refugee, barely a woman, apparently lost. Gracefully accepting that responsibility and after Danushka, shy and insecure arriving at their home, starting her informal but certain Western education right off. By taking her to the National and to the tattered Tate, but also by taking her for obvious reasons to see Boris, the Russian expatriate grandmaster, co-owner of the Mandrake chess club in a basement on Mead, a street the free French took great delight in mispronouncing, and a good friend of Gordon, our chess-obsessed, hard-drinking old boy.

At the very beginning Boris often interpreted between the Sumners and Danushka whenever communication had ground to a halt. Boris had lived in London for many years and from him and during their walks, Danushka heard about the heroics of Wanda Landowska, the Polish harpsichord player, performing at Underground stations throughout the Blitz' fieriest nights in an effort to soothe people's nerves. It was a story of courage, of conquered fear, greatly touching the young refugee’s heart. Boris also teasing Danushka in Russian about the great treatise on which he was supposed to be working, entitled Capitalism, Communism and Sodomy, phenomenally parallel concepts he said, but she was too young to laugh, preferring to look at the new faces, the new streets where Churchill's booming voice still rang from old wireless sets and innocent windows, open. She watched the thousands upon thousands of people, when in that other life of hers she had been with only three other people, then two, then one, then none... and now not getting enough of it.

Despite Kathleen's efforts to dress her more decently, Danushka unwittingly contributed to the new émigré look with her ill-fitting, ill-matching, even grotesque clothes ---the bungled haircut and the pre-historic walking shoes she had brought with her all the way from Russia. She quizzed Boris innocently about the pervasive pomp, the continuous ceremony she saw going on all round her ---the changing of the Guards, the flying of the Union Jack, all those drawings of a dog called Bull, the wigs on sombre, black-robed men. Serious soon, he would explain to her that all these symbols are born of deep respect for the people by the people, and the basis of England's legendary resilience.

"Turning their country into a prison doesn’t make sense to them... But Danushka, dear girl, you still haven't told me anything about yourself, " Boris said during one of their Soho strolls. But how could she begin to tell him what had happened to her, what she had been through, why she was here? Her love for Vladimir, Volodya, and the mission, his mission that she was on, about the weeks of lifting her knees up high and over deep and heavy snow in order to progress, across that interminable, frozen night. About their last minutes together, the morning her brother had taken her to the edge of that silent shrouded forest with which she was so well acquainted. The spot where Vladimir had stopped their three steaming, harnessed horses beside those grey, frigid thickets she knew so well because it was the exact same place her father had also taken her, years earlier, when she was still small. To walk and to play the last summer that he was still alive, surprising her at the time because he had never taken her anywhere, so naturally she had loved him for it, only much later to understand that he must have sensed a darkness in his future, and those small outings his last embrace. 

"If they stop you, say as little as possible. You got lost travelling around the region, trading handicraft for food. That's all. You know it's illegal, everything always is. But now that we've beaten the Nazis, they're not going to be as tough as they used to!'

Danushka's brother, Vladimir, had spoken softly but urgently, vapour dancing from his mouth. And perhaps more to reassure himself, adding:` Naw, they won't punish you. They'll scold you, they'll try scaring you, but in the end they'll send you home! Anyway, you're just a girl!'

He should have realized the utter stupidity of that last, short phrase, the contradiction it contained. Like weak mortar making the entire edifice of his weeks of pleading and reasoning with Danushka come crashing down. For this terrible, this solitary Homeric journey, this flight on foot to the West she was about to embark upon that morning, shouldn’t it have been his?

But at the time Danushka did not pick him up on it. Too stunned, she had listened to him but not heard him, barely nodding while he fidgeted with the small knitted bag that he strapped round her fragile frame. It was filled with well-wrapped tempera-coloured Kargopol Polkan watchdogs and Sirin-bird clay figurines. Her alibi, should she get caught, Vladimir impressing upon her.

She was too dazed by the cold, but probably even more by her deep sense of disbelief, the surreal business of leaving her brother and reluctant lover and the only life she had known. There, just outside Grinyovo, in the Karelia region, a long way southwest of Arkhangelsk, a city, according to Vladimir, named after an arch-angel who must have got lost one day and crashed. For no sane angel, Volodya had muttered, would otherwise have come to stay in modern Russia, the Russia that was sometimes besieged from the outside, but just as surely from within. But then, he said, more and more angels were trying to descend. Some like hungry, lonely vultures, only perching, tired of flying, and of lying, jealous of the living, despite all their troubles, for could it be that eternity is even colder than anything down here? And was it the gaze of those very imaginary angels, which had made Vladimir send her looking for warmth here in the west?

" Danushka, what are you thinking?" Boris asked. " You haven't  said anything in nearly half an hour!"

" Don't you want to know how I got here, Boris?"

" How you got here, my little Danushka, is your secret. It's the one thing we exiles never ask each other. It brings bad luck! But do talk about yourself, if it makes you feel better!"

" My nostrils, my eyebrows were frozen.. They were for weeks." Danushka spoke, following Boris' advice. She sounded like she was reciting a story she had read, and re-read. " It was at least forty below the day I left. My brother limped nervously round the troika on the loud, crunching snow. You see, his right foot had been nearly severed, bloodied, infected, cut to the bone, after one day accidentally stepping into a bear-trap. But that was another year, and summer, and he a boy without shoes. I was too small to help him then. It was a terrible accident, but at least it kept him home, with me, with my mother, when other men, all men, were sent to fight at Stalingrad. He fixed my snow-shoes and said  `Here's a map. I drew it while you were asleep. It's the best I can come up with since the bastards took away our books'!"

Danushka had spoken softly, monotonously, the words now flowing forth. She was unable to stop, the months of pent up anguish having taken their toll. Her Russian phrases were heavy, having been composed during weeks of unspeakable solitude. Heavy and ponderous like every damned step through that hateful snow. Boris just let her speak, and speak, and then, putting his arm round her, softly asked:

" Do you still love your brother?"

" Why not? What are you asking me? If I hate him now? Because he sent me here? Away from him?"

" He could have come with you..!"

" Volodya, that's his nick name, can't walk! Didn't I just explain that to you?" Danushka's voice had contained affection but now contained no small amount of quiet rage.

" You could have refused. You could have stayed!"

" And you? Why didn't you stay, Boris? What are you doing here, in London? Things aren't that simple, are they? I left, because of Volodya, because he begged me to, on his knees. My mother never leaving her bed since my father disappeared. She had nothing to do with it. She cares more for herself than for us. Her grief is selfish and mean. It wasn’t for her that I would stay, or leave!"

" But if he loved you, how could he..?"

" Volodya loves me, but he loves Russia even more. That's why he sent me. To see where it all went wrong, how we all went wrong. Yes, I didn't care, I only wanted to be with him. But I couldn't disappoint him, it was too important. Even though, out there, on that tundra, sometimes zig-zagging like the track of some train gone mad, all those weeks, and until the day I fainted and woke up in that Swedish country church, I was very, very angry with him..!"

" How long did it take you? Did you know the terrain? Did the Sumi Lapps help?"

" I don't remember. And didn't you just tell me not to speak about that part. I think I want to go back to Kathleen!"

She missed Volodya, his stubbly beard against her face, his pounding chest, his sweet embrace. Oh, it was she who had first pressed her breasts into the hollow of his stomach, she who had taken his warm, rough hand and thrust it between her thighs when she was barely fourteen. He had laughed and admonished her, drawing away at first. But she couldn’t help it. She was like the animals she had lived with all her life. She knew them well. She had often been told to lie beside them when they were ill, in the small barn at the far end of their kholkoze. And sometimes she needed Volodya to touch her, as if she too were unwell.

Then, once, it had happened. During one long polar night he finally let her have her way, for the first time allowing her to sit on top of him. Moving silently, gently, until electric bolts ripped through her loins and she had sobbed with happiness. But this she told to nobody, not even to her new friend Kathleen. Not because she had done anything wrong, but because speaking about Volodya in this way was like sharing him with someone, and that she could never, ever contemplate.

Their love had lasted until last year, when she turned seventeen. When Vladimir had first begun to talk about the future, about freedom when all she wanted was him, his nearness, to prepare him his bath, his food, Mother always sick in bed.

"We'll have to get you out of this rotten icebox, Danushka! Away from Stalin, the night. None of this is very healthy for you. We're living like animals, look what's happening to us,' and then, horribly, Vladimir had begun to shy away from her. As if he couldn’t bear to be with her any longer. And this hurt her more than anyone could possibly understand.

" She must have crossed a part of Finland, or a piece of northern Norway, to get to Sweden....!" Boris thought. He was enormously impressed with this unassuming, giant of a small girl. He turned a corner, wondering about the quickest way back to Gordon's flat. He respected his tiny compatriot's wish to be alone. But then Danushka spoke again, as if she felt a need to sum it all up.

"Volodya wants me to describe to him where Marx worked, un-harassed, here in London, and maybe go to Switzerland one day to a city called Zurich, where railway cars go straight up mountains and into the sky, to see why Vladimir Ilyich could work, read and write there, yet nobody is allowed to read at home."

Whereupon Boris quietly put his huge arm round Danushka's shoulder and told her one more thing.

"Well, I don't know about your brother sending you here, but he's right about one thing, Danushka!" he said. " The big dream is and was a good one for Russia. An inevitable dream, because before things were always very, very bad. Yes, there had to be a revolution. But where it all went wrong was when we allowed Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin, butchers all of them, to fail us! You see, my sweet, dreams only work, provided next morning you wake up! If not, all you do is end up in a coma. And that's not living, is it? C'mon, I'll walk you home!"

                                           * * * * * * * * *

"Piss off!" tall, blond, wavy-haired, flat-nosed, but not unhandsome Tommy had mumbled under his breath, jumping to his feet, off the barstool on which he had been sitting, drinking a half-pint of Bitter. He had just witnessed what he thought was an American serviceman move  in on a pretty blond bird who in a distant way reminded him of his mother. She was obviously a lot younger and also a lot shorter. Her parents were sitting next to her, but didn’t resemble her. Tommy was furious. He was pretty sure it was the Yank, the same bloke with whom he had a bit of a run-in at the Queen's Larder one night, a few months back. And perhaps this was even the pretty girl who that evening had also been there.

Tommy, like a good number of young Englishmen, had a thing against all those foreigners reigning in London right after the war and who seemed to be grabbing and snatching away all the girls. He had just left the stale air of the moist walls and old clothes in his flat; his grandmother sitting near the window, gazing down dreamily into the narrow street below. She had waved at him and smiled as he walked away towards the tube, to come to this dance and have some fun, too.

Earlier that day, Tommy had come home after his workout at Nigel's Gym. He had dumped an old army bag full of sweaty clothes on the floor, the room was small, stifling, less than a few hundred feet square. The table against the wall was crowded with dirty plates and teacups, in the corner stood his unmade bed, too short for him. Tommy had been shocked at the old woman's appearance. She had looked more neglected than ever. She had looked haggard, and he had tried cheering her up.

" Watcha cock! How's yourself?"

She nodded. She was glad he was back, but had not been feeling well of late. And it hadn’t helped catching her grandson going into her purse and stealing a handful of change. It wasn’t as much for the money as the matter of her last and only hope betraying her. Just like her husband and only daughter had always done. And then that grinding, that dreary poverty, always the scraping by, every hour of every day... Her bones ached as well. She had cried a lot, and did poorly trying not to show it.

Tommy felt badly about having disappointed her. It was true he had been a bit short for half a pack of Navy Cuts cigarettes and gone into her wallet. But he had done so dozens of times and always put the money back. Later, after earning a bit of cash doing deliveries for the green-grocer down the road and without ever bothering to tell her. He’s no thief, or if he is, she never his victim. He loves her, respects her, they have a bond. The one his mother reinforced by not showing up at home anymore, preferring to run round with one bloody foreign soldier or sailor after another. Probably dreaming of a new life in New Zealand or Rhodesia, but getting dumped once a month. Either way, dropped, engaged or married, doing the two of them, him, Tommy, and his grandmother, absolutely no good

 " Are you still angry wif'me then?" he grinned, while washing up over a small wooden tub in the corner that represented the kitchen, and before going out to the West End, to the Strand Ballroom, maybe, later that evening.

" There's a man come by! 'is name is Wea'erby or something!"

" Wha's 'e want then?"

" 'e said 'e saw you fight the o'er night. Says you could be somebo'y. May even 'ave a job for you...!"

Some time earlier Tommy had concluded that if he were ever to get out of this rut, this depressing life, someone would have to do something very easy for him, something he apparently was incapable of doing for himself. And that was to force him right up against a huge wall. Without the possibility of retreat, cornered like a rat, forced to fight back and get killed or to take one desperate leap over that wall, to freedom and more. He dried his face and put on clean clothes. He combed his unfashionably long, blond hair, powerfully stroking it back with a nearly toothless comb, it making very little difference.

" Well, aren't you 'appy!" he said. " Come, I'll take you down to the Jack for a pig, I made a few bob today, you can tell me all about the bloke!"

He would bring her back home in half an hour, and then go out, he had decided. Up to now Tommy figured boxing was his only way out, his only ticket to another life. But he also had terrific self-doubts which paralysed him. He didn’t have a great deal of self-respect, a stigma that came with the neighbourhood, their private lives, stuck in the East End, turf of the Dockers, while not being one of them. Sure he had tried to work in the port. But it was a father and son thing to get in and he didn’t have one of those, of course. That is why it bothered him the old girl seemed to be giving up, she, the only person who had always encouraged him, pushing him to finish school, feeding him, dressing him, even getting him those small jobs at the chemist and the green-grocer while he was growing up, then sending him off to Nigel's...Where she wanted him to become tough, a fighter, no longer the pale, poor, insignificant lad who would be everyone's doormat. So that one day he could drive a lorry or even join the Navy perhaps...

Tommy didn’t know for sure what it was that bothered her. It couldn’t just be the incident with the spare change. Perhaps it was the recent war, the bombings, the memories, or simply her arthritis. But here she was, very down indeed. And he wondered what he could do for her. Steal, fight, claw? Yes, but not on his own. Better fight in the service of someone much stronger than him, someone as yet unknown. Who would corner him but ultimately offer a new horizon for the two of them, 'im and 'er. Presently he eased his grandmother down the stairs, the apples, across the slow road which took forever because of her stiff legs, poor shoes and the cobbles uneven and wet. As always, it had been raining miserably.

"C'mon, then. It’ll cheer you op!" he insisted with a smile, in pure Cockney, thinking of a loop and a quick Tommy for ‘er.

A man his grandmother's own age, well-dressed for the area, looked up as they walked in. He was carefully eating fish that had just been served. Tommy had never seen the man there before, he wore a plaid jacket with leather patches at the elbows, a shirt and tie to match, and he also sported a moustache which curled at the tips. He would better fit at some country inn, but perhaps he had some insane craving for the Pearly Queen and her ensemble, performing here later that night.

Tommy had just sat down with his grandmother and let his eyes run round the house to see if anyone he knew was there, when upon their return to her face he saw something that gave him a pleasant jolt. For what struck him was how suddenly and unexpectedly happy his grandmother looked, from one moment to the other her entire demeanour changed, colour back to her cheeks, back a little straighter, she had quickly tidied her grey hair in the back of her neck ---smiling at the elderly gentleman who smiled back.

And suddenly it was the happiest night either one of them had in a long time. It was miraculous. Tommy tried having a conversation with her but she hardly paid attention. Even tried to help her eat as he so often did, by holding her deformed arthritic hand or by helping her glass to her lips, but tonight she wouldn’t have it. She gently pushed him away, others who knew them and looked their way and saw what was going on, smiling. But Tommy didn’t care. He hadn’t seen her like this for ages and enjoyed the moment as much as she did. Until his mind drifted back to the mysterious afternoon caller, Weatherby, who would return in the morning, he had left word. Where he came from, what he had to offer, what he looked like, if he was sincere…

                                           * * * * * * * * *

“ 'Ello, there! Like to dance?" Tommy, said, pulling Danushka out of her seat and onto the dance floor in one move. It all occured so suddenly, she didn’t know what was happening. Her mind was on Joey, an unknown soldier, who had just joined their table. Joey, a man appearing to be so affable but who deep in his heart carried a lurching, slow-burning sense of refusal. Often affability is only manoeuvring, the taking of initiative, the controlling of conversation, of keeping intruders at bay. Joey was good at talking fast and talking hard, it’s what the streets had taught him. But here Danushka found herself standing on a half-empty floor, the music just started, and another man, come from nowhere, putting his arm round her waist.

Gordon and Kathleen waved to encourage her, shrugging their shoulders, signalling to her to make the best of it. Joey raised his eyebrows just a tad. He didn’t know who the guy who looked like a boxer was, though there was something vaguely familiar about him. Nor did he know what to make of the ‘dude’ coming on so fast.

" Come on! Come on! What's the matter! Dance! Dance!" Now it was Tommy's turn to feel awkward, because the small, pretty girl on the high heels had suddenly sunk her face into her hands. For the first time since she was fourteen sobbing out loud, though this time not for happiness and in the middle of that dance floor, in front of a seated, noisy crowd.

" It's all right, it's all right!" Kathleen came to the rescue, apologizing to the calm but annoyed young Englishman. "It's not her fault! She's a Russian refugee! I suspect she's never danced before. Please let me take her back to our table, and do join us for a drink!"

" Cunt Yank" Tommy muttered angrily under his breath. " It's all 'is bloody fault, i'n't it!". He declined Kathleen's invitation and left. After having a closer, a second look at the people round that table, Tommy was now convinced that Joey was the same soldier he'd had a run-in with at the Queen's Larder one night. Joey had rubbed him wrong even then, cap cocked nonchalantly on a thick, dark, military crewcut, over a pockmarked face, and an irritating grin. It was the second time Joey had spoiled Tommy's evening, and this one had started off so well. That first time he had hared out of the Queen's Larder, to make his way to the Russell Square tube station, in anger throwing a half-open fist at the red, solid cast-iron and fast dozing letter box standing in his path. A punch that was the first expression of a new dawn for him--- he wasn't going to take it anymore. It was also the first manifestation of the will he would require to one day get behind the steering wheel of a racing car. That is if he could persuade Weatherby to let him drive one, not repair one, something he would eventually be allowed to do. But this time leaving quietly, back into the night, alone.

For all his brawn Tommy became aware some time ago that it was quite pointless to end up at the wrong end of an upper-cut. For knock-outs are radical, immediate, public and humiliating. Deep down Tommy was afraid of their devastating consequence: in the ring one can't come in second or third, the pressure to win debilitating him. Still, he remembered gloating over the stiff elbow he had sunk into the Yank's ribs that time. Tommy was becoming like England itself ---tattered but scrappy once purpose had defined itself. Despite everything, he was getting more at ease with himself.

                                            * * * * * * * *

It was Christmas in London. The months had whisked by. A Salvation Army Brass Band played psalms outside Harrod's, while two woman officers, beating belled tambourines in good time, collected for the poor. Gordon threw a half-crown into the kettle and shivered in his winter coat. Kathleen was inside, shopping, but he had come out, not able to stand the hustle, the bustle, the pushing any longer.

It was a dark, late afternoon and the wind blew cold. His nose was red and his eyes watery, his fingers stiff inside his fur-lined gloves. His gout was on the move. He didn’t complain, just wasn’t used to these decidedly un-Egyptian temperatures. Port Saïd had been his last posting, administrating the Canal there, and its scorching weather for most of the year bearable only because it was so dry at the same time, dryer than the desert from where it would emanate so relentlessly. But there was also dust there, and blindness and cholera. And closer to the Nile, malaria, hunger and fanaticism, all inter-twined. And a European could only take so much of that, so that the urge to come home was many faceted, one of them the local, grovelling functionaries so inert and corrupt as to drive any sane, honest man mad. On top of the heap, Farouk, like a fat, gluttonous, perspiring, conspiring sphinx, his operetta army another thorn in most expatriates’ side. In the end Gordon hearing the rumblings in the desert, the other side of Alexandria and Rommel, the desert rat, getting ready with his Italian footmen for Montgomery at Al Alamein. The Germans everywhere from the Levant to Libya and though here not occupiers per sé, an impediment to his and Kathleen's freedom to travel, making those last years in Egypt too painful to describe.

It’s during times like these that memories begin to haunt, that childhood re-imposes, that sadness sets in, particularly when sitting dreaming on the terrace of Shepheard's Hotel, after business had brought him to Cairo, and having crossed the ochre sands between here and the Suez Canal yet another time. There Gordon suddenly remembering his younger sister getting her first menstruation at the age of twelve, parading up and down with her package of sanitary cotton, for everyone to note that she had become a woman and expecting to be treated as such, that is with suitable respect. She luckier than Eve, born many years later, getting none from her parents, but Gordon couldn’t know this of course. In fact he would never meet the youthful widow, an out-of-protest stripper, at one point sharing Tommy's life.

Here Gordon would reminisce about his years at Public school, the summer camping trips to France. The jumping into roped-off river, everybody naked, all the boys keeping away from the headmaster's fast hands, even digging trenches round their tents to keep that man at bay… the boys' running joke, anyway. Or the smoking of his first, swiped fag during the same outing, the prolonged nausea it caused, cramps setting in worse than if he had eaten pounds of green plums. He smiled, wondering what ever became of the little rogues and would-be bugger, where they were all swimming now.

He had solemnly promised Kathleen they would return home as soon as all the fury ended, praying England would still be there, unchanged. In the Middle East, those last years, he had become more sensitive to the suffering round him, becoming particularly irritated with the appalling arrogance of his own younger colonial colleagues. He found their airs of hegemony stupid and immoral, the invisible exploitation they carried on round the clock out of date. There, as in India, did they not realize the world as they knew it or imagined they knew it had already come to an end? That fellahin and untouchable deserved a better lot?

" Silly bastards!" he called those Empire types, each day getting more heavily into drink.

To some Gordon appeared laconic, but he was very much a man of quiet commitment, diffident but on the inside angrier than all hell. He was the perfect keeper of the Suez books ---honest, lawless, yet never an anarchist. Only not respecting rules that he recognised had to exist, for the others, of course, never for him. A gentleman of the first order, non-confrontational, smooth and graceful as a tropical fish, new internationalist, in a small symbolic way father to his King...

" Rashwa, Sumner Effendi? Foulous? A small greasing of the palm, Sir?"

" Two loads of coal, Sumner? One for our pocket, one for the ship?"

" No thanks! Thank you all very much! And I do mean the lot of you!"

Except giving baksheesh to the forgotten, the handing out of alms, this he never refused and why they followed him to the souks, the infirm, the children, his clan, all of them, whenever he passed through.

" Sumner Effendi, Sumner Effendi....!"

" Yes, yes, all right...Here you are....God bless...!"

He took the handkerchief Kathleen had ironed for him that morning and loudly blew his painfully throbbing nose. The colourful piece of cloth had been given to him by a distant Irish cousin. The English always manage to have their Irish cousins somehow be distant, Gordon mused, thinly smiling, although he didn’t quite know how they accomplished it. Then he chuckled in the wind, for without them knowing it, he is the Irish cousin, which probably explains his creative behaviour in all those foreign lands and Kathleen probably not even remembering it, though she had been warned by him some time after a bottle of gin or two, one intimate evening. Gordon originally hailing from County Mayo, but he could barely remember its green, rolling grass. His parents leaving for Durban when he was only four. And then moving, and moving, in search of a better life, before the turn of the century, but always within the empire of old. He had been used to open decks, to open skies, to open shirts and even a few dispersed open minds. Now here in London, the new do's and don'ts, where to cross the road, where to enter a building, to pay for the telephone, the wireless, and how to address Mr. So and Mrs. So, in which mandatory corner to place one's initials, where to affix a stamp, stamps, stamps everywhere, on every corner, corners and the lining up behind each lingering queue ---it was all a bit taxing, but it didn’t matter, did it? For he was home, home at last, and home was where Kathleen got him. He the best friend she ever had, while taking his quirks, his morning testiness, the double gins, the smoking, mainly because he’s the most decent man she has known and is ever likely to meet.

And still, it wasn’t so terribly long ago that she got rid of all her previous and incidental lovers, dashing nibblers of her nipples who bought her dresses and who brought her momentary passion, stroking her softly in her shadowy corners. But these men always ended up treating her with the cruelty of a child, which they were, these younger lions. Not worth it, she decided, not really, even though Gordon, much her senior, at night would soon and mostly snore.

This Kathleen presently walked out of Harrod's, half a dozen stately black taxi-cabs standing patiently waiting in line for her. Red double-deckers tearing dangerously close round their parked fenders, one taxi-driver, spotting Gordon standing somewhat forlornly on the pavement as if he was unsure where to go, reckoning here was a man of distinction, probably good for a handsome tip, calling him `Guv'ner', offering to drive him where ever he wished.

" Look, Gordon! Look what I bought for Danuska! The poor dear! She has absolutely nothing to wear!"

" Yes, yes, I agree, it's a lovely jumper. But when do we go back to the flat? Do you think that American has left by now? Wasn't he returning to Berlin tonight? We don't know much about him, do we! Are you quite sure Danushka’s safe with him?!"

                                                 * * * * * * * * *

 Only a few years after Vladimir Chernov was born in Minsk, but well before Danushka saw her first light near Grinyovo…. on a different parallel, on another continent, with a different climate, with a different pace and mood, a newborn male infant was abandoned on a subway train. For the first time and already taken in his very new life for what would be one of many subsequent, dubious, even odious rides.

Wild, free and scrambling, free ferocious grazing for wealth, fast and rocketing events nearly every hour of the day, racing Fords and racing minds, these propelled the American herd forward but also made it inadvertently trample on some of its stumbling, weaker components, unnoticed, and in dust that was never seen to settle. One of these an infant, soon to be baptised Joey by a British nurse named Evelyn, who worked at the Mt. Sinai Hospital having just completed a long stint in Palestine.

" Oh, my Gawd, I thought it was a snake. But, oh, Amazin' Grace, when that there brown bag moved, and after all them white folk be gone runnin’ way screaming, I saw, praise the Lawd, I saw the tiniest of li`l bitty fingers done come stick right outta that there brown shoppin' bag, I swear!"

An eighty-four year old black woman with doleful eyes explained what happened to the Bronx precinct policeman who had ‘done come rushin’ up the ill-lit stairs leading to the over-ground portion of the evening sub-way line, summoned to retrieve a bag with a snake.

Chorus: Watcha say, ole woman?

Old Man: Watcha say, ole Missie?

Youth: Whatcha say, ole puss?

Old Lady: It’s Mrs Bailey, I'll have ya’all know!

" They done run faster than a crazed herda buffalo, them white folk!" she added, her face turning sombre with contempt." And they'ze white fingers, you know! I don't believe how they’d be doin' a bad thing like that, to one their own!"

Evelyn, the delightful, heavy-set nurse who had just been hired at the hospital's obstetrics ward, named the foundling Lawrence after a countryman of hers, whose exploits in the thirst-lands of Arabia had captured her imagination and had long been the subject of her lonely passion. But this darkish child, instead of on the Bronx line, might have been found on sandy knoll, deep in that mythical desert where Evelyn used to work before sailing to America of the canyons, some ancient indeed, but in her opinion mainly urban, ghastly new, and more like towering forests of stone. Then on second thought she not only named him Lawrence but also Joseph, after a carpenter, once upon a biblical time.

Needless to say the hospital's very name held tremendous appeal for nurse Evelyn, the reason she fought so hard for a job there and succeeding just in time to be entrusted with the welfare of young Lawrence Joseph, tiny traveller, discoverer, bed-wetter, lover of offered wet breasts and a short time later the odd spoon of lukewarm pabulum. Only the latter provided lovingly by Evelyn, every four hours, on or off shift, not the former, as regrettably she was long dry. Authorities soon throwing inane darts at invisible charts to determine small Joey's future, callously ignoring the nurse's fervent pleas to adopt him followed by their refusal and having something to do with her temporary legal status in the United States of Infinite Wisdom, being unmarried, and lacking `stability', though not apparently a heart...

Darts then making Joey's rather prolonged stay at Mt. Sinai come to an abrupt end one day--- his natural mother declared incurably absent and so dispatched on his endless journey of foster upon foster home. Where it would soon become apparent to all who touched upon his young life that Joey was smart, healthy and the proud possessor of a will of his own, one that would ultimately prevent him from fitting in with those very parents, their other child, their parakeet or their garish wallpaper. And just as well, for these families received money for his care and he would find out they took him only till the Christmas shopping bills were paid, not a day longer.

Joey concluding it was much less painful not to become attached to anyone, not even a dog, than to follow his natural urge for affection. He was a youngster subjected to short-term leasing, with no drop-off charges, a fully lubricated child, handy to have round, here to air-condition a summer, there to warm a long winter's night, rented out by and large at a pace of twice a year, understandably cultivating in him a sizeable aversion and a deep mistrust towards anyone married and adult.

And it was a certain Mrs. Agnes Monroe who was the last and easily the most determined of these merchants, one who decided to use her cunning lust to rid him of his acne. She seduced him only two days after the young, strong castaway had reached the age of thirteen. A boy who’d never been taught to stop and look at a chestnut tree, or admire the spotted tufts of a night-owl weary at dawn, after its long hunt in a wet, dark park. A boy who knew what a home-run was, without having set foot in Yankee Stadium, despite having grown up in and around the Bronx. Agnes Monroe herself becoming convinced at an early age that by being good she wouldn’t get too far, all the signs there, whatever turn she took. As a small girl nobody ever noticing her, no matter how diligent, courteous and prompt she was. Boys teasing her, girlfriends using her, parents decent but only sitting there, and sitting there, smiling. Somewhat like the parents of another, younger woman called Eve, who was growing up in North Yorkshire and who would have a crush on Joey, an American of native Indian extraction, accidentally meeting him in the lobby of her Paris hotel.

As it turned out though Mrs. Monroe had, miraculously, and given her bloodline, a more than accomplished mind. But even that would do her little good and adding insult to injury, she wasn’t particularly lovely either. At home there had been no money to force the course: she could never buy the graces and the love other, richer girls, who also ugly, could. So that when to her own astonishment a man turned up a second and then a third time at her doorstep, she decided to marry him as fast as she decently could.

He owned a fruit-stand, rose early, shaved poorly, but if not much else, always paid the rent. Of this she could be sure. The times were hard, America's bag had burst, even banks went bust and New York was a battle field, so that her choice had been justified. He became her twice a week husband. Only God could divine what he was doing on this earth, because it soon seemed to her that he came from another planet. Out of touch, out of reach, mainly sticking it in her wrong moist end, and getting her pregnant the few times he turned her over.

" Albania in New York!" she often hissed in an attempt at bitter humour, referring to his swarthiness. But where then did he get the name Monroe?

Untrained, stumpy and overweight, her natural intellect by far surpassed her husband's and continued to grow through prodigious reading throughout her life, which with a small break here, a loving push there, might well have taken a fuller direction. But what she saw, what she experienced was endless crap, adorned, to boot, by children who were indifferent to her. What she needed was a lift, a laugh, some tension to off-set the unbearable boredom of her existence. Getting it when that incredible orphan walked in through her door, acquired on impulse, in a last attempt to break down the wall between her family and herself, bringing in some extra cash to boot, but where Agnes Monroe went wrong was not perhaps by seducing the orphan, but by deciding to steal him, lock, stock and barrel, by wanting to keep him all for herself.

" Joey, why don't you stay home from school this afternoon? You've worked so hard lately, and the weather is so foul. Come, I'll write your teacher a note! What d'yah say, hey, boy?!"

They could spend some time together... He had been placed in September, it was now November, and she had grown to like him a lot... He was so big for his age, almost like a man... And a good man had to rest... Had to be spoiled... Until five o'clock in the afternoon at least, till then no one else home... So she would bake him his favourite pie, of apple, buying a whole case of soda just for him… With a bit of money she had secretly put away for him...

And thus it was that Agnes Monroe, blushing with an excitement she had never felt in her life, took revenge on her world. On her silly, smiling, peasant parents who were still alive, on her husband and in a way on all of New York. And this by soon opening her housecoat and her genital orifice wide all at once, keeping Joey home from school whenever she desired. And to this end would write long reports to his principal and the Child-Welfare agency concerning his supposed frail health, while spending evenings glaring at her husband and children, all the while furiously fondling Joey's new, young thighs under the kitchen table with stockinged feet.

Joey's skin cleared up nicely that fall, but failing every one of his exams. In addition, after the first excitement of his strange initiation, Mrs. Monroe's appetite becoming progressively more obsessive while in direct proportion Joey's suddenly declined. As a consequence she became rather jealous of his every move, creating an atmosphere in the three bedroom tenement that could soon be cut with the hard, dried edge of his repeatedly stained handkerchief, Alice no longer speaking to anyone but Joey, her children hating him and observant neighbours winking meaningfully, at the outdoor market, behind her husband’s back.

And so it came that she nabbed not only Joey's precocious manhood but a good slice of his youth as well. And when she missed two periods and explained to Joey what this meant he knew the time had come to move on. But he was trapped, could talk to no one, couldn’t ask for help, didn’t want another foster family and was damned if he would go back to some foul-smelling ward. He turned fourteen and to the streets all at once. But not before smashing up the Monroe house first, with a crowbar he had found in a lane, one morning, poorly clad but not yet underfed, and smiling rather eerily.

                                           * * * * * * * * *

With Kathleen, Danushka would go on excursions of a different sort. With her she discovered London by roaming Fitzrovia and Bloomsbury and with her she was slowly beginning to appreciate how much Vladimir loved her by sending her here. She stood in the Fitzroy and brushed against tall, paint-stained Augustus John without either one of them knowing the other, quite obviously. Not far from a stringy writer named Blair who called himself Orwell and a man who, like Vladimir, understood the depths of the totalitarian menace so well. Just like Koestler, who was also there, as was an alcoholic cherub whose given-name was Dylan and who would soon leave for and rush back from short-lived illusion in freshly slaughtered Prague, in a great hurry to smoke and drink himself into an early, melancholy grave.

Danushka also finally encountered Marx at Highgate Cemetery in North London where she stood pensively before his imposing granite and bronze tombstone, covered by new wreaths and surrounded by wooded walkways, wild flowers and the breath of island air she was beginning to get accustomed to. It is where she prayed for Volodya whose warm body she missed, asking him for help and strength:

" Volodya, Voloydya, I'm here. I've done everything you've asked, but what do I do next?!"

But then and fortunately she got distracted by some of the other headstones, each with its own story to tell, surely not all necessarily sad. For this, in a certain way, could also quite easily be a happy place. And we do live or die by distractions or the lack of them. Like stones, stone angels everywhere, ivy snuggling up and round. Or terraces rising and falling according to where one stood and which way one looked. Plus those beds of flowers, pasture green lawns once immaculate, now neglected, leading away towards more and more neighbourhoods of the immensely peaceful dead.

" Look, the Egyptian Avenue behind that special gate! It even has obelisks. Miles of sand now, and we're all set!" Kathleen exclaimed. She laughed at the gaudy banality of it all and would have had a real soul-mate in Manolo, the Spanish stowaway, now on his way to Hoboken and Greenwich Village, where he would befriend an awkward ex-serviceman, just back from Berlin, at Zanetti's Café and also the man whose feet Danushka would some day cure from a case of severe and chronic eczema, by teaching him how to bathe them gently, in his own urine…

It was still the moment that Danushka first stood silently next to Marx's chair. Under the Imperial Dome of that reading room, just past the Egyptian room, at the British Museum, always thinking about her brother Vladimir but only to be distracted again and again, as through some strange power, a pair of invisible eyes looking down on her from the book-stacked walls, taunting eyes, haunting eyes, of deep and tempting American blood, eyes set below a soldier's cap and above cheeks rougher than Volodya's, eyes that at that very moment were at work somewhere at Berlin's Tempelhof Airfield, under an aircraft, contemplating an engine, but also busy planning another visit to London. To get a chick or to catch a flick starring a bunch of nose-thumbing brothers, also called Marx.

Danushka was an earth child. A child of a far northern parallel linked to nature with dimensions and properties long lost to the millions in the cities. She, like Joey, inexplicably as well, could feel what others could not. It was this sense which had guided her across the frozen North where she had been cold, lonely and exhausted, but never afraid.

"Kathleen, I come back here alone. I tired now. We go?"

But she would get little time on her own. Gordon, the aging bon-vivant, hair shaven at the temples, brilliantine in the glossed-up rest of it would constantly insist on showing the night side of his beloved, newly discovered London, and this would make Danushka very tired the next day. Often she would go along, only hoping to see that grinning soldier's face another time. Gordon's eyes would sparkle playfully behind his Joycean spectacles, his dark pin-striped suit, his perennial bowler, despite everything, celebrating the English weather, regardless of rain or shine. He never said much. He just listened and drank up words and concerns and laughter, together with the stiff gin that seldom left his hand. He once took Danushka to the French Pub on Dean Street, where de Gaulle's wartime manifesto was still glued on Gaston's wall. It was the time before the writers Sandy Fawkes and Jeffrey Bernard reigned there and at the Coach and Horses of course, as permanent fixtures on appropriated bar stools, insulting one another lethally, fighting the pervasive stench of personal failure as someone put it and the place one Royal Navy sailor got free beer from all each time he showed the tiny glass bottle containing the pubic hair he had retrieved from the lavatory of the Royal frigate on which he said he worked. Leaving every loud and self-appointed French expert speculating wildly as to whom it might so deliciously belong, though Danushka would again not quite get the joke, the howling mirth, though she was delighted to see so many happy faces, inebriated and otherwise, not unnaturally, given her past.

Until the hour they returned home by walking slowly along Shaftesbury Avenue and up Southhampton Row, where Kathleen and Gordon lived and where Danushka each night lay her head near the hot, purring and sensuous plumbing, which may not have been as good as at Buckingham Palace, but after the isolated freezing Grinyovo farmhouse, more than satisfied her.

                                           * * * * * * * * *

Danushka wanted to dry her tears, she wasn’t embarrassed, wouldn’t even know what that word meant. She was furious. Not with the dashing Englishman who had pulled her out onto the dance floor, he had been nice enough. She was angry with herself for letting him do it, when she really wanted Joey.

" Relax, young man! Our unknown friend just got the jump on you and Danushka here hasn’t yet learnt how to fend for herself!" Gordon explained to Joey, in a casual tone.

" Sure!"

" Danushka's Russian!" Kathleen repeated. " She's only been here for a very short time!"

" A Ruskie? No kidding!" Joey was taken by surprise, thinking he had met what could become his first English date. " We helped those Russians, and now they've become our enemy, would you believe that?" he laughed. " Hi! My name's Joey. I'm an American, from the Bronx, but stationed in Berlin!"

Danushka had quickly calmed down. She peered shyly at Joey through moist eyes which she dried with a handkerchief Kathleen had produced from her purse.

" Well, it looks as if we're the only natives here!" Gordon retorted cheerfully." My name's Gordon! Gordon Sumner… My wife… Kathleen! And this… this is our Danuska. Delighted to meet you, may I get you a drink!"

Joey felt uncomfortable. This girl was weird. What the hell was he getting into? He better get out of here, fast!

" No thanks for the offer. I guess you folks'd rather be alone after what happened, over there, with that guy! Besides, I can only stay a moment, I got my buddies waiting upstairs. We wanna see as much as we can, got in yesterday, have less than two days here. Goin' back to Berlin before yah know it..!"

" Oh, too bad! We understand! Are you entirely sure we can't change your mind?"

" We came to listen to the band...!"

" We thought we'd show Danushka around...!"

They all spoke rapidly now. Something had died. It was no one's fault. The soldier was right, they were just going through the motions. Danushka's face had gone pale with disappointment and desperation. Kathleen could not bear to see her like that. She and Gordon spoke in concert.

" The music's so loud...!"

" We can hardly speak ...!"

" We can hardly hear each other...!"

" I say, you look like such a nice young man....!"

" And you Americans are always so very, very welcome...!"

" Would you....?"

" Would you care, before you leave for Berlin...?!

" I say, would you have tea with us! "

" Tomorrow, say...!"

" Our place? "

Joey hesitated but just to get rid of them he said "Sure! For breakfast? Why not! If it's not too far!"

" No, not for breakfast, dear boy. In England tea's at three. We live just up the road! Here, here's our address. I see you're Air Force, when precisely are you flying out?"

" No problem. Thanks for the invite. See you all at three. What did you ask? Oh, I fly back late tomorrow night, but now I gotta go...!"

They shook hands. Joey put his cap back on his head and left without looking back. For a moment he pretended to search for his non-existent buddies, then raced out by way of the stairs, going up two steps at the time. He left Kathleen triumphantly smiling at Danushka, overt complicity written all over her face. Gordon had caught on quickly and they all and for different reasons felt something irrational, something inexplicable but something important had taken place here, something which no one could possibly relate to anything, to any recognition or precedent. The appearance of this young man, Joey, as if pre-ordained, mysterious, and something over which neither he, nor any one had any control, except Danushka perhaps...

                                           * * * * * * * * *

She’d been sitting motionless in front of the window. She wore a pleated, cream-coloured skirt which hung just below her slender knees. The length was not quite the required one for the year but if longer her legs would have appeared to be even shorter than they really were. Something she obviously wished to avoid. She wore a plain soft woollen round-necked and second-hand black jumper. Her hair was cut short. She wore the same high heels on which she walked to the Polytechnic and which Kathleen had managed to obtain for her, not an easy matter, for all goods were in short supply and used items often the norm.

Unless you were the truant who ordered half-dinners in decent restaurants only to switch coats, run out and pawn the superior one round the corner, to pay for the rest of the night out. Or the dashing chap who picked up umbrellas at chic hotels he claimed he had left there the day before, selling off dozens of them at a time. But Danushka had no such notions. She got up from her chair with suppressed nervousness and walked across the large room. It was Victorian, except for the assortment of African artefacts and masks the Sumners had collected over the years. The BBC Symphony played a new Britten piece on the wireless. It was already well past three o'clock, which would explain her state of mind. Her stomach knotted, first because Joey was late, and now because it sounded as if he had arrived.

Gordon and Kathleen had conveniently gone shopping. It’s the moment she opened the heavy slab of Lebanese rosewood which Gordon had salvaged and shipped home and made into a door. Doors were a thing with Gordon. As giving and open-minded as he was, he lived by privacy and a solid door ensured that Danushka tried everything not to tremble. She smiled. Joey stood in the twilight of the hall, grinning over a single field flower, surprised the door had opened in perfect time, without him having to knock.

" This is for you. It's all I could find in London. Hope you like it..!"

He didn’t not know why he had come, something about the girl had kept nagging away at him for nobody had ever looked at him quite in that way before ---she had a look that was a curious mixture of desperation and superior strength. But there also was another magnetism at work, something making it seem they were two aliens instinctively recognizing each other on earth. Or so he thought. But it was all so vague, and he had so little to go by. And he had never before dealt with anyone at this level. It scared him, but he had come to find out anyway. He had to. The English couple seemed like good guys, they would help him along, though he had learnt since day one not to trust a single soul, particularly if they were older than him. And in that briefest, in that most hesitating of instants his life flashed before his eyes, as if he were in an accident, tumbling off a bridge, into a ravine, while standing safely on the landing, in the small hall, in front of her. On how he had managed to subsist on the streets for a few years, a pimply youth, always in bloom like a knotty willow. How he stole bread and fruit from stalls and drank water from police-horse troughs in Central Park. As it would always be, it was Depression time in the Bronx and competition for food commensurately fierce. Fathers begging on street corners, one of them, knife in hand and apologetic, once relieving Joey of at least a handful of food, explaining that his infant daughter had not had anything to eat in days and that he couldn’t take her crying any more. He didn’t mention his wife. Until Joey heard there was late summer farm work, picking apples in Vermont, or tobacco in Virginia and he hitched suffocating rides in railroad box-cars and slept in draughty barns where he listened to farm animals and crickets, feeling strangely at home though he had never been away from the city before. For he could understand those animals, smell them, hear them scurry, scuttle when others he knew could not, making him wonder why he could, when he was a Bronx brat. Why he had the muscular elasticity and the power of a mountain cat, when he was barely fifteen. But some had pointed out that his maturing face, in profile, looked exactly like the Indian on the silver nickel of the time, which if anything would explain his survival prowess, give him roots, real or not, and started making him feel proud. Then one day older runaways told him he should lie about his age and enlist in the Air Force, like they had done, showing him their cash, and their good shoes and their cleaned teeth, bragging endlessly about it all.

It had taken Joey a long time to decide, then manage to falsify a birth-certificate and volunteer, towards the winding down of War, for the Air Force. Because, part American-Indian or not, soaring like a spirit was what he had always dreamt of doing. And he did it while naturally loathing all authority, simply to make a pragmatic move, ending up at Plattsburgh Air Force base, in New York State's North Country, somewhere near the Canadian border, where he received a thirty-six month mechanic's, not a pilot's training, before becoming eligible for a tour of duty overseas, in a devastated city called Berlin.

It was this Joey who, while on leave, had stood in the Queen's Larder one night, a London pub, where he drank and smoked Luckies in a city still drunk on victory, bursting at the seams with refugees, exiles and Allied personnel like himself. He stood elbow to elbow with England's own rowdy, raunchy partisans, drinking Bitter, for which he didn’t particularly care. As far as he was concerned that night no place was far enough away from his discriminating officers at Tempelhof Airfield. Who picked on him because he was a lowly enlistee and because they thought he wasn’t quite white enough, and had no known family. It was their America that had stolen what it could from him, his toys, his youth, his innocence. And he would pay her back one day, America, his fucking uniform, he thought, just a short parade. If hypocrisy was what it took, he too could play that game.

Why were there two United States of America, anyway? One for them, and one for him. So that if some were the soul, some the brains, others the hands, the feet, the voice of America, surely that evening Joey was its fists. Fists that might go soft one day, like all eventually do, but in the end un-balling, unclenching, only wishing to stroke from that point on. But that stage was still a long way off for him. In fact he would only mount it in France, and just as he would involuntarily expire. But for that night and now, and whether Joey liked it or not, he was America ---energetic, essentially good-hearted but also short-sighted, rude, crude and even vulgar, like so many youngsters who hurt from blows to the head, to the heart, and are struggling to grow up. It was in the Queen's Larder, the soppy Mills Brothers singing about their Paper Doll over the crackling of the speakers, that his eyes were drawn towards a pretty little wide-eyed thing, angelic looking girl, and he only realized now it was with her he was about to have tea.

Funny, wonderful place where this could happen, who had invented it, with its quids, its bobs, guineas, and half-crowns, and driving on the wrong side of the street ---Man, a guy could get killed if he didn't watch out. On the other hand some blond, punched-out jerk had for no good reason knocked the wind out of him. By jolting him in the ribs with an elbow, then run off like a shit. Would that have happened at home? But then again, where exactly was home for people like him?

" Come!" Danushka whispered, stepping back one pace while opening the door completely, raising one arm, pointing it towards the room inside, where music rose and sliced through the dusk, creating the air and the space they both so desperately wanted.

" Thanks! Hey, nice place you got here!" Joey spoke with American deliberateness, strutting in with ease.

" Thank you for flower. It beautiful. Have seat, please!"

" Sure thing, thanks !"

" I glad you here!"

Danushka blushed. They both sat down. She on the edge of an armchair her knees squeezed tightly together, he sprawled out on the sofa, only now taking off his uniform cap. Then awkward silence, before Joey asked

" Mind if I smoke?"

He pulled out a badly wrinkled Lucky Strike, which gave Danushka a chance to admire his large, square, strong hands while he straightened out the package.

" You like tea? And cheese? And crackers? It Stil...Stil...Stilton! Very good!"

" Sure! Thanks. Say, what's your name again? I didn't get it last night, with all that racket going on!"

" Racket?" She instinctively reached for the small dictionary she always kept closely at hand.

" The music, the noise, last night!"

" Ah!" Danushka smiled, then repeating Joey " Racket. Nice Word!"

" So what's your name, honey?"

" Honey? My name not honey! My name Danushka!"

" Danushka...nice Russian name!"

Danushka blushed, then got up to get the tea she had been preparing and the crackers with the cheese, most of which Kathleen had left, ready to be served.

" Never met any Russians before..! Seen plenty of them, though. Through my binoculars, over in Berlin. Hey, will you be here for the Olympic Games? I think they're on in a year. The Americans are gonna beat the pants off the rest of the world. Remember Jesse Owens, before the war?"

Danushka was happy to let him do the talking. She had no idea to whom or to what Joey was referring, but it was music to her ears. She returned to the low table round which they sat, carrying a tray loaded perilously with a pot, cups, saucers, cream, sugar, slices of lemon, crackers, a large dish with Stilton Cheese and a special slicing knife. It was a far way from the melting snows towards the end of her trek. When she had taken a few, slow steps in her makeshift boots, to test the firmness of the ground. Then deciding to leave her unwieldy snowshoes forever behind. This tiniest of human dots, this minuscule, groping breathing, puzzled, puzzling girl, controlled by invisible strings from a distant farmhouse, continuing on and on, clambering over crevice and sliding beneath newly dripping branches. She, who stepped on wriggling purple-headed ice-worms, she who swatted furiously at the first ravenous black flies which had begun rising from the freshly soggy ground. Pulled, pushed, out of love and amazing loyalty to another being and his dreams, as if these dreams were her own. But she also had her doubts.

"So what!" she would sometimes think. Sure she knew about Lenin and about Marx, but she didn’t like all the slogans these men had invented, the empty streets and shops. Which is not surprising, what can one expect from a bearded thinker not even willing to liberate his maid, knocking her up, and then having Engels marry her to save his own marriage. At least that's what she had heard. And now Volodya was sending her precisely there, from where all those troubles had come. She loved him, but didn’t understand him at all.

" What's the matter, little sister? " he had said. " You haven't opened your mouth in days!"

Which was true enough, but only because she was afraid she would scream out sometimes, or go mad. Because how could he, the only person in the world who mattered to her, but who had become obsessed with the `brooding, murderous Georgian', with `the distorted dream', send her away from him? He had spoken of the hollow laughter round them, the cruel joke, the catastrophic hoax. But what about her? What about her dreams? What about the two of them? Why did he want to get rid of her, when she needed him for everything? Yet she also wanted him to be proud of her. So one day she could regain him. Out there, in the freezing night, it had propelled her onto her small, sore, scrambling feet again, to walk, walk for days, before, incredibly, and for the first time really starting to weaken just as finally it had started to get warmer. The moment she had become oblivious to the magnificence surrounding her, to the cry of the loon, the tiny impromptu cascades, the boundless expanse, the soft but boisterous breeze, the squatting beaver as she finished a huge circle up and then away from Murmansk and the White and Barents Sea. And this not the least because the black flies continued to feast on her, constantly and mercilessly settling on her gasping mouth and gaping, wheezing nostrils, her ears, her eyelids and moist brow. Even swallowing some, making her gag as she plodded onward, unstoppable, until some time later and in a strange alphabet she had read the words "SVENSKA" something or other, next to "KYRKA" on a white, wooden, belfry-ed Lutheran country church. It was the hour she reached Laimoluokta, on the shores of a glacial, frozen inland sea called Sornetrask, though she had no way of knowing this just then. But she did realize she had arrived in Sweden and this thought so overwhelmed her that she fainted, dead away. From exhaustion, from prolonged tension, from hunger and pure joy and when they found the exotic, dressed-in-layers, foul-smelling, angelic and small Russian girl, they carried her into the adjoining rectory where she was given warm soup and Lutfisk, cured in soda and slaked lime, and soon a soothing, slow, hot steaming bath as well.

And when the Swedes, with elongated faces Danushka had never seen before, looked at the enigmatic woman with the unseeing, bottomless look, with the glacier-blue eyes so common in Arctic women, some of whom, rumour has it, are one tenth Husky-dog, they tried to ask her who she was, where she came from, and if she had been alone. But all she would say was 'London', 'London', all over again. So that as soon as she got better they put her on a nineteen hour train to a city called Stockholm by way of Kiruna, accompanied by Nina, a buxom, middle-aged chaperon, who spoke Russian.

The speed and the efficiency of the move on orders from the Swedish Government which considered her escape an unusually sensitive matter, shocked Danushka. She had never experienced pace, speed and had no knowledge of precision and purpose. All she knew was deliberate inertia, studied slowness, false order, thicker than molasses through which movement was unpleasant but not particularly difficult, provided one never subversively quickened the pace.

After arriving in Stockholm, Danushka having slept the whole way, her head still spinning and a bit confused, inquired if the buildings before her and in the distance, the buildings which seemed to move round and round and looked like they would fall down on her, were in London. And all the waiting men had smiled. Later she was brought to a Ministry Building, not far from Drottningholm Palace, across the estuary from Gamlastan, the old Gas-town and heart of this island-floating capital. It had high ceilings and large brown desks, and people in khaki-coloured uniforms with ribbons and tassled lanyards of rank. But the mood there was different. The Swedes, triumphal and friendly at first, becoming more cautious. Danushka keeping hearing a word which sounded like a name and it kept coming out of nearly every mouth.

" Who is this Wallenberg? What does he have to do with me?" she asked her chaperon, who avoided her eyes. Whereupon she learned he was a heroic Swedish aristocrat, who had been taken to Russia after Budapest was `liberated', not long ago, disappearing after having rescued thousands of people of Karl Marx's tribe. From what she deduced the Commissars Volodya so thoroughly despised surely knew where this Raoul Wallenberg was. And Sweden wanted him back. Therefore it didn’t want those Commissars becoming angry because of her escape and so jeopardize their own hero's return.

One thing she didn’t know was that the Workers' Ambassador, who was the Slavs' endemic paranoia personified, and consequently deeply defensive, had demanded Danushka be turned over to his care. His spies quickly having found out about her, a startling case, and reinforcing his claim over her he had flashed two metallic teeth, courtesy of Soviet dentistry, while pounding his desk.

Few had ever escaped via the North, fewer still, solitary women her age, surely deranged, he claimed. Who else would possibly leave the Workers' Utopia, praised in the West only by a handful of leftist, French bistrot-intellectuals and eventually by a few infamous British upper-class traitors, in the end exposed, and becoming known as `moles'...But this side of the coin the Ambassador will almost certainly keep facing down.

"London!" Danushka kept repeating. "London!", to anyone who would listen to her. And fortunately, but unbeknownst to her, it was decided to keep her story out of the Svenska Dagbladet's pages, which appeased the Red envoy to whom propaganda or its nemesis, the truth, was of great concern in the world of new, simulated confrontation, baptised `Cold War' later. He made it clear he preferred warm, white Swedish bread, and the superb local vodka brand at the same time that Sweden concluded Danushka was too unimportant to be exchanged for Wallenberg. Whereupon they spirited her to England as a stateless person, acceding to Vladimir's and now her own wishes, under the convenient auspices of Henri Dunant's Swiss and red-crossed boys, who flew her in a rickety, terrifying military Dakota to old, no longer so perfidious Albion, where she landed at Northolt Airport and the people were noticeably poorer than in Sweden, but still threw imaginary flowers at their fine Prime Minister and their handsome King. And where she now served someone else's tea to an American she felt she knew, with small, nervously trembling hands.

" Thanks," Joey said, picking cheese from the platter and carefully downing tea for the first time in his life." So what are you doing here, in London? Where are your hosts?"

" They out!"

" How did you manage to unload them?", Joey grinned bluntly.

" Unload?"

" Yeah, unload. How did you do it?"

" Yeah, unload. How did you do it?" Danushka mimicked Joey innocently, cracking him up and making her blush as a result.

" Where's your Russian family?" he demanded to know.

" Your name Jou...Joe...Joey? Is right?"

" Right!"

" I have brother in Russia I love much, much..."

" And?"

" And?"

" And? Go on!"

" Ah, yes. Sorry. His name Vladimir! Volodya!"

" He all right? He good guy?" Joey was kidding her now.

" Guy?" She repeated, again reaching for her pocket dictionary.

" Yeah! A guy! A man! A good one? Even if he's Russian, even if he's red? Hell, what am I saying. I'm red, too! I'm an Indian brave, do you know that, can you see it?"

 Joey laughed, and Danushka joined in with laughter of her own, though she didn’t understand, just being happy for the first time in months.

" Eyes, face, skin, smile, hands....  All Vladimir!" Danushka blushed again and had spoken rapidly, pointing at every part of him, afraid she would bore him, but also uncomfortable with her own audacity.

" Danushka, I'm not much of tea guy. If you're my sister, if I'm your Vladimir, come over here and sit next to me!" Joey reached out for her, grinning. He realized he was pulling a bit of a Mrs. Monroe on her, but it didn’t bother him. What the hell, she liked him, she wanted him. What else would any soldier do? He pulled her out of the armchair and she went to sit next to him. It was the first time they touched and she shook like a leaf.

" You see this face, Danushka? You see these bullet holes in my cheeks? I'm one mean cat, Danushka. One mean animal. I'm part red-Indian, I gotta terrific sense of nature rushing through my veins. And d'yah know what this sense tells me, Danushka? That you're one wild creature yourself, with all that innocence of yours!"

And again Danushka didn’t get a word of what he said, yet she understood everything. The scent of him aroused her. A scent that few women would have realized was there, but most would have reacted to as well. It’s nature's communication that two creatures of the same species must join. In union. The edict of hundred's of thousands years on this earth. Until the day scent-free, sterile, man-made modern existence would kill these natural signals and mix up gender as well as the mind. It’s what worried savants everywhere would one day start writing about. But Danushka couldn’t have cared less. She reached out for his face and the pock-marked cheeks, his raw-boned jaw, then followed the contours of his small, graceful ears. She even checked out his teeth by putting her fingers to his mouth, and continued her journey reaching his military hair, which she stroked.

She partially undid his uniform tie, opened his grey shirt and made him take off his jacket, while getting rid of his cigarette. Whereupon these tortured, contorted, coiling children spoke no more. There was no need. Danushka kicked off her precious new shoes and Joey his hated ones. She opened his trouser-belt and he ran his racing, pulsing fingers up her outstretched blazing legs before she lay down, pulling him on top of her and all the doubts and loneliness and hunger and cold and worry and fear and hope, all her instincts, strengths, and desires burst out in one self-igniting rolling mass, after Joey ripped off her panties with the enormous and bottled up power of his own lousy, betrayal-ridden past.

And when they slumped she reached for him and wiped the remaining boiling seeds off him and over her belly, round her nipples and her mouth, bathing herself in him and her own embodied dreams. Then she licked him clean of sweat, the way the mare back at the farmhouse had licked her new born foal one day, cleansing it lovingly of its own placenta... And all the while she whispered Russian endearments which in turn he didn’t understand, but seemed to grasp. They hugged and hugged and she sobbed a little. He played with her hair, wondering what that warm feeling was he felt. And so they clung together, horrendously lonely and neglected cast-offs of two continents.

" Danushka!" he whispered on impulse. " Danushka what are you doing here? If you have nobody...one day....Will you come to America!"

It was an astonishing thing for him to say and one of the very few times in his entire life that Joey would give all of himself. But he did not, could not know that himself. And in the end it would make no difference, because he would never get to reach the natural end of his road. As for Danushka, she decided there and then to accept the offer, without thinking of the consequences, not knowing, nor immediately caring how she would be able to balance this, her tantalizing future, with her suddenly receding past. It was as if, inevitably, a veil had begun to gently cover Volodya's absent but until now omnipresent face.

                                               P A R T  I I

                                                          (LONDON II)

 " You bloo’y mur’ered them, di’in't you ?!"

Tommy had sent her cards, and drinks and beautiful flowers, her sultry derring-do, her taunting, sensuous songs enthralling him. But not least the way she controlled the rhythm of the music with her hips, her bust and pouting lips. Gypsy Rose could take lessons from her, and Tommy desired her boundlessly.

" Each time I was happily married... And do speak properly, my dear!" Eve said.

In fact she was truly saddened when she lost one of her quick-succession, aging husbands. They had given her affection, but above all what she most craved, which was limitless attention. She had felt protected, unchallenged in their arms and couldn’t understand why they had been taken away from her.

" Four husbands? In five years? All of them old? Just how much cash have you stashed away, ducky?"

If at this point Tommy didn’t sound like a man out to conquer a woman, it was because Eve had steadfastly cold-shouldered him, exasperating him, making him try to shock her into responding more favourably to his advances, But she had a tendency to treat her own body as a bit of a nuisance, wanting to down-play her own desirability. She often thought it was unreasonable having to be a woman, the daily farming of the body ---the nourishing, the pruning, the harvesting, the seasons, her swellings, the downpours, the protective gear; her role in this natural environment putting her off, that is the imposed musts, the may-nots and all the tiresome rest of them. Secondly, and much like Kathleen when she was younger, Eve generally didn’t much care for men Tommy's age. Though she did like his sense of urgency, his energy, but still there was this illustrated text-book type visual image of sex she had inherited from her mother, which with all its delights and challenges sometimes seemed such a messy and hopelessly un-elegant business. On days like that she simply shuddered picturing herself lying back and folded open, yet at other times the very memory of passion arousing her limitlessly.

Tommy's days of greasy nails from under the jacked up Morris car that Weatherby's garage used to race, were long gone. Jacky Weatherby had offered him a chance at something new, an automotive profession, while still allowing him to mercilessly pound his fists in the ring at night. It had been a difficult start, for Tommy knew absolutely nothing about cars, and Weatherby had turned out to be a most impatient man. But Tommy listened and Tommy studied and he done his level best because of the extra cash that came with it. 

 Twice a week he was permitted to leave the garage early, to do strenuous workouts at Nigel's gym...still thinking he could be a champ, but slowly getting different ideas, deciding to try and convince Jacky not to let him merely fix but actually race one of the cars! Indeed, the more he thought about it, the more the idea mesmerized him. An addiction to the smell of smoking tyres and burning exhausts taking hold of him: he couldn’t wait to relinquish body sweat, and two swollen, bandaged hands in favour of hot, turning rubber beneath his feet.

In Weatherby Tommy had found the erector of the wall he had been looking for, one to be forced up against and over it. All he still had to do was indicating his boss where to put it up. And fast! It also was no accident that early on Tommy would come to Soho for drinks, getting away from his own East-End. Even though he was still a very ordinary working stiff, a car mechanic at the time, he had already begun to develop a taste for better things, become envious of people who dressed better than him, spoke better than him, who could spend more than him, like the men who dropped by the garage and spoke with Weatherby about Monza and Le Mans. He promised himself he would live closer to this other world, never end up in a dank council-flat, like the old woman, his grandmother, and surely at the end of her day his randy mum as well. As it turned out Tommy quickly breaking into car-racing, and this by showing utter lack of emotion under pressure, a trait Jacky Weatherby much admired and had already noticed in the obliqueness of Tommy's vaguely bulging eyes. It was after they had started teaching him how to drive, then one day let him sit behind the wheel of a car with which they were competing. Weatherby reluctant at first, and sceptical, while watching Tommy tear along a small and private track. Tommy foolishly refusing to even wear the mandatory goggles he was handed, yet a novice driver proceeding to clock an astonishing time.

Chaps like them, for Jacky himself was also relatively young and very much a self-made man, had been too young by a whisker to go to war. Their elders, under arms, often failing to return from missions in Normandy, Sicily, the Atlantic, or somewhere else, or surviving but acquiring a taste for the military and deciding to stay on. Having become addicted to living on the edge, the moral authority it gave them, the good life it brought them, together with the inebriating incense frigates and guns, Lancasters and Shermans provided all day long. All of which opened up small holes in the super tight fabric and sacrosanct hierarchies of complex English Society ---for some it now becoming possible to enter Public school, the civil service, or go into banking, commerce or the stuff these boys had been doing, where previously they would have all been relegated to their respective holes.

Yes, Weatherby was lucky and by extension Tommy, too. Through the spinning of the wheel, literally, he would find himself somewhere near the edge of such a vacuum ---rich-brat racing-car drivers in very short supply at war's end. Enabling him to show that fearlessness, and shine so bright at races on obsolete airfields round London and soon as far away as Brands Hatch and Silverstone. Not that the racing of cars represented

big money then, but it captured the imagination of the public. And those engaged in it could make a big name for themselves. And a name, then as now, is everything.

Tommy quickly progressed from bending over or crawling underneath a greasy chassis to driving the great post-war machines competitively. Until one day, during a spill, he would fracture his arms and very nearly sever his spine, but, having quickly made that name for himself, he was able to carry on at the business end of this roaring world, which was slowly becoming more viable. The crash occurring in the newly divided Western and Federated part of Germany, at the Nürburg Ring, or Niebelungen Ring as some jested, which Tommy didn’t understand or he might have sworn `Gotterdammerung'! It was right after the historic show trials at nearby Nuremberg, at a time when the British Empire would be shrunk by a small, bald, bespectacled and pacifistic soon-to-be-assassinated dhoti-clad man. To be followed, west of the Indian Ocean, by large, coarse Afrikaners, who had long been dreaming of a totally White Christmas all their own. Indeed, both King and the Status Quo were not well. In fact within a few short years both would inexorably expire. All of which again somehow benefited many young men of Tommy's and Jacky's generation, allowing them to permanently penetrate the privacy of the still prim but weakened manor, seemingly defenceless now, vulnerable like maiden lost.

And few took more advantage of the situation, of the opening of doors previously tightly shut, than our boy. No more lunch pail, no more patched trousers for him, quickly becoming an invited fixture at chic Mayfair clubs, without for a moment neglecting to frequent the haunts of his former low-life. Going everywhere, with long, soft, wavy hair, that impervious look, and the slow-fast moving mouth covering up his gnawing sense of frailty ---there, where he could assuage rich old hands by speaking to them knowledgeably in softened-down cockney about financing fast, green English cars he would design. Cars holding their own against Italian Ferrari-red, French-blue or German-silver bullets that were usurping Britain's perceived mechanical engineering pre-eminence. He would persuade investors not to put their faith in good old Clement Attlee's high-tax, socialist, post-colonial Britain, but to fill his own pockets instead. And this to underwrite prototypes of turbine-powered cars that he promised to design but would never get off the verbal, proverbial drawing board, Tommy much preferring to pad several off-shore bank accounts and to entertain Eve, the upper-cast, young, four times widowed striptease artist and singer, rather stand-offish and mostly black chiffon dressed.

Tommy had become a real thief, at last. One born out of grub he could no longer stomach. Scaler of the first tangible wall he had encountered and Jacky Weatherby had erected for him. But in the end none were his friends, whence perhaps the dictum: never grant a poor man the light of day, or reckon with what later he'll do to you! Still, thieves not generally known for poor taste, Eve splendidly proving this, she, who wanted a companion who would stay for a while, not an excessively close one, but nonetheless one who had absolutely no intention to lie beneath a tombstone quite yet. It was the reason that besides any other consideration, she had finally consented to meet a very persistent young man, Tommy Stanton by name.

" Cash!? Ducky!? Now really! For your information, how much money I have is none of your bloody business!" she replied, snapping right back at him.

" How did you do them in? The four, dear departed ones? By arsenic?"

Tommy admired success, he admired cunning. He had grown to love danger and had made up his mind he was vaguely afraid of her.

" Yes! By arsenic and old lace around my thighs. Would you like a cup?"

Eve sensed Tommy's lingering wariness and decided to leave it that way. It would assure a certain distance, which she preferred. He would never dominate her, she would take his pleasure, much like acquiring a strong, pulling, human dog. A dog who gambled, a dog who fought, a dog who raided other gardens, who drove a car, who was obsessed with money but who knew how to spend it, too. A dog who could love her, love her roughly, once in a spell. One who might rule on occasion but one who would never reign, for Eve was the hereditary sovereign… of her own realm.

" I bet you I've got more money than you!"

" Oh, Tommy, don't be vulgar. What's mine is mine, what's yours is yours! Let's just leave it at that!"

" I reckon I have half a million by now..!"

" Good, then you can buy me dinner!"

Another reason she tolerated Tommy was that he too worshipped the night. And that she could meet him or speak with him at all hours. Once at midnight she went to a railway station, following another, a random and anonymous human being there, a man she had picked out of the crowd at Piccadilly Circus, and who travelled on foot at the time. She did it just to find out what happened on the other side of the night, what others were doing there. This man, who walked straight to his train compartment at Victoria Station, never looking away and where, facing the front of the train, he softly went to sleep just as soon as he sat down. And Eve had stood there discreetly beside the train, in amazement watching him. From between the odours of grease and of grime, and from between the vapours that rose from the track.

 Some consider the night a moment of death which they can enter at will, like walking into their kitchen or a bank. Others claim to love the night, to adore it, but in reality they are fearful of the dark, stalling to enter into it like surgery, waiting till the very last minute, and only when they have no other choice. Eve belonging to the latter group, had become addicted to that night. It was a period in her life when days were unfriendly and cold, in darkness where she really lived and ruled.

" John! John, there's someone at the door! I'm in the kitchen and my hands are wet...!"

" What is it, John? A registered letter? From who?"

" From our Eve, you said?"

" How very thoughtful of her! On our anniversary!"

John Warmond, impeccable gentry, implacable third generation engineer, native of Sutton-upon-Derwent, North Yorkshire, now living in Essex in bliss, just east of London, was a man who had been married, buried, for exactly twenty one years. This was no reflection on Ann, his indexing wife, a trained librarian who worked in a bookshop when she first met the shy, graduate student, who mumbled and blushed each time he required a text.

And when he didn’t need a book, he came by anyway, nearly every Saturday, just standing there, on the road, in front of the shop's bay window, peering through the glass for minutes on end. He was a handsome man, excruciatingly polite, and in line with his future profession, mechanically inclined. It would have been easier for everyone if long-sheltered John had not had such difficulty in finding his tongue. But luckily, Ann, having learned to speak to complete strangers in the shop, there had one over on him.

" My goodness, Mr Warmond!" she had said, " You can't go home in this dreadful weather. You look cold and you’re wet. You were standing there, outside the window for nearly an hour. It is New Year's day, the shop’s closing early...Won't you dry yourself and have a cup of tea with mother and me? We live just up the road!"

All John would need in life was a sort of dust-free, noise-free, optimum-temperature quarantine zone, much like the one in the weapons establishment laboratory, where he would later be employed. Not that there was a war going on just then, in fact the Great One, the war to end them all, WWI, had barely been concluded. But there was the Empire for a while yet to be concerned about and weapons remained a wonderful export item, for small killings, tiny repressions, nothing like the war that was, or the ones still to come. Ann on her part not overly excited about living with her mother suspected she was missing out on something strong. Like what struck her about the lives she read about in the shop, intriguing her endlessly even though she wouldn’t always understand them. And though she never had the nerve to ask anyone about those private matters, she had somehow mustered the intuitive courage to open up a dialogue with the awkward, handsome lad, again and again showing up before her.

It was word by word, smile by timid smile, gesture by small gesture that Ann started to teach John how to court her in a proper fashion, how to dress less eccentrically and how to walk beside her after she closed the shop and he accompanied her to the letter box round the corner. She wasn’t particularly worldly, had been protected too, though from a much more modest background. But she had been an avid student of the early cinema. In fact she taught herself how to swim in the Derwent by imitating the swimming strokes of Johnny Weissmuller in his many Tarzan movies. And it had worked quite well for her. For although, and by comparison, she remained a very pale Jane to his apeman, she actually managed to swim quite nicely in less than a year. Not that this mattered now. But what did turn out to be of vital importance was that besides those mild adventure movies, her outlook was really influenced by watching the elitist and melodramatic drawing-room pieces on the silent cinema screens of the day. Because it lead, one year after their first tea, to Ann proposing that John propose to her in the exact same theatrical fashion she had read in the captions, on those screens, words and a style that John Warmond mimicked to perfection barely thirty minutes later, if not less. Their engagement brief and every Tuesday evening Ann teaching John how to lie on top of her, which by contrast she had seen in illustrated books that were hidden in the bookstore's darkest, most distant corners. It would be John's appointed hour. First he would leave Ann's tiny house, but wait below in the garden, that clever, randy little devil, and then, as soon as Ann's mother had retired and thought to be sound asleep, Ann would steal down the stairs and let the brilliant lover back in and walk him silently, nervously to the sofa in her living room. Besides going swimming alone in the Derwent, it was the boldest act Ann would ever perpetrate and afterwards give her many pangs of guilt, but then again, that’s what pangs are for. As for John, nobody knows how he really felt then, or at any other time.

In spring they were married and couldn’t believe their happiness. Ann's mother cried, and the Vicar smiled as they were both apt to do. John's parents had entertained some reservations, thinking Ann a trifle `peasantine', pronouncing that non-existent word in a slow, French and literary sort of fashion. But in the end they were forced to admit that their subdued, stuffed puppy would not likely do better, therefore finally agreeing to the match.

Exactly on New Year's Day, a year later, in their thatched cottage, Eve was born. She had a lovely complexion and a determined little face. Her arrival assured, because the directions in her mother's illustrated books, let it be recorded, spot on in their descriptions of how to perform the sex act, and what would result from it. So that Ann, without her and John realizing it, had given birth to New Year's Eve. Which was a play on words that would escape neither Tommy nor Joey, after fate would throw the three of them up in the wind, bang up against each other, in Paris, twenty odd years later and so provoke their separate laughter, just like `Eve Dropping', or was it `Eve Dipping', would knows?

Eve had not noticed Tommy right away in the club where she now sang, and danced professionally. He started trying to get closer to her by tipping the members of the band, something few ever did, and which was a clever move. Because it had them talking about him all the time and Tommy knew club musicians gossip like old maids. The only gamble he took was if she were married to one of them. But from the hat-check girl he found out about the four husbands, every single one of them, because they used to briefly, very, very briefly, too briefly, frequent the place.

Eve didn’t think Tommy was in any way remarkable. And certainly not in the subdued lights of the club, which made most people look pretty much alike. But then there was the scuffle, when Tommy got into an argument, about her as it turned out. He had got up and walked slowly to a table where he silently grabbed a man by his shirt after that man had loudly shouted Hey, that's not singing! That's snarling, for Christ's sake!, which Eve hadn’t even heard. In the end Tommy knocking the man down and both getting removed from the velvet den, with Tommy returning instantly, a hand bleeding still, but not too scraped to generously bribe the bouncer, allowing him back in straight away.

This incident had pleased Eve in a certain, amusing sort of way. Young women of a relatively good background, of decent breeding, of articulated consonants and despite their follies, though seldom admitting it, and while hiding behind a divine sense of distance, very often get drawn to the more basic man, to the rawer side of life. After all, what was Eve doing, performing in that place, stripping while singing, if not for a very peculiar reason? A twist of life, resulting not just from her father's voluntary and exquisite burial inside his own marriage, but also from his dedication to his work designing barometric explosives detonators, capable of blowing an aircraft out of the sky. Not unlike a ship hitting a mine, but this one through a loaded mailbag, a crew meal box or a stowed trunk and a father so busy that he wouldn’t even allow his only child to interfere with his work and other habits that stank. Like his six-thirty morning shit, locking the door to their only bathroom for an hour, until his seven-thirty porridge would arrive, followed by kippers, or the tuning in to the BBC eight o'clock morning news.

It is difficult to assess here why one thing would lead to the other. Why Eve was excluded from his life, and from her mother's life as well. It is just as difficult to fully know what John did with all his newscasts, his Times obituary pages which at times seemed to suggest that in London only Lords die. By way of consolation, even though these nobles passed on at an uncommonly mature age, everyone else, by never ever getting mentioned in print, evidently enjoying eternal life.

Amid this unruffled precision Eve's mother, Ann, thought it only proper to abandon her films and her books and most everything else she stood for, to turn herself into a castrata, at least that is how Eve later described her, modern Italian language classes proudly paying off. It so becoming clear to Eve that the death of passion is a personal tragedy, and a lifestyle she wouldn’t want to emulate. Not an amazing realization considering that without an alternative it would be her destiny to become a sort of houseplant, odourless, unquestioning, silent, and meek.

Despite their daughter's early misgivings, John and Ann enjoyed a perfect union, not one of discord or tension in the least. In fact the only minor irritant, the only hint of disturbance, of interference with their private lives, the minutest of impingements on their exceptional happiness was probably the birth and then the annoyingly lengthy childhood of Eve, their very own child.

Eve sat next to Tommy as they drove down Regent Street toward Trafalgar Square. It was crowded, filled with turbans and saris, ceremonial daggers, with Ghurkhas and their watchful eyes. London was still the centre of the earth and the buskers knew it, performing for the throngs and for a petite Russian girl, walking by with her adoptive English mother, Kathleen, at that precise moment. These street performers singing badly and chased away by Bobbies as they seldom had permits for work of this kind, dressing in tails or shaving their scalps as Mohicans, juggling, jumping and dancing. Also fighting among themselves for a queue, an audience, a crowd, before coming round for money with their caps. And then, noticing her rapture, Danushka got blown a kiss by the clowns, even though her wide blue eyes had first shown them a certain fright: a simple matter of fear of the unknown; she had never seen clowns before, to her they represented a laughing threat. Clowns most vital, left their slapstick but never a last word, representing man’s deep desire to remain innocent, a child forever, protected by a higher force. She was still clapping when Tommy zipped by below the square. He had just bought a new roadster, splinter-proof windows, gone the yellow mica of earlier sports cars. He was showing his wheels off to Eve, who asked him:

" What do you do for a living, Tommy?"

" I kill my victims, too!" he replied. " But differently, that's all!"

" You mean by letting them live? How benign, how terribly boring!"

Eve had found out a few details about Tommy's past, the mother, the grandmother, the gym, the racing, the rise, the accident, but knew nothing about his schemes. As for herself, she had told him very little about North Yorkshire and Essex, her parents and the rest. But one day when she had felt low she told him, “You know, there's something to be said for mothers eating their young, instead of doing what they did to us,” quickly adding “We're so close to Greenwich here and zero time, perhaps we weren't meant to exist!”

She remembered how relieved John and Ann Warmond had been when the time had come for her to go off to boarding school. She had no fond memories to speak of and in those miserable surroundings began constructing a life by asking to wear the clothes of other girls, at night, transforming here into another child. She took it in stride, children are so gallant sometimes. But when it became too much she would climb to the top of a very tall tree and look into the misty distance in preparation of becoming a renegade: spontaneous and natural, refusing to be suppressed much longer. Her first menstruation came unexpectedly and coincided with the beginning of fifth form. She panicked when it occurred and telephoned her mother who told her to stay in the dormitory, assuring her she would ring up her head-mistress. But Eve, not knowing what was happening to her body wanted her mother to fetch her or at the very least to stay with her--- mother was very polite, not far at all, but refused to come out.

And it was after another one of these genteel, emotional rejections, after all the years of enigmatic parental ostracism she suffered, that an early version of a human hydrogen bomb exploded. The day that Eve shouted an obscenity at her mother, one she had just picked up from Leilah, her best friend, before slamming down the telephone ---You know, mother, you can go and fuck yourself! After which she would only go home during holidays, the weeks the boys in the small town soon started to take note of her stunning body. Regrettably none of them perceiving her wounded heart which she kept well hidden, while smoking with them, in the park.

It was soon after that she started inhaling and drinking and learnt exotic dancing from Leilah, who hailed from Lebanon. It was with her she would sneak out of a dormitory window and hitchhike to the nearest nightclub, getting back just before daybreak, reeking remarkably. It was there she got the attention she craved. It was there she met the father she never had, a barrister, a kind, older man who watched over her, who protected her, treating her warmly. And it was for him that she soon mainly danced.

He had a rollicking laugh, which he employed beautifully. Particularly when she began to strip, showing off her Betty Grable black silk-stocking-ed legs, milk-white skin and exuberant, youthful breasts. Her school haircut, her dirty nails from climbing the vined walls, her knee, showing up bruised when bare, only served to excite the lewd crowds, though not her elderly beau, who shook his head. She looked ridiculous of course, but could not, would not stop, not unless it was to drop dead.

Naturally this man became Eve's surrogate father who took her home with him one night preparing her a sumptuous dinner. He was an honourable chap and let her sleep in a warm guestroom upstairs. But an hour later she came back down, looking for his bedroom where she sat down beside him, he already sound asleep. But when she stroked his hair and cuddled up beside him, he woke within minutes and lovingly deflowered her.

Eve managed to graduate somehow, and secretly married the barrister until one day he suddenly died. She, a widow in her teens, abruptly re-confronted with the loneliness that she had abandoned, until a short time later, when she married his best friend, giving this chap a year of happiness, too. Until he left this world in a fashion all his own, and she married his friend, and his friend, too…

Eve was truly saddened but had a tidy sum in the bank and still many lives before her, so to speak. Her parents were aware of none of this, grateful she was studying so hard that she could no longer come home.

" What's the letter all about, John?"

" It's from Lloyd's of London? A copy of a certificate?"

" To do with Eve? We are her beneficiaries? That's nice. She insured her  WHAT....... Did you say her BREASTS?"

" Against professional risks, did you say ? What on earth does that mean, dear ?"

" A dancer? She's become a dancer, you said?!"

" Oh, John...."

" A dancer, in a club, a club in London....oh, John, what will people say...!"

" John, do we deserve this, after all that we gave her, after all we did for her!"

" Oh, John....!"

Eve turned her head towards Tommy, the half-face she saw in the car glowed faintly in the setting sun. She thought of Leilah who taught her how to dance. She had gone to Geneva and married a diplomat who worked for a new United Nations agency there. They had kept in touch by mail. Telephones were still not very functional and rare. Eve didn’t like to write back, only mailing short notes at dawn after she had been up the whole night. And now Leilah had left her husband and returned to the Middle East. Her first letters from Beirut were filled with a sense of relief. But lately they had become crowded with expressions of nagging doubt. She wrote Eve about how her husband had the good sense to make her resent him for his endless litany of insults, forcing her to do the dirty work of leaving him. And how she since found out that he did it on purpose and how, even though she was the one who break off, she was left with a towering feeling of rejection which she was likely to carry with her for a long, long time.

" Come to Lebanon, Eve!" Leilah pleaded with her." I know you're not happy. It is so quiet here. Druze, Jew, and Maronite live in peace together between mountain and sea, coriander growing everywhere. Celebratory ululating fills the nights. Just what you are looking for! Isn't it you who doesn't quite know how to pass through them?! Come! There’s beauty and harmony all around. Unlike those European fratricides and the one in Palestine, just south of here! P.S. I have a utility boyfriend. I seem to intimidate him, for now at least. And even though he's built like a brick Shi'ite house. Kisses. L.!"

Eve looked at Tommy and wondered how she would go about leaving him one day, almost in the same way an American ex-soldier and her own future lover in Paris would look sideways at a sweet Russian girl in New York one day. She had warned Tommy that theirs was nothing but a passing affair, which could last for years, but would pass all the same, as most must. She specifically told him not to even entertain the thought that she belonged to him. That there was not and never would be any degree of exclusivity.

It was strange. Eve couldn’t divine how their relationship would unfold, only that probably it wouldn’t end like her four marriages, given Tommy's age. And one thing was certain, she would never stand for the rejection Leilah had suffered, never again. Not after what she had gone through with her parents, in her early years. So that she, exactly like Joey, elsewhere, much later, would be compelled to make the first move. Defeating defeat before it would consume her, an irrational but understandable and tragic conclusion that is lodged in far too many hearts. But then she couldn’t know how everything would take care of itself. End violently, in Paris. Resulting in the familiar, old, cold way...

" Where would you like to have dinner?" Tommy asked, noticing Eve was staring at him in a most peculiar way.

" I think I want to go home," she suddenly announced. " Sorry, I don't feel well!"                   

Tommy shrugged his broad shoulders. It wasn’t the first time Eve’s mood had changed radically. He thought it had something to do with her being a performer. Who else would have one breast tattooed? He though it was a birthmark at first. Until the day that he was allowed to touch it, it was very small, it was in the form of a lily. After the first flower she had ever received, from her first husband. Tommy had become privy to that secret the first late, late night she had come home with him at Sheppards Bush, where he now lived in adjoining flats, beside his aging grandmother. It was seven o'clock in the morning, Eve and he too tired to make love. But that had been the whole point....

And yet, it hadn’t been the first time someone had noticed Eve's tattoo. The other one a reporter, asking if he could photograph it, write a story about her. He had noticed the lily with a pair of theatre binoculars when she was stripping, one night at the club. It was the time Eve got the wicked idea to insure her breasts with Lloyd's, both the tattooed and the unblemished one. Since everybody suddenly made such a damned fuss about such an insignificant decoration. Why men were like that she would never understand. But it made good copy, tremendous publicity. The article not a bust, not at all, business at the club booming as a consequence and  ensuring her shaken parents got stopped dead cold in the street and could no longer go shopping, not even for food and quickly die of scurvy, she hoped.

Tommy grinned. He remembered reading the story. It was only sometime later that he would actually meet her. He shook his head even now. Insane, murderous, rich, beautiful bitch. Just what the doctor had ordered.

" What's so damn funny?" Eve asked.

" None of your business! Are you coming up to my place?"        

" You can go to hell, as far as I'm concerned!"

                                     P A R T  I I I

                                    (NEW YORK)  

It doesn’t matter in Hoboken, but there was a time in England when some would simply call the gardener by his family name, like Jones, or if he was particularly submissive, Jonesy. As in ‘I say, have you planted the petunias yet? Good man, Jonesy!’. Or if the master was queer, ‘I say Rutherford, would you come up to my quarters and place your hands on my genitals?’

Of course Jones, and do let’s stick with him, would have a Christian name, be honest, industrious, have a wife and children, and allowed to attend the same services. Though once there, he would be relegated to the back pews with the vicar’s condescending nod. Then one bright day, for the sake of emancipation and particularly in manored, mannered areas, it became the norm to call him Mister Jones, suggesting that perhaps he was human after all. But this attempt at equality of course could not go uncontested, so that fairly soon the elevated started calling each other, their peers and nominal superiors, such as Ministers of the Crown or Archbishops, without the ‘Mister’, and only by their family name. After all, Churchill, we can't address you the same way we do Mr. Jones, our gardener, can we? Whot? Whot? Which goes to prove there always is a way out, and that when feelings of entitlement are strong enough, any game can be rigged at will. Though not in New Jersey, Umlauff might self-confidently insist.

But the whole issue got really off the track when Cesar Ritz started dressing his bartenders and waiters in morning coats and formal, black bow-ties. It drove the elite out of their minds. And those other chaps, Chaplin, and Laurel and Hardy, wreaking absolute havoc with their bowler hat. All of them contributing to putting respectable dress in a death-knell and even Astaire's top-hat and tuxedo in the movies, later, quite unable to revive one of these visible marks of distinction: though male, class elegance the last thing on Herbert Umlauff’s mind.

So that soon certain upper-crust types in their quiet desperation really went overboard and starting to wear rolled up, woollen, marine watch-caps on their windy boulevards, just to stay ahead of the game. Others among the high and the mighty simply giving up, caving in to the great, the omnipresent, the most vulgar neck-tie. The one that bank employees like Herbie wore. Because Americans do things differently, appearing to have no dress code or family names at all, calling each other exclusively by their given names, that on top of everything else get abbreviated, with them the only way to tell a Dick from a dick by closely looking at him or shaking him, in the end…

There exist of course as many social levels in America as anywhere else, only these levels and their barriers are hazier, more mobile, making naive people like Herbert Umlauff walk around, unwisely, with a false sense of security, an air of self-importance and an outlook to match.

Jones, at least, knowing exactly where he stands, or shall we say, sits. But Umlauff, really in much in the same position, believes he’s in full control of his station, when he’s nothing of the kind and the doubt here, who in the long run is better off: old British Jones or Herbie Umlauff from east ‘Jersey, on the Hudson west river side?

Nell, Umlauff's more than plump wife, asked the bedraggled young man with the strange clothes to wait at the door. He had no name whatsoever, for legally he didn't exist. Furthermore, at this moment in his life, he couldn’t have cared less about the comparative merits of two cultures he barely knew. He was down and he was out, and Nell had seen that fast! Could she bring him a nice, warm cup of coffee? No it wasn't a problem, no problem at all. She had bought a new product, which could be prepared instantly, wouldn't take more than a second. It was invented in Switzerland where they could hide the entire population under the mountains in case of war. For who was going to take chances with Austrian eunuchs, like that Hitler feller, again. God only knows how many others like him, pocket-comb moustache and all, they still had walking around Vienna or Braunau. Yeah, didn't he know? Hitler had been bitten by a billy-goat when he was a child. In the pants that is, if he knew what she meant. It was why he had turned out to be such a strange and cruel man. And many studying the news reels from those days, would agree with the woman. With the help of her unseen son able to look through the near hypnotic, snarling, growling exhortations of the man, seeing for the first time perhaps that he walked funny… Often even paling beside the stride of assorted generals and SS types, grim, fierce-looking, determined, arms stretched up and out in their inimitable Nazi fashion, the Fuhrer answering with his own, casual, bent, limp salute. As if he was on his way to some girl-scout camp... Anyway, imagine the anguish of not having a thing like other men costing millions their lives, the fat lady said. Because, yeah, Eisenhower apparently was impotent, too! Funny, wasn't it, those two fighting over the world, both of them, sorta inadequate..! Just like that little Goebbels guy, with his rallies, his torch-lights, his forests of swastikas, his scorched earth and his death camps, all because of a dumb little club-foot. At least that's how her son Leon saw it, such a smart boy. Did he, Manolo, know all this? Isn't he Swiss like that powdered coffee of hers, he sure didn't sound like he’s from `Jersey…? Hadn’t he noticed that stiff, completely inappropriately dressed Neville Chamberlain, wearing his 19th century striped trousers and morning coat as if he was going to a wedding, being sadly passé and out of his league when confronting the new savage from Munich. Failure predetermined by a ridiculous frock from another century? The beast that only normal, confident, relaxed giants like Roosevelt and Churchill could and would tame, the beast that he had let run free? The others dressing the modern, the unadorned way, attired just like Harry Truman, later, clothing thereby not only making the man, but seemingly deciding victory and defeat, and life and death?

Nell stopped dispensing her son's wisdom at last and just soon enough, for Manolo was about to collapse, right there, in front of her, on her Hoboken weather-beaten porch. She was in a generous mood. Her husband Herbie home, sitting in the kitchen, so that it wasn't as if she was taking a chance by speaking to him, this stranger at the door. Oh, Herbie would growl all right and ask her why she did such a dumb thing, getting involved with a weirdo at her door, one who could pull a gun on them. She knew exactly what Herbie was going to say, but she was going to ask him anyway!

" Wait!", she told Manolo. " It'll only take a moment! I'll be right back!"

" Herbie, there's this young man out there...!"

" Oh, really, Nell?" Herbie was already annoyed. He, too, knew what was coming. And he had just started handicapping the afternoon horses on his racing form. It was spread out over the entire kitchen table. What would she have done if he hadn’t been home? Shit! This was Saturday and the day already half gone. It was his only real time off, besides Sundays when absolutely nothing went on. Some banks closed the entire Saturday, but natural­ly not his Savings and Loan. He had gone and worked from nine to twelve today, and now his wife stood squarely in front of him, annoying him with some sob story, as usual.

" What's he selling, Nell?"

" I think he's gonna drop unless we give him something to eat!" 

" Oh, Nell....We all gotta drop one day....! How much? How much

  is it gonna cost us this time?"

" He's got this sailor's bag. And he's got this old brush in his hand. And he's askin' if he can paint something, in exchange for a bite to eat… Po­or kid, looks like such a mess, Herbie! My, you should see his eyes... I think if the good Lord dropped in on us right now...."

" He would have eyes just like that? I know, Nell, I know...! But He wouldn't come out here to paint, baby! He'd be comin' to GET you... And so’s this one, if we don't watch out...!"

" Oh, no, Herbie. This kid's hungry, and thirsty, and he wants to work. He limps bad, too! Musta had an accident or somethin'... Anyway, whether you like it or not, I'm gonna feed him some!"

" I know that, Nell! I knew that the minute you walked in. You can't look a stray cat in the eye without gettin' all gooey, startin' dotin' all over him!"

There are 300 more pages to this novel, but these will give you a taste........

Part IV is set in Paris