“The young people don’t come anymore?”
She doesn’t know, it appears. She is distracted.
“I think so, I don’t really know.”
Her stare is always empty, her voice always flat.
“You could kill them one by one,” she says slowly, “in the Nazi gas chambers.”
“Yes. But not anymore. There aren’t any chambers anymore. Anywhere.”
“No. No, here you get the labor camp or a quick death.”
“Yes.”
Her blue eyes slash always in the direction of the road. She says:
“It wasn’t these Jews here in those gas chambers.”
“No, it was others.”
“Others,” she pauses, “but the same name: Jews.”
“Yes. We wanted that.”
She asks nothing more.
He looks at the bare walls, the white road white with frost, the darkened park beyond.
“It was his house,” he says.
“Yes. And there’s a park. There. And in the park there are dogs.”
Her gaze comes back to the space in front of them.
She gestures toward the back of the house that opens onto the park. “There’s this room that looks out on the park, the other you came from. If you try to run away, I’ll call out to David. David will wake up and he’ll kill you.”
He smiles. She says:
“That’s the way, here in Gringo’s houses in Staadt. They shoot, they kill. Unless we tell them that they don’t have the right, then they don’t have the right. Before it would take a little longer.”
“And whose territory are we in now?”
“The one who is the strongest. During the night that would be Gringo.”
“And in the day it’s the merchants.”
“Yes,” she says. “Before, a long time before Gringo.”
Abahn gets up, he walks back and forth across the room, going and coming, and then he sits near the Jew, on the opposite side of the table from him. She joins them. She sits with them. They look at the Jew. She talks, is quiet some more, talks again.
“He didn’t know where to go when he came here. He came here because he didn’t have anywhere else to go. He’s been here for a few days already, waiting for us. The merchants were also looking to get rid of him, as you see.”
“Yes.”
She looks at Abahn for a long time.
“And you?”
“I came to Staadt now, tonight.”
“By chance?”
“No.”
Silence. She is still focused on him.
“You’re alone as well?”
“Yes. With the Jews.”
He smiles. She does not return his smile. It is almost as if she doesn’t see it. She says:
“This house is being confiscated by the merchants, the park, too. Not because of the dogs; we don’t know what will happen to them. They find it hard to adjust to a new master. We don’t know what to do with them.”
“Maybe. Did the Jew have anything to say about it?”
“Not yet.”
He looks at her more intensely.
“Did you ask him that question?”
“Which one?”
“About what is going to happen to the dogs?”
She turns toward the dark park.
“Maybe later,” she says, “later in the night.”
David shifts in his chair. He opens his eyes.
Then falls asleep again. Abahn says:
“David wakes up when we talk about the dogs?”
“Yes. You guessed it.”
The same slowness creeps into their voices. He asks:
“Why did you let me in? For what?”
She says quickly:
“You came in.”
“Why did you speak to me?”
“You spoke to me.”
Abruptly his glare flares, then subsides.
“You’re not afraid of anything,” he says. “Nothing.”
Silence. He regards her slim form, erect, alert. Her half-lidded stare. She listens out the window: the dogs are barking.
Far, in the direction she listens, that of the setting sun, the dogs are barking. Muted but numerous.
The barking ceases. He asks:
“Are you afraid now?”
“Not as much.”
“You’re not afraid for yourself?”
“No.” She pauses, considers. “Not fear.”
He waits. She is thinking. She finds what she wants to say:
“It’s to be suffered.”
“Badly?”
She considers again:
“No. In full.”
They fall silent.
•
She gets up. She walks toward David. She gestures toward Abahn. She speaks in a low tone. “They know each other a little, David and the Jew.”
She is listening to the sounds of Staadt outside.
“I think they are still coming.”
She turns in the direction of the frost-covered road, pauses.
“You said they knew David a little?”
“Yes. Some people knew him. David may have forgotten, but they knew him.” She pauses again. He says nothing. She turns to him.
“What did you say?”
“Nothing.”
They look at one another.
He asks:
“Who are you?”
She focuses on him, his intense gaze, interrogating.
“I don’t know,” she says.
His stare bores into her.
“I mean to him—who are you to him?”
She shrugs. She does not know anymore.
“Are you his wife?”
“Yes.”
“Are you his mother?”
She does not answer. She is thinking.
“You’re not his mother?”
“He wishes I were his mother.”
“You don’t want that?”
“No.”
The Jew raises his head. She sees him. For a long while she looks at him. Then she goes to sit down next to him again. She is quiet the whole time. Then she speaks to him in even tones: