"I'm very good at my work."

"It's science, isn't it?"

"Biology. Research."

Then the laboratories would persist; the flat became perhaps a four-room flat in the Krasnoy suburbs; two children, no abortions, two-week vacations in summer in the mountains, then the hydrogen bomb. Or no hydrogen bomb. It made no difference.

"What do you do research on?"

"Certain molecules. The molecular structure of life."

That was strange, the structure of life. Of course he was talking down to her; things are not briefly described, her father had said, when one is talking of life. So he was good at finding out the molecular structure of life, this fellow whose wordless cry she had heard faintly from congested lungs, from the dark neighborhood and approaches of his death; he had called out and "Poor child," her mother had whispered, but it was she who had answered, had followed him. And now he brought her back to life.

"Ah," she said, still not lifting her head, "I don't understand all that. I'm stupid."

"Why did they name you Bruna, when you're blonde?"

She looked up startled, laughed. "I was bald till I was ten months old." She looked at him, seeing him again, and the future be damned, since all possible futures ever envisaged are – rusty sinks, two-week vacations and bombs or collective fraternity or harps and houris – endlessly, sordidly dreary, all delight being in the present and its past, all truth too, and all fidelity in the word, the flesh, the present moment: for the future, however you look at it, contains only one sure thing and that is death. But the moment is unpredictable. There is simply no telling what will happen. Kasimir came in with a bunch of red and blue flowers and said, "Mother wants to know if you'd like milk-toast for supper."

"Oatbread, oatbread," Bruna sang arranging the cornflowers and poppies in Stefan's water-glass. They ate oats three times a day here, some poultry, turnips, potatoes; the little brother Antony raised lettuce, the mother cooked, the daughters swept the big house; there was no wheat-flour, no beef, no milk, no housemaid, not any more, not since before Bruna was born. They camped here in their big old country house, they lived like gypsies, said the mother: a professor's daughter born in the middle class, nurtured and married in the middle class, giving up order, plenty, and leisure without complaint but not giving up the least scruple of the discriminations she had been privileged to learn. So Kasimir for all his gentleness could still hold himself untouched. So Bruna still thought of herself as coming next after Kasimir, and asked about one's family. So Stefan knew himself here in a fortress, in a family, at home. He and Kasimir and Bruna were laughing aloud together when the father came in. "Out," Dr Augeskar said, standing heroic and absolute in the doorway, the sun-king or a solar myth; his son and daughter, laughing and signalling child-like to Stefan behind his back, went out. "Enough is enough," Augeskar said, auscult-ing, and Stefan lay guilty, smiling, child-like.

The seventh day, when Stefan and Kasimir should have taken bus and train back to Krasnoy where the University was now open, was hot. Warm darkness followed, windows open, the whole house open to choruses of frogs by the river, choruses of crickets in the furrows, a southwest wind bearing odors of the forest over dry autumn hills. Between the curtains billowing and going slack burned six stars, so bright in the dry dark sky that they might set fire to the curtains. Bruna sat on the floor by Stefan's bed, Kasimir lay like a huge wheatstalk across the foot of it, Bendika, whose husband was in Krasnoy, nursed her five-month-old firstborn in a chair by the empty fireplace. Joachim Bret sat on the windowsill, his shirtsleeves rolled up so that the bluish figures OA46992 were visible on his lean arm, playing his guitar to accompany an English lute-song:

Then, since he liked to sing praise and blame of love in all the languages he knew and did not know, he began to strum out "Plaisir d'Amour," but came to grief on the shift of key, while the baby was sat up to belch loudly causing merriment. The baby was flung aloft by Kasimir while Bendika protested softly, "He's full, Kasi, he'll spill." – "I am your uncle. I am Uncle Kasimir, my pockets are full of peppermints and papal indulgences. Look at me, whelp! You don't dare vomit on your uncle. You don't dare. Go vomit on your aunt." The baby stared unwinking at Bruna and waved its hands; its fat, silky belly showed between shirt and diaper. The girl returned its gaze as silently, as steadily. "Who are you?" said the baby. "Who are you?" said the maiden, without words, in wonder, while Stefan watched and faint chords in A sobbed joyously on Bret's guitar between the lighted room and the dark dry night of autumn. The tall young mother carried the baby off to bed, Kasimir turned off the light. Now the autumn night was in the room, and their voices spoke among the choruses of crickets and frogs on the fields, by the streams. "It was clever of you to get sick, Stefan," said Kasimir, lying again across the foot of the bed, long arms white in the dusk. "Stay sick, and we can stay here all winter."

"All year. For years. Did you get your fiddle fixed?"

"Oh yes. Been practicing the Schubert. Pa, pa, poum pah."

"When's the concert?"

"Sometime in October. Plenty of time. Poum, poum – swim, swim, little trout. Ah!" The long white arms sawed vaguely a viol of dusk. "Why did you choose the bass viol, Kasimir?" asked Bret's voice among frogs and crickets, across marshbottoms and furrows, from the windowsill. "Because he's shy," said Bruna's voice like a country wind. "Because he's an enemy of the feasible," said Stefan's dark dry voice. Silence. "Because I showed extraordinary promise as a student of the cello," said Kasimir's voice, "and so I was forced to consider, did I want to perform the Dvorak Concerto to cheering audiences and win a People's Artist award, or did I not? I chose to be a low buzz in the background. Poum, pa poum. And when I die, I want you to put my corpse in the fiddle case, and ship it rapid express deep-freeze to Pablo Casals with a label saying 'Corpse of Great Central European Cellist.'" The hot wind blew through the dark. Kasimir was done, Bruna and Stefan were ready to pass on, but Joachim Bret was not able to. He spoke of a man who had been helping people get across the border; here in the southwest rumors of him were thick now; a young man, Bret said, who had been jailed, had escaped, got to England, and come back; set up an escape route, got over a hundred people out in ten months, and only now had been spotted and was being hunted by the secret police. "Quixotic? Traitorous? Heroic?" Bret asked. "He's hiding in the attic now," Kasimir said, and Stefan added, "Sick of milk-toast." They evaded and would not judge; betrayal and fidelity were immediate to them, could not be weighed any more than a pound of flesh, their own flesh. Only Bret, who had been born outside prison, was excited, insistent. Prevne was crawling with agents, he went, even if you went to buy a newspaper your identification was checked. "Easier to have it tattooed on, like you," said Kasimir. "Move your foot, Stefan." – "Move your fat rump, then." – "Oh, mine are German numbers, out of date. A few more wars and I'll run out of skin." – "Shed it, then, like a snake." – "No, they go right down to the bone." – "Shed your bones, then," Stefan said, "be a jellyfish. Be an amoeba. When they pin me down, I bud off. Two little spineless Stefans where they thought they had one MR 64100282A. Four of them, eight, sixteen thirty-two sixty-four a hundred and twenty-eight. I would entirely cover the surface of the globe were it not for my natural enemies." The bed shook, Bruna laughed in darkness. "Play the English song again, Joachim," she said.