Her glass was empty and she was watching me, the shock still dull in her stone blue eyes, their quickness blunted.

'Are we useful to you?'

She wanted to know why I’d gone to the trouble of getting her a new karta.

'Not really.'

'If we can be useful, tell us.'

'All right.'

She gave a little nod and was still again. I could have learned something from this woman, from her ability to sit like this, her calm containing her anguish, a brother for the camps and a friend for the grave and the known world falling away like a city going down.

I got the girl over and paid.

'You've got somewhere safe you can go?'

'Oh yes.' But she looked at me blankly because she hadn't thought of it yet: that there had to be somewhere safe she could go.

Perhaps there was nowhere now. The people who had rebuilt this capital from the ruins of the war were being smoked out of it like rats.

'Don't take any risks. Keep low for a few days.'

'Yes,' she said.

'Go to your parents. They in Warsaw?'

She answered in Polish because it was all she still remembered of them, the language they'd spoken together.

'There are friends you can go to?' She nodded and I said: 'I don't mean People in Czyn. Forget Wednesday, it's been called off. Forget the barricades, there won't be any. Just save yourself, Alinka.'

I got up and she lifted her head, watching me, as I sensed she'd go on watching me when I left here, until the door blotted me out and another bit of her known world broke away.

'You'll be all right now. You've got your papers.'

She nodded again. Standing over her I noticed her hand sliding towards the empty glass. the palm flat on the table and the fingers parting and covering the round glass base as if to hold it down so that no one could knock it away and send its fragments dropping among all the other fragments of once familiar things.

Papers weren't any use to her now. Even her name had been taken away for pulping in a destruction machine. Wanda Rek was no one, meant nothing.

I got a pencil. 'If you need me you can phone this number. Just leave the message they'll know who it's for.' Then I left her and went through the swing door and crossed the street. The wind blew from the north and the tall lamps swayed at the top of their stems, sending shadows on the move. I thought it would have been possible to keep on walking, then I had to find a doorway and shelter there, not from the wind, from the idea of going on. There weren't any people about: they didn't fancy being out in this killing cold. The windows of the state supermarkets were bright with cheap goods to impress the visitors with the wealth of Polish production; the lamps kept the dark sky hidden and made it look as if the city were still alive or at least had once contained life, but from here it seemed more like a fairground hit by plague, a lone tram running blindly on its tracks into the distance as if there hadn't been time to switch it off, the perspective of neon signs winking for no one, for nothing. What a bloody silly time, I'd told Merrick, to open talks here, but he'd said they were expected to last for a good six months, well into the summer.

Then the movement, quite a long way off, of the only living thing that seemed to be left. Coming out of the bar she put her gloved hands to her face as she felt the cut of the wind, at first moving away from me and then coming back, not sure where to go in a world she no longer knew.

From where I lay the window made a blank parallelogram, a screen where light came as a train went by, fading in the intervals to the background glow of the city. The glass had frosted over again, covering the clear patch I'd scraped with my nails, but it wasn't symbolic: I could see even farther now than I'd seen then. And I didn't like it.

There wasn't any light from the freight trucks, only their noise and the shake of the building; the light came from the passenger trains, though not from all of them because some had their blinds down, those for the east.

I didn't like it because most of what I could see was based on mission-feel and I couldn't discount it. Assumptions were unreliable: I assumed that there was an adverse party working the same field as Merrick and I and feeding the Polanski unit with doped info until its turn came to be wiped out and I assumed that the KG.B. had chosen to vet me and let me run and both these assumptions could be wrong. Mission-feel is never wrong: it's the specialised instinct you develop as you go forward into the dark like an old dog fox sniffing the wind and catching the scent of things it has smelled before and learned to distrust; and in the concealing darkness the forefoot is sensitive, poised and held still above the patch of unknown ground where in the next movement the trap can spring shut.

The feeling I had was close to that; but a man, being a more sophisticated beast, is caught with traps of greater complexity, and what I sensed was that behind all the logic I was trying to bring to the few facts available and all the attempts to make a pattern from random pieces, the opposition had a programme running, its engineering as smooth and massive as the iron wheels that rolled past here on their predestined rails; and that I was in its path.

Egerton didn't know what it was but he knew it was there and he'd sent me to find it and blow it up.

'Is it morning?'

'No.'

'I don't want morning to come.'

She'd told me before in a different way, saying she didn't want the night to end, crying for a long time naked against me, the saltiness on my face, asking me to hurt her, as if the mind's hurt wasn't enough: guilt for the dead, the abandoned, her leanness quivering and her mouth avid but far from love. Later she forgot and the body was enough, her skin burning under my hands and her thighs alive: she made love as if time was running out. Later still she told me about herself, speaking in Polish and half to someone else: to the person who must one day find again and recognise these pieces of identity and try to make them whole.

'They wanted Jan and me to go with them but Israel was only a place on the map and we had all Poland, where we were born. They sent long letters at first, saying what a solid future there was for us if we'd go out there, and how kind the people were, and finally we got sick of reading their letters and just tore them up, still in the envelopes. To me it was a kind of — not disloyalty exactly — a rejection of all we'd been as a family; they'd turned their backs on everything we'd known and loved and grown up with, the music and the forests and the fires in winter, and our friends. But I missed them, so did Jan, and when I got married it was partly to make a new home for him, though I think I was in love for a time. But Michal' — she paused on the name, finding an odd-shaped piece that she knew would never fit — 'Michal started getting letters from my father, the same kind my brother and I used to get, and he said we were obviously missing a big chance, and tried to convince me, and couldn't. So he went out there to join them.'

Thus it is in events that thy tribe shall forever wander, finding in the shade of each tree a seeming haven till it be shewn that as the sun moves, the shadow moves, leaving thee unsheltered.

'He said that since the Russians had taken over our country a Pole couldn't be a Pole so he was going where at least a Jew could be a Jew. I think he was sure I'd follow him, but I threw his ring from the Slasko-Dabrowski Bridge.'

Then for a time she slept and so did I, and when I woke towards dawn she'd moved away a little and leaned watching me in the grey light from the city, her face still stained from the tears that had dried, her eyes dark in thought as she asked me again who I was, who are you please.