Grey Moon

Notebook. The night they said we were saved.

It passed Earth at 04:12, and the whole building exhaled at once — I heard it through the floor: the Hofmanns’ television, a cheer from the courtyard, someone uncorking something. We’d been told for nine days it would miss, and it missed. People who do not pray prayed anyway, then felt foolish and happy. By morning the relief had curdled into jokes.

It struck the near side of the moon a few hours later. A footnote. A clip of a grey flash that everyone watched twice and forgot.

What no one is saying, because there’s no reason to say it: the moon came up wrong tonight. Not bleeding, not glowing — the light’s gone cooler, toward the blue end, flat and metallic, like a screen left on in an empty room. I went to the balcony three times to rule out the glazing. It isn’t the glazing. It’s the only thing all day that didn’t resolve, and I’m the only person I know still thinking about it. That’s probably a fact about me, not about the moon.

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[Breakfast television transcript — “Morgen!”, segment 2. One week after impact.]

HOST: —and honestly? I think it’s beautiful. Werner, back me up.

CO-HOST: It’s growing on me. First night, sure, a little eerie. Now my daughter calls it the silver moon and she won’t go to bed until she’s seen it.

HOST: Out of the mouths of babes. We’ve got tourism boards already — Reykjavík, the Dolomites — selling “silver moon” weekends. Somebody’s bottled a gin.

CO-HOST: Of course they have.

HOST: Doctor Halsey, you’re our astronomer this morning. Should we be worried, or should we be booking?

HALSEY: You should be booking. What you’re seeing is a change in albedo — surface reflectivity, nothing more exotic than that. The impact redistributed regolith across the near side; the reorganized minerals scatter sunlight toward the blue end, so the disc reads cooler to the naked eye. It is, I’d wager, the most exhaustively documented non-event in the history of the field — which ought to tell you precisely how little there is to find.

HOST: So the doom-and-gloom crowd online —

HALSEY: People needed something to be afraid of for nine days. That fear has to go somewhere. Give it a week and the moon’s wallpaper again.

HOST: Wallpaper! You heard it here. After the break — is silver the new gold? We’re talking autumn colours with —

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Notebook. Day 19, though I had to count back to be sure.

The astronomer on Morgen! promised the moon would be wallpaper inside a week, and he was right — the only forecast anyone got right this month. I haven’t been to the balcony in eleven days. There’s a beer named after it now, Silbermond, on tap at the Kasten, and Lena bought the gin as a joke and we drank it and it was just gin.

I’d half expected to keep noticing the light. I don’t. The eye corrects. Walk under a strange colour long enough and you stop seeing it. I tested myself last night: stood at the window, tried to summon the wrongness I was so sure of on the first night. Couldn’t. It’s just the moon. Lower, a touch blue, perfectly ordinary.

So I was wrong, and I’m writing it down because I’m so rarely wrong in this direction: afraid of nothing. I sleep well. Everyone I know slept badly for nine days about the rock and now sleeps fine. We are, all of us, completely back to normal.

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Notebook. Day 35.

Lena’s waking at four. Three nights now, maybe four. She’s up on her elbow at the window when I surface. Not doing anything, just at the window. When I ask she says it’s work, the Brenner account, the quarter closing. It isn’t work. She likes her work; she’s good at it; the Brenner account closed in March. I didn’t say that. You don’t correct someone at four in the morning.

She isn’t sad, exactly. I keep checking the word against her and it doesn’t fit. It’s more that some small motor that idles under a person — the thing that makes them reach for their phone, hum, complain — has gone quiet in her. She sits very still. This morning she said, “Do you ever feel like you’ve already heard everything anyone’s ever going to say to you?” and then laughed, so I laughed.

Probably it’s the season. Probably it’s me, reading too closely. I read the moon too closely and was wrong. I’m writing it down because if I’m wrong again I want the record to show it.

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[Unsent. No recipient, no date — kept apart from the record. Around day 46.]

You’ll think I’m doing the thing again. I’m not doing the thing.

I’ve been watching the numbers nobody’s bothering to watch, because the people whose job it is to watch them are, statistically, starting not to show up for work. Sick leave is up. Not dramatically. Eleven percent in the sectors I can see, which is the kind of number you explain away with flu, with weather, with anything, and everyone is, because the alternative is admitting you have no explanation.

What I can’t make anyone understand: society isn’t a thing — it’s a performance everyone has agreed to keep up, and it runs on people getting up. Not heroism. Just getting up, on time, moved by something they can’t name and never examine. Pull that thread and you don’t get a crisis. You get nothing. An eleven that becomes a twenty and then a number nobody’s left to count.

Nobody’s panicking, which is how I know it’s started. You don’t feel the floor go until you’re already through it.

I won’t say this to anyone. There’s no one I could say it to who wouldn’t tell me it’s the season.

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[Press release — Federal Ministry of Health. Day 51. Excerpt.]

The Ministry notes recent public concern regarding mental-health indicators and wishes to provide context and reassurance.

A modest increase in crisis-line volume and emergency presentations has been observed across several Länder over the past three weeks. This rise is consistent with seasonal patterns, the conclusion of the summer holidays, and heightened media attention following the lunar impact event. No causal link between the two has been established. We caution strongly against speculation.

As a precaution, the Ministry has asked regional services to maintain extended staffing where feasible. Citizens experiencing low mood are reminded that support is available, and that such feelings are, in the great majority of cases, temporary.

A further update will be issued should circumstances warrant.

---

[Inside the back cover. Pencil, a child’s hand, years later:]

We found these when we cleared the flat. He kept everything. He even kept being wrong on purpose, so someone could check later. I checked. He wasn’t wrong about us. — A.

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Notebook. Day 53.

It isn’t just Lena.

Reuter chaired the Thursday review and then chaired it again on Friday — same agenda, same slides, the same budget line he’d “wanted to flag.” Nobody stopped him, and nobody else seemed to notice. Half the room had the look now, the one I’ve started to recognise: the face a house makes with the lights off.

I did the arithmetic on the way home, because arithmetic is where I go. The ones who’ve gone quiet are the ones who had the most running: Reuter with his directorships, Lena with her accounts, the planners, the loud ones, the people who carried the most forward into next week. The ones still themselves are the ones who never expected much from anything. The drunk on the Schwabentor bridge is exactly as cheerful as he was in August.

That should comfort me. It doesn’t. I keep doing the arithmetic and arriving at myself.

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Notebook. Day 65.

Walked the Schlossberg with Stefan, because Saturday is Saturday and neither of us renegotiates a standing arrangement over weather or apocalypse. It rained the whole way up. He said it before I could, the way he’s said it at the foot of every hill for fifteen years, as his father said it to him: „Wir sind nicht aus Zucker.“ We’re not made of sugar. We won’t melt. So we climbed. He talked about Ana, and his wife’s London posting that keeps not quite happening, and the beetle Ana’s keeping. He is exactly the same Stefan.

That’s the thing I keep filing and can’t square: half the city has gone quiet, and Stefan — who of anyone I know has the most reason to go under — is still telling me to mind the wet roots. I put him in the column with the cheerful drunk on the bridge, and me: the ones it doesn’t want. I don’t ask why.

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Notebook. Day 69.

Lena didn’t go to work today. She didn’t call in. When I asked if she meant to, she looked at me as if I’d asked her to translate something. The words were fine. The point of them had been mislaid.

She isn’t in pain. I want to be exact about that, because everyone is about to start using the word suffering and I don’t think it’s the right one. She’s gone economical. She eats if I put it down. She answers if I ask twice. Last night she said, “It’s all right, you know. It’s just that I can see how it ends, and it’s a long way to walk for that,” and I sat with that for an hour after she slept and couldn’t find the lie in it.

Then this morning Ana held the lift for me and talked the whole way down about her beetle in its jar: what it eats, the names she’s auditioning for it, whether it’s lonely. Bright as a struck match. Her mother behind her, grey, not hearing a word. Two of them in the same small box.

I don’t know what I’m looking at. But I’ve started keeping the curtains shut at night, and I’ve started counting who’s young.

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Notebook. Day 71.

Why am I fine.

I’ve turned it over and there’s no flattering answer. It isn’t strength; I have no more of that than Reuter did. It isn’t love holding me here. I love Lena, and it hasn’t touched whatever this is. The only honest answer is the unflattering one: there was nothing in me for it to take.

Whatever’s reaching people goes looking for the part that wants — the part that leans into next year, that needs the work to mean something, the mind running hot on its own importance. It came looking in me and found the room already cleared. I’d done that years ago, quietly, and called it being realistic.

So I get to stay. I get to keep the record while the others go quiet, one by one, and be the last reliable witness in a building full of people I can’t follow.

That isn’t survival. I don’t have a word for what it is.

[Press conference transcript — Federal Ministry of Health, Berlin. Day 78. Broadcast live.]

MINISTER: Good afternoon. I’ll be brief, because brevity is itself a kind of reassurance. There is no — and I want to be unambiguous — there is no “moon sickness.” I’d ask responsible outlets to retire the phrase. What we’re seeing is a rise in depressive and anxiety presentations, and the causes are well understood: a frightening near-miss, months of saturation coverage, the season. We’ve lived through collective anxiety before. We came through it before.

JOURNALIST (Die Zeit): Minister — the rise is in the over-forties specifically. Anxiety doesn’t usually pick an age bracket.

MINISTER: Older citizens follow the news more closely. They carry more responsibility, they have more to lie awake about. I’d gently suggest that’s explanation enough.

JOURNALIST: And the correlation with moonrise? The clinics are reporting that admissions —

MINISTER: I’ve seen the chart that’s circulating. I’d remind the room that ice-cream sales correlate with drowning. Correlation is the oldest trick in the panic playbook, and we will not govern by chart.

JOURNALIST: So there’s nothing people should be doing differently.

MINISTER: Sleep well. Call your parents. Turn off the news now and then — including, with respect, mine. Thank you. That’s all.

---

[Margin, beside “Call your parents.” A child’s hand, later:]

“My mum read this part out loud and laughed. I didn’t get the joke. It was the last time I heard her laugh, so I kept the page. — A.”

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[Preprint submission — abstract and moderator decision. Day 85. Flagged, then removed.]

Title: A spectral–temporal correlation between post-impact lunar albedo and adult affective collapse

Authors: P. Lindqvist (Astrophysics, Uppsala); R. Adeyemi (Neuropsychiatry, KCL)

Abstract: Since the near-side impact (Day 0), reflected lunar light has shifted measurably toward shorter wavelengths, with anomalous polarization. We report a tight temporal coupling between local moonrise and the onset of acute depressive symptoms in adults over forty, absent in pre-pubescent children. We do not propose a mechanism. We report a correlation we cannot explain and consider too strong — and too lethal — to withhold. We urge immediate independent replication.

Moderator decision: Declined for general distribution. Rationale: claims of causality without mechanism; risk of public alarm; insufficient peer review. Authors advised to resubmit through clinical channels. [Note appended Day 71: original submission restored to archive, for the record.]

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[Internal memo — Universitätsklinikum Freiburg, Klinik für Psychiatrie und Psychotherapie. Day 91. Az. PSY-2026/0114. Internal distribution; not for forwarding.]

Re: Adjustment of departmental procedures in view of current capacity

Dear colleagues,

The following measures take effect immediately and apply until revoked. We ask for your understanding.

1. Capacity. Acute admissions have exceeded available beds on nine consecutive nights. Patients presenting with lower-risk affective symptoms are, following assessment and documentation, to be referred to outpatient follow-up. We are aware this falls short of our usual standard and ask for your understanding under the present circumstances.

2. Staffing. Night cover will be consolidated. Leave requests now require departmental approval, in coordination with the staff council. Should colleagues be personally affected, we ask that you inform your line manager; an unexcused absence places a burden on the entire team.

3. Communication. To ensure consistent external messaging, the communications office recommends the phrasing “seasonal affective pressure” in patient-facing documents and correspondence. The terms “wave,” “epidemic,” and “lunar” should be avoided.

4. Prioritisation. Where triage cannot be avoided, patients under eighteen and those with dependent children take precedence.

These measures will be reviewed as soon as the situation permits. We thank you for your dedication during this demanding period.

With collegial regards,
Prof. Dr. med. A. Brandt
Ärztlicher Direktor, Klinik für Psychiatrie und Psychotherapie

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[Federal Office of Civil Protection — public warning, pushed to all mobile devices. Day 93, 19:14.]

⚠ PRECAUTIONARY ADVISORY — this is not an emergency

As a precaution, residents are advised to remain indoors after moonrise (tonight: 19:42) and to keep curtains or blinds closed until dawn. There is no airborne hazard and no need to stockpile supplies.

Persons over forty, and those with a history of depression, are advised to avoid direct exposure to moonlight where practical. Children are not considered at risk.

This measure is temporary. Schools and workplaces remain open. Emergency services are fully operational. Further guidance will follow.

Do not call emergency lines for information. Stay calm. Look after one another.

Notebook. Day 99.

They send the alert at seven now. This was the second night of it, and by half past the street had put itself to bed. I watched it from the kitchen: the Krauses’ blinds, then the third floor, then the whole facade across the courtyard going dark in patches, like a switchboard losing its operators. We are a careful species. Tell us to pull the curtains and we pull them — even the ones who don’t believe it.

I pulled ours. Lena was on the couch, where she’d been since morning. Not asleep. That’s the part I can’t get used to. She used to wake at four; now she doesn’t sleep and doesn’t rise, just lies with her eyes open and lets the day happen to the ceiling. I bring her things; she takes them when I put them in her hands. If I don’t say get up, she doesn’t, and I’ve stopped saying it — because the third time you say it and watch it land on nothing.

That’s the entry. I can’t remember when she stopped starting things, and now she’s stopped finishing them too. She just stays, in the exact middle of the day, like someone waiting in a corridor for a name that isn’t going to be called.

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[School worksheet, “My News.” A child’s careful hand. Undated — around day 106.]

My news is we are going to London on a aeroplane to Granny Pearl. Granny Pearl has a garden with a apple tree and a cat called Mr Biscuit. Mama says the moon there is the proper moon and I will sleep better. I am bringing my beetle but Mama says the aeroplane might not allow him so I have made him a box with holes and not told her. My news is also Mama is very tired. When I am big I am going to be a vet, or the person who finds out what is wrong with the moon. By Ana, age 8 and three quarters.

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Notebook. Day 110.

Ana knocked at half seven, while it was still more night than morning, and handed me the jar with both hands — the way you hand over something alive. The aeroplane wouldn’t take him. “His name is Borko,” she said. “He likes the soft part of the apple, not the skin. He doesn’t like the sun. I wrote it all down.” There was a folded paper rubber-banded to the lid: instructions in the careful hand, and a drawing of Borko looking, I think, optimistic.

She explained the trip in case I worried: London, the long one, Mama’s work, and Granny Pearl’s garden where she’ll stay so Mama won’t be alone in a strange flat at night. The going-along was her own idea; she told me so with some pride. I did not say that a child volunteering to mind her mother is a thing that should not yet have a name.

Her mother waited by the lift with the cases, dressed, ready, and somehow not quite arrived. I said I’d keep Borko until they were back. Ana weighed this with the gravity of a customs officer and decided to allow it. Then the doors closed on the two of them.

From the window I watched the taxi pull away, Ana waving from the rear glass long after the car had turned, waving at the building, at me, at the whole grey street, as if she were the one staying behind and we were the ones being carried off.

I have a beetle now. I put him on the kitchen sill, out of the sun, and read his instructions twice. It is the most anyone has asked of me in weeks, and I find I don’t want to get it wrong.

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Notebook. Day 117.

Found Stefan at the allotment. That’s where he is now the flat’s gone quiet, wife and daughter in London and a whole autumn of evenings to fill. I’d half expected a man rattling around missing them, already pricing a flight to follow, working out how to get them home before whatever this is closes the airports. He was netting the winter cabbages against the pigeons. Methodical and unhurried.

This is a man who once drove back through the night from a contract abroad because Ana had a non-speaking part — a tree — in the school play, and would not be the empty seat in the third row. I waited for that man. He talked about the netting, the pigeons, the merits of a particular knot. He stepped around the daughter-sized hole in the conversation without appearing to notice it was there.

I almost said it: get her back, Stefan, while there are still planes. I didn’t. What would I be doing but frightening a steady man on a hunch? I said the cabbages looked good.

When I left he called after me, with no hill in sight, „Wir sind nicht aus Zucker.“ He laughed, and it was entirely him. I keep turning it over. Everyone I know who’s gone has gone strange first; Stefan’s only gone quiet around one subject, and is otherwise so completely himself that I’ve decided it’s an ordinary kind of missing them, not the other thing. I’ve decided. I note that I’ve decided, which is what I do when I’m not sure.

---

[Postcard — London to Freiburg. A child’s hand, posted around day 117.]

Dear Marko,

Mama said the English moon would be the proper moon, but I checked on the first night and it is the same moon. I think Mama got it wrong, which she does not usually do.

Granny Pearl says I worry like an old woman and gave me cocoa for it. Mama is tired from the journey and sleeps in the day now. Mr Biscuit sleeps on her feet.

Is Borko eating? The soft part, not the skin, and keep him out of the sun. Tell him I am coming back.

— Ana

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Notebook. Day 125.

The Tuesday integration review used to fill the room. Today it was me, Wallner, and a wall of black rectangles. Istanbul sent apologies. Their flight was cancelled, the first of ours to go, which makes a grim kind of sense: the far edges fray first.

But it wasn’t only the flight. Hamburg cancelled half its people, and Hamburg comes by train. I don’t know whether the trains were a mess or whether they ran fine and the people didn’t. Deutsche Bahn often is a mess; you can hang almost anything on it and nobody checks. I didn’t find out. That’s the part that stays with me afterwards: I could have asked, and I chose the version that let me get on with the agenda. So did Wallner. We both reached for the railways, both a little relieved to have something to blame that comes with a timetable.

He moved the rest to remote “until travel settles,” and I didn’t correct him, though I know what a schedule looks like when it’s eaten from the inside — not cancelled so much as quietly unattended. Saying so out loud felt like bad manners. Travel settling is a comfortable thing to be waiting for; it puts the trouble out on the rails, somewhere other than the empty chairs.

Then I did the arithmetic I shouldn’t. I checked it on my phone, under the table, like a score I was ashamed to care about: Basel to London. Still flying. Twice a day, still flying. No reason to look. Ana’s there and safe and her mother’s with her. I looked anyway, and noted the times, and noted that I’d noted them.

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Notebook. Day 130.

Borko is thriving. I want that on the record, because it’s the one thing in this flat I can say cleanly. The apple, the soft part, no skin, out of the sun: I follow Ana’s paper to the letter, and the result is a beetle in robust health, doing his slow circuits of the jar with the air of a man with places to be. Eight years old and she wrote clearer instructions than most of the manuals I’ve shipped. You do this, then this, and the living thing stays living.

Lena came with no paper. That’s the difference I keep arriving at, the two of them across the room from each other in the evening: the jar on the sill, Lena on the couch, both very still, only one of them mendable. I can keep a beetle alive because a child told me how. I have shared rooms with this woman for nine years and I don’t have her instructions, and there’s no one left to write them, and if there were I’m not certain my hands would do what they said.

I changed the apple tonight and found I’d cut a second piece without thinking, for her, out of the habit of laying two places. She wasn’t hungry. She’s never hungry. I ate it myself at the window so it wouldn’t be something I’d thrown away, and watched the moon come up, and did the only maintenance the evening would allow. The beetle. I can manage the beetle.

[Public notice — City of Freiburg, with the Federal Ministry of Health. Day 153. Pushed to all devices.]

From Thursday, a Centre for Accompanied Departure (Zentrum für begleiteten Abschied) will operate at the former exhibition halls at the Messe, following the model established in Hamburg, Cologne, and Munich.

The Centre offers a calm, supervised, and dignified setting for residents who have reached a settled decision and prefer not to be at home. Access is voluntary. No referral is required. Companions may accompany a resident to the door; for reasons of capacity, they cannot remain.

Opening hours are continuous. There is no waiting list.

We ask for the public’s understanding, and for restraint from gathering at the entrance. Counselling remains available to those who wish it, though we recognise that for many the time for counselling has passed.

Further centres will follow as demand requires.

---

Marko woke at four, the way Lena used to, and knew the flat was empty before he had a reason to.

He lay still and catalogued it, because cataloguing was what he had instead of dread. The radiator was cold — had been cold for weeks; the building’s heat had failed after the lifts and the stairwell lights, one system at a time, each failure announced by a notice nobody was left to post. The flat held the particular silence of a room with one breath in it instead of two. He had heard that silence coming for a long time, and had told himself he was imagining the slope of it, as he once had about the moon.

The note was on the kitchen table, under the salt, where she knew he’d find it because he always reached for the salt. One word, in a hand that had not been steady in months and was steady here:

Goodbye.

He read it twice, for errors, and there were none. The City had pushed the notice to his phone the evening before, like the moonrise warnings: a Centre, at the Messe, accompanied, dignified, no waiting list. He had read it standing at this same table and had said nothing to her, because there was nothing to say that she had not already decided, months ago, out loud, while he sat beside her and failed to find the lie in it. I can see how it ends, and it’s a long way to walk for that. She had not been describing despair. She had been doing arithmetic, the same as he did, and had arrived at her answer the way he kept arriving at his. He had only hoped her number and his were different.

Companions may accompany a resident to the door. They cannot remain. She had spared him the door.

He sat down. He was aware of the chair, of the cold coming up through the floor, and he waited to feel the thing he had spent a hundred days watching take everyone else — the grey hush, the motor going quiet, the lights going out room by room behind a person’s eyes. He waited for the moon to find, at last, the way in.

It didn’t come. He checked again, carefully, and what was there instead was older than the moon and entirely ordinary: he missed her. Not the vast grey thing that had taken the city, but the plain human kind, the size of one person, the grief that has been felling people one at a time since long before there was a word for it.

So he wasn’t going under. He understood that too, and it was not a relief. It meant the thing that had cleared him out years ago had held; that the room in him she had once walked into — the only warmth that had ever reached that far back — was a room again, and empty again, and he was still the man who got to stay in it and keep the record.

Then Marko, who had not wept in the whole of the adult life he could remember, who had written down the end of the world in a level hand and double-checked the dates, put his head down on the table beside the one word she had left him, and cried until the light came up grey over a city that no longer turned on its lamps to meet it.

He would keep the note. He kept everything. And in time he would get up, because getting up was the one thing left in him that still worked — and there was a child in London who did not yet know she was going to need someone to come.

[Service notice — Deutsche Bahn, in coordination with the Federal Network Agency. Day 154. Posted to stations and the booking application.]

From Friday, the published long-distance timetable is suspended. This is not a strike notice.

Services will operate where crewed. Departure boards remain accurate as to intention; passengers are advised that a service shown as delayed may no longer have a driver, and that the difference cannot always be displayed.

Regional services continue at the discretion of the regions. International connections cannot be guaranteed beyond the border station.

Tickets remain valid on any train that runs. Refunds are suspended; the refund office asks for patience.

We thank the employees who continue to report. We ask passengers not to ask the remaining staff when normal service will resume. They do not know, and they are asked too often.

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Notebook. Day 155.

Stefan came yesterday evening, around eight. He asked for the car from the doorway, coat still on. He had it worked out: the trains’ notice had come in the afternoon, the flights were finished weeks ago, so he would drive to London and bring the two of them back, and return the car or the cost of it. He’d already made a list — water, his camping stove, batteries, the tools from the allotment shed.

Then he asked whether Lena was managing, and I told him about the Messe. He was quiet. He said he’d come at a bad time and that the car could wait. It couldn’t, and we both stood there knowing it. He had London at under a thousand kilometres. It is 880. I’d checked it on Day 125 and hadn’t written down why. I said I would drive.

Before he went up he played me a message from Ana, on his phone since Day 145. I asked for it twice and copied it out; it belongs with the record.

This morning he was at the car by half six. The jar is wedged behind the passenger seat, out of the sun. I’m keeping the record in lines from here: times, the odometer, what the tank does and I’m writing in a moving car, and since the Messe I haven’t wanted to write more than that.

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[Voice message — Ana, London, to Stefan’s phone. Sent Day 145; copied into the record Day 155.]

“Papa, it’s me, on Granny’s phone, mine is for emergencies. Mama ate the soup but she sleeps in the day again. Granny says it’s still the travel, which I don’t think is right, because we came ages ago. We get eggs because Granny knows the man at the shop. The queue is all slow people now. Not the young ones, but the old ones are. When are you coming? Granny’s phone says eleven percent. Bye. Tell Marko: the soft part, not the skin.”

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[Loose sheet folded into the notebook — a route plan in Marko’s hand. Day 155.]

London. Two routes.

A. Strasbourg — Reims — Calais. 880 km.
B. Karlsruhe — Saarbrücken — Luxembourg — Brussels — Calais. 940 km.

B is 60 km longer and goes through Luxembourg. Cheapest fuel in Europe; the whole border is petrol stations, storage built for three countries’ commuters. Best odds of a working pump on any route. Decision: B.

Tank: half. ~340 km.
Stations en route: unknown. Plan as if closed.
Jerrycan: none.

Borders: Schengen — open, on paper.
Crossing to England: tunnel unknown, ferries unknown. Decide at Calais.

Water, bread, stove (S.), cash in three pockets. Beetle: instructions taped to the jar.

---

Notebook. Day 155 — kept in the car.

07:10 — out. Odometer 84,112. Tank ½. Stefan said „Wir sind nicht aus Zucker“ at the ramp and I gave it back. The rule of the phrase.

08:55 — Karlsruhe. Nineteen trucks parked on the shoulder since Offenburg. Counted.

09:30 — Rasthof: lit, locked. KEIN PERSONAL, handwritten.

10:05 — next services dead, pumps without power. Off the autobahn at the following exit. Reasoning: a chain station needs staff, payment systems, deliveries. A one-man station needs the man.

11:05 — village station short of Zweibrücken. Owner on a chair by the pump. Cash, no limit, tank filled. He asked where to; Stefan told him. He looked at the car and said nothing.

12:30 — A8 again, Saarbrücken bypassed.

13:35 — end of a queue, 2 km before the Moselle. Both lanes. Engines off. The crossing is at Schengen.

---

They walked up the line to see. At the bridge there was a barrier and two light armoured vehicles with Luxembourg plates, and behind the barrier six or seven soldiers, young. There was no sign. Nothing had been pushed to anyone’s phone. There was just the barrier.

A man in a suit jacket stood at the front asking the nearest soldier for the legal basis, his phone held up to record the answer. The soldier said it was closed. Since when? Since Tuesday. Until when? The soldier didn’t answer that one; by the look of him he had stopped answering it hours ago.

Stefan tried French. Transit only, he said. Family in England, a daughter of eight. The soldier heard him out, which was more than the man with the phone had got, and then said it the same way: closed, monsieur. No exception named, no reason offered. Behind him, across the river, the canopy of a filling station stood over empty pumps with its price board lit.

They walked back to the car. Stefan named the Rhine bridges from his cycling years — Gambsheim, Marckolsheim, Breisach — and said to try the smallest first: if they were guarding Schengen, they would be guarding Strasbourg. The smallest was Breisach. Neither of them said how far south that was.

In the queue behind them, no one else had turned around yet.

---

Notebook. Day 155, evening.

15:05 — turned where the median opens for service vehicles. Most of the queue stayed.

17:20 — Kehl turnoff. The approach to the Europabrücke backed up out of sight. Stefan had said it would be. Kept south on the B-road, Rhine on the right.

19:20 — Breisach. The small bridge. One gendarmerie van on the French side, engine running, lights off. The gendarme looked at the plate and waved us across without leaving the van.

19:25 — France. From the bridge you can see the Kaiserstuhl. The flat is twenty-five minutes east of here.

19:50 — stopped on a farm track past Neuf-Brisach, before moonrise.

Odometer 84,754. Driven today: 642 km. London this morning: 880. London tonight: 810.

[Exercise book — Ana, London. School has closed; she keeps the book herself now. Around Day 143.]

Things I am in charge of now

Since school stopped I write the list in the morning so I don’t forget any.

1. Wake Mama. She sleeps in the day now even though the day is not for sleeping. You say it three times and then you open the curtain. Granny says let her rest, but if nobody wakes her she does not wake up by herself. I tested it.
2. Granny’s tablets, the white one and the two little ones, with breakfast. Granny used to do them. Now she says you do them, love, you’re quicker. Her get up and go has got up and went, she says, and laughs. I don’t laugh because it is true.
3. Eggs. Granny knows the man, but now I go, because the queue is long and Granny can’t stand up that long any more. You take the eggs and put the money in the tin. He trusts us.
4. Feed Mr Biscuit. This one is easy. He reminds me.
5. The phone. It has to be off most of the time so there is some left for when Papa rings. It got down to eleven once and I was frightened, so now I am strict.

Mama did not eat the toast today, but she said good girl when I brought it, which she always says. I am keeping this book like Marko keeps his.

---

[Exercise book — Ana, London. Around Day 145.]

The moon

I am still checking it. Mama said the English moon would be the proper one, but it is the same moon. I have checked thirty-one nights. I write down if it is bright or not bright. Bright means you can see the garden without the light on.

I noticed a thing. The day after a bright night Mama is harder to wake. I thought it was a coincidence. Granny taught me that word. But I marked it, and now it is four times. Four is a lot for a coincidence.

I asked Granny if the moon can make you tired. She said only werewolves, love, and that I worry like an old woman, and put the kettle on. So I did not ask again.

But I am still marking it.

---

[Public information — issued by London Councils on behalf of the London boroughs, with NHS England (London). Day 146. Posted to households and at GP surgeries, libraries and Tube stations.]

Accompanied Departure: more centres now open

We know that many people across London are waiting longer than any of us would wish. To help with this, further centres will open from Friday.

You do not need an appointment and you do not need to ring ahead. Please just come along. Bring some form of ID and, if you have it, your NHS number — though no one will be turned away for the want of either.

Someone may come with you to the door. We are sorry that, for reasons of space, they cannot come any further. There are quiet rooms at every site and step-free access throughout. Tea is available.

Please go to the centre nearest you. The new sites are at the ExCeL — the old Nightingale hall — the Olympic Park, and Alexandra Palace, alongside those already open at Olympia and Wembley. A list is kept on the council website for as long as we are able to keep it up to date.

Getting about London is not what it was. Several Tube lines are suspended and the buses run when there are crews for them. If you find a centre closed, it is closed for want of staff, not shut for the day; please do not wait outside in the hope it reopens.

The chaplaincy and the telephone support line are still here, though the line is now open mornings only.

Our staff and volunteers are very few now, and they are giving everything they have. Please be kind to them, and thank you for your patience.

---

[Exercise book — Ana, London. Around Day 147.]

The big children

On the egg road there are children who are not slow. They are by the shut shops, older ones and some little ones, and the older ones look after the little ones. They have a pram with no baby in it, for carrying things.

One girl talked to me. She talks fast and I get about half. She asked where my grown-up was and I said at home, and she said something with “sound” in it that I think means all right. She gave me a biscuit, and another one to share. I did share it.

They are always there now, and the slow people mostly are not. I don’t know whose children they are. Maybe nobody’s.

Their English is not my English. Mama’s English is the slow kind, for me. Theirs is the fast kind, for each other. I am learning some of it. “Safe” is one. They say it when you go and when you come.

I did not tell Granny about them. I am not sure why. I just keep it in the book.

---

[Exercise book — Ana, London. Around Day 148.]

Mama did not wake today. I said it three times and opened the curtain and said it three more. She is breathing. I checked.

Granny is in the chair. She said she would just rest her eyes. That was the morning, and it is dark now, and she is still resting them. I did the tablets but she did not take the little ones.

I have turned the phone on. I am going to ring Papa even though it is not an emergency. I will say it quick so the battery lasts.

[Found among the recovered papers. A single sheet, unsigned, undated.]

I have been awake since it was light. It is dark now. I did not do anything in between.

Nothing is wrong. That is the part. I am not sad. I could write the reasons to get up and they would all be true. I have written them. They are true and they do not start anything.

She is in the next room. I can hear her. She is fine. It does not touch the small ones. She came in and asked me something and I answered and she went away, so I can still do that much. I love her. I know it the way I know my own name. It is a fact, and it is in there, and I am in here, and the two do not reach each other.

I do not want to die but I am looking forward to dying.

I am waiting for the change.

Notebook. Day 156.

Stefan is different this morning. I don’t know if it’s the driving or something else. Twelve hours yesterday, six hundred and forty-two kilometres for seventy. He didn’t move when I got up. When he woke he sat a while looking at the field before he opened the door.

For fifteen years he has said it first, at the foot of every hill: „Wir sind nicht aus Zucker.“ This morning he didn’t. I said it, to start him. He said, “No. We’re not.” He didn’t say it back.

I drove. He didn’t offer and I didn’t ask. He knew these roads better than I did, from the cycling years, and he didn’t say a word about them.

---

Notebook. Day 156 — kept in the car.

07:50 — out. Odometer 84,754. Tank under a quarter. North, west of the river — A35 for Strasbourg, then Calais.

08:35 — Sélestat. Péage open, barriers up, no one in the booths. Everyone drives through now.

09:20 — more cars stopped on the shoulder than moving on the road. Left where they ran dry, doors shut.

10:05 — Strasbourg ring, light. A van passed us well over the limit, six or seven young people in it, mattresses roped to the roof, going the other way — south and west.

10:40 — Brumath services: chain station, dark, no power to the pumps. Didn’t stop. Nothing since the village yesterday.

11:10 — Stefan hasn’t touched the water. It’s where I wedged it this morning. His hands aren’t right — not shaking, not still. Eyes shut, not asleep.

---

It came to him past Brumath, watching Stefan’s hands. This wasn’t what had taken Lena. Lena went the slow way — economical, quieter by degrees, eating when it was put in front of her. This was faster and it was physical: the hands, sweat at the hairline in a cold car, Stefan folding inward by the hour. Not the moon. Something that had run out.

He’d had Stefan in the wrong column since the autumn.

“How long have you been without medication?”

Stefan didn’t open his eyes. It was a long time before he answered. “Almost two weeks.”

There was a pharmacy at the next junction, green cross dark, and another past it. There was no next question. No counter between here and Calais where a man could give a name and be handed back the thing that held him.

He kept right and watched the fuel.

---

Notebook. Day 156 — kept in the car.

11:40 — warning light.

12:05 — past Saverne the engine died. Coasted to the verge.

Odometer 84,891. Out — the same as the ones we passed all morning. Doors shut.

---

Notebook. Day 156.

We left the car on the verge. Stefan would try the houses up ahead for a car that still ran, a person, anything, and I’d go back to the services. We’d meet at the car.

I said it to his back. „Wir sind nicht aus Zucker.“ This morning he had only agreed. This time he didn’t answer. He walked steadily, didn’t turn, and where the road dipped he went out of sight.

Then I walked the other way.

---

Notebook. Day 156 — kept in the car.

14:30 — back at the car. Services dry, shop stripped. S. not back.

16:00 — not back.

16:40 — walked up to the houses. Four of them, dark, doors open, no one. Called from the yards. No answer, no sign he’d been there.

18:10 — back at the car. Dark. Not back.

21:00 — not back.

---

Notebook. Day 157.

He didn’t come back in the night. I kept the dome light on until the battery warned, in case he came to the road in the dark and missed the car. He didn’t come.

I won’t write that he’s dead. I don’t know that. I know he had two weeks of nothing in him, and that he walked up a road toward four empty houses and didn’t come back.

The jar is behind the seat. I gave the beetle the soft part this morning. That was Ana’s instruction.

Notebook. Day 157.

I waited until midday. Then I wrote a note and left it under the wiper: out of fuel, gone north on foot, keeping to the main road. If he comes back he’ll know which way. I don’t think he’ll come back. I left it anyway.

I took what I could carry: the water, what food was left, the warm things, the notebook. The jar. I cut the air-holes in the lid bigger and wedged it into the top of the pack where I can see it. Ana told me how to feed the beetle, not how to carry it to England. I’m carrying it.

I left the car on the verge with the others and started walking. Last odometer reading: 84,891. No odometer after this — just the time and the road.

---

Notebook. Day 158.

I expected fighting. Everyone who pictured this pictured fighting — the last tins, the petrol, doors kicked in. There’s none of it. I’ve walked through three towns since the car and they’re quiet. Doors shut. A dog had taught itself to work a bin lid. An old man sat on a step and watched me pass and didn’t get up.

The ones my age and over are indoors, or slow on the pavements, like Lena. The ones who move with any purpose are young. They don’t run from me and they don’t ask me for anything. North of the second town a girl of fifteen or sixteen was carrying water in from somewhere, two smaller ones behind her in a line, and she nodded at me like I was weather.

I keep the jar in the top of the pack. It’s alive. I check.

Past the third town someone had put up a board, not a flyer but a sheet of plywood bolted to the signpost, painted white, lettered by hand and kept clean. I copied it.

---

[Notice — plywood, bolted to a signpost on the north road. Hand-lettered, French and English. Day 158. Copied.]

OPEN HOUSE — 3 KM NORTH
FOOD. WATER. A BED. A FIRE.
TAKE WHAT YOU NEED. LEAVE WHAT YOU CAN.
NO ONE IS TURNED AWAY.

LOOKING FOR SOMEONE?
THE BOARD IS HERE. WE WILL POST FOR YOU.
IT REACHES EVERYWHERE THAT STILL ANSWERS.

— LA MAISON DE LA ROUTE NORD / THE NORTH ROAD HOUSE

---

Notebook. Day 158.

I hadn’t meant to stop. Three kilometres off the line, England to reach, and I’ve never been good at taking things from people. They came out to the road anyway.

Two of them, a boy of seventeen or so and a smaller one. Not to stop me, just to walk a way and ask where I was going. When I said England the older one didn’t laugh. He said the house was more or less on the way, that I should eat and sleep, and that the Board was there if I was looking for anyone. The rest I could decide after.

The house had been a school. Maybe thirty living in it, none over forty. Teenagers, mostly, with a few in their twenties and thirties fetching and carrying alongside them. A fire in the yard under a steel hood, water carried from a well they’d reopened, a rota on the wall in a child’s careful capitals — who cooked, who fetched, who sat with the slow ones in the village. They fed me without ceremony: soup, bread, an egg. A girl asked my name and wrote it in a book.

I kept waiting for the catch — the price, the rule, the one in charge. There’s no one in charge. There’s a rota.

---

He stayed a day longer than he’d meant to. From the step where they’d put him he could watch most of the house without being in the way, and for most of a day that was what he did.

The lorry came in from the east at four, low on its springs, and a dozen of them unloaded it in a line without being told: sacks, crates, a drum of something, hand to hand into the old gym. Earlier two of the girls had gone down toward the village with a covered basket between them and come back without it; he gathered there were people down there who couldn’t come up, and that someone went to them every day.

They ate at dusk, at long tables dragged out under the steel hood — soup, bread, whatever the lorry had brought. A small girl cried through most of the meal, tired or remembering something, he couldn’t tell; the boy beside her kept an arm round her and went on eating and didn’t make her stop. Further down, a child was doing sums by lamplight.

He was not the only one they’d taken in. A man of about sixty had come up the road that afternoon and stood in the yard a while before he asked the thing Marko had wanted to ask and hadn’t — who was in charge. The girl he asked couldn’t have been seventeen. She said there wasn’t anyone, not the way he meant, and asked what he needed. The man didn’t have an answer ready. He had come to be told where to go, and there was no one whose job that was. He ate, slept in the gym, and by morning he was gone, as two others had gone while Marko watched, older people drifting up out of the south and out again, a meal, a night, then on to wherever they still believed the thing in charge was waiting.

Marko watched a man near his own age help two boys fold a tarpaulin. They let him take a corner, waited while he found the fold, thanked him at the end. The job had gone slower for his being in it. Nobody minded, and nobody gave him a second one. Marko was the same to them and he knew it: fed, made welcome, not needed. The one thing he had that the others didn’t was somewhere to be.

---

Notebook. Day 159.

None of it should hold. I spent twenty years paid to find the place a system breaks, and by everything I know this one is single points of failure end to end. It holds anyway. It holds because no one in it is trying to win.

---

Notebook. Day 160.

I meant to be gone at first light. I went to the Board instead, to put Ana’s name on the roads ahead of me. I have spent this whole journey checking things and sending nothing. Today I would send one thing.

---

They kept the Board in the old caretaker’s office — two laptops, a printer, a ledger gone soft at the corners, and a girl of nineteen or so who ran it off the panels on the gym roof. It worked, she told him, when the sun had been out; the houses passed messages between them at night, when the line was quiet. Slow, she said. But it got there.

He gave her the name — Ana Petrović, eight, last seen in London with her grandmother — and started to spell Petrović, the č for the people who don’t have it. She wasn’t writing. She was reading the screen. She asked him to spell his own name, which he’d given at the door his first night and thought nothing of, and when he had, she turned the laptop round so he could see.

There was already something under his name. It had come in two nights before, while he slept in the gym, and had been waiting. He copied it into the notebook.

---

[Board message — relayed from London, passed house to house. Held under the name MARKO at the North Road House. Day 160. Copied.]

ANA PETROVIĆ, AGE 8 — SAFE, LONDON. LOOKING FOR: MARKO, FREIBURG.

Her words, as the older ones wrote them down for her:

Dear Marko. The big children helped me put this on the board. Is Borko alive? The soft part, not the skin, and not the sun. I am keeping my book the way you keep yours, and I have written everything down. The big children are bringing me home. Have you heard from Papa? I have rung and rung and he does not answer. If you see him, tell him to ring me.

— Ana

The van ran without trouble. There were vehicles everywhere for the taking now, and they had picked a good one, with proper seats, all of them, and the back stacked with boxes they were carrying to the people in Germany. Ten of them rode in it, the little ones wedged among the boxes or asleep across a lap. There was nothing on the road to slow them. The lanes ran clear to the edge of seeing, and where there were cars they were off in the gateways and on the verges with their doors shut, left tidy, as if everyone had agreed at once to stop and walk away from them.

A tall girl called Mar drove the long stretches, and Ana sat where she could watch the back of her head — the plait she had learned by the second day, and how it worked loose by afternoon. The big ones took the wheel in turns and minded the small ones in turns and nobody told anybody to. Ana had asked, the first day, who was in charge, and a boy had grinned and said the van was, and that had turned out to be near enough true. A couple of times someone started a song and the whole van took it up, the big ones loud and certain, Ana catching the ends of the lines and singing those.

At noon the radio under the dash — a fat long-range set that hissed and muttered all day in voices from other vans and other houses — told them where to fill up, and they turned off for a farm. It was a big working place, with a green pump in the yard for the tractors and people who came out to meet them, older ones and young together, which Ana had stopped expecting to see. A woman set bread and a hard yellow cheese on the tailgate while the tank filled, and would take nothing for it but the news off the radio. The pump drew from its own tank, sunk in the ground for the harvest, and it worked.

While the tank filled, Ana had the cart, a four-wheeled one, the folding kind made for camping gear, better than the prams they’d started with. Moving the boxes across the yard on it was her job, hers to do, and she did it with her weight thrown into the handle. There was a little boy, three or four, who had fixed himself to her side somewhere in the first days and rode pressed against her in the van and slept there; she kept an arm over him on the bends the way the big ones kept an arm over her. She did not know whose he was, and no one seemed to, and she kept the arm over him anyway.

Around her neck she wore a scarf of her mother’s. She had it on day and night and nobody made her take it off. The exercise book she kept on her too. On the roadsides now and then a board went past — plywood bolted to a signpost, painted white, the open-house kind, the word for food on it in two languages and an arrow. They did not stop at those. They had their own house to reach.

---

They crossed into Germany at the grey end of the afternoon. There was no barrier and no one in the booths; the plaza stood open and empty. Everything official did now. But the signs went over from French to German between one and the next, and these she could read properly, and that was how she knew. Ausfahrt. Town names that leaned, the further they went, toward the names she had. She watched them come and said nothing about it.

The house they stopped at for the rest day had been a school, set back from a village, with a yard and a flagpole. On the pole the children had run up a flag of their own, a bedsheet painted with a sun and big uneven letters, and it lifted and dropped in the evening wind. It was the kind of place she knew now — young people running it, a rota chalked on a door, a fire never quite let out — but it was further along than the others. There was hot water; she washed standing up in a tiled room full of steam and came out pink. There was food at a table, on plates, sitting down. A small child had drawn a dog and a house in wax crayon on the wall by the stairs, and nobody had cleaned it off. When it got dark, lights came on. Not many, run carefully off something on the roof, but lights, in the evening, in rooms, the way it used to be.

There were children her own age, more of them together than she had seen in a long time, and after the meal they took her into a game in the yard without asking her much, which was the best way. It had complicated rules and she learned them by playing and getting them wrong, and for an hour she was a child in a yard in a game — running, called for, out of breath — and nothing else.

The radio worked for a long time that evening. The next leg was planned out on it in pieces, house to house: in the morning she would change vans. A group was going south, down toward Freiburg, and she would go with them the rest of the way home; the ones she had come with would turn west. It was settled around her and told to her once, plainly, and she understood it and did not argue.

Mar found her before sleep and made nothing of it: gave her a folded square of chocolate from somewhere, said the southern lot were sound and she’d be home in a day or two, and that was that. Ana put the chocolate in the book to keep, then thought better of it and ate it.

Before the lights went she sat with the book on her knees and wrote the day down in her round, careful hand, leaving nothing out: the farm and the green pump, the cheese, the game, the vans changing in the morning. Then she slept inside, in a row of mattresses with the small boy on one side, warm in a way the van never got, so warm her arms went heavy and far away. Somebody passing in the dark said the word they all said, the leaving-and-arriving word, low, to no one — Safe — and she was gone before she could have said it back.

---

The southbound van brought her into Freiburg in the afternoon. She knew the turns before she could have named them, and then she knew the street, and then the building: the grey front, the courtyard, the third-floor windows that were hers. The southern lot waited at the kerb while she went up. They were not in a hurry; nobody was, any more.

The flat was exactly as it had been left. That was the strangeness of it: not wrecked, not robbed, only stopped. Her mother’s coat on the hook. The breakfast things put away. The clocks were still going, still right, the kitchen one and the little one in the hall, keeping the proper time in the empty rooms as if they had not been told. Ana went through it without touching much. In her own room she lay down on her own bed, on top of the cover, in her shoes, and stayed there a while looking at the ceiling she had looked at all her life, and the house was very quiet, and the clocks went on keeping the time.

Then one of the southern girls called up the stairwell that they should go, and Ana got up. She took two new exercise books from the drawer in her desk — the blank ones, kept for a school year that wasn’t going to start — and put them with the one she had. She asked the girl the name of the house they were taking her to, and the street, and wrote it down. On the way out she asked if they could stop a floor down; there was another door she wanted to try.

It was Marko’s, and it was locked. She had known it would be. He had written that he was coming, not that he was here, and she had read it twice and understood it. But she tried the handle anyway, and knocked, and when nothing answered she did the thing she had come down to do. She tore a page from one of the new books and wrote where she would be, the house and the street and the girl’s name for it, and signed it, and slipped it under his door, far enough in that it would not be lost.

The house they took her to had been a big school on the edge of the city, and it was the best-kept place she had been in since London stopped being London. The lights worked, off panels and batteries someone understood. There was a kitchen with a rota pinned up and people cooking in it at proper hours. The little ones had lessons in the mornings, sums and letters, at desks. There was a board in the hall, a real one, that talked to the other houses when the power was good.

They took her in as the others had, without fuss and without a ceremony: a bed in a room with three other girls, a peg with her name going up that afternoon, a place at the table, a job on the rota for the morning. By the evening she had been folded in so completely that it was hard to remember she had come only that day.

---

He came the next day, in the afternoon, on a bicycle, with the road still on him, burnt and thin and not steady on his feet. He had been to the building first; he had her note in his pocket, the torn page with the house and the street in her round hand. At the door he asked for her by name, and then, before they fetched her, he asked the ones who ran the place something else, quietly, in the hall: whether he should tell her about her father, or leave it. He had decided things the whole way here and had not been able to decide this one.

They were young, the ones he asked: teenagers, a couple past twenty. They heard him out. One of them, a girl with a level look, said he should tell her, and tell her straight, and that it should be him, since he was the one who’d been there. The hidden things were the ones that went wrong in the little ones, she said; she’d seen it more than once. She said it as if it were settled practice, which by now it likely was. He said all right. He had wanted, he realised, to be told not to.

When they brought her down she did not run to him. She stopped a little way off and looked at him as if checking him against what she remembered. Then she came and put her arms round him, briefly, and stepped back. She had got taller, or he had got smaller. She asked if he’d had a hard time on the road, and he said not too bad.

He had meant to do it gently, in stages. He got as far as Papa, and that he had been with Papa on the road, and that Papa had been very tired, more tired than the medicine could — and she said, “He died.” Not a question. Her hand had gone up to the scarf at her neck. “On the road. With you.”

“Yes,” he said.

“I thought so.” Her face had not changed yet. “I kept the phone for him the whole way. I charged it last night, when there was the plug. He didn’t ring.” She said it like the end of a sum that had only ever had the one answer. “If he could have rung, he would have rung.”

And then, now that she had stopped speaking, it came up through her all at once — her face going, her breath catching and tearing, no words in it now or only the edges of them, Papa and once and something he couldn’t make out — and he got down onto the floor of the hall, which his knees did not want to do, and held on to her while she did it. A couple of the young ones stood close without crowding. One went to fetch water nobody would drink.

When it had passed its worst he said the thing he had come to say, and made a poor job of it, because he had no practice and because it was true, and the two together undid his sentences. He wanted to look after her now, he said. She could come and live with him; he would manage it, whatever it took. That he was sorry — here he lost the thread and found it again — sorry he had not been more use, before, with any of it, with her mother or with getting her home or with Papa; that he had been too slow at all of it; but that he was here now, and meant to stay, and she was not to worry about being looked after.

Ana wiped her face on the scarf and considered it with the seriousness she gave to everything. The house was good, she said. She had a bed and a peg with her name and a job in the mornings; there were the other children, and the little boy who was hers to mind; she was going to be happy here, she could tell already. She did not want to be looked after in a flat by one person. She wanted to be here.

But he could come and see her, she said. Every day, if he liked. There was always food, and he could meet the little boy, and she would show him the board and how it reached the other houses. She said it as an arrangement, a thing to set up properly, and asked when he would start.

He said tomorrow. She said good. Mornings were best, after lessons. Then she went to tell the girl with the level look that he would be coming, so they’d know to expect him at the door.

---

[In one of the blank exercise books she took from her desk. The same hand, years later:]

He came the next morning. He had Borko with him, alive, and my paper still taped to the lid. He had done it exactly, the whole way.

He came one more time.

— A.