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mass exodus from parliament, informing reporters waiting outside that they had been physically abused by Czech police.
    Everybody in Prague knew this game—incidents, provocations, speeches—it meant that the German tank divisions sitting up on the border were coming down. Today? Tomorrow? When?
    Soon.
    On the surface, there was nothing to see. But what they felt here made itself known in subtle ways: the way people looked at each other, a note in a voice, the unfinished sentence. Szara took the receipt he'd been given in Ostend to the central railroad station. The baggagemaster shook his head, this was from a smaller station, and gestured toward the edge of the city.
    He took a taxi, but by the time he arrived, the baggage room of the outlying station was closed for lunch. He found himself in a strange, silent neighborhood with signs in Polish and Ukrainian, boarded windows, groups of tieless men with buttoned collars gathered on street corners. He walked along empty streets swept by wind-driven swirls of dust. The women were hidden in black shawls, children held hands and kept close to the buildings. He heard a bell, looked down a steep lane, and saw a Jewish peddlerwith a slumped, starved horse, plumes of breath streaming from its nostrils as it attempted to pull a cart up a hill.
    Szara found a tiny café; conversation stopped when he walked in. He drank a cup of tea. There was no sugar. He could hear a clock ticking behind a curtained doorway. What was it in this place? A demon lived here. Szara struggled to breathe, his persona flowed away like mist and left a dull and anxious man sitting at a table. The clock behind the curtain chimed three and he walked quickly to the station. The baggagemaster limped painfully and wore a blue railroad uniform with a war medal pinned on the lapel. He took the receipt silently and, after a moment of study, nodded to himself. He disappeared for a long time, then returned with a leather satchel. Szara asked if a taxi could be called. “No,” the man said. Szara waited for more, for an explanation, something, but that was it. No.
    So he walked. For miles, through zigzag streets clogged with Saturday life, where every ancient stone leaned or sagged; past crowds of Orthodox Jews in caftans and curling sidelocks, gossiping in front of tiny synagogues; past Czech housewives in their print dresses, carrying home black breads and garlic sausages from the street markets; past children and dogs playing soccer on the cobblestones and old men who leaned their elbows on the windowsills and smoked their pipes and stared at the life in the street below. It was every quarter in every city in Europe in the cold, smoky days of November, but to Szara it was like being trapped in the dream where some terrifying thing was happening but the world ignored it and went blindly about its business.
    Reaching the hotel, he trudged upstairs and hurled the satchel onto the bed. Then he collapsed in a chair and closed his eyes in order to concentrate. Certain instincts flared to life: he must write about what he'd felt, must describe the haunting of this place. Done well, he knew, such stories spread, took on a life of their own. The politicians would do what they did, but the readers, the people, would understand, care, be animated by pity to speak out for the Czech republic. How to do it? What to select? Which fact really spoke, so that the writer could step aside and allow the story to tellitself. And if his own dispatch did not appear in other countries, it most certainly would run in the Communist party press, in many languages, and more foreign journalists than cared to admit it had a glance at such newspapers. Editorial policy said anything to keep the peace, but let the correspondents come here and see it for themselves.
    Then the satchel reminded him of its presence. He examined it and realized he'd never seen one like it: the leather was dense, pebbled, the hide of a powerful, unknown animal. It was