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result that the accused man avoided the rope, which was as well because people in those days were far too quick to reach for it, and for the Court, ultimately, the fact that Judejahn escaped hanging was just as well because the monster Judejahn had been earmarked for re-employment, war being a dirty business. The Oberbürgermeister had probably gone to Rome in his own car, he could probably run to a Mercedes again by now, or maybe the city had provided him with the vehicle for the scenic ride, Italy, land of longing, land of Germans, and Pfaffrath the German had his leather-bound Goethe on his shelves, and tax-commentaries well-thumbed next to the man from Weimar, a dubious type, what good ever came out of Weimar, and it irritated Judejahn having to imagine his brother-in-law with his snout in the trough again—it was treason, the fellow had committed base treason and should have swung for it. But Judejahn had a car at his disposal also, it wasn't that he had to walk, no, but he wanted to, he wanted to make the pilgrimage to bourgeois life on foot, that was appropriate here, appropriate in this city and this situation, he wanted to gain time, and Rome, they said, Rome where the bishops had settled and the streets crawled with surplices, Rome, they said, was a beautiful city, and now Judejahn was going to see it for himself. He hadn't been able to hitherto, he'd been here on duty, given orders here, gone on the rampage here. Now he could stroll through Rome, could pick up what the town had to offer by way of balmy air, historical sites, sophisticated whores and rich food. Why stint himself? He'd been in the desert a long time, and Rome was still standing, not in ruins. The eternal city, they called it. That was professors' and priests' talk. Judejahn showed his murderer's face. He knew better than that. He'd seen plenty of cities go under.
    She waited. She waited by herself. No one helped her to wait, no one shortened the time by talking to her, and she didn't want the time to be shortened anyway or for them to concern themselves with her, because she alone was in mourning, she alone was distressed, and not even her sister Anna understood that Eva Judejahn was not weeping for lost possessions, or rank or respect, still less was it grief over Judejahn, whom she had seen as a hero entering Valhalla, that paled her countenance; she was grieving for Grossdeutschland, she was shedding tears for the Führer, lamenting the fact that treachery and betrayal and unnatural pacts had brought down the Germanic idea of world-salvation, the millennial Third Reich. The sound of laughter came up from the lobby through staircases and corridors, in at her window from the courtyard came the smell of cooking and an American dance tune sung by an Italian kitchen boy; but she wasn't reached by the laughter or the lively new nigger song embellished by bel canto, she stood in her widow's weeds in the stone cage of her room, madness, incomprehension and fleeting time, she stood wolf-throated, pregnant with vengeance, in the delirium of a myth she'd helped to concoct, prey to her innermost fears, her greying straw-blonde hair, sheaf of wheat left to stand when the frightened farm hands fled at the approach of a thunderstorm, her hair tied in a stern womanly knot over the pale face, long-skulled face, square-chinned face, sorrow face, terror face, ravened, burned out, a death's head like the insignia Judejahn wore on his peaked cap. She was like a ghost, not a Eumenide, but a northerly ghost, a foggy ghost that a madman had brought to Rome and locked into a hotel room.
    She was in a small room, the smallest one in the hotel, that had been her desire, for brother-in-law Friedrich Wilhelm, who wouldn't understand that it was she who had to remove the blot from the name of Germany, Friedrich Wilhelm had undertaken the journey for her sake, so Anna said too, and Friedrich Wilhelm Pfaffrath patted Eva Judejahn gently on the shoulder and said, 'There, there,