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because he wanted to see him face-to-face. Since the streetcar conductor had come home at twelve the night before, and since it was Monday, he would come down at half past two so as to be at his depot by three.
    What had the old men been talking about when Frank came in? It made no difference to him. One of them was a shoemaker with a shop a little farther down the street, but for lack of materials he hardly worked anymore. He must have been eyeing Frank’s shoes, appraising them, indignant that the young man didn’t even bother to wear galoshes over them.
    There were places you could go, no doubt about it, and places where you’d better not set foot. Timo’s was the place for him. Not this. What would they say about him when he left?
    Holst, too, was one of those big men who had shrunk. They were a race apart and you could spot them at a glance. Hamling, for example, was big but solid. Holst, much taller and with shoulders that must once have been broad, was all droopy now. And it wasn’t only his clothes that were worn out and hung loose. His skin had also grown too large. It probably hung from his body in folds, just like it did from his face.
    From the very onset of the present situation—and he had been barely fifteen at the time—Frank had felt contempt for abject poverty and for those who submitted to it. It amounted to a revulsion, a sort of disgust, even for the girls, thin and pale, who came to his mother’s and threw themselves on their food. Some of them would weep with emotion, fill their plates, and then be unable to eat.
    The road where the streetcar ran was black and white, and the snow on it was filthier than anywhere else. As far as the eye could see it was transected by the streetcar rails, black and shining, curving together where the two lines met. The sky was low and too bright, with a luminosity more depressing than any uniform gray. That whiteness, glaring, translucent, had something menacing about it, something absolute and eternal. Under it, colors became hard and mean, the brown or the dirty yellow of the houses, for example, or the dark red of the streetcar that seemed to float in the air. And, opposite Kamp’s, in front of the tripe seller’s, stretched a long ugly line of people waiting, the women in shawls and the little girls with their skinny legs stamping their wooden soles on the pavement, trying to keep warm.
    â€œWhat do I owe you?”
    He paid. The amount was ridiculous. It was really almost too much trouble to unbutton his coat for so little. The prices in these cafés were absurd. Though it was true—you got what you paid for.
    Holst was standing on the curb, all gray, with his long shapeless overcoat, his muffler, and those boots of his tied around his ankles with string. In other times, in other countries, people would have stopped to stare at him, decked out like that, with newspapers stuffed under his clothes for warmth, probably, and that tin lunch box he clasped so tightly under his arm. What kind of food could he be carrying in it?
    Frank joined him, as if he, too, were waiting for the streetcar. He paced up and down; a dozen times he came face-to-face with Holst and looked him straight in the eye, exhaling puffs of cigarette smoke. If he threw away the butt, would Sissy’s father pick it up? Perhaps not in front of him, for the sake of dignity, although in town people often did, people who were neither beggars nor workingmen.
    He had never seen Holst smoke. Had he smoked before?
    Frank, annoyed, felt like a loud little dog trying to catch his attention. He prowled around the tall gray figure, and the other man, motionless, seemed unaware of his presence.
    Yet last night, Holst had seen him in the blind alley. He knew about the death of the noncommissioned officer. He knew, too, it was almost certain—the concierge had drawn the tenants into his apartment one by one—that they had arrested the violinist from the second