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disputes could spring up over jurisdiction and boundary lines.
    Hiring a business manager at all was a sign of prosperity. Until then, the paper’s founder and owner, Isaac Landau, aided by one old bookkeeper, had done all the buying of paper and inks and press equipment, all the billing and contracting and whatever “business managing” had to be done. Ivarin had no taste for such matters, and as insurance against any future invasion, rather made a point of it.
    Fehler was not yet thirty-five when Landau took him on, but he was no neophyte. He had been a job printer, like his father before him, and had gone on from there to magazine and newspaper work in the foreign-language field. He sounded like a native-born American, having lived in the Middle West from the age of one or two until he was grown, but his mother tongue was German and the Yiddish that went with it because his parents were Jews. With three sons, his father had thought ahead to their forced conscription in the German Army and had emigrated after the Franco-Prussian war, settling in Milwaukee because New York had “too many Russian Jews.”
    The German Jew versus the Russian Jew, Stefan Ivarin thought now, turning over in bed. Maybe that’s why I found something objectionable in Fehler from the start. The German Jew buttering his soul with that slippery superiority over the Russian Jew or Polish Jew. An intramural bigotry that outsiders never suspect. But had Fehler been more Russian than all the Romanoffs, we’d have clashed anyway, the moment he proclaimed himself a “philosophical anarchist.” What is that indeed, except an anarchist with his tail between his legs? Not precisely the right Damon for my Pythias.
    An international metaphor, Ivarin thought, and felt the first vagueness of sleep.
    In the darkness Fee woke, shaken by fear and recognition. Her father’s voice, full-throated and deep like an animal’s, rose and fell in the screaming of his nightmare. For a second she lay still, hoping somebody else would do it this time. Then she sprang up and ran to his room and leaned down over him. “Papa, wake up, Papa.”
    His screaming rose in volume and she knew he would not wake until she had touched his shoulder. Then he would give one final cry, and it would be over for this time. But the instant of touching him and of hearing that last cry was the worst moment. For another second, she continued to call, “Papa, wake up.” Then she forced her hand through the darkness and seized his shoulder.
    At her touch his body leaped.
    “Wuh-ahhh.” It was a sliding groaning howl, followed by abrupt silence. He sat up and, in his ordinary voice, said impatiently, “All right, all right.”
    “It’s me, Papa. Are you up?”
    “Yes, yes. I had a bad dream.” He stretched his hand out for his glasses, on a chair drawn up to his bed, and as his blanket fell back from his moving arm, a faint sour smell rose to her nostrils. She drew back a step. “Turn the light on, Firuschka.”
    She crossed the bare floor to the switch, her heart still thudding. He always called her Firuschka when she woke him, and he always said exactly the same words: All right, all right. I had a bad dream.
    The switch clicked as she turned back to him, reluctantly now that they could see each other. After waking him, she never knew what to say; it was hard even to meet his eyes. But to shake him awake and then just leave without a word seemed terrible.
    She stood still, glancing around the room, waiting. Even coming in here at night was strange; everything looked different. His clothes were hung on a knob of his chair; through the open door to his study she could see his papers and equations and books piled on his desk, and the old wooden table next to it, with his chessboard and more books about famous chess players and their tournaments.
    In bed, her father was clearing his throat and coughing. “What time is it?” he asked, and she made herself look at him as she answered.