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themselves with tissues dampened by rain wiped from the side panels of the car, and to at least pretend that their embraces should and could outlive the sex.
    Mouetta turned her back against her husband once again. Lix wrapped himself around his wife. Her mouth was bruised. She had not been compensated with an orgasm. Yet she was contented, unaccountably. Her husband had surprised her for a change. She had surprised herself. “That’s not like you,” she said, not facing him. She’d only meant to tease him, say how glad she was to have him to herself for this third year. Yet it was also an accusation, in a way.
    Both of them were too tired to take offense for long and both of them had earned the right to fold up in the cushions of the car and fall asleep. Untroubled dreams. Untroubled by the activist,
himself curled up but hardly sleeping underneath the desk in Freda’s office, while down the fourth-floor corridor the caretaker with master keys and soldiers at his heels (tipped off by Lix when he was being questioned by the roadblock volunteers) was heading for the student’s hiding place. They’d flush out all the troublemakers who’d thought they might find refuge in their rooms.
    Untroubled, too, by Freda, sharing her strange cell with eleven other women, five blankets, and two beds, already bruised, traduced, and undermined, fearful of the day ahead, determined, though, and proud. And so relieved that her young student lover would be saved and would by now be sleeping on her cousin’s study couch.
    Untroubled by those three fresh bodies in the city morgue, the youthful and impatient victims of the truncheons and the gas, the careless armored jeep, the interest rates, the gulf between the ruling and the ruled.
    Untroubled, even, by the thought of Lix’s five offspring (yes, five. There’s one who’s undiscovered yet), now sleeping somewhere in the world, produced by the only four women, other than Mouetta, he’d ever slept with. A jackpot of a sort.
    So this is our opportunity to welcome Mouetta’s first and Lix’s sixth child into the corridor. Whom should we thank, and what, for this chance winner of the lottery? Those things that made the night so bad for everybody else? The riots possibly. The traffic barriers. The idiotic militiamen who (or so Lix falsely claimed) were not bright enough to recognize the actor in their midst? The rain with its own three hundred million random pellets, the fertile, unforgiving rain that still was beating on their car? The shame
Lix felt? These were the settings for this single conception, the only cast and scenery and props that could produce this child. Change anything and you change everything. Another place, another time, produces someone else.
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    â€œCHOOSE ONE,” Mouetta said. “Choose one. If you could go to bed with anybody here, which one?”
    This was a question she’d posed to Lix a dozen times before, in public places, very often as a postscript—and not, despite her husband’s best endeavors, as a prologue—to their lovemaking.
    It was hardly 8:30 in the morning, Friday, not seven hours since their close encounter in the car. The early hours of her undiscovered pregnancy.
    That coming night, revitalized by the drier weather, there’d be new disturbances, better organized and more venomous than Thursday’s. Nine dead, this time, including three cadets trapped in a burning transporter. And, dramatically, the firebombing of the Bursary Chambers Club where—wrongly—it was thought some bankers and some military were dining. The wounded victims were, in fact, two waitresses, a cloakroom clerk, a fireman, and fourteen members of an investment club who hadn’t had the lungs or legs to get away from their third-story dining suite.
    For the moment everything was quiet. Apart from the parked police vans and the helicopters, the city, still in debt and shock, still