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command of English.
    The main entrance was blocked by rubble, heaps of shattered bricks and paving stones, splintered boards, the kind of disaster zone that had by now become so familiar. In the courtyard, groups of shabby men gathered, smoking foul cigarettes and trading in information and goods in a babel of tongues. As he crossed the courtyard to the lobby where, in better days, a reception desk had surely stood, Jack witnessed a brisk trade in sacks of cucumbers and potatoes, bread and cabbages, and of course the ubiquitous packages of Chesterfields and Luckies. A brace of game birds changed hands, too small to be ducks, too colorful to be pigeons. No one bothered to hide his activities from or even take notice of the American officer in their midst. He was taken aback by their brazenness, but when he found the GIs ostensibly guarding the place, he understood. The American soldiers were themselves busy selling off the contents of their C rations and of the packages their mothers and girlfriends had so lovingly sent them from home.
    There were so many girls in the camp, the sergeant in charge told him. And most of them had already learned enough English to communicate at least a little bit.
    “Red hair,” Jack said. “Curly. And thin. Very thin.” He had been ready to come up with some bogus reason for his visit, but the sergeant in charge at the Hotel Europa clearly did not care about the rules against fraternization, even less about Jack’s business.
    “Feel free to look around. Word of warning, though, sir. Some of these people, you stick your head in their room, they act like you’re coming to murder their mother.”
    Jack was tempted to remind the man that the experience of having a soldier walk into their houses and murder their mothers was a familiar one to a fair number of the people currently residing in the hotel, but the sergeant had three bronze battle stars on his chest. Jack wouldn’t be telling him anything he didn’t already know.
    They were interrupted by furious shouts from across the courtyard. A woman barreled through the crowds, assuming—correctly, it seemed—that anyone unlucky enough to find himself in her path would give way.
    “Aw, shit,” the sergeant said.
    The woman had an apple face on a potato body, a thin braid of colorless hair circling her head. “Come!” she said.
    “What now, Maria?” the sergeant said. “Why you all worked up this time?”
    Her English was insufficient to allow her to explain. She just kept repeating, “Come! Come!” until finally the sergeant called over two of his men and told them to escort the lady upstairs and find out what was wrong. Jack, curious, accompanied the men across the courtyard, none of them moving fast enough to suit Maria, who kept stopping and waving at them to catch up, with a flick of her hand, the way you’d call a dog to heel.
    She led them through a door, its glass replaced with panels of scarred timber that had somehow managed to evade the cooking fires. A stairway looped upward with vestigial elegance, and at its center rose an elevator shaft, enclosed in lacy wrought iron. It was heaped with trash, including a baby carriage missing all but one of its wheels. As they climbed up the staircase circling the defunct elevator shaft, birds nesting in the walls took off with a great flutter of wings, startling Jack, though not the others.
    There were three rooms on each floor, and most of the doors were open as a concession to the thick July heat. Jack saw that the rooms had been divided into crude cubicles, with each living space separated from the others by a strung-up blanket. Six, seven, up to a dozen people werecrammed into each room, lying on bunks of crude lumber or sprawled in one of the few remaining chairs. Children chased one another through the halls. When the soldiers and their furious escort reached the fourth floor, the door to the first apartment opened, and an elderly woman walked out. Jack looked past her into