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suggest? A lawyer perhaps?”
    â€œAre you crazy? The last time this happened to a friend of minethey jailed the lawyer too. It is a crime to defend people who have committed no crime.”
    I looked at her in astonishment.
    â€œDoes this happen often to friends of yours?”
    â€œNot often, no. You are pretty safe with me. Unless…”
    â€œUnless what?”
    She was standing a pace away from me, her back to the chapel, her eyes fixed on the Nusle steps.
    â€œDo you see that old woman?” she asked.
    I turned my eyes in the direction of hers. The woman with the dog was coming down now, handing her body from step to step, gripping the rail and muttering.
    â€œLike the poodle in
Faust
,” she went on, “he comes in many forms.”
    â€œWho?”
    â€œMephistopheles. The spirit who always denies.”
    The old woman had reached the bottom of the steps and was passing out of view. In the Prague of those days, there was a peculiar emptiness that supervened, in the wake of people who were too much looked at. The specter of the city followed them into the void, and in its wake you saw a pillaged graveyard—dilapidated buildings, cracked pavements, crumbling façades with the air of tombs, and the sad uncared-for trees that the dead had planted. This emptiness haunted me whenever I came up from underground. But never before had I seen it as I saw it then, standing beside a woman who put on display not only her beauty and energy, but her education, too, and who stood above the emptiness as a mother stands above the troubles of her child. I was seized by the conviction that this woman whom I had loved from the moment I saw her had also been sent to rescue me.
    She took the glove from her right hand and warmed her fingers in her mouth. I wanted to take the hand in mine and warm it properly. I thrust my hands deeper into the pockets of my coat.
    â€œSo what should we do?” I asked.
    â€œThe only thing that works is a campaign,” she said. “In the Western press.”
    â€œAnd who can organize that?”
    â€œNot someone who lives underground.”
    â€œSo where do
you
live, Betka?”
    Betka looked at me, and I was out of my depth. How could I find words for this girl who did not whisper, did not hide as others hid from the hidden witness? I thought of Mother. That innocent woman, who had deserved only the very best of life and received only the worst, was now being broken on the wheel of their questions. The spasm of guilt that I felt was like smoke from the turbine of my excitement, which curled away above the chapel and was lost in the void. Words at home had never been direct. The world lay beyond our walls like a threat; we occasionally alluded to it, but never described it as it was. Our conversations were a kind of embroidered silence, each of us buried in the fiction of another life, a life of reckless solitude. All my dealings aboveground had been shaped by the same imperative—to conceal, to retreat, to make my pain so small that I could pack it into a hollow tooth and bite on it.
    â€œI want to say that I live in the real world,” she said. “But they abolished it long ago.”
    I muttered something, but she continued to look at me as though waiting for a confession. Still the words would not come.
    â€œI think I know who wrote these stories,” she went on. “It was you, wasn’t it?”
    â€œCould be.”
    â€œI understand you,” she went on, “because I dreamed you up. And this book lies on the edge of my dream.”
    She had taken the volume of
Rumors
from her bag and held it out to me.
    â€œKeep it. It is safer with you.”
    She replaced it with a smile.
    â€œSo there you are,” she said, “back in my dream.”
    â€œI like it inside your dream. I like it very much.”
    â€œOnly miracles happen in dreams. And you can’t rely on miracles. We should go, by the way.”
    She