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themselves it was really much quicker that way. Then giving up cleaning the toilets or preparing every meal,-losing their grip one thread at a time. Until it was all they could do just to rise from bed in the morning and face the day …
    And so who was worse off? A child like Marie, returned to the mother who made her want to drown — or the children with no parents at all? Their fate lay in the hands of the state. A few miles across Rostov stood the new city orphanage, the Home for Children, installed in the altered hulk of a bank. Children surrounded by walls of grieving marble, rows of metal beds with crusty paint flaking off and thin mattresses over the coiled springs. A place of communal showers and lukewarm meals spooned onto dented tin trays. Frau Direktor had seen a notice in the press praising the home for being “modernly efficient” and housing five hundred. Five hundred what? Tons of sausage? The newsmen slurred words together for the sake of rendering complex thoughts into digestible hunks; modernly efficient — as if a Home for Children were some kind of meat-packing plant, where they packed little living sausages onto coil-spring beds and kept them fed and washed and warm enough till the next meal came around.
    Frau Direktor ceased squandering her time on dark thoughts,- for better or worse she had put her hopes in a cold box on an empty street. No use dwelling on outcomes she could not affect. No, she must stand before her interns. Tell them what she had written and show them what they must do. Run. Fly from this place. They had to try.
    Her two interns rose to greet her. “Thank you,” she said. “It would have been hopeless here the last few days without your help. Most of all, you, Petra, who came back heaven sent.” Their young housekeeper sat shyly on the couch like a wallflower at her first dance, clearly in awe of her sudden admittance to the inner circle of the clinic. Nighttime pressed against the windows,- the streetlamps outside shone like yellow coal miners’ lanterns in a smoky tunnel. Upstairs the children slept, that whole part of the house breathing as one.
    â€œWe have to get out,” Frau Direktor said. She waved her hand about the four corners of the dilapidated living room. “It’s over.”
    At first the blank eyes stared dully back. The slaves had adjusted to their extra burdens, to the lack of sleep, the gritty food. They had stopped looking forward — plodding on like yoked oxen, never raising their heads. Their backs about to break, and they didn’t even know it.
    Madame Le Boyau perceived her exhaustion first, nodding slowly as if she’d finally seen the future. “How much time do we have?”
    Frau Direktor could see their minds furiously spinning, tracing paths of flight; quick mental head counts of the children tossed like photographs, snap judgments weighing one child’s merits over the next. Which ones would travel well? Which the best in crowds? Easiest to feed? Or in the toilet?
    â€œDo you want me to choose for you?” Frau Direktor asked thickly. “In a few days and with a little luck, you’ll be on your way out of the country. You may be lost in an unfamiliar city, or running in a railway station with minutes to catch your train. There’ll be a policeman at the end of the platform, checking papers, and a family of fat Slovaks pushing you from behind. You’ll have a mentally disturbed child on your hands, threatening to explode. Maybe more than one. So if you have to rely on me for your analytical technique to get you on that train or out of that public rest room, you’re in serious trouble. Because I’m not leaving. I’m staying here. For the police.”
    This left her breathless,- she felt a constriction in her chest, a faint whistling…. Asthma. Her first attack in years. She tried to ignore it. God, how awful! The choking on her own tubes, the frantic drowning