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shook her head. “I was born in the Ukraine.” He did not know where that was, but didn’t like to say so. “Now I am come from Mulheim, in the American zone, to Australia.” She called it Owstrahlia. “I am to work here at the hospital.”
    “Have you just arrived?” he asked.
    “In the camp I have been three weeks, but here only three days.”
    “Three days? Then you’re brand-new!” They laughed together. “How do you like Australia?”
    “I like it very much, what I have seen.”
    “Are you a nurse?”
    She shook her head. “I think you call it ward-maid. I am to do scrubbing and the carrying trays, and the washing dishes, and the washing clothes.”
    “Do you know anybody in Australia?”
    She said, “I have good friends that I met on the ship, but they have gone to Mildura. But I have here Natasha who came with me, who is dancing with your friend. She comes also from the Ukraine and we were together at Mulheim, working at the same canteen.”
    “Natasha?”
    She laughed. “That is another name of the Ukraine. Natasha Byelev. Are our names very difficult?”
    “My word!”
    “Tell me,” she said presently, “your friend, is he Australian also?”
    “No,” he replied. “He’s Italian. His name’s Mario Ritti.”
    “Ah—an Italian. I did not think he was Australian.”
    “That’s right,” Tim said. “He works at Leonora, where I work. He’s on top of the world tonight, because he’s got a girl in Italy and the boss is going to pay her passage out here so that Mario can get married.”
    He had to repeat parts of that once or twice before its full import sunk in. “He will pay for her to come from Italy to Australia?” she said in wonder. “He must be a very rich man.”
    “He’s doing all right with the wool,” Tim said. “He’s not a rich man, really.”
    “Your friend is very lucky to work for such a man. Is his loved one to come soon?”
    “Soon as the boss can get her on a ship. He’s scared that Mario will leave when his two years are up. He wants to get him settled on the station in a house of his own, with a wife and family.”
    She stared at him. “He is to make him a house also?”
    “That’s right. Just a shack, you know.”
    She thought about this for a minute as they danced. “I also must work for two years,” she said. “I am to work here in the hospital, with Natasha.”
    “Do you like it?”
    She shrugged her shoulders. “I have been working so since five years, in the works canteen at Mulheim. Once I was to be schoolteacher, but with the war that was not possible.”
    “Where were you in the war?” he asked.
    “In Dresden,” she said. “When I was little girl my father and my mother left Odessa because they were not members of the Party and the life there was not good, and so they went to live in Dresden. There my father was schoolteacher, to teach the boys Russian. All before the war, and in the war, we lived in Dresden. Then the English bombed Dresden and my father and my mother were killed, both together. Our house was all destroyed. I was not there, because I worked that night in the factory outside the city and that was not bombed. But I went to go home in the morning, our house and the whole street was all destroyed, and my mother and my father were dead, both of them. So then the war came to Dresden very soon after, and I went first to Leipzig and then to Kassel because the Russians were coming, and there I met Natasha and we went to Mulheim in the end to work in the canteen.”
    Tim Archer said, “You’ve seen a mighty lot of foreign places. I should think you’d find it a bit slow in Banbury.”
    “I think it will be better to be in a slow place and live slowly for a time,” Tamara said. “So much has happened since I was a little girl.”
    Presently the dance ended and he took her back to her seat. Mario immediately asked her to dance again, and Tim escaped, and went to dance with Joan McFarlane.
    At the same time, at Leonora, Jane