him through her tears, wiping them away, assuming again the Oriental pose. "You believe what you want," she said. "We won't celebrate. We won't pretend. We'll say Freddie is dead. But I'll believe—what I believe. And I'm thankful to Mr. Davidson."

"So you can live in doubt all the rest of your life? For that you're thankful?"

"I'm thankful for a crumb when I expected nothing. Where are you going?"

Mr. Friedlander was buckling his worn overcoat and forcing his shoes into wet overshoes. "Out for a walk," he said. "I want to think."

"It's a cold night."

"I don't care."

Outside, with the snow still falling, drifting down in unhurried silence, he found himself hating Mr. Davidson. The man should have minded his own business. Old meddler. He was a menace to the community, too. Whose side was he on, anyway? A senile old man? An agent provocateur for the barbarians in the western mountains? Was his self-appointed mission in life to see to it that people like poor Mrs. Friedlander never knew another moment of peace all the rest of their lives?

The short-wave radio—all lies. It had to be lies. If it weren't lies you could understand nothing. Black is white or white is black. Everyone saying something else. You don't know. You never know.

He didn't want to start any trouble. He wasn't looking for trouble. He was only a good, Karadi-fearing citizen who knew his place. But Mr. Davidson had made a revelation to him. If all the others, if all those people Mr. Davidson had named, chuckling over each name, taking secret delight in each one as if he, the patriarch of the tenament had converted them, one at a time or in groups, into clandestine outlaws, if all those people were subversive, thought Mr. Friedlander, why should he suffer along with them? Was it fair that he received the same inadequate food, the same squalid lodging, the same menial jobs to perform? He knew his place.

But they had told him about Freddie—or Mr. Davidson, their spokesman, had—and he owed them something for that, for the one brief moment in which they had shoved back the snow, the grim cold winter, the bleak building and the smell of turnips, as a curtain, and revealed his own youth to him, sparkling with hope, with promise, with a life unfulfilled.

No!

Even that had been unkind. Premeditated? His lot 

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