nothing in writing?"

"They sent a man."

"You knew him?"

"No. He wore good clothing. He drove up in a sleek Karadi car."

"Quisling."

"Freddie died a hero's death, he said. Against the rebels."

"Rebels? Trying to preserve their own freedom? Freedom which we lost because the bombed cities couldn't survive?"

"I only know what the man told me, but how can we ... how ... all my life, always, forever, I will be praying and waiting for Freddie to walk in, right behind you, through that door. We never saw him die. They should at least send something. Some proof. Anything to make me understand he is dead."

Mr. Friedlander had been thinking the same thing. If you loved someone, your son, all his life and then a stranger came and said he was dead you could forget the stranger came and go on thinking of that someone, your son, alive and not dead, but too busy to come and see you, eating the food you could only dream about, sleeping in a warm bed, in some clean place far away. Only it was like the cat he once had read about. You took the cat and gave it food, catnip, but every time it ate you also fed it electricity, a shock. It wanted to eat but it was afraid of the electricity, the shock. It starved to death screeching from hunger in a room full of food. If that was what the Karadi wanted, he would say Freddie was dead. He would believe and laugh every time he saw them because they thought he was screeching from hunger in a room full of food.

"Stop it," Mr. Friedlander told his wife. "You stop that. If they say so, then Freddie is dead. We must put an announcement in the Karadi newspaper and make plans for a funeral."

"In all this snow? It's so cold."

"Anyway."

Mrs. Friedlander walked to the stove and stirred the bubbling turnip water. "You come and eat your supper," she said. "We'll talk about Freddie later."

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