"Is it lit?"

"Down a little. That's it."

They sat down at the table, Volf trying to pull the wrapper over his legs for warmth. Sanzo was dressed, but his shirt was buttoned wrong; he looked mean and haggard. In front of him on the table were a bottle and a glass. He poured the glass full and pushed it towards his father. Volf got it between his crippled hands and began to drink it in large mouthfuls, with a long savouring pause between each. Tired of waiting, Sanzo got himself another glass, poured it half full, and drank it straight off.

When Volf was done he looked at his son awhile, and said, "Alexander."

"What is it?"

Volf sat looking at him, and finally got up, repeating the name by which no one but Sanzo's mother, fifteen years dead, had ever called him: "Alexander . . ." He touched his son's shoulder with his stiff fingers, stood there a moment, and shuffled back to his room.

Sanzo poured out and drank again. He found it hard to get drunk alone; he wasn't sure if he was drunk yet or not. It was like sitting in a thick fog that never thinned and never got any thicker: a blankness. "Blank, not dark," he said, pointing a finger he could not see at no one there. These words had a great significance, but he did not like the sound of his voice for some reason. He felt for the glass, which had ceased to exist, and drank out of the bottle. The blankness remained the same as before. "Go away, go away, go away," he said. This time he liked the sound of his voice. "You aren't there. None of you. Nobody's there. I'm right here." This was satisfying, but he was beginning to feel sick. "I'm here, God damn it, I'm here," he said loudly. No one answered, no one woke. No one was there. "I'm here," he said. His mouth was twitching and trembling. He put his head down on his arms to make that stop; he was so dizzy he thought he was falling off the chair, but he fell asleep instead. The candle near his hand burned down and out. He slept on, hunched over the table, while the wind whined and the streets grew dim with morning.

"Well all I said was she was over there a lot lately."

"Yes?" Mrs Benat said in a tone of mild but serious interest.

"And she got all huffy," said Eva, the second daughter, sixteen.

"Mh, she did?"

"He can't even work, what does he act so stuck up for?"

"He works."

"Oh, fixing chairs or something. But he always acts so stuck up, and then she got stuck up when I asked her. Is my hair straight?" Eva was pretty, as her mother had been at sixteen. She was dressed now to walk out with one of the many solemn, bony-wristed youths who requested that privilege, and to earn it had to undergo a close inspection of their persons and their antecedents by Mr and Mrs Benat.

After she had gone Mrs Benat put up her darning and went into the younger children's room. Lisha was humming her five-year-old sister to sleep with the song about the two beggars. The wind that had risen the night before rattled the window in gusts.

"She asleep? Come along."

Lisha followed her mother to the kitchen.

"Make us a cup of chocolate. I'm dead tired – Ough, this little place. If we had a room where you girls could sit with your boys. I don't like this walking out, it's not right. A girl ought to be at home for her courting. . . ."

She said no more until Lisha had made the chocolate and sat down at the table with her. Then she said, "I don't want you going to the Chekeys' any more, Lisha."

Lisha set down her cup. She smoothed out a crease in her skirt, and folded the end of the belt under the buckle.

"Why not, mother?"

"People talk."

"People have to talk about something."

"Not about my daughter."

"Can he come here, then?"

Mrs Benat was startled by this flank attack, bold and almost impudent, the last thing she expected from Lisha. Shaken, she spoke out bluntly: "No. Do you mean you have been courting?"

"I guess so."

"The man is blind, Alitsia!"

"I know," the girl said, without irony.

"He can't – he can't earn a living!"

"His pension's two hundred and fifty."

"Two hundred and fifty!"

"It's two hundred and fifty more than a lot of people are making these days," Lisha said. "Besides, I can work."

"Lisha, you're not talking of marrying him?"

"We haven't yet."

"But Lisha! Don't you see – "

Mrs Benat's voice had grown soft, desperate. She laid the palms of her hands on the table, short, fine hands swollen with hot water and strong soap.

"Lisha, listen to me. I'm forty years old. Half my life I've lived in this city, twenty years in this place, these four rooms. I came here when I was your age. I was born in Foranoy, you know that, it's an old town too, but not a trap like this one. Your grandfather was a mill hand. We had a house there, a house with a parlor, and a yard with a rose bush. When your grandmother was dying, you wouldn't remember, but she kept asking, when are we going home? When are we going home? I liked it fine here at first, I was young, I met your father, we were going to move back up north, in a year or two. And we talked about it. And you children came. And then the war, and good pay. And now that's all gone and it's nothing but strikes and wage cuts. So I finally looked back and saw that we'll never get out, we're here for good. When I saw that I made a vow, Lisha. You'll say I'm not in church from one year to the next, but I went to the cathedral, and I made a vow to the Virgin of the Sovena there. I said, Holy Mother, I'll stay here, it's all right, if you'll let my children get out. I'll never say another word, if you'll just let them get away, get out of here."

She looked up at her daughter. Her voice grew still softer. "Do you see what I'm getting at, Lisha? Your father's a man in ten thousand. But what has he to show for it? Nothing. Nothing saved. The same flat we moved into when we married. The same job. Practically the same wages. That's how it is in this trap, this city. I see him caught in that, what about you? I won't have it! I want you to marry well, and get out of here! Let me finish. If you married Sanzo Chekey, two can scrape by on that pension of his, but what about children? And there isn't any work for you now. If you married him, you know where you'd go? Across the yard. From four rooms to three. With Sara and Albrekt and the old man. And work for nothing in their ratty little shop. And be tied to a man who'd come to hate you because he couldn't help you. Oh, I know Sanzo, he was always proud, and don't think I haven't grieved for him. But you're my child, and it's your life, Lisha, all your life!"

Her voice had risen, and it quavered on the last words. In tears, Lisha put out her hands across the table and held her mother's tightly. "Listen, mother, I promise … if Sanzo ever says anything – maybe he won't, I don't know – if he does, and I still can't find a job, so we'd have enough to move, then I'll say no."

"You don't think he'd let you earn his living?"

Though Lisha's eyes were swollen with tears and her cheeks were wet, she spoke quite steadily. "He's proud," she said, "but he's not stupid, mother."

"But Lisha, can't you find a whole man!"

The girl released her hands and sat up straighter. She said nothing.

"Promise me you won't see him again."

"I can't. I promised all I could, mother."

There was a silence between them.

"You never crossed me in anything," Mrs Benat said, in a heavy, pondering tone. "You've been a good one, always. You're grown now. I can't lock you in like a slut. Kass might say yes, but I can't do it now. It's up to you, Lisha. You can save yourself, and him. Or you can waste it all."

"Save myself? For what?" the girl said, without any bitterness. "There never was anybody but him. Even when I was a little kid, before he went into the army. To waste that, that would be a sin. . . . Maybe it was kind of a sin, a little bit, to make that vow, too, mother."