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'I had to run away,' she whispered, as though she were apologizing. 'They wipe out entire families, and even burn down their houses.' At first it was not easy, then she met Nicholas. Nicholas is an exceptional person; perhaps he shouldn't be a businessman at all, because he has a need to help others. Did I know that his mother knew Gandhi personally, and took part in most of his non-violent actions?

Eventually, what had to happen did happen — outside I heard the sound of an approaching car.

Angela ran to the window. 'Nicholas,' she announced. 'It looks like he's being followed. And I kept you here so long!'

It no longer made any sense to hurry. I sat talking to Nicholas for a while, then arranged to stop by for the bags in three days so I wouldn't be showing up here too often. I

thanked Nicholas for everything he was doing for me. He smiled. 'They're only books,' he said, and we parted.

The men who had tailed Nicholas were waiting in a car by the tennis-courts. When I walked out through the gate, they turned their headlights on, perhaps to let me know they were there, or perhaps just to get a better look at me.

Through the windows of the neighbouring houses the blue light of television screens glowed. 'Why do people watch television?' Nicholas had once asked me in amazement. 'They must know they're being lied to.'

I suddenly realized why he smuggled in all those books. Though a foreigner, he divined that those books — mostly written by Czechs, and banned by our overlords — belonged to us. Like his mother, he believed in non-violent resistance.

During the war the rooms in which we were imprisoned were patrolled by three especially well-trained spies. Accompanied by an armed man, these Three Fates, or Three Sowbugs, as they were called, would usually sweep in early in the morning, before the men had gone to work, and search our rooms for contraband. They emptied suitcases, burrowed into sheets, slit open straw mattresses and eiderdowns, felt coatsleeves, poured sugar, ersatz coffee or other luxuries on to the floor, and even prised up floorboards. They rarely discovered anything. But anyone found guilty was sent away to a place where only gas chambers awaited them.

One morning they came bursting in on us. I was still asleep and when I saw them in that first moment of awakening, anxiety gripped me by the throat. I had to get up, dress, all the time looking on while they worked. I knew all too well where the contraband was hidden — the roll of banknotes burned a hole in the wood and fell to my

feet like ash — but I also knew that I must not look in that direction. So I stared at the wall in front of me, and occasionally stole a glance at those three women absorbed in their unwomanly work. Sidelong, I saw them only as strange, moving monsters with fuzzy outlines.

Until they approached the sideboard that is; then I suddenly saw them sharply: three fat ugly old women, one of whom was just opening the fateful drawer. I remember noticing clearly her chubby hands and realizing at that moment that not one of the women could have reached into our hiding place. I felt the joyous laughter of relief rising within me. I was able to suppress it, but it rang inside me all the time those women were rummaging among our things. It was a laughter which, on that occasion at least, ushered death from our door.

I walked casually back to my car. I might have left it there, walked past the tennis-court and run down some of the steep lanes on the hillside, but if they were determined to follow me there was little I could do to escape. Moreover, I didn't have a single illegal item on me. I wasn't carrying rice or cocoa or writing-paper. But the definition of contraband changes with the wandering of that monstrous cloud. The current definition took greatest exception to ideas, that is, to anything that could disseminate them. Instead of being entrusted to three fat women, the search for contraband was now conducted by entire special departments provided with expensive but effective technology. Everything was done to ensure that not a single impulse of the spirit nor the sound of pure speech could ever occur in the territory they controlled.

Normally, I don't even notice the activities of these departments, or at least I try not to let them get to me. I

don't want them to smother my world. Occasionally, however, they make an appearance. I open my eyes in the morning and see them slitting open my books, dusting white powder on my floor, reading my letters. Or I hear about the flames they leave behind in their footsteps. Or they emerge from the darkness and shine their lights on me, reminders of death with whom they are allied. At such moments, I am possessed by a will to resist; I must do something quickly— to show myself that I am still alive, that the world in which I move is still human. I am prepared to weave in and out of the lights that pursue me, to seek out a secret hiding place, and when it seems at last that I have deceived their vigilance, I hear inside me the laughter of relief.

I knocked the snow off my boots, swung my arms back and forth to let them know that my hands were empty. I unlocked the car and got in. I had to drive past them; there was no other way out. They started off behind me.

I shouldn't have cared. There was nothing in the car but a basket of damp laundry my wife had picked up. They could have noted down my registration number before I drove off.

So why were they following me? Did they know something about those occasional bags full of books? Or did they not know, but suspect something else? Or was it that they didn't know, and suspected nothing in particular, but were merely running a routine check on Nicholas to see who he associated with? Who did Nicholas associate with? I had no idea.

They were keeping close. They had a better, newer car than I did, and it was equipped with a two-way radio they could use to call for help, or to send instructions ahead to stop me at the first major intersection. Nevertheless, I

longed to escape them.

I drove slowly through the fresh drifts of snow. At the first junction I braked, and my followers came to a halt behind me. The street I was intending to take climbed steeply up to the top of a hill. Several cars were descending towards the junction, and I waited until they were very close, then I moved out, stepped on the accelerator, and roared up the hill. Halfway up, I looked around. They hadn't managed to get away; they were still waiting until the cars descending the slippery hill had cleared the junction. I managed to reach the next corner before I saw them in the distance.

For a while I wound through some narrow back streets, constantly turning corners until, yes, there was a building I knew, with a wide gate leading to a large inner courtyard. As far as I could remember there was, or had been, a small park inside. There was even a bench hidden under the trees where my first love and I had necked. I drove through the gate. The trees had grown and there were more cars than I remembered, but I managed to find an empty space and parked in it. I walked back to the gate, and watched the street outside. They was no sign of them.

I got into my car again and, on a sudden whim, drove directly to the place where they would least expect to find me.

I stopped in front of Nicholas's house.

'What an idea,' said Angela, surprised to see me. 'You'd have probably tried to walk across those planks, too,' she added, referring to our conversation about Cortázar. Nicholas took one of the bags and carried it out for me.

I threw the bags on the floor between the front and back seats, then got in and drove off, taking the route I had followed a while before, except that instead of turning up

the hill, I drove down it towards my home. The only problem was that to get there I had to drive right across the city. If they wanted to, they could certainly find me somewhere along the way. Returning for the bags probably hadn't been a very wise thing to do. I could still hear Angela's excited voice evoking images of bloody faces, tortured bodies and burning homes.