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pulse, out of duty, but he knew he need not have done it. He’d seen death before and he knew what it meant when a body lay with all the angles bent wrong. He had knelt and, slowly and carefully, with the tail of his shirt, had cleaned his brother’s face. Then he took him home.
    Where the dirt road turned into his house, the dogs started barking. The door opened, and he saw his father’s silhouette in the doorway.
    The Russian, Antipin, came a few weeks later.
    Like the odd little man from Germany in the mint-colored overcoat, he came on the river. But, the local wise men noted quietly, there were interesting differences in the manner of his coming. The German had arrived by river steamer, with a movie projector and a steel trunk full of film cans and pamphlets. The Russian rowed in, on a small fishing skiff, tying up to one of the sagging pole-built docks that lined the river. The German was an older man, balding, with skin like parchment and a long thin nose. The Russian was a young man, a Slav, square-faced and solid, with neatly combed brown hair. The German had to use German-speaking National Union members to translate for him. The Russian spoke idiomatic Bulgarian—at least he tried—and they could understand his Russian well enough. All along the river, the Slavs could speak to each other without great difficulty.
    The German arrived as a German, and his arrival was honored. The postman’s chubby daughter waited at the dockside with a basket of fruit. There had been a banquet, with speeches and copious brandy. The Russian said, at first, that he was a Bulgarian. Nobody really believed him. Then a rumor went around that he was a Czech. Because it was a rumor, there were naturally some who believed it. Somehow there was confusion, and the Russian-Bulgarian-Czech, whatever the hell he was, wasn’t much seen around the town. To a few people, the Stoianevs among them, he admitted that he was a Russian and that his name was Antipin. Vassily Dmitrievich. The falsehoods were a gesture , he explained, not serious , necessitated by the current situation .
    The German smoked a cigar every night after dinner. It looked peculiar, outsized, in his thin weasel’s face. The Russian rolled and smoked cigarettes of makhorka , black Russian tobacco, earthy-smelling weed grown in the valleys of the Caucasus mountains. He was provident with it, offering constantly. Poor stuff, it was true. But what he had he shared, and this was noticed.
    Of all the points of difference that distinguished the two visitors,however, there was one that absorbed the coffeehouse philosophers a great deal more than any other:
    The German came from the west.
    The Russian came from the east.
    The German came downriver from Passau, on the German side of the Austrian border. The Russian came upriver from Izmail, in Soviet Bessarabia, having first sailed by steamer from the Black Sea port of Odessa.
    And, really, the local wise men said, there you had it. That was the root of it, all right, that great poxed whore of a river that ran by every front door in the Balkans. Well, in a manner of speaking. It had brought them grief and fury, iron and fire, hangmen and tax collectors. Somewhere, surely, it was proposed, there were men and women who loved their river, were happy and peaceful upon its banks, perhaps, even, prayed to its watery gods and thanked them nightly.
    Who could know? Surely it was possible, and it was much in their experience that that which was possible would, sooner or later, get around to happening. Fate had laws, they’d learned all too well, and that was one of them.
    And it was their fate to live on this river. It was their fate that some rivers drew conquerors much as corpses drew flies—and the metaphor was greatly to the point, was it not. Thus it was their fate to be conquered, to live as slaves. That was the truth of it, why call it something else? And, as slaves, to have the worst slaves’ luck of all: changing masters.
    For who in