Jem Read Free Page B

cathedral?"
    "It is the cathedral."
    "St. Stephan's is a monster? . . . Oh! Yes, I think I see. Those windows up high, they are the eyes? And those windows lined up underneath. They are the teeth."
    "It's smiling at us, do you see? And there are the ears, and the nose."
    Ahmed was not looking at the cathedral any more, but at her. "You are such a strange girl. I wonder what sort of Pakistani you would make."
    Nan caught her breath. "No! It's too much. Please don't talk like that." She took his arm. "Please, let's just walk."
    "I have not had any breakfast, Ana."
    "There's plenty of time." She guided him through the small park to the university, and down toward the larger one. She laughed. "Have you forgiven me for translating you so badly into Bulgarian?"
    "I would not have known how bad it was if you had not told me."
    "It was bad enough, Ahmed. I was looking at you when you were talking about this Kung's Star, and I forgot to translate."
    He glanced at her cautiously. "Do you know," he said, "Heir-of-Mao is personally interested in this planet. It was he who chose the name for the quasi-stellar object. He was there at the observatory when it was discovered. I think—"
    "What do you think, Ahmed?"
    "I think exciting things will happen," he said obscurely.
    She laughed and lifted his hand to touch her cheek.
    "Ana," he said, and stopped in the middle of the boulevard. "Listen to me. It is not impossible, you know. Even if I were to be away for a time, after that, for you and me, it would not be impossible."
    "Please, dear Ahmed—"
    "It is not impossible! I know," he said bitterly, oblivious of the fact that they were standing in the middle of the road, "that Pakistan is a poor country. We do not have food to export, like you and the Americans, and we do not have oil like the Middle Eastern states and the English. So we join with the countries that are left."
    "I respect Pakistan very much."
    "You were a child when you were there," he said severely. "But all the same it is not impossible to be happy, even in the People Bloc."
    A trolleybus was coming, three cars long and almost silent on its rubber-tired wheels. Nan tugged him out of the way, glad for the chance to change the subject.
    The difficulty with international conferences, she thought, was that you met political opponents, and sometimes they did not seem like opponents. She had not meant this involvement with someone from the other side. She certainly did not want its inconvenience and pain. She knew what the stakes were. As a translator with four fully mastered languages and half a dozen partials, she had been all over the world—largely within the Food Bloc, to be sure, but even so, that included Moscow and Kansas City and Rio and Ottawa. She had met defectors from the other sides. There had been a Welsh girl in Sydney; there were two or three Japanese on the faculty of the university, her own neighbors in Sofia. They always tried desperately to belong, but they were always different.
    Both the morning and Ahmed were too beautiful for such unhappy thoughts. That part of her mind which daydreamed and worried went from worry to daydream; the other part of her mind, the perceiving and interpreting part, had been following some events across the boulevard and now commanded her attention.
    "Look," she said, clutching at an excuse to divert Ahmed's attention, "what's going on over there?" It was on the Liberation Mall. The blond woman she had seen at one of the receptions was having an argument with two militiamen. One had her by the arm. The other was fingering his stun-stick and talking severely to a man, a youngish professorial type, also from the conference.
    Ahmed said, uninterested, "Americans and Bulgarians. Let the Fats settle their problems between themselves."
    "No, really!" Nan insisted. "I must see if I can help."

    But in the long run all that Nan Dimitrova accomplished was to get herself arrested too.
    It was the American woman's fault. Even an American