osmosis, which necessitated letting go of each otherтs hands and made Bruna
unhappy.
"This is far enough, this is fine here," Bruna kept saying. "I can see
everything. Thereтs the roof of the palace. Nothingтs going to happen, is it? I
mean, will anybody speak?" It was not what she meant, but she did not want
to shame her daughter with her fear, her daughter who had not been alive
when the stones turned to rubies. And she spoke quietly because although
there were so many people pressed and pressing into Roukh Square, they
were not noisy. They talked to one another in ordinary, quiet voices. Only now
and then, somebody down nearer the palace shouted out a name, and then
many other voices would repeat it with a roll and crash like a wave breaking.
Then they would be quiet again, murmuring vastly, like the sea between big
waves.
The streetlights had come on. Roukh Square was sparsely lighted by
tall, old cast-iron standards with double globes that shed a soft light high in
the air. Through that serene light, which seemed to darken the sky, came
drifting small, dry flecks of snow.
The flecks melted to droplets on Stefanaтs dark short hair and on the
scarf Bruna had tied over her fair short hair to keep her ears warm.
When Stefana stopped at last, Bruna stood up as tall as she could, and
because they were standing on the highest edge of the Square, in front of the
old dispensary, by craning, she could see the great crowd, the faces like
snowflakes, countless. She saw the evening darkening, the snow falling, and
no way out, and no way home. She was lost in the forest. The palace, whose
few lighted windows shone dully above the crowd, was silent. No one came
out, no one went in. It was the seat of government; it held the power. It was
the powerhouse, the powder magazine, the bomb. Power had been
compressed, jammed into those old reddish walls, packed and forced into
them over years, over centuries, till if it exploded, it would burst with horrible
violence, hurling pointed shards of stone, And out here in the twilight, in the
open, there was nothing but soft faces with shining eyes, soft little breasts and
stomachs and thighs protected only by bits of cloth.
She looked down at her feet on the pavement. They were cold. She
would have worn her boots if she had thought it was going to snow, if Fana
hadnтt hurried her so. She felt cold, lost, lonely to the point of tears. She set
her jaw and set her lips and stood firm on her cold feet on the cold stone.
There was a sound, sparse, sparkling, faint, like the snow crystals. The
crowd had gone quite silent, swept by low laughing murmurs, and through the
silence ran that small, discontinuous silvery sound.
"What is that?" asked Bruna, beginning to smile. "Why are they doing
that?"
This is a committee meeting. Surely you donтt want me to describe a
committee meeting? It meets as usual on Friday at I I in the morning in the
basement of the Economics Building. At 11 on Friday night, however, it is still
