Standing in the shelter of the tent -- a rejected hospital tent on which the rain now dripped, no longer drumming -- Adam watched his own hands touch the objects on the improvised counter of boards laid across two beef barrels. There was, of course, no real need to rearrange everything. A quarter inch this way or that for the hardbake, or the toffee, or the barley sugar, or the sardines, or the bitters, or the condensed milk, or the stationery, or the needles -- what could it mean? Adam watched his own hands make the caressing, anxious movement that, when rain falls and nobody comes, and ruin draws close like a cat rubbing against the ankles, has been the ritual of stall vendors, forever.

He recognized the gesture. He knew its meaning. He had seen a dry, old, yellowing hand reach out, with that painful solicitude, to touch, to rearrange, to shift aimlessly, some object worth a pfennig. Back in Bavaria he had seen that gesture, and at that sight his heart had always died within him. On such occasions he had not had the courage to look at the face above the hand, whatever face it might be.

Now the face was his own. He wondered what expression, as he made that gesture, was on his face. He wondered if it wore the old anxiety, or the old, taut stoicism. But there was no need, he remembered, for his hand to reach out, for his face to show concern or stoicism. It was nothing to him if rain fell and nobody came. Then why was he assuming the role -- the gesture and the suffering? What was he expiating? Or was he now taking the role -- the gesture and the suffering -- because it was the only way to affirm his history and identity in the torpid, befogged loneliness of this land.