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she had not known what to expect. But surely this could not be where Stefan lived. Her exuberance faded to dismay as she peered into the narrow filthy street opening in front of her.
    The paving stones ended where Elizabeth Street began. A haze of manure-scented dust overhung the street, which seemed even narrower due to the line of broken sagging wagons abandoned along the crumbling curb. Beneath the wagons and between them lay piles of garbage rotting in the afternoon heat, swarming with a dark covering of flies.
    Pressing an uncertain hand to her breast, Lucie examined the four and five-story wooden tenements that blocked any sunlight from the street. Between lines of grayish laundry crisscrossing overhead, she glimpsed broken window panes and listless children sitting on sagging metal fire escapes that looked as if they might pull loose at any moment and crash into the street below. The people hurrying past looked exhausted and anxious, some wore disturbing expressions of bewilderment or defeat. The clothing she noticed was unlike the fashionable ensembles she had admired on Broadway. Here the attire was mended and hastily assembled, in need of a good wash and a brushing. The lowered heads and bent backs were as shockingly familiar as the despair and hopelessness she had left behind in Wlad.
    "Stefan?" she whispered, swallowing with difficulty.
    "This way," he said gruffly, his gaze not meeting hers.
    They stepped off the paving stones into the dust and powdered manure overhanging Elizabeth Street, and immediately Lucie realized the same closely packed buildings that blocked the sunlight also trapped the heat. Before they had walked more than a few steps, a trickle of perspiration rolled down her throat, and patches of dampness spread under her arms.
    The heat and the stench of raw garbage, horse manure, outhouses and too many unwashed bodies packed into too little space made her feel dizzy. Pausing, she clasped Stefan's arm, recoiling from the sympathy she read in passing glances that swept over her bundle then herself before they turned away.
    "Through here," Stefan said, striding toward a dark narrow passageway leading between two buildings.
    "Stefan?" she asked again, staring up at him. But Stefan stood silently, her bundle over his broad shoulder, frowning at a beer wagon that lumbered along the street, stirring dust and flies and the odors of hardship and desperation.
    She caught her lower lip between her teeth, then lifted her skirts above her boots and drew a breath before she hastened through the dark tunnel that Stefan indicated. At the end of the opening lay a small shadowed courtyard of sorts, hemmed by tall buildings that trapped the stench from a row of tin-roofed latrines. Lucie halted and pressed a handkerchief to her nose, her eyes watering above the edge.
    The persistent drip from a rusted pump in the center of the courtyard had created a dark puddle of slowly spreading mud. Broken cobbles littered the ground, along with heaps of refuse as fly blown and malodorous as the piles in the street. A half dozen children played in the gray dirt, three women labored over laundry tubs near the row of outhouses. A tan dog sniffed at a mound of ashes and cinders. There was not a scrap of green in the stifling courtyard, only a few yellowed lines of weeds dying in the heat.
    For an instant Stefan met her gaze, then he moved past her, toward a door hanging from its hinges. Inside, a dark littered stairway stinking of urine and cooking odors led up to a hallway cast in permanent night. When Stefan opened one of the doors, Lucie stumbled inside and crossed directly to the window, leaning to inhale a long breath of hot stale air through the broken pane.
    Although she was high above the street, on the third floor, higher than she had been before, the din of wheels and harness and an erupting street brawl sounded as if she were standing in their midst. Numbed by what she had seen, she straightened slowly and turned to