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for a cigarette. All at once everything seemed simple. He decided to learn how to play cards tomorrow. And he had the strange feeling that this resolve had changed his whole life.

Chapter Two

    FIVE DAYS LATER the cardsharp was released. They had not been able to prove anything against him. He and Steiner parted friends. The cardsharp had improved his time by completing Steiner’s education in the methods of his pupil Katscher. As a parting gift he gave him the deck of cards and Steiner began to instruct Kern. He taught him skat, jass, tarots, and poker—skat for emigrants; jass to be played in Switzerland; tarots for Austria; and poker for all other occasions.
    Two weeks later Kern was summoned upstairs. A police sergeant led him into a room where a middle-aged man was sitting. The place seemed gigantic and so brilliantly lighted that Kern had to squint. He had grown accustomed to the cell.
    “You are Ludwig Kern, a student, of no nationality, born November 30, 1916, in Dresden?” the man asked indifferently, glancing at a document.
    Kern nodded. His throat was suddenly so dry he could not speak. The man looked up.
    “Yes,” Kern said huskily.
    “You have resided in Austria without reporting to the police …”
    The man hastily read through the record. “You have been sentenced to fourteen days’ detention and have now served your time. You will be expelled from Austria. You are forbidden to return under penalty of imprisonment. Here is the official order of deportation. You are to sign here in evidence of the fact that you have taken cognizance of this order and understand that to return will make you liable to punishment. Here at the right.”
    The man lit a cigarette. Kern looked in fascination at the pudgy, thick-veined hand holding the match. In two hours this man would shut up his desk and go to dinner. Afterwards, perhaps, he would play a game of tarots and drink a few glasses of vintage wine. About eleven he would yawn, pay his check and announce: “I’m tired. I’m going home to bed.” Home. To bed. At that time the woods along the border would be wrapt in darkness, strangeness, fear; and lost in them—alone, stumbling and tired, with a yearning for men and a dread of men—would be the tiny, flickering spark of life called Ludwig Kern. And the reason for this difference was that a piece of paper called a passport divided him from the bored official behind the desk. Their blood had the same temperature, their eyes the same structure, their nerves reacted to the same stimuli, their thoughts ran in the same channels—and yet an abyss separated them, nothing was the same for both; satisfaction for one was agony for the other, they were possessor and dispossessed, and the abyss that separated them was only a scrap of paper on which there was nothing but a name and a few meaningless dates.…
    “Here at the right,” said the official, “first and last name.”
    Kern got possession of himself and signed.
    “To which border do you wish to be taken?” asked the official.
    “The Czech border.”
    “All right. You will leave in an hour. You will be escorted there.”
    “I have a few things at the place I was staying. Can I get them?”
    “What are they?”
    “A bag with shirts and that kind of thing.”
    “All right. Tell the officer who is to take you to the border. You can stop on the way.”
    The sergeant led Kern downstairs again and took Steiner back with him.
    “What happened?” asked the Chicken, eagerly.
    “We’re going to get out in an hour.”
    “Jesus Christ!” said the Pole. “Then that crap start again.”
    “Would you rather stay here?” asked the Chicken.
    “If eating better—and me with little guard job—I very glad staying.”
    Kern took out his handkerchief and cleaned up his suit as best he could. His shirt was very dirty after two weeks’ wear. He reversed the cuffs which he had been carefully protecting. The Pole looked at him. “In one, two years all that—all