“On business,” he said, as if he were a bourgeois on a commercial journey to Leipzig or Prague. They stayed apart from the others in the house; at night her mother wept. Then one day she left the house earlier than usual and did not return that evening; there was no explanation. Her father was away also, but was due back soon. She remembered the others whispering, a dense sibilance in the little house; she thought of it as the hissing of snakes. Later—a week, a month, perhaps longer—she was taken by one of the men to the nearest city. En route, they stopped so that the man could relieve himself. It was an autumn day, when mist covered the hillside. She ran, but he caught her. Her dress was torn and she was bloody. She knew he was close behind her, in pursuit. She saw his shadow. She stumbled and crashed down the hillside, rolling over and over; she fell a long way. She remembered her fists bouncing against the earth, and the mist overhead, and her own strangled cries as she came to rest in a shallow gully, his arms around her.
