All the way home, he conjured fantasies from the white, multi-shaped exhalations of his breath. Here it was the smoke of a good Havana-rolled cigar and there the warm hissing steam from a radiator valve and later the magic-carpet clouds from the funnel of an ocean liner that might take him to far, warm places the Karadi had not reached. Almost, he thought he heard the great sonorous drone of the ship's whistle, but it was the toot of an automobile horn as the sleek vehicle came skidding around a corner, almost running down Mr. Friedlander before it disappeared in the swirling flurries of snow. He thought if he followed the tire tracks before the snow could cover them he would discover in which section of the city these particular Karadi lived, but he shook his fist instead, knowing the gesture would bring, at worst, a reprimand.
In the dim hallway of his tenement, smelling pungently of cabbage and turnips—and from somewhere way in back the faint, unmistakable aroma of beef—Mr. Friedlander shook the snow from his coat and stamped his numb feet before he climbed the three dark flights to his apartment. At each landing he would pause and look with longing and resentment at the door of the unused elevator shaft, then shrug and wonder why the Karadi had denied man even this simple luxury.
On the floor below his own, Mr. Friedlander heard the unmistakable crackling sound of a short-wave radio receiver. The fools! He wasn't going to talk, he lost no love on the Karadi. But there were others. There were neighbors, friends, brothers, even wives, there were the obvious quislings you shunned and the less obvious ones you didn't suspect until it was too late. One thing you never did was listen to the short-wave radio so defiantly its crackling could be heard not merely on the other side of the door but all the way out on the landing. The punishment was death.
Mr. Friedlander paused in front of his own door, where the odor of strong yellow turnips assailed his nostrils. It was so unsatisfyingly familiar, he almost gagged. The new generation hardly remembered the delightful old foods, but if Mr. Friedlander shut his eyes and thought, he could clearly smell steak and roast chicken and broiled lobster swimming in butter and a dry red wine to wash everything down slowly, so slowly he could taste every tiny morsel.
He pushed open the door and began to shrug off his worn coat. "I'm home," he said to the scabby walls, the gas range which had been converted to wood when the Karadi suspended all public utilities, to the bubbling pot which exuded the turnip smell, to the drab sofa, the two wooden chairs, the table he had constructed from two old saw horses and the planking he had found long ago after the Fourteenth Street Bomb.
From the small bedroom, he heard sobbing.
Mrs. Friedlander blinked red-rimmed eyes at him and squeezed his hand, wringing it as if it had been a wet rag. She was forty-four years old, six years younger than Mr. Friedlander, with a face which once had been comely but now was lined, gaunt and big-pored. She was even thinner than Mr. Friedlander, but looked shapeless in her thick woolen sweater and the baggy work trousers he had stolen from the quartermaster store of the plant where he worked.
"Try to tell me, Martha," he said. "It's good to talk."