Emma left before me this morning, in a cab, with Johnny, for Gus. This time I know, but when I don’t, I don’t ask her where she’s going. I ask her where she’s been when she comes back, because she likes me to, though I don’t have to know. Women don’t like being predicted, and I try to live with her without doing it, though after seven years together, it gets hard to stop. Pride’s the key. You hear talk that men are proud, but it’s nothing compared to women’s pride. It’s as if pride is all that men leave them, and then they have to hide it to protect it.
No one can know what the future will be, but that’s no excuse to do nothing about changing it. We have no choice but to guess honestly. We can only change the world by acting our guesses.
On the quay, I strike a match for my pipe, get it to draw, then right along the eastern boulevard towards the River Market. I don’t have to fight the crowd’s stream today, much, until I reach the market, and then I work my way down the lane between the stalls right to the end. It’s packed here with wholesalers, crate lifters, ponies hauling carts. The shoppers are just begin to appear, which makes this a sight of workers and their morning fears. I feel people pressing while I bob along down the current of them. You can learn as much from their smells as from anything else. It’s smells that bring back memories most quickly. An art of smells would be an art of memories. The same as to show people what silence is, you have to show them noise, a lot of it, swamp them with the vision of it, and let them work it out from the recoil.
Beyond the market, turn right behind the Art Warehouse, and soon after that there’s Sevenstars Lane in the morning, clotted with snow trudged into ice by the hod carriers passing through on their way to the new barracks that year. The cobblestones are black through the ice. Carriages never come this way – too narrow. The oak Dutch doors lining the way are shut. This is the quietest street in the city when the sun is out. I pound on a door, and it’s answered by a little grim-faced girl I’ve never seen, in a white cotton party frock and buckled black shoes. She wakes up a stare and bats her round blue eyes at me and bobs her curly blond hair. Who is this?
‘Hello, mister,’ she says in a mountaineer accent. ‘Would you like to come in?’
‘Yes I would, little girl.’
‘My name’s Maria. I’m so pleased.’ She curtsies and stands aside. Tibor is direct behind her – which is a redundant observation to make, from that door – at the kitchen table where he has watched the traffic all night. He’s nursing his broken knuckles and practising his deep breathing. The table has disappeared under his forearms, the wall behind his sloped shoulders. I’ve seen him here for years, always wearing a peaked leather cap and sheepskin vest and canvas breeches, but his eyes never admit to knowing me. He points his carrot thumb at a beaded doorway and grunts something unintelligible, as if I understood Hungarian.
And there, through the doorway, is Cassie tilted into her parlour sofa, serving herself for breakfast. She’s too tired to smile, and she knows me too well to need the effort.
‘Sometimes you see me here,’ she says. ‘Sometimes you don’t.’
‘You’re a mystery,’ I say. ‘Tell me how you are.’
‘Bone-weary, Paul. Other people’s nightmares are the worst.’
‘Do you have any to tell me?’
‘I’d never shut up. Don’t you have enough of your own, that you need to hear a month’s worth of mine?’
‘I’ve told you, I never dream. Who’s the little one with the gravedigger stare?’
‘The new recruit. I’ll tell you later.’
She rises to her feet with three slow moves and brushes the snow from my cap and hangs it on a hook in the hallway. She takes my coat and shakes the snow onto the slate floor. Mine’s the only coat there. Over pink chiffon, she pulls on a mint-green housecoat. Her hair is tangled, cornsilk at dusk. She’s been sleeping in last night’s face – Chinese red lipstick, heavily caked, two bright spots of rouge, black mascara. It takes strong effects to stand up against the lights and shadows here. But her neck – a smooth, ivory white, as if light within her is shining from below. She coughs hard as we enter the kitchen, which smells of boiling milk and stale cigar smoke.
Two other women have joined Tibor at the table. I know raven-haired Frieda from long before; the younger one is new to me. Most of the women in this house come with no age attached, but this new one is wearing her youth like her sole possession, with weakening pride and inarticulate fear.
‘And how are the rest of you?’ I ask.
‘As if anything changes by us,’ Cassie says. ‘Eternity is no fun. There’s some advice for you – don’t try it. You start seeing everything over and over. The time of day, that’s what changes here. You know Frieda. And there’s Connie who was fresh till last night, and the little pet is Maria. Everyone say hello to Paul. He doesn’t hurt anybody we know.’
‘Hello. Hello. Hello.’
‘Hello.’
Maria is still a fledgling, buds not opened yet, eyes tremulous.
Frieda shrugs. She’s always scraped her face clean by the time I appear. A sloe-eyed little piece with strong shoulders and motherly breasts and sturdy legs, hair crackling like dark flames. White housecoat with little flowers on it. Connie won’t look at me, and I don’t try to make her. I can see she’s new, from how she’s sitting folded up on a stool with her head tucked towards her shoulder. You can see where the lines on her face will be once she gets them, and she hasn’t learned the long stare. A house like this, and the other ones on the street, well, your imagination burns out fast if you’re a woman. I open my portfolio and show them the last drawings I made here, seeking their verification, which I get: Yes that’s what I looked like, yes I know what I was thinking then. The colours offend them at first. But in this world I’m the daylight they never bask in, so they let it pass.
‘Tea,’ Cassie croaks. Frowning, Maria climbs down from her stool to pour it for us. I’ve brought along salt rolls and goat cheese and ham and a pint of milk, which Maria stirs direct into the pot before she pours.
‘You can go,’ Cassie tells Tibor. Who raises himself to his feet while we watch each other and casts a shadow over the rest of us as he walks sideways up the stairs.
‘Yesterday was Connie’s first night,’ Cassie says. ‘Her and her sister both. Came in from the Urban Annex yesterday morning. Daddy down from some cow village drank up his luck, the brothers needed milk and bread, you heard the rest. You want to meet her sister too? She’s sleeping it off. Her name’s Josephine, if that makes any difference to you.’
‘Three’s plenty,’ I say.
‘Connie’s first night,’ Cassie says. ‘Meaning, ever. She should have told me. But she thought she’d pretend to be brave. Going to take her a week to sit straight again. We could have stopped that if she told us.’ Now the four of them are at the table, Maria on a high stool, Connie between the other two, a sparrow between two crows, going through my portfolio a second time. Maria lifts her tea mug with two hands. Frieda points at one drawing and sighs to herself, not yes, that’s me, but yes, that’s it. Most of the drawings are nudes. Some of them are touched with red charcoal.
‘Huh,’ Cassie says, and looks up with a blink. ‘How’s the kid, Paul?’
‘All he did the first month was yell at us. Now he’s learning to laugh.’
‘You’d better teach him that now – he won’t learn later. And Emma?’
‘She almost died.’
‘Nothing new there. Blame yourself, not the kid. We like kids here, don’t we, Maria? Look, you’ve been here for eight days, and nothing’s happened to you. She eleven years old, Paul. Want to see her certificate?’
Connie hasn’t touched the drawings, but she’s staring at them, with alarm tinged with horror. Is there a colour for that? Where in her face is the light?
‘Paul’s a friend of ours,’ Cassie explains to her. ‘Comes by once a month, to make us famous or something. We flash it for him and he sketches our little birds. There’s still good money in that, Paul?’
‘I’m doing well.’
‘Your wife got anything for you since the kid?’
‘I can never touch her again that way. Johnny hurt her too badly.’
Cassie considers that, imagining the pain. ‘There’s other holes. Connie, he’s come here for years and never touched us. Just draws us, and … What do you get for them, Paul? Fifty kroner a sheet?’
‘I used to. Now I sign them and get more than that.’ It’s how I made a living for a couple of years – purple work by special order. And I was happy to do it, let me tell you.
‘God, you never paid me that much,’ Frieda says.
‘You got one-third of what he paid me,’ Cassie says. ‘That was always the deal. Maria will cost you twenty today.’
‘One drawing of her, clothes on, for nothing.’
‘Oh, all right. What do you want us to do today?’
‘Tell stories.’
‘Come on,’ Cassie says. ‘Frieda? And you too, Connie, might as well learn something. Maria, play with Tibor.’ I follow them upstairs, three shaded flights. The wainscotting is green scarred with bootmarks, the lampshades in each room are Chinese red frilled with gold. In Cassie’s bedroom, two elaborate brass candlesticks are perched on a mahogany dresser. The unmade bed is covered with pillows and sagging in the middle. This is their own bedroom. Clients come no higher than the floor below, but I’ve learned that up here is the best place to draw them. I stand at the door, and Connie hovers just inside the room while the other two sit on the bed.
‘You don’t have to watch,’ Cassie tells Connie. ‘Yes you do. Paul doesn’t touch us. We tell him stories, and he draws us while we’re telling him. Who’s this one for, Paul?’
‘I’m going to paint you this time. These drawings are for a painting.’
‘Oh goodie,’ says Frieda.
‘He’s not from Budapest, oh no,’ Cassie says. And they both laugh.
‘He’s worse. He’s a Czech.’
Cassie shrugs. ‘Sudeten Czech. Why us, Paul? We two know, but tell her.’
‘Because it’s Tuesday.’
‘The best reason of all, you hear that, Connie? But why else, Paul.’
‘Because it’s too busy out there,’ I tell her. ‘Nothing changes in here. It’s one of the last places.’
‘Which is why we see what no one else does,’ Cassie says. ‘Are you listening, Connie? Men don’t like to look at themselves. They’d do anything not to. But sometimes they need to, and for that they come to us, and then they pay us never to tell what we see. Girl, you should have told us you were fresh. I would have kept you back for some grey-haired colonel with a baby chick who would have broken you gentlemanly, for twice the money. Yeah, we’ve got a call sheet of customers for the fresh ones – ask Paul. A tragedy, look do. Rented her last night to a cadet in the Uhlans, and now she’s no good to anyone for another week.’
‘Uhlans,’ I shrug. Of course.
They’ve spread the quilts on the floor. Frieda pins Cassie’s hair into a bun, then Cassie returns the favour.
‘No tresses for you today?’ Cassie asks, almost rueful.
‘That would be too sexual,’ I tell her, and Frieda laughs.
‘That’s the worst of it, Connie, you’ll find out. It’s when men paw your hair. You can never get it clean. Are you listening? Always keep your hair up and don’t let them grab it at the point of swoon. They’ll spill in it once, you’ll remember soon enough.’
Connie is standing pressed into a corner. Under her robe’s hanging folds, I see her stick figure, pencil arms and legs, bony neck, the dark half-rings of hunger under her eyes. That’s one thing about Cassie’s house – she’s going to eat full while she’s here. Now Cassie and Frieda are naked except for the white linen pants, their thighs and forearms swaying with loose muscle.
‘Are you going to make us famous?’ Frieda asks.
‘Not famous,’ I tell her, and start work. ‘But you’ll live longer.’
‘As if we want that.’
‘You sure you don’t want a free one,’ Cassie winks. ‘How many inches you got?’
‘Seven for each of you.’
‘Another braggart,’ Frieda says. ‘You wouldn’t get the pox from us. When women get it, it’s from men, but do you hear us complain? I mean, we do, but never to the men we got it from. Just to each other.’
‘One another,’ Cassie corrects her. ‘When I said Maria was eleven, well, I lied. She’s ten last week. You can check her certificate.’
Naked, they’re in their world, their shells broken. At my nod, they strike me another pose, Frieda leaning back in Cassie’s arms, each looking the other way, hands on Frieda’s spread knees. They watch me boost myself onto the dresser.
‘Who’s buying them this time?’ Cassie asks me. ‘We could get you customers, sell them right here.’
‘It will be some wealthy Jew,’ Frieda says. ‘We’re the ones with money to spend like that.’
‘We don’t get many Jews here,’ Cassie tells Connie. ‘Army officers this establishment. The stock agents are going to the Flaming Sword on Ball Street this year.’
‘So tell me about Maria,’ I say.
‘That’s an old story,’ Cassie says. ‘A civilian comes in last month and hands me a packet of clothes. That birthday frock you saw, and the little black shoes, and the little pants and stockings and camisole. “Do you have anyone this size?” he asks. Right, I tell myself – wants to fiddle his little girl, he’s bursting for it. “Hair, eyes, name,” I tell him. “Blonde, blue, Maria,” he says. “Come back in a week,” I say. So out I go to the Urban Annex and a broker pulls me in Maria. Which is her real name, by the way. You can check her certificate. Doesn’t have a last one, none of us do. Business has been up fifteen per cent since we put her on the door. Everyone wants to spoil her. In three or four years, we’ll auction her off. She’ll stay fresh before then.’
‘What about the guy who ordered her?’
‘That’s the best part,’ Frieda laughs.
‘That’s the best part,’ Cassie says. ‘He doesn’t even want to touch her. He just wants her to talk the nasty to him while he’s tugging himself. That’s it. We get the best of everything.’
When I turn over the sheet, she sits up on the quilt, knees high and spread, and pulls Frieda down as if they’re riding a sleigh together. Connie’s pressed her cheek to the wall. She truly believes she’s seen everything now. You must be horribly young to think you’ve seen it all.
‘I’d say Connie’s in the wrong business,’ I say.
‘Too late now,’ Cassie says. ‘Better for you here, darling, than a doorway in the Root Cellar. She just has to stop thinking about what they’re doing. Then it’s the easiest money in the world. Speaking of money …’
‘Count Freddie?’
‘He’s moved his business to the Calisto,’ Cassie says. ‘It’s them that do outcalls. I’m just as glad – he was too high maintenance for us. All the kit we had to buy for him that no one else ever asked for. He was paying for it but still, we had to find it and then store it.’
‘I don’t need the details on Freddie,’ I tell them.
‘Your sister tells you?’ Cassie asks. ‘Thank her for saving us the breath. You’ll stay young longer, not knowing what he needs. We’re talking about the rough trade, Connie. Plugs and chains, them. You’re twenty years and twenty kilos short of what that line takes.’
‘How would you be sitting,’ I ask, ‘if sex wasn’t the point.’
‘By us,’ Frieda says. ‘there wouldn’t be a point.’
‘Half the time even I don’t know the point of men,’ Cassie says.
‘There must always be a point,’ Frieda says, ‘but when it isn’t sex, I don’t ask what it is. We’re as open as any other house on this street: Everything Not Forbidden, that’s our motto. Safety’s our only house rule: Murder Not Allowed, you know? And we look down on pain reception the same as everyone else on the street. But we can’t stop the rich perverts at the door or word would get out we’re judging. It’s crazy and poor that doesn’t get in.’
Frieda lies on her side, Cassie the same behind her, and peers over Frieda’s shoulder with a false broad smile. Something works here. I frame what I see and polish the tip of a graphite. For a moment they look almost happy, and I’m thinking Lord grab that while you can.
‘Who were your customers last night,’ I ask.
Cassie is trailing her fingertips up Frieda’s ribcage. Frieda’s rouged her nipples for this. She’s staring into my eyes, practising her whore’s look, but it’s skin deep. I asked them once, one session, to wear their street clothes for this, but they refused. That would have been too personal.
‘Real names?’ Frieda asks.
‘Why not, if they gave them.’
‘We insist. In case there’s trouble, you see. That cavalry major, what was his name, Cassie?’
‘Eichdorff, came with a friend, some cadet, Klingmann, wanted to break his first pony. If I’d known I would have given him Frieda. He said Connie. Mistake, but he fell for the fresh look, like every other fresh fool. That was a sight. Two know-nothings, both pretending they knew.’
Connie is making herself look while they talk about her, and I watch from the corner of my eye while she tries to bring back the hope the night cost her.
‘Connie thought she was dying,’ Cassie said. ‘She was crying and crying. Well, we couldn’t stop it by then, they’d already paid. That’s the system, you know? A place like this, it’s about men paying us to do what no wife out there would ever do. They pay to think we want it, then we act like we do.’
‘You can’t die of sex,’ Frieda tells Connie. ‘Everything else, but not that. I was saying, so Connie got the cadet, and her sister got the major. What a song the major sings, Paul. Remember it? Cassie’s better at that.’
They grin at each other, then Cassie makes a choking cry, which sounds from her throat like ‘Heck, heck, heck.’
Now Frieda lies back on the quilt, one bare knee pointing to the ceiling, the other stretched across the floor. Her vulva is angry crimson beneath its nest of dense black hair. Cassie crouches between her legs with an arm around Frieda’s knee and looks at me over her shoulder, then remembers something.
‘Bob your uncle,’ she says. ‘The Pressburg factory tested the new 70 millimetre mortar shell last month. The range is six thousand metres, but accuracy falls off sharply at five-four. They think the fletts are too narrow by two centimetres, corrupt the vertical centre of gravity. Would I make a good spy, Paul?’
‘Artillery was never what I did,’ I tell her.
‘People used to kill each other for money, or revenge, or something else useful,’ Cassie says. ‘Too late for that now. Nothing but bad excuses the next time, and no one to judge but the people who started it. Paul was a Seventh Hussar, Connie, in the day. Make him tell you about the horse some day. It’s so easy, Paul, to get the artillery to spill. “Oh, yes, Otto, like that, Harry, you’re too strong for me, Jakob, take me, oh, oh.” And then you lie back with them and ask, “So whose cannon’s bigger, Karl?’’’
‘They don’t need us for spies,’ Frieda says. ‘Remember the colonel last month?’
‘Somebody ought to pay us double,’ Cassie says. ‘Men are always going to fight, Paul. Next year’s going to be with machine guns and artillery trains, mostly. We took in half a train car of Germans last week, some conference. Likely so we’ll start it ourselves next year, they said, with the Serbians, which will bring the Russians in, and once that happens the Germans and the French are going to start the big show. Straight through Belgium to Paris, that’s the way. Machine guns, steel trucks, gas, whatever that means. You think Solferino was a butcher’s floor, multiply that by a thousand once or twice. The next war, it’s going to be like death in a factory, no more bowing from the waist and shooting his horse at forty paces. I don’t mind.’ She looks at Connie. ‘Poor chick. The little red cadet popped out of her covered with blood he did. Screamed like a wood demon and thought she’d cut it off. If you want to find a husband, this is the place, dearie. You’ll marry ten here every night.’
‘Start wars,’ Frieda says. ‘That’s men. Then the women call them to bed while they’re feeling so manly. A good year for us, if it lasts.’
‘For a couple of months, anyway,’ Cassie says. ‘Start in July while the ground’s still dry.’
She and Frieda cackle together. And I look at Connie and think, Cry and get it over with. What have you seen till now that you’ve run out of tears for this? The woman lacks self-pity, that’s her problem. Don’t leave pity to everyone else. I keep drawing.
‘Machines were never part of His plan,’ I tell them.
‘Whose?’ asked Cassie.
‘The Big Guy’s,’ I tell them. ‘If you asked some tribesman in Africa, he’d tell you some god made the world and then vanished. For them, He’s never coming back, He stopped existing as soon as He created us.’
‘That’s the one who made us,’ Cassie says. ‘And the one who made you?’
‘He made the world,’ I tell them while they cock their heads at me. Good listeners, them. ‘And all He planned to do was watch after that. But I don’t think He expected us to come up with machines. I think when we get around to destroying ourselves with them, He’ll have to move up Judgment Day. Fooled Him, you know.’
‘If you could see the future,’ Cassie says, ‘you wouldn’t dare love anybody. Protect yourself, Paul. The world wants to destroy you. Attack? Hide? Lie? You’d better do something. I know, I know, you love Emma – good for you. But that just means be ready to go down with each other.’
‘If it’s power you want,’ Frieda tells Connie, ‘power over them, you’ll learn it all here. Just wait to learn that, how to make them pay for what they want to do to you, you’ll live with yourself soon enough, dearie. You won’t suffer so much from their games once you learn their rules. You won’t forget who you are by making this living – if anything, you’ll remember better.’
‘Your life’s still your own here,’ Cassie tells her. ‘You still get all the choices, unless you give them away. You’ve got more choices in here than you ever will out there. Don’t let yourself become what men pay you to be, that’s all.’
Frieda’s hand brushes the hair from Cassie’s face. Her other hand, I can’t use it, you know? Only their faces just then. So while they have their fun, I turn to watch Connie. Her horror only lasts for a second, then … I’ve seen death before this, okay. I know when something’s over, but I don’t know yet what it is for Connie. It’s different for everybody, what kills. Cassie groans hard, once. When I look up from my tablet, her eyes are bolted to me, from the bottom of a boiling well.
‘How’s that, Paul?’ she asks with a sagging grin.
Little Maria comes to the doorway. Tibor’s tied back her hair with a crooked blue ribbon and made her put on white wool stockings. I’m still hurrying to catch the moment. The glowing darkness in Cassie’s eyes, the familiar smirk on Frieda’s face that Cassie can’t see.
‘You got past Maria, this morning,” Cassie tells me. ‘Not easy, I can tell you that. Eight days she’s been here, and she can already smell the worst of them. The pain merchants, the twisters, the broken ones, them. You should hear her tell them to get lost. And they do.’
‘As long as Tibor’s standing right behind her,’ Frieda adds. ‘Then they do. Show Paul what you do, little one.’
‘Out out out out!’ Maria yells, her fists on her hips, while I clap my ears in my palms.
Cassie reaches under the bed and pulls out a two-thirds bottle of red. They sit up, and while she pulls the cork with her teeth, Frieda takes four glasses out of a dresser drawer. Fills them and then passes me one, Connie the other one.
Frieda says. ‘You owe me, Cassie.’
‘That’s real love, around here,’ Cassie tells Connie. ‘Why not some cool little blonde from the art school, Paul?’
‘I have one at home,’ I tell her. ‘Besides, you’re not beautiful.’
She laughs. ‘How about Connie? Is she beautiful?’
Yes, for a moment, yesterday.
‘All right, how about Maria. Is she beautiful?’
‘All ten-year-olds are beautiful.’
‘Did you practise your look, Maria? Get him in the eye, little pet.’
She looks up at me with unblinking eyes, and tilts her head, and pouts her lips –
‘Hello, daddy. Will you let me touch your pony when I’m older?’
I don’t drop my pencil, and wonder later how not.
‘Never heard that before, Paul? Admit it – that’s one step past everything you ever heard. She’s not finished – ’
‘How big will it grow one day, daddy?’ Maria says, her craning forward me, locking her eyes on me. ‘Will it trample my little kitten one day?’
I hold up my hand: Stop …
‘You never imagined, did you?’ Cassie says. ‘Admit it, Paul. You come to us because you know out there, you’d never see everything.’
‘We did it,’ Frieda says. ‘Look at his face. What’s he thinking, Cassie?’
‘I’ll tell you that,’ I say. ‘I’m thinking when Johnny’s ten, if someone touches him where – ’
‘No one’s touching Maria,’ Cassie says. ‘Years before we allow it.’
‘Maria,’ I say, ‘stand in front of Connie. Like that yes. And Connie, put your hands on her shoulders. Now both of you look at that bedpost, halfway down. Don’t move.’ So that I see their profiles in the mirror. I remember how I used to draw when I met Emma, how hard I was working around then to reduce the lines, looking for the one line, of the proper density, that locks down the others. Now that I’ve found it, I’m lost for what to do with it. So I do something I’ve never done. In the margin of a drawing, I write the words, dead love.
‘You’re telling me she’s safe from your customers here. Okay, Cassie, I believe you. But if I shouldn’t, tell me now and I’ll buy her out.’ With money from Charlotte. It would be easy. For that moment I feel, again, like a slave for life, to Karsch Metallwerken and the oily furnaces of that Hell.
‘Got to you, did we?’ Frieda says. ‘Thought so, Cassie.’
‘I know what you’re thinking,’ Cassie says. ‘That your sister would be good for it. The minute someone laid a hand on her, it would show on her, and her price would go half. We’ll let you know before the auction, which is three years anyway. You can buy her out if you want before then. Of course, the price will go up, the longer you wait.’
‘He just wants to do her himself,’ Frieda says.
‘Probably not,’ Cassie tells her. ‘Paul? Ethics? Why not? I just never thought he’d bring them here.’
‘He’s a father now,’ Frieda says, not to me.
‘But so’s Maria’s daddy-trick.’
‘All right then,’ I tell them. ‘I’ve got an even stranger story than hers. It’s even worse.’
‘Try us, do,’ Cassie says, and sighs to attention.
‘About the horse?’ Frieda asks.
‘Get Cassie to tell that one,’ I say. ‘So okay, there’s these two people. A young man and a young woman. And they meet, and it’s really hot for a while between them. It’s great in the sack, and you think he’d never done it before, because it’s never been this good, and he’s her first, and she’s shocked what he can make her feel. But the lust turns to something else, something just between them. They want to find out what it is, so they help each other learn. Then they get married, and one day the woman says she’s going to have a baby. And she does, and they love each other more than ever. No matter how hard it gets, but they know it never will be too hard between them, because that’s what a child has brought to them.’
‘That’s it?’ Frieda says.
‘He’s talking about him and Emma and the brat. So what’s the point, Paul. That’s not a story.’
‘It’s not a story,’ I say. ‘But I’m not done. The point is, here it is. The point is – some things you can’t do without – they happen before you imagine them. And you’ve never seen any of them, have you?’
