'The Thought of High Windows': Memory of Evil

effect-only to muse, "I don't like what I've become. For the first time, I want to be me." Ironically, she wishes to reclaim the signs of marginality, though though for many years those very signs were the bane of her adolescent life. She is no longer the Esther who once envied Eva's ethereal fairness.

Word of newborn Jewish babies reaches the Underground. The twins do not have enough to eat, and their cries will betray their and their parents' existence. It means death to them and the gentile family who is sheltering them. Sad Eyes plans to take the babies and kill them as an act of "'necessity'", for the greater good, but Esther and Madame balk. Secretly they ensconce the babies in an orphange run by nuns. When the Nazis find out, Esther devises a daring plan: she and Julie, another Underground operative, masquerade as the Gestapo and remove the babies from the nuns themselves. Holding one twin each, Esther and Julie flee, discarding their telltale uniforms. In the novel's most harrowing scene, a Nazi soldier finds Julie, and kills the baby. When Julie won't give information about the other twin, he shoots her "as if it's the easiest thing in the world...Then he strolls away." After the surviving twin is moved to a safe house, Esther is reassigned to another town. In the new town, Esther examines her reasons for working with the Underground. "I do it because I need to--for vengeance? To keep me from despair? Who knows?"

Esther realizes that she suddenly loves Walter in a more adult way, and though her days are indifferent and alike, Walter occupies her dreams. Miraculously, in her Solange guise, she is stopped on the street by a whispered word, "Mouse." It is Walter. They spend days--or weeks, it's hard to tell--together, bolstered by their newfound romantic, and erotic, love. One day, they encounter Nazis checking identification papers in the street. They pass without incident, until one of the soldiers sees a Mogen David on the ground. It the star that Walter gave Esther. The soldiers demand to know who dropped the star, but untrue to the quick-thinking resistance fighter she is, Esther is frozen with dread. It is Walter who claims the star as his. He grins and taunts the soldiers, meanwhile singing "Hickory Dickory Dock" in English, a secret warning to Esther to flee like the mouse in the nursery rhyme.

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