The front room of Memel’s home brought to mind an animal’s burrow. The floor was dirt, and the air smelled of roots and spices. The walls were made from tin scrap of varying degrees of corrosion, and they shuddered in the wind. But it was not an unpleasant space: a copper cauldron hung in the fireplace, its fat, rounded bottom licked by flames, and oil lamps throwing off a honey-colored light lined the rafters in neatly pegged rows. Lucy sat beneath these at a low-standing table. There was a litter of puppies roaming about, yipping and knocking things over and pouncing on one another; the exhausted mother lay on the floor beside the table, stomach bagged, dead to the world. “Poor Mama,” said Memel. “She’s had just about enough.” He nudged her with his foot and she retired to one of two small back rooms, with the puppies following after. Memel removed the cauldron from the fire and set it in the center of the table to cool. Tilting back his head, he shouted, “Mewe!”
Mewe’s muffled voice came through the wall, from his own shanty. “What?”
“Is Klara with you?”
“Yes.”
“Is she still angry at me?”
Lucy could hear the girl named Klara murmuring, but couldn’t decipher her words.
“She says she’s not,” Mewe called.
“And do you believe her?”
“Yes, I think I do.”
“And you? Are you still angry?”
“Not at all.”
“Will you please come and eat with us, then?”
A pause; more murmuring. “Who is ‘us’?” Mewe asked.
“Lucy has come to visit. The lad from the train?”
“Yes, he was spying on us a moment ago.”
Memel looked at Lucy with a questioning glance. Lucy shook his head. “I was only passing by,” he whispered.
“He claims not to have been spying, Mewe.”
“Oh? And what would he call it, then?”
“Passing by, is how he describes it.”
Yet more murmuring. Mewe said, “Ask him for us, please, if he believes one must be in motion to be passing?”
Lucy admitted that yes, he supposed one did have to be, and Memel restated this.
“Well, then,” Mewe continued, “how does he explain the fact of his being stationary at my window?”
Memel raised his eyebrows. “Were you stationary, Lucy?”
“Perhaps I lingered for a moment.”
“Now he is calling it a momentary lingering,” Memel said.
“I see,” said Mewe. Murmuring. “We would like to know, then, just what is the difference between the two?”
Lucy thought he could hear some restrained laughter coming from Klara. To Memel he said, “Spying suggests a hope to come by private information. My intentions were much simpler.”
Memel digested, then repeated the words, which precipitated further hushed discussion between Mewe and Klara. At last the former said, “Would Lucy describe himself, then, as idly curious?”
Lucy was now certain he could hear both Klara and Mewe stifling their amusement.
“Well?” Memel asked, who was smiling.
“I think that would be fair,” said Lucy.
“It would be fair, he says,” Memel said.
For a time, Lucy could not hear any further chatter from next door. Finally it was Klara who spoke. “Give us a moment to finish our game, Father,” she said.