niche unwrapping an instrument. He wore corduroy pants with threadbare knees, a greasy blue shirt and an embroidered cloth cap from beneath which hung a narrow plait. A black dog with a faded bandana knotted around its neck sat by his feet. The girl felt a thrill when it looked at her with the same startled recognition as her aunt’s ebony maid.
‘I told you, it is better not to look at anyone,’ the aunt admonished. ‘Men like that call themselves musicians but they are beggars, or worse.’ She flushed slightly.
The ghostly subterranean wind blew again, and the girl’s hair and clothes fluttered wildly. Her aunt was glad that her own coiffure was firmly lacquered, and that her clothes had substance enough not to be trifled with by the draft. She tried to take shallow breaths, certain the air was laden with the germs of these odd and unsavoury people who lingered between the arches. Thinking of her acquaintance, the aunt told the girl never to go beyond the end of the platforms, which narrowed into ledges that ran away down the dark tunnels.
‘The workmen use them when they repair the rails or the signals. The metro is very old and there are disused stations and tunnels and bricked-up stairways and goodness knows what else where you could easily lose your way,’ she said. It had been many years since she had used the metro and it seemed to have been allowed to lapse into a queer sort of anarchy. If only the girl had the wit to be afraid, but clearly she did not.
A moment later, the metro train, a sleek snake of silver, burst from the tunnel and sighed to a halt beside the platform, where its doors glided open with a soft hiss. The girl and the aunt entered the nearest carriage and found a seat. ‘Never make the mistake of entering the metro when people are going to work in the morning or leaving work in the evening, for it is impossibly crowded,’ the older woman warned. She spoke of pickpockets, but in her eyes there was something more than hands feeling for a purse. ‘You must also avoid the metro when there are too few people around,’ she added.
When they reached the correct stop, they stepped out onto the platform and mounted the moving stair to return to the surface, where the aunt explained they were within walking distance of their apartment. At the top of the escalator there was an old beggar woman gazing downward.
‘A storm is coming!’ she cried. ‘See how it has turned my soup sour!’ She pointed accusingly to a battered metal boiler sitting squatly and incongruously in a tattered pram upon which hung a multitude of bulging plastic bags. The crowd split smoothly into two streams which passed either side of the old harridan, everyone averting their eyes. But several young men with army greens and shaven heads stopped to jeer. One had a swastika tattooed on his scalp, the aunt noted, wondering if the girl knew what it was, what it meant.
They made to pass the old beggar woman who, without warning, plunged forward and caught the girl by the wrist. The aunt gave a little shriek and batted uselessly at the clutching hand, the blackened fingers reminding her of the dark, leathery paw of an ape.
The old woman had eyes only for her pale young captive. ‘Do you know what it means when soup goes sour?’ she demanded.
The girl shook her head in wonderment.
The old woman leaned close enough that the girl could smell her earthy reek. ‘It is a sign,’ she said, eyes aglitter.
The aunt wrenched her free with a strength born of indignation, and hustled her firmly away, before taking out a tiny lace-edged handkerchief and rubbing hard at the girl’s wrist. The old beggar woman’s fingers had left a perfect print of grime on her pale skin, but the mark seemed indelible as a bruise.
‘Never mind,’ she comforted herself. ‘I have carbolic soap that will remove it.’
It was night when they came out of the station and the girl was surprised, for they had entered the metro in daylight. Their underground journey had not seemed so long, but of course time might move differently with the weight of so much earth pressing down on it.
They made their way past shops and restaurants and houses behind neat little wrought-iron fences with lace-curtained windows through which she could see people laughing, talking, reading and smoking. She thought of