That November, I began to truly believe I would spend the rest of my life in this apartment, that deliverance would never come. I would sit in my alcove and look at the pearl necklace and sometimes wonder at its grandeur and sometimes at its impotence. To trade it meant to trust that someone would actually get me a kennkarte, would actually ferry me to Stockholm, would actually keep his word to me, a Jew. Nowak, Henryk, the greed of a stranger, the goodwill of a stranger: none of them seemed particularly reliable to me. Any one of them could take the pearl, surrounded by diamonds, and give me
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