Elizabeth Pond

The two boys, stooped on the sidewalk in front of the rows of jars, scrutinize the 45 goldfish and gesture the comparative merits of each. The objects of their attention swim in incessant truncated figure eights in bottle after bottle, as their stocky proprietress regards the boys impassively. Crowds eddy through the narrow passageway left between the makeshift sidewalk stands with their tarpaulin roofs. Oblivious to the jostling, the boys deliberate for ten minutes, then with some quick bargaining hand over 50 piasters. Without once losing a drop of water or her jaded expression, the proprietress nets the winner in a plastic bag, cascades fish and water into another plastic carrying bag, squeezes excess water back into the original jar, and secures the bag with a looped rubber band. The boys rise and set off in the melee, shielding their prize with elbows and frowns. On either side apathetic rabbits and chickens, sometimes sharing the same woven cages, await their fate. Plumbing faucets and joints, Samsonite luggage, C-rations, canned Chinese delicacies, new Sony radios, and

 “To Czechoslovakia,” I proposed as we raised our glasses. “Ah, you are an optimist,” Zdenek responded sardonically. He, like every other Czech, was a pessimist. Things were worse now than in the last years of President Antonin Novotny’s rule. They would get worse still, with police harassment escalating to arrests and sentences of unknown severity. The situation would remain bad for a long time, with no hope of rescue as there was under the Nazi occupation in World War II. “You’ve come to see the end,” was another friend’s opening greeting. “There is no place to go for your family, for yourself, no private place,” commented a third. “Everyone is nervous and neurotic and drinks like a fish.” “It was happier before our ‘friends’ came,” said one grandmother simply. The faces of all of them showed the familiar Czech mix of pain and laughter to have shifted in favor of pain in the 15 months since the Soviet invasion. The Sword   For a nation so swiftly grown accustomed to the gaiety and spontaneity of

Saigon –   After two years of deliberation and maneuvering Nguyen Van Thieu has crossed the Rubicon. He is organizing a new party with its nucleus in the army and giving its formation top priority. All indications are that the South Vietnamese President is no longer equivocating but has finally made his decision. He is turning to military hard-liners and former Diemists as his primary political base. The move can be compared only with Ngo Dinh Nhu’s formation of the Can Lao party in the mid-fifties. This party gradually became Nhu’s personal intelligence and enforcement agency in asserting Ngo Dinh Diem’s paramilitary control over the country. With this move a new era has begun. Thieu is finally shifting away from his long-held negative strategy of dispersing his rivals but not building any political structure of his own. Two diametrically opposed projections for the future arise from this development. In the optimistic analysis, Thieu now feels himself firm enough in the saddle to control whatever political apparatus he builds. He will be able to use the