Even if, in Ithaca, a few persons remember you, or only your name, the place itself rejects, you. . . You cant go back. The country you dream about returning to isnt there."" This is the lesson learned, after the displacement of the war years, by Michael Nadzin, who now four years later joins his two oldest friends- Jan Kot and Antoni Dubiecki, in Nice. There Kot and Dubiecki share not only the solidarity of their past and their passionate patriotism, but also a certain hope for the future, for the magazine they will launch with the help of a wealthy young widow- Anna, which will represent the best of the old Poland to which they will some day return. Derelicts, they have also become scavengers in their attempt to attach themselves to some sort of security (Anna, with her wealth, and her intimations that she will share it). And while they welcome Michael, they never accept him without doubts. As the weeks pass, Anna falls in love with Michael and he accepts the marriage offered. But his many memories of ""rottenness, decay, sterility, exile, mutilation"" intrude and isolate him; he can find no real identification with his friends and their little magazine, nor with Anna and her gestures of largesse. He incurs Dubieckis political suspicions when he gives a handout to a former Nazi informer, Annas when he takes in and nurses an old love, Sophy, whom he now finds drugged and dying. And at the close, as he breaks with his friends, turns his back on Anna and the comfort of the life with her, he realizes that he is a man without a country or a cause, and that his only commitment can be to a few human beings- such as he- hopelessly adrift. . . A thoughtful theme, this is strengthened by the acrid sharpness of this emigre milieu, by a devastating awareness of the disintegration it represents, and by the saddening search of its compassionate central figure. An audience, however, beyond Storm Jamesons name may be difficult to assess and assure. Literature, Fiction, Action