Shroud

ONE

Who speaks? It is her voice, in my head. I fear it will not stop until I stop. It talks to me as I haul myself along these cobbled streets, telling me things I do not want to hear. Sometimes I answer, protest aloud, demanding to be left in peace. Yesterday in the baker's shop that I frequent on the Via San Tommaso I must have shouted out something, her name, perhaps, for suddenly everyone in the crowded place was looking at me, as they do here, not in alarm or disapproval but simple curiosity. They all know me by now, the baker and the butcher and the fellow at the vegetable stall, and their customers, too, hennaed housewives, mostly, plump as pigeons, with their perfume and ugly jewellery and great, dark, disappointed eyes. I note their remarkably slender legs; they age from the top down, for these are still the legs, suggestively a little bowed, that they must have had in their twenties or even earlier. Clearly I interest them. Perhaps what appeals to them is the suggestion of the commedia dell'arte in my appearance, the one-eyed glare and comically spavined gait, the stick and hat in place of Harlequin's club and mask. They do not seem to mind if I am mad. But I am not mad, really, only very, very old. I feel I have been alive for aeons. When I look back I see what seems a primordial darkness, scattered with points of cold, hard light, immensely distant, each from each, and from me. Soon, in a few months, we shall enter the final decade of this millennium; I will not live to see the next one, a matter of some regret, the previous two having generated such glories, such delights.

Yes, I have returned to this arcaded city, unwisely, it may be. I rented a place in one of the little alleyways hard by the Duomo, I shall not say which one, for reasons that are not entirely clear to me, although I confess I worry intermittently about the possibility of a visit from the police. It is not much, my bolt-hole, a couple of rooms, low-ceilinged, dank; the windows are so narrow and dirty I have to keep a table lamp burning all day for fear of falling over something in the half dark. I would not wish to be found dead here, the door broken down, my landlady screaming, and I in who knows what mode of disarray. She is, my landlady – quella strega! – a widow, and of a decidedly histrionic bent. She tells me this used to be the city's red light district, and gives me a look the import of which I do not care to speculate upon, widening her eyes and holding her head far back, affording me an unpleasant view into the caverns of her nostrils. I always suspected I would end up like this, an outcast, stumping the back streets of some anonymous city, talking to myself and being stared at by passers-by. Yet I chose to come back here, though not out of fondness, certainly. Turin resembles nothing so much as a vast, grandiose cemetery, with all this marble, these monuments, these gesturing statues; it is no wonder poor N. went off his head here, thinking himself a king and the father of kings and stopping in the street to embrace a cabman's nag. They lost his luggage, too, as once they did mine, sent it to Sampierdarena when he was headed in the opposite direction; forever after he could not hear that melodious place-name without a snarl of rage.

Enough of these vagaries. I am going to explain myself, to myself, and to you, my dear, for if you can talk to me then surely you can hear me, too. Calmly, quietly, eschewing my accustomed gaudiness of tone and gesture, I shall speak only of what I know, of what I can vouch for. At once the polyp doubt rears its blunt and ugly head: what do I know? for what can I vouch? There exists neither "spirit," nor reason, nor thinking, nor consciousness, nor soul, nor will, nor truth: all are fictions … So the crazed philosopher declares, swinging his mighty hammer. Yet the notion haunts me that I am being given one last chance to redeem something of myself. I am not speaking of the soul, I am not that far gone in my dotage. But there may be some small, precious thing that I can buy back, as once I bought back Mama Vander's silver pill-box from the pawnbroker's. It occurs to me to wonder if that might have been your real purpose, not to expose me and make a name for yourself at all, but rather to offer me the possibility of redemption. If so, you have already had an effect: redemption is not a word that up to now has figured prominently in my vocabulary. But then your motives were never clear to me, no more, I suspect, than they were to you. Perhaps you did indeed betray me, and someday soon a publication will pop up from the presses in an obscure corner of academe with a posthumous essay in it, by you, on me, and I shall be disgraced, laughed at, hooted out of the lecture hall. Well, no matter.

The name, my name, is Axel Vander, on that much I insist. That much, if no more. Her letter was delivered to me one morning a world ago in the pleasant town of Arcady by a helmed and goggled Hermes on a bike. The message it carried was one I had been waiting for and dreading all my life, what I think of as my life, my real life. Now it had come at last, and the first thing I felt was embarrassment. It was as if I had been informed that a long-dead sibling, hardly remembered and never loved, was not dead after all, but tritely and vigorously alive, residing in a neighbouring suburb and about to pay an impossible visit. What could I find to say, at such a distance of time, to this discarded version of myself? I drank whisky all day, euphoric with terror and panic, and woke up at dead of night to find myself slumped in the old swivel chair down in my study with a burnt-out cigarette stub still in my fingers. From outside in the soft California darkness I could smell the smells that were exotic to me even yet, after so many years: eucalyptus, dust still warm from the day's sun, the tang of charcoal drifting down from the blond hills where fires had been smouldering sullenly in the grass for months. I let the letter fall to the floor and laughed the inane laugh of the inebriated. A car sizzled past on Cedar Street, going very slowly, as if its driver were counting the house numbers, and I thought of a mask with narrowed eyes behind it scanning the doors and the blinded windows. I lifted a hand and cocked my thumb and pointed a finger into the darkness where the door was. I laughed again, more phlegmily this time, and turned my hand around and stuck the pointing finger into my mouth and let the thumb fall like a hammer. I would have put a bullet in myself if… if what?

Pah.

I tried to rise but could not, and fell back with a clatter, the chair squealing in agony under me, my dead leg rolling like a log. I hate this leg, ineluctable companion of my failing years, hate it even more than the sightless eye that glares at me unmoving from the morning mirror, clouded and colourless as I imagine the eye of a dead albatross. That is what I am, a dead weight hung about my own neck. It will not be so for long more. Lately I have begun to feel that I am falling off myself, that my suety old flesh is melting off my skeleton and soon will all be gone. I shall not mind; I shall be glad; I shall rise up then, bared of inessentials, all gleaming bone and sinew smooth as candle wax, new, unknown, my real self at last. There is a moment that comes in drunkenness, or on the far side of it, when, as is said to happen sometimes to the afflicted in the throes of a heart attack, I seem to separate from my body and float upward, and hang aloft, looking down on the spectacle of myself with disinterested attention. It had happened now. I saw myself sprawled there, and then shift again with a violent heave, like a splayed horse trying to get to its feet, flailing about helplessly, muttering. I reached for the bottle on the desk and drank greedily from the neck, making suckling noises. My mouth was raw from the long day's drinking. When I let my arm sweep down beside the chair the bottle slipped from my fingers and rolled with a joggling hesitancy on the polished wooden floor, pouring its heart out in lavish, glottal gulps. Let it spill. In truth, I dislike the smoke-and-ashes taste of bourbon, but early on I had fixed on it to be my drink, as part of my strategy of difference, another way of being on guard, as an actor puts a pebble in his shoe to remind him that the character he is playing has a limp. This was in the days when I was making myself over. So difficult it was, to judge just so, to forge the fine discriminations, to maintain a balance – no one could know how difficult. If it had been a work of art I was fashioning they would have applauded my mastery. Perhaps that was my mistake, to do it all in secret, instead of openly, with a flourish. They would have been entertained; they would have forgiven me; Harlequin is always forgiven, always survives.

I heard paper crackle under one of the castors of the chair, like a snicker of admonitory laughter. It was that letter. See: I lean, I grunt, I pluck it up and flatten it with a fist on the arm of the chair and read it yet again in the cone of gold-dusted light that bathes me in its undeserved benevolence, my old wild leaning head, my sloping shoulder, my rope-veined claw. The typewritten lines flicker in time to a pulse beating in my temple, and my good eye waters with the effort of keeping the words steady and in line. She was in Antwerp – Antwerp, dear God! Her studied, scholarly tone amused me. Narrowly, striving to concentrate, I speculated as to how much she might know. I had thought I had shaken off the pelt of my far past yet here was evidence that it would not be entirely sloughed, but was dragging along behind me, still attached by a thread or two of dried slime.

It came to me then, with drunken clarity, what I would do. Odd, how this random world insinuates its sly suggestions. I scrabbled among the papers on the desk and found the embossed card that had been lying there for a week and read with a rictus of contempt its curlicued and pompous blandishments. Chiarissimo Prof essore! Il Direttore del Convegno considéra un altissimo onore e un immenso piacere invitarla ufficialmente a Torino … I had intended to decline, of course, with a curt and scornful note, but now I saw that I must go, and make her come to me there. Where better to confront my ruin, if that was what it was to be?

When I had read the letter first my first thought had been to disappear, simply to stand up and walk out of my life, as I did once before, with remarkable, with outrageous, success. It would be less easy this time; then, I was no one, now there are people – a select band, but a band – across however many continents there are who know the name of Axel Vander; all the same, it could be done. I had my escape routes mapped out, my secret bank accounts primed, my sanctuaries sealed and waiting… I am exaggerating, of course. But for a minute or two I did entertain the thought of fleeing, and was entertained by it. It made me feel daring, dangerous; it made me feel young. I wondered if this wielder of the poison pen, whoever she might be, had known the effect her letter would have on me: was it possible she was allowing me time to cut and run? But where would I go to, really? Whatever plans I might have put in place, there was nowhere farther I could escape to beyond this tawny shore, last edge of what for me was the known world. No, I would not do it, I would not give her the satisfaction of hearing the clump and stumble of my clay feet as I fled. Better far to confront her, laugh in the face of her accusations – ha! I would lie to her, of course; mendacity is second, no, is first nature to me. All my life I have lied. I lied to escape, I lied to be loved, I lied for placement and power; I lied to lie. It was a way of living; lies are life's almost-anagram. And now my earliest exercises in the art, my prentice falsehoods, had come back to undo me.

I woke at five in spectral rain-light, not sober yet. For a second I expected Magda to give her familiar moan of mild complaint and turn over in the bed with an oceanic heave. I reached out a hand beside me to where she was not; the sheet there had a special, faintly clammy chill that I knew I must be imagining and yet was convinced I could feel. I lay with eyes still shut and lit my wake-up cigarette, then rose and walked barefoot into the living room, my dead leg thumping on the maple boards. I am not of an apocalyptic disposition, having seen so many worlds seem to end and yet survive, but that morning I had the certain sense of having crossed, of having been forced to cross, an invisible frontier, and of being in a state that forever more would be post-something, would be forever an afterwards. That letter, of course, was the crossing point. Now I was cloven in two more thoroughly than ever, I who was always more than myself. On one side there was the I I had been before the letter arrived, and now there was this new I, a singular capital standing at a tilt to all the known things that had suddenly become unfamiliar. The house had a tense and watchful aspect, as if resentful of my intrusion on its furtive doings at this unaccus-tomedly early hour. Phantoms of shadow hung about, trying not to be noticed. A window streamed with rain, and opposite it in the room a patch of wall rippled like dark silk. I stopped still and peered into the gloom, seeking a focus; there were times when Magda was there, a palpable presence, but not now, and the shadows were shadows only. From the garden I could hear the rain beating on the leaves and into the clay, and I pictured it, falling down straight and shiny as wires through the windless dawn.

The coffee machine was still at its diarrhoeal labours when the rain stopped abruptly. I never got used to the weather on that coast, it was always too orderly, too arranged; there the spring with its discreet matutinal downpours followed by days of seamless sunlight had none of the unpredictability, the flushed feverish-ness, of the springtimes of my youth. Arcadians complain of the climate, in their relaxed, wry way, but to me these conditions hardly constituted weather at all, product that I am of Europe 's bleak northern lowlands with their ice storms and slanting rain and skies of tumultuous cloud endlessly unscrolling eastward. I took my steaming mug into the breakfast nook, easing myself awkwardly between the bench seat and the table. The drenched garden, tousled and glittering, had the abashed look of something picking itself up after an unseemly tussle. There would be mist on the bay for half the morning, until the sun was strong enough to burn it off, as the weather forecasters would say. I like that phrase, to burn it off, the figurative, brisk assurance of it. Out there on that coast the elements are something to be patronised; even the not infrequent earthquakes are a sort of huge communal joke. In the first months after we moved into the house I used to love to sit like that of a morning, looking out on my avocado tree, my peach tree, at the humming-birds busy about the bush that I think is called hibiscus, listening in a state of tingling bliss to the early-morning news on the radio, impatient for the end when the risibly solemn-voiced announcer would inform me of what the day had in store for me, the highs and lows of temperature – never too high, never too low – the breezes pacific and soft as breaths, the fog's standing mirage. It was like being promised a succession of lavish and wholly undeserved treats.

I went off to the bathroom, and when I returned, haphazardly shaven and putting on my tie, this time Magda was there, in her old grey dressing-gown with the frayed drawstring, sitting in the nook where I had sat. She looked as solid as an armchair, with hands laid flat along her thighs and a yard of flannel stretched between her splayed knees, and my heart gave a sideways knock and for a second I was afraid I would fall over. This is how I best remember her in that house, planted there in the neuralgic light of early morning, the iron hair severely parted down the middle and the heavy braids coiled against her head like two outsized earphones, her callused feet bare, her brooding, inexpectant gaze fixed slightly off to one side of me. Today she held her face turned away a little, at a characteristically watchful angle. It seemed that she might speak, if I waited long enough. But then I blinked and she was gone, and my heart settled down grumpily to its accustomed, rocky measure. Why could she not leave me alone? She had wanted to go, I was sure of it, so why must she keep coming back like this? My coffee mug stood at the place where she had appeared, still with its faint plume of steam; it had the look of the smoking barrel of a gun.

Unnerved, I went into what was known, I do not know why, as the lounge. It was the dimmest room in the house; a lamp had to be kept burning wanly there, too, day and night. Perhaps that was the reason people were always unwilling to linger in the room, despite the sofa and the easy chairs and the invitingly jumbled bookshelves. People? What am I saying? There never were people, to speak of, except me, and Magda. We did not encourage visitors; we were not sociable; we barely knew the names of our nearest neighbours; it was how I had insisted it should be, and Magda had willingly complied, at least I think she did so willingly. I sat down on the couch, crapulent and tired and squelchy with sudden, sweet self-pity. I never feel more acutely the pathos and perils of my life as in the early morning, the very time when I should be full of renewed hope and vigour. Briefly my resolve faltered; why was I going on this journey, what did I think I would achieve? I clasped a hand under my knee and heaved up my dead leg and banged it down on one of the little tables, making the lamp-bulb jump and blink. What choice did I have, but to go?

There was a single window in the room, large and long, giving on to a narrow walkway and the siding of the next-door house. Day had fully taken hold now and the window was a big rectangle of wettish sunlight slashed through with diagonals of indigo shadow; against the gloom in which I sat it might have been a painting, garish and flat as a primitive depiction of a tropical scene. I remarked inwardly again how uninsistent was the sunlight in this part of the world, a matt radiance, unvarying and calm, that would fill every square inch of the day like a bright, colourless gas, seeming not to have its source in the sky but to shine out of the very things on which it was falling, the buildings white as sugar cubes, the pastel motor cars, the burnished, black-green trees that lined every street like so many dreamy guardians. I noted too, more immediately, the dustiness of the room. Since Magda's going I had made no attempt at maintaining the place; I was not even sure where the cleaning things were stored, though I thought surely there must be a broom, a mop, a pail…? I had been under the impression that Magda had kept a daily woman, who came when I was not there, but although I waited in on successive mornings, no one turned up. Perhaps I only imagined gleaming-black Jemima, with her rolling eye and stupendous bosom and cotton-white headscarf tied in a top-knot. Then did Magda do all the household chores herself? I do not know why this possibility should be surprising, but it is. Now, with her gone, dust lay everywhere undisturbed, a fine, soft, mole-coloured fur, cut through by a pathway maze that marked out the pattern of my widowed life in the house: door to hall, kitchen to table, bathroom to bedroom. The margins of my world were disappearing, crumbling into this grey penumbra of soft dirt.

Widowed, or widowered? Is there such a word? Sometimes even still the language puts out a foot for me to trip over.

In her last years it was a mystery to me how Magda passed the time when I was not at home, as increasingly I made sure not to be. Housework was hardly the whole answer, even for one as slow-moving and deliberate as she always was. Whenever I enquired of her what she had done during the day she would take on a cornered look, holding her face at that three-quarters angle away from me and letting one shoulder droop, so that I felt I was being edged around by a large, wary ruminant. These cringing reactions of hers always annoyed me, although I could not think in what terms exactly to protest, and I would have to content myself with giving her my steeliest, white-lipped smile, drawing air in swiftly through my nostrils with a reptilian hiss that made her flinch. After these exchanges it gratified me that she would go about the house all evening heaving troubled little sighs, or being extra quiet, as if she were listening anxiously for the abatement of my anger. When we were in company together, at some unavoidable party or college reception, I could not resist making dry asides about her, inviting those unwise enough to engage us in conversation to join in my amusement at her incongruous, ill-attired, mute presence by my side. Those witticisms of mine at her expense were at least part of what made her into a public joke; through the years I had overheard her referred to variously as "Vander's Màdchen," and "Mutter Vander," and, mysteriously, "Old Eva." She did not seem to resent these petty public cruelties to which I subjected her, and would even smile a little, shyly, as if in pride at how appallingly I could behave, her large, button-black eyes shining and her upper lip protruding plumply. And of course this happy tolerance infuriated me all the more, and I would want to strike her, as she stood there amid the press of people in her overcoat and her broad, flat shoes, holding a glass of wine she kept forgetting to sip, contentedly isolated in the unfathomable depths of herself, my big, slow, enigmatic mate whom for the best part of forty years I must have loved or else I would have left.

I stood up from the couch and went into the bedroom again, where I was startled to discover that I had already packed a suitcase. I must have done it in the early hours, when I was drunk. I had no memory of it. I recalled telephoning the airline, and my surprise at being answered not by a machine but by a wide-awake and irritatingly bright human voice – I cannot adjust to the world's increasing nightlessness – but after that diere was only the fuzzy, faintly humming blank of inebriated sleep. Perhaps it was more than the bourbon, I thought; perhaps my mind was going.

How would one detect the encroachment of senility, when what is being attacked is the very faculty of detection itself? Would there be intervals of respite, flashes of frightful clarity in the midst of maunderings, moments of shivery recognition before the looking-glass, goggling in horror at the dribbled-on shirt-front, the piss-stained flies? Probably not; probably I shall shuffle into senility all unaware. The onset of extreme old age as I am experiencing it is a gradual process of accumulation, a slow settling as of soft grey stuff, like the dust in the untended house, under which the once-sharp edges of my self are blurring. There is an opposite process, too, by which things grow rigid and immovable, turning my stools into ingots of hot iron, drying out my joints until they grate on each other like pumice stones, making my toenails hard as horn. Things out in the world, the supposedly inanimate objects, join in the conspiracy against me. I misplace things, lose things, my spectacles, the book I was reading a minute ago, Mama Vander's redeemed silver pill-box – there is that bibelot again – that I kept as a talisman for more than half a century but that now seems to be gone, fallen into a crevice in time. Objects topple on me from high shelves, items of furniture plant themselves in my path. I cut myself repeatedly, with razor, fruit knife, scissors; hardly a week passes when I do not find myself some morning hunched over the handbasin fumblingly trying to unpeel a plaster with my teeth while blood from a sliced finger drips with shocking matter-of-factness on to the porcelain. Are these mishaps not of a different order from heretofore? I was never adroit, even in the quickest years of youth, but I wonder if my clumsiness now might be something new, not merely a physical unhandiness but a radical form of discontinuity, the outward manifestation of lapses and final closures occurring deep in the brain. The smallest things are always the surest warning, if one but heeded them. The first sign I registered of Magda's malady was the sudden craving that she developed for children's food of all kinds, popcorn and potato chips, toffee bars, sherbet bags, penny lollipops.

In the street outside a car horn brayed; for me the sound of the car horn is that great republic's most characteristic call, full-throated, peremptory, with an undertone of amused mockery. I snatched up my suitcase and my stick and lurched to the door, like a long-term convict who has heard the dead-bolts shooting.

The taxi driver was a caricature immigrant from the East, bearish and taciturn, a Russian, most likely, as so many of them seem to be in these newly liberated days. He took my bag unwillingly and turned and lumbered with it down the porch steps. There are times when that entire coastal strip seems a film set and everyone on it a character actor. In the street the lush trees shone in the sun and there were bright blooms in every front yard, yet even now, in this early morning at the height of spring, the air had a musty, used-up feel to it, another effect of the general lack of weather, and no wind, and the smog that even the dawn rains cannot fully dispel. The driver did not open the taxi door for me, and I had difficulty getting into the low-slung vehicle, first throwing in my walking stick and then turning and folding my torso in half and shoving myself backwards through the door on to the seat and grasping my useless leg in both hands and hauling it in after me. Hard to be graceful when you are half a cripple. Throughout my laboured manoeuvrings, the Russian sat in front like a stone man, facing impassively forward, hairy-eared, his thick shoulders stooped. Now he shifted a lever somewhere – I never did learn to drive that country's vast and terrifying motor cars – and trod on the accelerator and the engine roared and the taxi surged away from the kerb like a stuck animal. Turning, I spied one of my neighbours standing out on his porch in string vest and shorts, watching me go, with what seemed a look of confirmed suspicion, as if he were only waiting for the taxi to turn the corner before running to the telephone and calling the authorities to inform them that the suspect bird next door had flown the coop. He is one of those indigenous, lean, tall types with greying curls and a bandit's drooping moustache. In the two decades and more that he lived beside us I exchanged no more than a handful of guardedly polite greetings with him, although once he came to the house to complain about a stray dog that Magda had taken in; I got rid of the dog, naturally. Now for the first time it occurred to me to wonder if the fellow might be a Hebrew. I thought it likely – those springy curls, that nose. Half the population of Arcady and its environs seemed to be of the Chosen, though not the kind that I was once used to; these Luftmenschen were altogether too sure of themselves, too pushy and uncomplaining.

We came down to the shore and turned in the direction of the bridge. I had been right, there was still mist on the bay, though the sun was steadily strengthening. The highway was congested with morning traffic, six lanes of it hurtling forward like a herd of maddened animals. I pressed my hands over my face. I was tired; my mind was tired; it is wearing out, like the rest of me, though not as quickly. And yet it cannot stop working, even for an instant, even when I am asleep; I can never quite come to terms with this appalling fact. Repeatedly now, especially in the night, I return to the awful possibility that the mind might survive the body's death. They say that Danton's severed head was heard to heap curses on Robespierre. To be trapped like that, even for a minute, to feel the system shutting down, to see the light finally failing – ah! The taxi banged over a ramp in the road and began the long scramble up the slope of the bridge, waddling along at a strained sixty, the tyres whooping and the engine rattling like a faulty air-conditioner. I leaned my head back on the greasy plastic of the seat and closed my eyes again. In the dark the old questions teemed. What do I know? Less now than yesterday. Time and age have brought not wisdom, as they are supposed to do, but confusion, and a broadening incomprehension, each year laying down another ring of nescience. What do I know? When I opened my eyes we had gained the first crest of the bridge, and the city was there before us, walking sedately up and down its line of low hills, the bristling buildings flat and featureless as in a stage backdrop at this still-early hour. A tiny aeroplane was poised on a high bank of petrol-blue smog. In all the time I lived there I was never once on the other bridge, the famous rust red one; I do not know for sure where it leads from or goes to. What do I care for mere topography? The topography of the mind, now, that is a different matter… The topography of the mind – do I really say such things, out loud, for people to hear?

A battered white car driven by a frail black youth veered suddenly into the lane in front of us, and the Russian stamped on the brake and the taxi groaned and perilously swayed, and I was thrown forward and struck my good knee painfully on something hard in the seat-back. A traffic accident, that quintessential American road show, was always one of my liveliest terrors, the intolerable absurdity of all that noise and heat and hissing steam and pain. The angered Russian began jockeying for position, and at last with a tremendous wrench of the steering wheel he pulled into the left lane and overtook the white car and opened the automatic window on the passenger side and flung out a polysyllabic Cossack curse. The black boy, a skinny arm resting on the door beside him, his long, delicate fingers drumming in time to the music thundering from his car radio, turned and gave us a broad smile, showing a mouthful of impossibly huge, impossibly white teeth, then hawked deeply and spat a stringy green gobbet that landed with a smack in the corner of the rear window by my face, making me start back in disgust. The boy threw up his Egyptian head and gave a heehaw laugh that I saw but could not hear above the traffic roar and the pounding of the radio, and shot forward gleefully in a black blast of exhaust smoke. The Russian spoke savagely some words that I was unperturbed not to understand.

From the bridge, by an exit I had never noticed before, we descended abruptly into an unfamiliar wilderness of filling stations and cheap motels and ochre scrubland. I wondered vaguely if the Russian really knew the way to the airport; it would not be the first time one of these angry exiles from Muscovy had taken me to the wrong destination. I watched the disheartened landscape with its raked shadows fleeting past and was struck yet again by the strangeness of being here, of being anywhere, in the company of all these deceptive singularities. The Russian was the Russian with the long arms and the hirsute ears, the black boy was the black boy who wore a torn singlet and had spat at us; even I was the I who was on my way to the airport, and from the airport to another, older world. Were we, any of us, anything more than the sum of our attributes, even to ourselves? Was I more than a moving complex of impulses, fears, random fancies? I spent the best part of what I suppose I must call my career trying to drum into those who would listen among the general mob of resistant sentimentalists surrounding me the simple lesson that there is no self: no ego, no precious individual spark breathed into each one of us by a bearded patriarch in the sky, who does not exist either. And yet… For all my insistence, and to my secret shame, I admit that even I cannot entirely rid myself of the conviction of an enduring core of selfhood amid the welter of the world, a kernel immune to any gale that might pluck the leaves from the almond tree and make the sustaining branches swing and shake.

Here is the airport, in the morning's splintered glare, the flustered travellers lugging their bags, the taxi cabs like milling hounds nosing at each other's rear parts, the black man in the peaked cap grinning and saying, "Good morning, sir!" with enormous, false, emphatic cheerfulness. I paid the Russian his fare – the brute smiled! – and took my suitcase and turned on the swivel of my stick and went forward with my boatman's gait to meet a shadowy otherself in the smoked-glass doors of the departure hall that at the last moment, just as it seemed I and my reflection must meet in mutual annihilation, suddenly bethought themselves and opened before me with a hot gasp.

Fly! Fly!

She placed the two frail scraps of newspaper on the little lamp-lit table by the bed and sat back on her heels and studied them for a long moment, her hands laid flat on the table edge and her chin resting on her hands, now the news report of his long-ago death, now the side-by-side photographs of him and of the other one, all faded by time. Each breath she breathed clouded briefly the glass top of the table and stirred the fragments of sepia-coloured paper. They were brittle and light as a butterfly's wings. She felt a thrill of guilt; she had clipped them out with a nail scissors, hunched over the newspaper file, expecting the librarian to see what she was doing and come and upbraid her in guttural outrage and in a language not one word of which she would understand. She wondered again at the misprint in the caption to the photograph – Axel Vanden – the inexplicable appropriateness of it. How young he looked, hardly more than a boy, very good-looking, but with such an alarmed expression; it was probably just that the camera flash had startled him, though she could not help seeing fright and foreboding in those eyes. The other one, beside him, wore a grin, insolent and yet self-mocking. She picked up delicately in her fingertips the two rectangles of rice paper, which she had trimmed to an exact fit, and laid one each over the two cuttings, first the report of his death, then the photographs. The fountain pen she had bought was of an old-fashioned design, plump in the middle and tapered at the end; it had cost an alarming amount of money. Inside, there had been not the rubber bulb she had expected – the fake-antique effect was confined to the exterior – only a rigid plastic ink cartridge. It was better this way: a bulb she would have had to remove, for fear of it leaking, or bursting, but she could leave the cartridge in, it would be safe, and small enough to give ample space for her purpose inside the hollow of the barrel. This way too the pen would work, and that was good; verisimilitude is in the details, that was a lesson she had learned at the knee of a master. Now she moved the two pieces of newsprint to the front edge of the table and carefully, not daring to breathe, rolled them tightly on to the spindle of the ink cartridge, first one, then the other, face down with the protective sheets of rice paper between them, and secured them with a loop of fine thread she had teased from the hem of her blouse. Tying the knot was difficult, for the leaves of newsprint and the rice paper all kept trying to uncurl, and she had to make three attempts before she succeeded. She was careful too in screwing back the barrel of the pen; at one of the turns it snagged somehow on its threads and made a cracking noise, and she had the sensation of something soft and warm flipping over in the pit of her stomach. But then it was done. Resting fatly in her fingers the pen felt as full as a loaded pistol. To test it she wrote her name with a flourish on the pad beside the bed; the nib was too fine for her liking. She screwed on the cap again and clipped the pen into the pocket of her blouse and went and stood before the wardrobe mirror and looked at herself for a long time. Her own reflection always fascinated her, and frightened her, too, this inescapable person standing there, so known, so knowing, and so strange.

Tonight the voices in her head were silent.

Now there was nothing more to do; she had made all possible preparations. Axel Vander would have had her letter by this time, over there on the far side of the world, they had assured her of that at the post office. She had asked for the swiftest possible delivery; it had taken another dismayingly large handful of her dwindling store of bank notes. She went and leaned by the window and looked out into the night. In the square there were rain puddles, shiny and black as oil, and a line of trees, plane trees, she supposed, throwing ragged, oblong shadows across the pavement. She could hear a barrel organ playing somewhere, with mechanical and sinister cheeriness – a barrel organ, at this time of night? – and there was a faint, sickly aroma of what it took her a moment to identify as vanilla. She liked being here, in the unfamiliar city, the isolation of it. She was sure he would come. Perhaps as soon as tomorrow. He might even have set out already. She pictured him, tried to picture him, hurrying through the airport, flustered and petulant, banging his fist on the ticket counter and shouting out his name, demanding attention, insisting he must have a seat on the very next flight; he was famous for the violence of his temper. A tremor of excitement ran through her and she shivered. The only face she could put on him was the one from the newspaper cutting, with its youthful grin. He would be angry, and frightened, too, perhaps; he might offer her money; he might even threaten her. But she was not afraid. The prospect of his rage, his threats, did not alarm her; on the contrary, it made her feel calm, as if she were flying, somehow, suspended on firm air, unreachable, beyond all peril. What did she want from him? She did not know. There was something to be desired, certainly, she felt it inside her, like a vague and not unpleasurable distress; it was the feeling she imagined of being newly pregnant. She held his fate in her hands, his future; she had found him out. Yes, he would come, she was sure of it.

It was after midnight when I got into the city at last. There had been flight delays and missed connections, and the limousine that had been supposed to meet me at the airport was not there, the driver having tired of waiting and gone away. Then they told me my suitcase had not arrived, that it must have been sent on to somewhere else. At the lost luggage desk a swarthy clerk with his cap pushed to the back of his head and an unlit cigarette tucked behind his ear pretended not to understand my Italian – which, I might have told him, I learned from Dante – then shrugged and said the bag could be anywhere, and gave me a sheaf of incomprehensible forms to fill in. I threw the papers back in his face and for a horribly thrilling moment it seemed, from the truculent way he lowered his already low brow and scowled, that he might turn violent, and I took a step backwards and hefted my stick defensively. He only shrugged, however, and jabbered into a telephone, and told me someone would come, and turned contemptuously away. There was another wait then. Fuming, I sculled myself up and down the arrivals area, cutting a swathe through the press of tourists and noisy families and self-important businessmen with their slim briefcases and too-shiny, tasselled shoes. Presently a uniformed young woman from the airline arrived and informed me with a musical little laugh mat yes, the Professore's luggage had indeed gone to another destination, but that it would shortly be brought back and sent directly to my hotel. She had a large bust and a faint moustache and unpleasantly protrusive eyes, and reminded me of a celebrated operatic diva of the immediate postwar years whose name I cannot for the moment recall. I swore at her, and she blinked rapidly and ventured a glassy smile, not trusting that she had heard me correctly. She went off and found a taxi for me, and I was driven at astonishing speed – one always forgets how they drive here – through the humid night, into the city, where the last of the Saturday evening crowds were still promenading under the stone arcades.

Then at the hotel I found that my room had been given away. They pretended to have no record of my reservation, but from the evasively vacant look of the bald old body at the reception desk I knew it was a lie. I raised my voice, and made threats, and stabbed at the floor of the lobby with my stick. The manager was summoned, a preposterously handsome, heavy-set, ageing dandy, mahogany-coloured and shiny-haired, with the puffed-up chest of a heroic tenor – this entire business was turning into opera bujfa – and advanced on me, unctuously smiling, with hands outspread, and assured me that everything would be arranged, everything would be fixed, in just a little while, if I would be patient. So I went and sat on a squeaky leather chair in the deserted bar, under the resentful eye of a tired barman, and drank too much red wine, and when at length I was led up to my room, on the fifth floor, a partitioned-off brown cell with a naked lavatory bowl standing in a corner, I was too tipsy and tired to complain any more. Despite exhaustion and the lateness of the hour, however, I decided I must speak at once, immediately, now, to the letter-writer, my mysterious nemesis, and even called the switchboard and asked to be put through to Antwerp, but then I paused and thought better of it – I would have started straight away to shriek at her – and threw down the receiver and crawled into bed, bleared and unbathed, still wearing the underwear I had not changed since setting out half a world ago.

I passed a restless night; the bed, as so often with hotel beds, was far too small to accommodate me and my stiff leg, and I was woken repeatedly by noises from outside, car horns and revving motorcycles and young men shouting to each other from street to street. Toward dawn the clamour abated and I fell into a doze, beset by violent dreams. I woke early, sweating alcohol, my brain beating, and rose and stumbled to the window and opened wide the curtains and squinted up between the beetling buildings at the dense cerulean sky of Europe.

After breakfast, with renewed fuss and apologies, I was moved into a large suite on the more salubrious third floor. The rooms were spacious and cool, with floors of black marble, silken smooth. My returned suitcase stood at the foot of the bed, wearing a shame-faced look. I have a fondness for hotel rooms, the air they have of tight-lipped anonymity, the sense of being sealed off from the world, the almost audible echo of whisperings and indrawn breaths and women crying out in helpless rapture. Reclining in a mid-morning bath I concocted a picture of Miss Nemesis: a dried-up old virgin with blue-veined talons and spectacles on a string, and a mouth, with a fan of fine wrinkles etched into the whiskered upper lip, set in bitter dissatisfaction at the lost promise of her youth, when she had worn slacks and smoked cigarettes and written that thesis on Wordsworth's politics or Shelley's atheism that had so shocked and impressed her tutor at Girton or the bluestockings at Bryn Mawr. Surely she would be easy to deal with. First I would try charm, then threats; if all else failed I would take her to the top of the Antonelli Mole and push her off. Laughing, I began to cough, and felt my tobacco-beaten lungs wobbling in their cage like heavy, half-inflated, wet balloons, and the bath water around me swayed and almost slopped over. My cigarette case, another purloined trinket from the past, was beside me in the soap dish. I lit up, small flakes of hot ash hissing around me in the water. Nothing like a good deep chestful of cigarette smoke to quell a morning cough.

I hauled myself up in a cascade of suds and immediately jarred my elbow on the edge of a glass shelf. This new pain struck up an echo in the knee I had bruised yesterday in the taxi on the bridge. I stood a moment clutching my arm and swearing. I am a bad fit with the world, an awkward fit; I am too high, too wide, too heavy for the common scale of things. I am not being boastful, quite the contrary; I have always found my oversized self burdensome and embarrassing. Before me in the misted glass of the bathroom's floor-length mirror my reflection loomed, pallid and peering I went out to the bedroom and stood by the window looking down into the shaded defile of the street, still massaging my bruised elbow. A bus went past, cars, foreshortened people. At the corner, where an angled block of buttery sunlight leaned, a woman selling flowers looked up and seemed to see me – was it possible, at such a distance? What a sight I would have been, suspended up there behind glass, a grotesque seraph, vast, naked, ancient. I lifted a hand, the palm held flatly forward, in solemn greeting, but the flower seller made no response.

Almost before I knew what I was doing I had snatched up the telephone and asked for the Antwerp number. Waiting, I could hear myself breathing in the mouthpiece, as if I were standing behind my own shoulder. Wet still from the bath, I dripped on the marble floor, in the darkly gleaming surface of which I could see yet another, dim reflection of myself, in end-on perspective this time, like that bronzen portrait of the dead Christ by what's-his-name, first the feet and then the shins, the knees, and dangling genitals, and belly and big chest, and topping it all the aura of wild hair and the featureless face looking down.

She answered on the first ring. I hardly knew what to say; I had not thought I would reach her at once like this, I had expected delays, obstacles, evasions. Yes, she said, yes, this is she. I could not place her accent; she was not English, and yet an English-speaker. I knew from something in her voice that she had been doing nothing, nothing at all, only waiting for me to call. I pictured the scene, the meagre room in the cheap hotel, the light of a northern spring morning the colour of shined-on lead falling from a mansard window, and her, sitting on the side of the bed, head bowed and arthritic old hands folded in her lap, biding through the long hours, listening to the silence, willing it to be broken by the telephone's jangling summons. She spoke with judicious care, costively, rationing the words; was there someone with her, overhearing what she said? No, she would be alone, I was certain of that. I said that she must come to me, for I would not go to her, and there was a lengthy pause. Then she said it was a question of the fare; train travel was expensive, and it was a long way. Now it was I who allowed the silence to expand. Did she think I should pay for her to come and ruin me? Still I would not speak. Very well, she said at last, she would take the overnight express and be here in the morning, and without another word, yet not hurriedly, she hung up. I shivered; the bath water drying off had left my old skin stretched and chill. My hands were shaking too, a little, but not from the damp or the cold.

I dressed, impatiently, as always now. With the years I find these necessary morning rituals increasingly irksome. For whose benefit was I putting on this shirt, this linen suit, this tie that was too short and too broad at the end and made me look, as I could see from the mirror, as if my tongue were hanging out? The old should have a special garment, something like a monk's habit, simple and functional, and suitably presageful of the winding-sheet. I ran my fingers through the crackling strands of my unruly hair, without visible effect; I never wanted to let my hair grow wild like this, especially when it began to turn white, but I felt it would be expected of me, the famous Mijnheer de Professor from the doddery, woolly Old World. Suddenly, like a soft blow, the memory from childhood came to me of my mother wetting a fingertip and smoothing down the comma of wiry hair on the crown of my head that always a moment afterwards would spring up again. I recalled too the curiously voluptuous shiver of disgust I would experience when she was helping me into some new item of clothing, a blouse, or knee-breeches, or a crisp navy-and-white sailor suit with the pasteboard price-tag still dangling from a buttonhole. What was the cause of that inner recoil? An excess of intimacy with my mother, under the chrysanthemum-smell of whose face powder I could detect a medley of more intimate and more exciting odours? No, that is not it, I think; what made me flinch, surely, was an over-consciousness of self, the sudden, ghastly awareness of being trapped inside this armature of flesh and bone like a pupa wedged in the hardened-over mastic of its cocoon. Immediately, again, came the demand: What self? What sticky imago did I imagine was within me, do I imagine is within me, even still, aching to burst forth and spread its gorgeous, eyed wings?

The lift was an old-fashioned, rackety affair, the sight of which twanged another vaguely nostalgic string at the far back of my memory. I could hear it coming down from above, stopping at every floor and flinging open its gate with a noise of mashing metals, as if successive armfuls of wire clothes-hangers were being crushed between giant steel claws. When it reached me, though, there was no one in it. The lobby too was empty, the reception desk unattended. Through a partly open door behind the desk I spied the manager from last night, eating a sandwich, sitting hunched at the corner of a table on which there was a typewriter and untidy mounds of papers. He was tieless today, with the sleeves of his white shirt rolled and the collar open on a tufted triangle of bulging chest. Was he, out of costume like this and in slight dishevelment, was he, I wondered, more himself, or less? He was going at the sandwich with the concentrated ferocity of a dog that has not been fed for days. When he saw me looking he did not acknowledge me, only scowled, his jaw munching away, and leaned out sideways and pushed the door shut with his foot. I was about to walk on when there rose unbidden before my mind's eye the image of the coffee mug, the one I had left on the table in the lounge when the taxi arrived to take me to the airport. I saw it all that way away, on what was now the dark side of the world, the rim marked with a dried half moon of gum from my morning mouth, the coffee dregs turning to a ring of furry brown powder in the bottom, just standing there in the darkness and the silence, one among all the other mute, unmoving objects I had left behind me in the locked house, and it came to me, with inexplicable but absolute certainty, that I would never return there. Shaken, I faltered, and put a hand to the desk to steady myself. A clerk came out of the office and looked at me. To cover the moment's infirmity I asked for a map of the city, and the clerk opened one between us on the counter and with a show of laboured dutifulness – why do his kind always glance aside in that blank, bored way just before they speak? – began to show me on it the location of the hotel. Yes yes, I said, I knew where I was! I snatched up the map and without folding it I stuffed it into my pocket and went through the glass door and corkscrewed myself on my stick down the steps into the high, narrow street.

What did it mean, that I would not go back? Was I to die here, in this city? I am not superstitious, I do not believe in premonitions, yet there it was, the conviction – no, the knowledge – that I would not return home again, ever. But then I thought: Home? I walked along the street in wonderment and muddled alarm, in the unfamiliar air, smelling the city's unfamiliar smells. At the sunlit corner I came upon the flower seller. She was seated beside her stall on a folding canvas stool. She was a foreigner, another refugee, I surmised, not Russian, this time, but a native of one of those statelets wedged like boulders of basalt, though beginning rapidly to crumble now, between the straining continental plates of East and West. Her skin was a dull shade of khaki, and she was dressed in what looked to me like a gypsy costume, with bangles and many cheap rings, and a brightly coloured headscarf knotted tightly under her chin. She was young, no more than thirty, I thought, but her face was the face of an old woman, pinched and sharp. She was talking to herself, rapidly, in a low, rhythmic singsong, a sort of atrophied whine of entreaty and complaint. I felt a jolt, as in the experience of putting a foot on to the non-existent top step of a staircase in the dark, when I saw from the filmed-over emptiness of her eyes that she was blind. She sensed my hovering presence at once, though, and fumbled a spray of lily-of-the-valley from the stall and offered it to me, her whine intensifying into a pitiful but curiously unurgent, almost indifferent, beseeching. I produced a bank note, in an absurdly enormous denomination, and she put out a thin, leaf-brown hand unerringly and took it, and stored it swiftly in an inner recess of her beaded bodice. I waited for my change, but none was offered. She sat and softly keened complainingly as before, oblivious of me now, it appeared, rocking herself back and forth on her stool. Only then did I notice that she was in an advanced state of pregnancy. Behind me a yellow-and-black tram went past, spitting big, soft, flabby sparks from its overhead connection and causing the pavement to quake. Stooping in the lee of all that force and clangour I turned and hurried on.

I dodged into the first caffè that I came to and sat at a table far at the back, as if to hide from a pursuer. My upper lip was damp with sweat and my heart was joggling from side to side like a cartoon alarm clock. What was the matter, why had that encounter so disturbed me? I recalled the old man in Paris, a distant relative on my mother's side, in his dank apartment in the Marais, pressing fistfuls of francs into my hands and reciting for me the names of people who might help me, in Lisbon, London, New York, chanting them over and over in an urgent murmur, as if they were the verses of the Law. Even now, half a century later, I can recall a surprising number of them – their names, that is, for of course I never went near the people themselves. They would all be dead by now, most likely, and their children grown up, become lawyers or doctors or big shots in the insurance business, who would not care who I was, or what I had made of myself, or how, for no good reason, I had deceived that old man in the Marais, telling him I was someone other than who I was. I lifted my coffee cup with a hand that was trembling again and sought to quell the memories welling up out of the murk of the past. What is remarkable is not that we remember, but that we forget – who was it that said that? I looked about me at the caffè's ornate trappings, the chandeliers, the potbellied coffee machines, the gleaming copper spigot at the bar from which a constant purling cord of water flowed. There were few patrons: a panting old man and his panting dog, a woman in an elaborate hat eating pastries, and a clownish, carrot-haired fellow wearing an ill-fitting, loud, checked blazer and a bright yellow shirt with a soiled collar, the wide wings of which were spread flat over the lapels of his blazer, who kept glancing surreptitiously in my direction with a faint, elusive leer. By the door three black-tied waiters loitered, exchanging desultory remarks and eyeing the toecaps of their patent-leather shoes. For a second, strangely, and for no reason that I knew, everything seemed to stop, as if the world had missed a heartbeat. Is this how death will be, a chink in the flow of time through which I shall slip as lightly as a letter dropping with a rustle into the mysterious dark interior of a mailbox? I paid my bill and rose abruptly and made for the door, again as if I were fleeing someone, and had the sensation, as so often at such precipitate moments, of having left something of myself behind, and thought that if I were to look back now I would see a crude parody of myself sprawled on the chair where I had been sitting, a limp, life-sized marionette, hands hanging and jointed limbs all awry, grinning woodenly at the ceiling.

The door, heavy and high, resisted me, and I had to lean my weight into it to push it open. At my back I heard a flapping step, and saw in the sunstruck, bevelled glass panel of the door in front of me the reflection of a grinning face looming at my shoulder. It was the red-haired fellow, the one who had been watching me while I drank my coffee. I turned to confront him, and the door on its stiff spring swung back and struck me on the shoulder, and would have sent me pitching headlong among the tables and the chairs and the legs of the waiters if Carrot Head had not grasped me by the elbow – the one I had bruised on the bathroom shelf, naturally – and held me upright. He had a large, round, high-coloured face, with a sprinkling of ginger bristles on cheeks and chin that glittered in the sunlight falling through the glass. That awful blazer was far too big for him, as were his trousers, and he wore a pair of incongruous, once-white plimsolls with soiled laces and thick rubber soles. He nodded and leered, saying something in what seemed to be dialect. I shook off with difficulty that insistent and insinuating hand, and took a step forward and let go of the door, hoping it would bash my pursuer in the face, but he avoided it nimbly and followed me into the street, still keeping up his incomprehensible patter. The only word of it I could make out sounded like signore, which was repeated over and over, with puzzling emphasis, while Carrot Head nodded vehemently and pointed to his own face. I turned away from him and set off along the lofty corridor of the arcade as fast as my bad leg and the uneven paving flags would allow, keeping my gaze fixed furiously ahead. Still Carrot Head would not let me go, but trotted eagerly beside me, burbling away, and leaning down and round and up to push his face in front of mine. And so we went along, by the stone archways, through alternating intensities of shadow and sunlight, glanced at by quizzical passers-by, until, at an intersection, beside a second-hand bookstall, I halted suddenly and took a step sideways and lifted high my stick in a hand white and shaking, and Carrot Head at last fell back, pursing his lips and shaking his head with a sorrowful smile and holding up placatingly a pair of empty palms.

Out of the shadows into the long piazza I stepped, and paused to stand a moment, breathing hard, waiting for my anger and disquiet to abate, still wondering what the fellow could have wanted of me. With a cold eye I took in what the guidebooks would call the panorama: the wedding-cake façades, the bronze horseman unsheathing his sword, the famed twin churches down at the far end of the square, all bathed in a honeyed, sunlit haze. I find this city no more attractive or interesting than any other I have known. Customs, legends, tales of colourful characters and events, such stuff leaves me cold; the picturesque in particular I find revolting. I do not care what battles Emanuele Filiberto won or lost, or where Cavour liked to eat his dinner. History is a hotchpotch of anecdotes, neither true nor false, and what does it matter where it is supposed to have taken place? How I used to despise those novelists whose paltry fictions it was my misfortune in the early years of my career to be forced to foist upon my students, I mean those northern worshippers of the sun-drenched south, the self-styled pagans – frauds and remittance men all – whose scenes were set on thyme-scented islands, or in pine-shaded hilltop villages, or in that steamy seaport in a disregarded corner of the Mediterranean, where the hero and his sloe-eyed mistress shared their parting dinner in a little restaurant up a side street from the harbour where the tourists never ventured, the anchovies and the bitter olives and the rough local wine, and the restaurant-keeper's wife humming something plangent, and the street arabs wheedling, and the three-legged dog gnawing a knuckle of bone, and the old poet at the next table coughing his life out over a last absinthe. As if place meant something; as if being somewhere vivid and exotic ensured an automatic intensification of living. No: give me an anonymous patch of ground, with asphalt, and an oily bonfire smouldering, and vague factories in the distance, some rank, exhausted nonplace where I can feel safe, where I can feel at home, if I am ever to feel at home, anywhere.

I walked on. A stream of motor cars was flowing swiftly through the square, separating into two channels around the bronze horseman's plinth and meeting and mingling again in cacophonous disorder on the other side. The sun was being stealthily swallowed by a fat, barely moving cloud, putty-grey and burning silver all along its forward edge. A pigeon landed in front of me, descending in an awkward flurry on churning wings, like a rapid succession of violet-grey ink-blot tests. I turned again and struck away from the square, and walked through ever narrower, cobbled streets, until I came out at last unexpectedly into a wide avenue flanked on both sides with chestnut trees in flower. Here I could breathe more easily. As I passed under the first broad, high, cool canopy of leaves, it occurred to me to wonder when a tree would feel most like itself, when it would feel it had most fully achieved its true being. I mean, if it were sentient – and who is to know if we are the only conscious ones, or that our consciousness is the only kind there is? – at what stage of its yearly cycle would it say, now, now I am what I am, now at last I am in my total treeness. Would it be in spring's first greening, or the full-leafed glory of June, or autumn flame, or even the gnarled nakedness of winter? And to live that cycle of life within another cycle – the one from bud to bareness, the other, the longer one, from sapling to hollow stump – surely that would be confusing. Would the fall of its leaves feel like incipient death, each year? Would spring feel like rebirth? Thinking these thoughts, in that midday's green dusk, I heard, or felt, rather, a reverberant boom, as if in the distance a great sheet of pliant metal had been struck with a huge, soft hammer. Thunder? I did not think so. Some aeroplane noise? A cannon shot, perhaps, marking the midday hour? Whatever it was it disturbed me. I quickened my pace, veering off in the direction of the hotel.

Presently I realised that I had lost my way, and I had to stop at a street corner to consult the crumpled map the hotel clerk had given me. I was squinting up in search of a street name when I registered the girl, on the corner opposite, looking in my direction. She was tallish, fair, neither pretty nor plain; I would not have noticed her had she not seemed to be regarding me with a smile, knowing, not unfriendly, as if I were someone she had met long ago, in faintly discreditable circumstances. She stepped forward into the street, squeezing between two cars parked closely nose to tail. Was she coming to accost me? The prospect made my pulse quicken, and I did not know whether to wait for her or flee. Who were all these people, the flower seller, Carrot Head, now this girl, and what did they want with me? The lorry had already braked, its tyres locked and shrieking, when it struck her. I had the sense of her spinning on her toes, head thrown back and hair flying, fast and tensely graceful as a dancer. There was a cry, not hers. A burly, grey-haired man on the pavement behind her threw up one arm and said something loud and deprecating in a deep bass voice. Vehicles squawked and pulled aside to right and left as the lorry hurtled down the centre of the street for twenty yards and came at last to a slewed, smoking stop. The girl had fallen back and was draped against the side of one of the parked cars with her arms flung wide. There was blood in her hair, and a glistening, innocent-looking trickle of blood coming out of her left ear. The large man who had thrown up his arm was toiling toward her at a bow-legged run, but before he could reach her she slithered abruptly to the ground as if everything inside her had suddenly liquefied, and lay in a boneless heap. Now others were running forward, and people were scrambling out of their cars and craning to see what had happened. I turned about quickly and set off at a headlong lurch, not caring which direction I was going in, so long as it was away from there. People jostled me, pressing forward for a glimpse of the fallen girl, with vague, eager, self-forgetting frowns. I was in a sort of panic, gasping, the sweat running into my eyes, and there was a blazing pain deep in my groin. I did not know what I was fleeing from; not the girl's death, certainly, or not only that. A half-formed image came to my mind – from Bosch, was it, or Dante? – of an emaciated, gape-mouthed figure, stooped and naked, running with uplifted arms through a landscape of burning red earth, bearing another figure, its own double, lashed to it tightly back to back. At last I came to the quiet of a secluded small piazza, with cobbles and more strutting pigeons and a patch of dusty grass, all loured over by the baroque, blocky façade of a palace, the name of which I knew I should know but could not remember. Unable to go any further I flopped down on a bench of polished marble. There was no one else about. A noontide pall of lethargy had fallen on the city. That slow cloud now hid the sun, and the soft grey air and the silence calmed my seething nerves. The pain in my groin subsided.

Why such upset? This was not the first violent end I had witnessed. Was it that it was another of death's heartless demonstrations that even the young are not immune to its capricious singlings-out? No, that is too obscure. Perhaps it was simply because the girl had seemed to be looking at me, had seemed to know or recognise me, might even have been about to speak to me. But why should that make the encounter, if such it could be called, so unsettling? In certain circles, admittedly rarefied, mine is a well-known face. I am used to strangers recognising me. They will pause, the young in particular, and look at me, shyly, or with resentment, or more often just that slow, dull, witless stare, as if it is not the real me they are seeing but a representation of me, an animated model set up for their free and exclusive scrutiny. So why should the girl's attention have made me want to take to my heels? Oh, but I knew, I knew of course, why I was agitated: it was not the girl I was thinking of, it was Magda. When she was alive I could hardly be said to have given her a second thought, while now she was constantly on my mind, if only as a shadow, the solitary spectator sitting in the benches above the spotlit ring where the gaudy and increasingly chaotic performance of who and what I am pretending to be is carried on without interval. She lingers there, unwilling shade, wishing to be gone, perhaps, yet curious to see the not so grand finale, with its tumbling clowns and bowing acrobats and trained animals doing their last lap. Only in death has she begun to live fully, for me.

Strange, but try as I may I cannot remember exactly how or when we met. In my memory of it, that first, long-ago season in an unreally vivid New York is all haste and noise and sullen heat. Even in the streets I felt as if I were trapped inside a huge, smoky, deafening factory. Everything was always on the move, there was never a moment of cessation or stillness. Traffic thudded day and night along the streets above the corner basement room where I lodged; the papers on the scarred old table I used for a work desk shivered and shifted in the draught from the electric fan some acquaintance had given me, as it turned its fuzzy face and fencer's mask slowly from side to side in obdurate refusal of relief. All day a confusion of disembodied legs passed back and forth on the pavement outside the ground-level window above my table, as if there were a riot, or a disordered, shuffling marathon dance, continually going on out there. And then there was the talk, incessant, raucous, plosive with challenge or swollen with sudden declarations of sincerity and fellow-feeling. I would meet them at the end of their working day – work was one of the sacred words then, pronounced with breathy awe – the scrawny young men in open-necked shirts, with their flat haircuts and Zippo lighters, sweating earnestness, the serious-eyed girls in pumps and calf-length skirts clutching paperback copies of Capital to their chests like breastplates. The thin, sweetish beer, the charry cigarette smoke, the sudden squabbles that were as suddenly quelled, the shouts and thrusting forefingers, and that gesture of half-angry dismissal of a contrary opinion, so characteristic of the time and place, a free-wristed, sideways slap at the air and the face turning aside, with wrinkled nose and drooping lower lip: Ndah! – all this was intensely strange to me, and yet familiar, too, I could not think why, at first, until I realised that of course I had seen it all over and over again, for vears, in the cinema, every Saturday night, when I was young. America on the screen had been more intimately familiar to me than the streets of the city where I was born and where I lived. And so, in New York, the actual New York, that was how I chose to present myself, as a character out of the pictures, a fat cigarette lolling in my lips and a tumbler of bourbon at my elbow. I even used to dress the part, in brown fedora and tight, double-breasted suit and two-toned shoes. Oh, yes, it was quite a figure that I cut. The intellectual as tough guy, that was all the rage, in those days. All I lacked was a companion, some big babe, loose and hard-drinking, and as tough as I was supposed to be. People were baffled, therefore, especially the girls, when it turned out to be sweet, silent, undemonstrative Magdalena that I chose to be my moll, my mate. Even then, when she was still in her twenties, there was a massive, stony quality to her, something granitic and unrelievedly grey, that was curiously attractive, to me, at least. I quickly understood, when I first began to notice her, that she kept to the background not out of shyness or fear – although she was shy, she was fearful – but in order to be able to watch and listen to all that went on from the shelter of anonymity. She was unflagging in her obligingness, doing errands for the men and the bossier of the girls, fetching books for them, and packs of cigarettes, and sandwiches and paper cups of coffee; I can still see her, in her sandals and no-colour knitted dress, her hair in fat braids, coming down the basement steps in that odd, elephantine way that she had, turning sideways and lowering one broad foot on to each step and then bringing the second down to join it, her chin tucked into her fish-pale throat and her gaze fixed on whatever it was she was carrying. She was living on the Lower East Side – a placename that in those days still sounded as suggestively exotic to my ears as Samarkand or the Isles of the Blest – with a plumber, a militant Pole of simian aspect with a revolutionist's wire-brush moustache, who was said to beat her. She would not talk about him, even when she had left him and had come to live with me in my basement, bringing a bottle of bourbon as a moving-in present and one not very large suitcase containing everything she possessed. Late one night the Pole turned up in the street outside, drunk and in a tearful rage and calling out her name, and banged on the door and would have kicked in the window had it not been barred. I wanted to get up and chase him away – even with my bad leg I did not doubt I would be well able to see off the little ape – but Magda prevented me.

She did not like to talk about herself or her life; when she did mention some event from the past her voice would take on a tinge of puzzlement, as if what had happened had happened to someone else and she could not understand how she knew so many of the details. Nor did she care particularly to hear about my life before we had met. Others, even the brashest among our acquaintances, regarded me with a kind of wondering respect, with a holy reverence, almost: I was the real thing, a genuine survivor, who had come walking into their midst out of the fire and furnace smoke of the European catastrophe, like Frankenstein's monster staggering out of the burning mill. To Magda, though, herself a survivor, I was simply Vander – she did not care to call me Axel; it sounded, she said, like the name of a guard dog – a man much like any other, more volatile, perhaps, than the ones she was used to, potentially more violent even than her Pole, but still no more than a man. She did not remark particularly my dead leg or my blind eye, and accepted without comment the bragging lies I told her as to how I had come by them – my stand against a rampaging mob, the blow I got from a storm trooper's rifle butt – lies I had rehearsed so often that I had come almost to believe them myself. Early one sweltering morning, though, I woke out of a doze to find her leaning over me – our bed was a mattress on the floor – with her large, soft face propped on a hand, contemplating me in big-eyed, solemn silence. For a minute neither of us stirred, then she touched a fingertip to the pulpy lid of my bad eye and murmured, "And I only am escaped alone to tell thee" and the bristles stood up on the back of my neck, as if it were an oracle that had spoken. Who would have expected Magda, big, slow, flat-footed Magda, to come out with something so grave, so sonorous, so biblically apt to both our states?

My life with her was a special way of being alone. It was like living on intimate terms with a creature from another species; she was to me as remote and inaccessible as some large, harmless herbivore. At times I thought there was no mystery to her at all, that she was as blank as she seemed, then at others I grew convinced that this appearance of unmoving calm that she displayed was a mask she had fashioned for herself behind which she too must be locked in frantic strategies of calculation and control, practising, like me, for a part she did not believe she would ever be able to fill convincingly. In the state of mutual incomprehension that was our life together we were forever surprising each other. She was alarmingly well read, as in the early days I had frequent and shame-making cause to discover. Already I had made myself adept at appearing deeply learned in a range of subjects by the skilful employment of certain key concepts, gleaned from the work of others, but to which I was able to give a personal twist of mordancy or insight. In everything I wrote there was a tensed, febrile urgency that was generated directly out of the life predicament in which I had placed myself; I was fashioning a new methodology of thinking modelled on the crossings and conflicts of my own intricate and, in large part, fabricated past. I could discourse with convincing familiarity on texts I had not got round to reading, philosophies I had not yet studied, great men I had never met. My assertive elusiveness, as one critic rather clumsily called it, mesmerised the small but influential coterie of savants who sampled and approved of my early pieces. Though they might question my grasp of theory and even doubt my scholarship, all were united in acclaiming my mastery of the language, the tone and pitch of my singular voice; even my critics, and there were more than a few of them, could only stand back and watch in frustration as their best barbs skidded off the high gloss of my prose style. This surprised as much as it pleased me; how could they not see, in hiding behind the brashness and the bravado of what I wrote, the trembling auto-didact hunched over his Webster's, his Chicago Manual, his Grammar for Foreign Students? Perhaps it was the very bizarreries of usage which I unavoidably fell into that they took for the willed eccentricities in which they imagined only a lord of language would dare to indulge.

Do not misunderstand me: I have no doubt that I possess genius, of a kind. It is just not the kind that it has pretended all those years to be. I sometimes think that I missed my calling, that I could have been a great artist, a master of compelling inventiveness, arch, allusive, magisterially splenetic, given to arcane reference, obscure aims, an alchemist of word and image. Indeed, my critics often grumble at the desolate lyricism of my mature style, seeing behind it the pale hand of the poet. I take their point. Mine is the kind of commentary in which frequently the comment will claim an equal rank with that which is supposedly its object; equal, and sometimes superior. In my study of Rilke, an early work, there are passages of ecstatic intensity that world-drunk lyricist himself might have envied, while those long, twinned essays on Kleist and on Kafka are as desperate and inconsolable as any of the plays or the parables of those two hierophants of dejection. Shall I bow before these great ones? Shall I bend the knee to their eminence? Damned if I will. I hold myself as high as any of them, in my own estimation. What troubles me only is the thought of all I might have done had I been simply – if such a thing may be said to be simple – myself.

Magda was apparently as impressed by me as everyone else was, and took my poses and my brilliant pretences at their face value. If she knew I was a fraud, she did not seem to mind; seemed, indeed, to admire me, in her detached way, for my nerve and resourcefulness. There was a particular, small smile I would occasionally catch fleeting across her face when I was expounding to a spellbound company on some dense text she knew I had done no more than glance at. She had read Hegel and Marx, and much else beside. She could reel off quotations as by rote, for she had a remarkable memory, even if little of what the quoted passages might signify had stuck; she carried her knowledge of all those titanic thinkers like an atrophied limb, the intellectual equivalent of my useless leg. She had obediently studied the century's revolutionary texts at the bidding of the Pole, since he was not a great reader himself, but was determined they should be the perfect Party pair, he the hammer of activism, she the sickle of ideology. She shrugged, telling me this, and smiled, fondly, as at the recollection of some not entirely innocent childhood game of make-believe. Yes, she saw through us all, in her mute, intuitive fashion. Was that the reason I chose her above the others? Was that the reason she chose me? Was she my protectress, the guardian of my borrowed, my purloined, reputation? It comes to me with mournful force that these questions now will never be answered, or not by her, certainly.

She regarded the past as a sort of huge, unavoidable mistake, a whole set of wrong beginnings that had now, at last, been put right. If she had any anger for all that had befallen her it was directed not at the devisers of the vast project of destruction in which she had been caught up and from which she had barely escaped with her life, but at the very victims of it, all those who had not escaped, even her bewildered parents, her sister who had been so vain of her dark beauty, her little brother, still clutching his toy bugle as he was marched away. It was not that she blamed them for not resisting, or for being hapless and confused and self-deluding – her mother before being hustled to the trucks had squeezed her hand and made her promise to write – but for the simple fact of their having existed, of their having been there in the first place to be taken away from her in the last. She had kept nothing of them, no photograph, no document, no lock of hair, only her memories, and these she would willingly have relinquished, had she been able. That she of all of them was the only one to have survived, because her name had somehow slipped from the lists, was only another cause for baffled, mute anger.

We had been together for some months before she would tell me any of this. Late one raw November afternoon we had been to the cinema – or the movies, as I was learning to call them – and were sheltering from the cold in a coffeehouse on Bleecker Street when she began to weep, quietly, almost pensively. In the interval of the double bill a newsreel had been shown of scenes from the ruins of Europe, and the sight of those seemingly endless ranks of corpses had jogged something in her, and now she could not stop telling me what had happened to her. Sitting beside her as she talked, I held myself motionless, barely breathing; my fist, lying on the table by her hand, felt so heavy it seemed I would never be able to lift it again. Her recollections of flight and escape were fitful, lit in flashes: the sharp white stones on a mountain track; massed, dark trees moving past in the headlights of a lorry in which she lay hidden under sacking; a boy soldier at some dusty border post offering her an apple from his tunic pocket. It was as if she had made the perilous journey not in linear time, but in great leaps, from stopping place to stopping place, between each of which she had somehow been absolved from consciousness. When she had finished I had to tell her my story, of course, the etiquette of our predicament as survivors demanding it. Story is right. We had left the coffee shop by then and were walking down the street in the bitter cold and the gathering dusk, the traffic flowing along beside us through the slush like wreckage being carried on a river in sluggish spate. She leaned heavily on my arm, a dragging weight. She did not want to hear the things I was telling her, she was tired of them; she resented the burden of her tragic fate, and mine. In the light of her resistance my inventiveness burgeoned; never before or since did I spin my tale so well or so convincingly as I did that night, weaving through the lies a few, fine, shining threads of truth, as the wet white flakes fell fast around us and the huddled, faceless figures of passers-by loomed up at us suddenly out of the lamplight and as quickly vanished behind us into the dark. I could not but admire my own performance. What a fabulist I was; what an artist! And I never did tell her the real, the whole, the tawdry truth.

High in the air above me there came again that hollow booming sound I had heard on the avenue under the chestnut tree, and I woke with a shiver from my reveries. The day had cleared and the sun was hot in the piazza under a cloudless, hard, white sky. I recognized suddenly where I was: it was here that N., in the final months before his collapse, had lodged in a room in the Fino house on the corner looking out on the massive façade of the Palazzo Carignano – that was its name! – scribbling crazed letters and signing them Dionysus, The Crucified, Nietzsche Caesar … I closed my eyes and pressed a thumb and finger to them until tiny lights like distant rockets began to pop and flare in the darkness behind the fids. I am convinced my blind eye works when it is shut. I saw again, as clearly as I had seen it happen, the truck skidding and the girl spinning and the man with the grey hair throwing up his arm in that strange way and calling out as if to warn off some unwary intruder on this scene of violence and blood. I opened my eyes again and rose unsteadily to my feet, heaving myself up with both hands pressed on the crook of my stick. I was hot; I was thirsty; I was tired.

When I woke the curtains were pulled against the light of day and I thought it was still dawn and that everything that had happened since my arrival had been a dream. I lay motionless on the bed, staring into the gauzy folds of shadow about me, gripped by an obscure panic. I could not understand why I was dressed in suit and tie; I even had my shoes on, although the laces at least were undone. My right arm had been asleep and tingled unpleasantly now as the blood began to move in it again; my injured elbow ached. Slowly memory began to gather up its fragments. I had drunk a bottle of wine with lunch in the hotel dining room and had stumbled up here to my room to rest and must have passed out, felled by alcohol and the last embers of travel fever. I got myself up cautiously and sat for a moment on the side of the bed with my head bowed. Why had I come to this city? I was too old and worn to travel so far for the sake of a whim. I could have made the writer of that letter come to me in Arcady, that would have tested her resolve. I rose with a groan and went into the windowless bathroom and stood wincing and blinking in humming white light. Dandruff, caries, Doctor Baloardo's big pockmarked nose. I washed out my mouth; the tap water tasted of tin. I stood and gazed dully in the mirror, hands braced on the basin and my shoulders hunched. I had the sensation then, as so often, of shifting slightly aside from myself, as if I were going out of focus and separating into two. I wonder if other people feel as I do, seeming never to be wholly present wherever I happen to be, seeming not so much a person as a contingency, misplaced and adrift in time. My true source and destination are always elsewhere, although where exactly that elsewhere might be I do not know; perhaps it is in childhood, that age of authenticity the scenes of which I can summon up more and more vividly the farther away from them that I get. Banal possibility. Dull thoughts in a dulled mind. It was the wine, the weariness.

The taxi was waiting for me at the door of the hotel. I was late already, but I did not care; let them wait. This time the city, in afternoon light, showed me another, softer side to the one I had seen that morning. Sun glanced, white-gold, on car roofs and the windows of caffès. We passed under the Mole, absurd in its pagoda lines. I noted without enthusiasm the thickening flotsam of strolling students in the streets, and presently the grey concrete headland of the university buildings hove into view. When I saw Franco Bartoli on the steps, standing on tiptoe with neck outstretched and casting about him anxiously, I had an urge to duck down and order the taxi driver to drive on. I asked myself bitterly again what had possessed me to come to Turin, what there could be here for me except confrontation, exposure, humiliation. I alighted from the taxi and turned back to pay the fare, and saw out of the corner of my eye Bartoli trotting toward me happily, already speaking although he was still well out of earshot. He is a delicate, balding, bearded, egg-shaped little man, voluble and nervous, and watchful as a weasel. He pressed one of my hands tightly in both of his and babbled breathless welcomes which made me grind my teeth. I pushed past and levered myself up the steps on my stick with Bartoli fairly dancing about me. So good of me to come! – such an honour! – everyone so eager to see me! I scowled. "Who is here?" I demanded. Bartoli ticked off names on his miniature fingers. "Old friends," he said, beaming, "all old friends!" I almost had to laugh.

And here they were, waiting for me indeed, fifteen or twenty of them, in a wide, low-ceilinged top-floor room the four walls of which were made of sheets of smoked plate-glass bolted between rust-red girders, in the brutal modern way. They were huddled together in the middle of the large empty space where a bar had been set up on linen-covered trestle tables, all with their faces turned toward me expectantly as I stood eyeing them from the doorway. It was true, I did know most of them, the faces if not their names; I am not good at remembering names, even when I try, which is not often. I sighed, and with Bartoli bouncing ahead of me I set off across the floor, fixing my stony smile in place and bringing my stick down on the squeaky rubber tiles with deliberate force. Bartoli dived into the crowd, swirling and swooping among them like a choreographer assembling his troupe. He has the mannered and slightly mechanical movements of a professional performer. I was greeted on all sides with wary warmth. Bartoli drew me to the table where the drinks were, and when the waiter, a dark young bruiser with a peasant's hands, did not move smartly enough he seized a bottle and two glasses and poured the wine himself. "A son of the south," he said to me out of a corner of his mouth. "They live on our taxes and send us oxen in tribute." Franco is very vain of his accentless English. The waiter was watching him sullenly. He handed a glass to me and tipped his own in salute. "Hard to believe that we have lured you here at last," he said, with a sharp little twinkle. "We have invited you every year for the past seven years – I checked our records, yes – but always in vain." He was like a boxer, outclassed and outweighed, dodging and feinting, looking for an opening through which to jab an insult at me. I hardly attended him. I was remembering, with sudden, hallucinatory intensity, the summers of my boyhood at my grandfather's farm. A city child, I always registered first and most acutely the smells of the place, of flowers, fruits, and plants, and of their decay, the hot smell of horse dung, the smell of earth and excrement in the little wooden privy in the garden under the heavily scented elder tree, the exquisite perfume of the wild strawberries I hunted for in the hedgerows, the smell of mushrooms, the smell of hens and of their blood, the smell of the cat and the dogs, the smell of chaff, of oil, of spurts of boiling water, of animal and human sweat, of my grandfather's tobacco, the pungent smell of wine, and worn cloth, the smell of sawdust, the smell of my own sweat. I liked best the time of harvest, when the wheat and oats and rye were brought in from the fields to the threshing shed. It was, or seemed to me to be, a vast building, big as a church, big as a cathedral, with a lofty, arched ceiling and high-set windows through which thick beams of sunlight streamed down. The air was dense with swirling chaff, and the workmen coughed and spat and swore, shouting to make themselves heard above the constant din. The threshing machine was an enormous, complicated wooden structure, like a giant insect, the moving parts of which kept up a deafening clickety-clacking. It was driven by a steam engine attached to it by a long leather belt that terrified me as it shuddered and slapped like a thing in agony. In the shed it was always a luminous dusk, and the men moved about like ghosts, with cloths tied over their mouths. Low down at one end of the machine the golden grain flowed through an open funnel into the sacks, while, high above, the stripped and broken straw was shucked out in ceaseless, wild and somehow comic eruptions. I stood beside my grandfather, who above the noise attempted to explain to me how the parts of the machine worked. What a sense of splendour and communion I felt, before this scene of labour and its rewards! And then at midday all work stopped and an extraordinary, ringing silence descended, and we all marched off together to the cavernous stone kitchen of the farm where my grandmother served up a meal of beer and bread and eggs and thick-sliced sausage. At rest as at work the men treated each other as if they were a band of brothers, slapping each other on the back, shouting at each other across the length of the room, laughing, swearing, calling out ribald insults. I wandered freely among these men who were exhausted yet elated, too. No one paid me any particular attention; it was as if I were one of them. Then, with the help of the beer, the first artless murmurings of a song would be heard, halting at first, seeming to go wrong and lose its way, only to break out at last in an exultant cacophony that caught me up in its sweep and made my chest constrict and my throat swell with emotion. In a pause in the singing I was made to take a drink of beer, and although I hated the sour taste, which reminded me of the pigsty, I smiled and smacked my lips and held out my cup for more, and was applauded, and then the singing welled up again, and from the far end of the long table my grandfather smiled at me… All this I remembered, even though it had never happened. Certainly, there was a threshing machine, but I only ever glimpsed it at work, from outside the shed, which I was forbidden to enter because of my supposed weak constitution; I was kept away from the workmen, too, for fear I might see and hear things unsuitable to a child of my tender years. It was all a dream I had worked up out of my desire to be there, in the threshing shed and the kitchen, in the midst of men, a fantasy born of my longing to belong. Now through time-dimmed eyes I peered from this high place out at the city, all burned-looking beyond the smoked glass of the walls, and it was as if I had come round from a swoon to find myself among a band of survivors huddled here above the site of a vast and ruinous conflagration.

A touch on my arm made me turn. For a second I did not recognise Kristina Kovacs. It was not that she had aged very much, or changed greatly in appearance since I had seen her last, yet all the same something had happened to her. She looked not like herself but like a close relative, her own twin, perhaps, vaguer than the woman I had known, less sharply defined, faded, somehow, and somehow hollow-seeming. I could not think what to say to her, and instead leaned down quickly and kissed her on the cheek. Her skin was warm and dry, and seemed to vibrate tinily all over its surface, as if she were in the grip of a fever. She put a hand to the spot where I had kissed her and gave a familiar, dusky laugh – I am not the kissing kind – and leaned back from the shoulders to look up at me, holding her head to one side, her black eyes bright with fond malice and amusement. She exclaimed at how well I looked; she seemed genuinely surprised, as if she had come to a place in her life that allowed only of disimprovements. And yet she was no more than half my age. I wondered if she could recall with the same sweet, poignant clarity as I did that afternoon years before when she had come unannounced to my hotel room, in Budapest, or Bucharest, was it, or Belgrade? The place does not matter, only the moment. I remembered her salmon-coloured slip and the solemn way she lay down on her back before me on the bed, as if she had been felled by the awesome force of her own passion. I bit her lips until they bled, I licked the soles of her feet. Now she was asking me what I would speak on tomorrow at the conference, and Franco Bartoli popped up like a toy man at my elbow and, smoothing a hand on his fine, soft, gleaming beard, said with a roguish smirk that surely Professor Vander could have only one subject, here, in Turin…? I did not know what he was talking about. "I have prepared nothing," I said. I wanted him to be gone from my side. I was picturing the sprinkle of freckles in the hollow between Kristina Kovacs's pale, mismatched and somehow melancholy breasts. Behind her now the smoky city stretched away to the mountains in the distance with their furled rim of cloud. She was still gazing up at me with that wry, intimate smile. She has, or had, a habit of moving her head very slightly from side to side, as if she were swaying in time to the measures of a slow, inner melody. I felt unwell. The sour wine had parched the linings of my mouth. I leaned out to set my emptied glass on the table and took the opportunity to elbow Bartoli as if by accident in his little paunch, which made me feel better, then stamped away from him and Kristina Kovacs with pointed rudeness and planted myself before one of the glass walls with my back to the room, glaring bleakly out over the city. Behind me the buzz of conversation faltered briefly and caught itself up on a higher, more brittle note: Axel Vander being a boor, as usual. As I had at the hotel window that morning, I imagined again how I would seem to someone looking up from the streets below, an airborne figure, suspended on an angled stick and perhaps about to plummet, a decrepit, lost archangel. Once more I experienced a burning, bile-like rush of self-pity, pure and unfocused. Kristina Kovacs came and stood beside me, a breathing presence, the crown of her head level with my shoulder. I fancied I caught a whiff of her breath, warm, brownish and bad.Together we looked out at the distant mountain ranges. "I think I have been found out," I heard myself saying, in a tone of laboured, unconvincing lightness. "I had a letter. Someone has been looking into my past. She is coming here." I glanced sidelong at Kristina, and smiling she returned my glance. "She?" she murmured, shaking her head. "Oh, Axel, have you been foolish again?"

I was instantly abashed and angry at myself. I could not think why I had confided in her. She knew nothing about me or my past, the real or the invented one. What was she to me but an afternoon of mostly simulated passion in an overheated hotel room in a snowbound city I would never return to? I have always supposed it was those few hours in bed that had prompted the belated review she wrote of After Words. The review was a light piece, intended to be teasingly allusive; it had struck an incongruously frivolous note amid the weighty lucubrations of Débat. The letter of thanks I sent to her when the piece appeared had cost me much effort. I had sought to match her sly, arch tone, but the result was unsatisfactory in a way I could not quite make out. Her note in reply was all innocence and warm affection, with no mention of our tryst. Now I wondered uneasily if perhaps she did know more about me than she pretended, about my past, I mean, my interesting past. Well, what did it matter any more? That harpy even now on her way from Antwerp would likely be the end of me. I was, I realised, looking forward to the prospect of destruction. Yes, let it come, I thought, almost gaily, I shall welcome it! All at once, in place of the anger and self-pity of a minute ago, I had a sensation of incipient weightlessness, as if at any moment I might float upward, wingless and yet wonderfully volant, and drift away free, into air, and light, the empty, cold and brilliant blue.

"I am dying, Axel," Kristina Kovacs said.

She was looking at the floor with an almost girlish air of surprise and faint shame, as if it were some passionate secret she had blurted out. "Yes, I am dying," she said, more softly this time yet with more force, testing it, impressing on herself the incredible truth of it. I stared down at her. An aeroplane passed low above the building with a ripping rumble, and an instant later its vast shadow flashed across the glass walls. Kristina smiled, and shook her head ruefully, and said she was sorry, and that I must forget she had spoken. "Tell me about your girl," she said with awful, brave brightness. "The one who has found you out, I mean. You said it was a girl, didn't you? In the past it always was. What dreadful secret has she uncovered?" She laughed, not unkindly. I gripped the walking stick fiercely in my fist. How did she think she had the right to speak to me like this? I am Axel Vander. People do not say such things to me, with such impudence. She took a step nearer and put a hand on my arm, her grip at once urgent and infirm. I knew what was coming. I drew back from her touch. The air seemed suddenly thick, unbreathable. "Do you remember Prague?" she said. Prague, then, not Belgrade, not Budapest. I would say nothing. "So hot," Kristina murmured, her gaze blurring as she smiled into the past, "so hot, that hotel room…" This was intolerable. I looked about. Someone must rescue me. Where was that fool Bartoli, now that he was needed? "I'm sorry," I snarled, "forgive me," and wiping my mouth on my sleeve I turned from her abruptly and launched myself out across the sea-wide floor toward the door and escape. Franco Bartoli came hurrying after me, yelping. I brandished my stick, more in threat than farewell, and plunged on, a man pursued.

When she came out of the train station the street lamps were still palely burning in the dawn light and the air was the colour of dirty water. A map of the city showed her that it was not far to the hotel where he was staying. She decided to walk. A tram came lurching along its line. She liked trams, the ungainly, earnest look of them. She waited on the pavement as it passed, her bag in her hand, her raincoat over her arm. She felt like a figure from an earlier time, with that coat and bag, her plain dress and old-fashioned shoes, the eager, untried younger self of someone who in time would be famous, famously tragic, perhaps. Often she saw herself like this, in other guises, other possible lives, and so vividly it seemed she must have lived before. She shivered a little, and put on her raincoat; she had expected it would be warmer, this far south. Later the sun would come out. She had hardly slept on the train, huddled in a corner seat in a crowded compartment with her bag under her feet and her folded raincoat for a pillow. The train had kept stopping at deserted stations, and would stand for long minutes creaking and sighing in the night-deep, desolate silence, before setting off again with a series of loud clanks. Once she had pressed her face to the window and peered up and had seen that they were racing along beside a range of high, jagged mountains, whose sheer bases came to within a yard or two of the track. She had supposed they must be the Alps. She could glimpse their peaks, sparkling and unreal so high up there in the moonlight. She remembered being in the mountains once long ago with her father; he had pulled her up a slope on a sled, and afterwards had let her take a sip of his mulled wine. In the dark hour before dawn she dozed for a while; it was less like sleep than one of those fretful night fevers of childhood, and she woke repeatedly with a start, thinking one of the other passengers had touched her, or tried to interfere with her belongings. As they were arriving at last a fat man had stood up too soon and when the train stopped he had pitched forward and almost fallen on her, and to save himself had clapped a huge hand on her shoulder, hurting her. He had smelled faintly of vomit. Now, shaky and light-headed, she set off across the broad avenue. In the piazza before her the starlings were waking noisily in the trees, and a great flock of pigeons rose up, their thousand wings making a noise like derisive applause.

She did not know what she would do when she got to the hotel. It was still early, and she would have to wait at least an hour before she could think of announcing her arrival. She would not mind waiting in the lobby, but she was not sure the hotel people would even let her come inside at such an early hour. The voices in her head started up then, as she had known they would, as they always did when she was uncertain or nervous, seizing their chance. It was as if a motley and curious crowd had fallen into step behind her, hard on her heels, and were discussing her and her plight among themselves in excited, fast, unintelligible whispers. She stopped for a moment and leaned against a shuttered shop window with a hand over her eyes, but with the world blacked out the din of voices only intensified. She took a deep breath and went on.

Dozing in the train she had dreamed of Harlequin in his half-mask. Then she had roused herself and brought out her notebook, her fountain pen. H. the headman, his mask and bat. Maistre on the executioner: "who is this inexplicable being…?" Rip the mask from his face to find – another mask. Father father father.

The phantoms behind her fell back.

And now already here was the hotel, with a laurel bush in a pot at the foot of the steps. The glass door swung open automatically before her, and she wondered if instead of approaching it at the measured pace that was demanded she had run at it full tilt would it have still managed to open in time or would she have been too quick for the mechanism. She saw herself sprawled there on the marble step, amid big lances of shattered glass, the blood pumping from her throat and wrists. It struck her how like hospitals hotels are. A young man in a smart black suit behind the reception desk smiled at her non-committally. She walked past him with her gaze fixed straight ahead and her back arched, trying to look as if she had a perfect right to be there. She had never understood exactly how hotels work, or what the rules of hotel living are. For instance, how would paying guests be distinguished from the other people who would drift in and out here during the day, casual visitors, people coming for lunch, or for assignations in the bar, suchlike? Would that young man at the reception desk know she was not staying here? She had not asked him for a key, but she might have one, all the same, might have got it earlier from one of his colleagues, before he came on duty, and taken it with her when she went out. There was her bag, of course, but it was not very big, and might be a shopping bag, for all he knew. But why would she have gone out with a shopping bag at dawn, when no shops were open, and how could she be coming back now with it full?

The lobby was all gleaming marble surfaces, with hidden lighting and a low ceiling. There was a sort of pond in the middle where water splashed among ferns, soothingly. She took off her coat and sat down at one end of an uncomfortable leather couch that she knew the backs of her legs would stick to even through her dress. A large, indifferent silence hung about her. She wondered if the ferns in the pond were real or made of plastic; they looked suspiciously genuine. She was trying not to think of the voices; often, just thinking of them was enough to set them going. The young man from the reception desk came and asked, in English, with cool politeness, if she wished for anything, some coffee, perhaps, or tea? She shook her head; she did not know what the procedure for paying would be; she imagined herself offering him money only to be met with an offended stare. He was handsome, like a film actor, dark and smooth and poised. He smiled again, this time with a shadow of irony, she thought. As he was turning away he glanced at her bag and lifted an eyebrow, in a way that told her he knew she was not a guest. She wondered enviously how he had decided. Perhaps everyone checking in was photographed in secret, and the pictures were kept in a file under the desk, and he had gone through it and not found hers. More likely he had known just by the look of her, the way she was sitting, so straight, with her knees together and her hands folded in her lap; that, and the fact that she had not gone up in the lift, to her room, the room that she did not have. She looked at her watch and sighed. A single, gloating voice began whispering in her head.

Here I am, asleep again, and dreaming. In the dream I am in an aeroplane, or on it, rather, for the cabin is open to the sky, with a metal floor and a rounded metal canopy above supported on thin steel struts. There are other passengers on board but I cannot see them, the headrests of the seats are set too high. The air is gushing against my face, wonderfully cool and mild. Far below, through breaks in the cloud, I can see fields and rivers, little puffs of green that must be trees, and houses, and highways, a whole toy world laid out and stretching off to the curved horizon on all sides. As I fly along, feather-light and free, I am myself and also someone else, and this is all right, and natural. A stewardess comes and leans over me, telling me something, but when I look up at her I see that she has a bearded, pained face, the face of a man, gentle but not effeminate, the eyes lightly closed as in death, the lids stretched like paper or silk over the bulging orbs beneath. She is handing me something, a folded sheet of paper, a letter, perhaps, which I try not to accept, but she insists, still with that gentle, kindly, suffering expression. Signore, she is saying, with soft urgency, pointing to her bearded face, signore, signore. I push at her to make her stand aside, the paper crackling in my hand, and try to rise from my seat, but cannot, my leg will not let me. I know that the plane is going to crash, I can feel it dipping out of its headlong course, can feel the metal floor shivering with the strain. The world was rushing up to meet me, the objects in it growing bigger in sudden, ratcheted expansions, like a series of photographic enlargements being laid rapidly one over the other. At last I got myself upright, my leg severing itself painlessly at the hip and releasing me, and as I hopped bleeding down the aisle I saw that it was not an aeroplane I was travelling in but the open back of a lorry that bucked and swayed as it hurtled driverless through the smoke and blare of the midday traffic. There was a cry, and someone shouted something, and I woke, cold with sweat and clutching the edge of the mattress, my teeth clenched and my legs tangled in the sheets.

I rose unsteadily and went and shut the window, seeking to block out the noise of the street. It was not yet seven and already the day was in full, clamorous swing; I thought wistfully of Arcady 's somnolent mornings. On the bedside table behind me the telephone rang. I grew up without telephones, and have never managed to become accustomed to the instrument, the way it sits there, the same in every house and hotel room, ready to break out at any moment without warning, petulant and demanding as a wailing infant. I went back and sat on the side of the bed and picked up the receiver cautiously, and cautiously applied it to my ear, and for a moment saw myself as my father, with all his wariness of the world's machinery. My father. How strange. I had not thought about him in… how long? A voice was speaking in my ear, from the reception desk, to inform me that "una persona" was waiting for me downstairs. I nodded, as if the receptionist were standing in front of me. Then I put the receiver down again, exhaling a breath. So.

I ate breakfast in my room, unhurriedly, and afterwards lay in a scalding bath for a long time. Now that she was here, now that the moment of confrontation had arrived, I had drifted into a state of lethargy and lazy contemplation. That momentary vision of my father had stirred up all manner of unexpected memories from the far past, of my childhood, of my family, of the Vander household with its many cousins, uncles, aunts. It was as if I were drowning, calmly, with my life not so much flashing before me as playing out selected scenes for me in dreamy slow motion. At length I rose and towelled myself briskly and put on my linen suit, hopelessly wrinkled now, and my stubby tie. Grimly I grinned at myself in the mirror: the drowned man dresses for his own funeral. In the corridor there was a mortal hush. The lift arrived with its clangings and mashings and I stepped into the box and descended, with one hand in my pocket rubbing a coin – the ferryman's levy! – between a finger and thumb.

Odd, that Arcady should have been the place where I ended up, so far from everything that I had once known. It was in the wrong direction entirely; by rights, I should have been borne the opposite way, like so many others, into the heart of the calamity, the toppling towers, the fire storms, the children shrieking in the burning lake. When I got to Arcady and looked back, however, I saw that everything I had done had been pushing me relentlessly toward it, as if the essays published, the addresses delivered, the honours won, had been so many zephyrs wafting me irresistibly westward, from Europe to Manhattan, to Pennsylvania, to the plains of Indiana, to bleak Nebraska – such harsh poetry in those names! – and then in a last, high leap, over the mountains and down to that narrow strip of sunlit coast where I came to rest with a soundless, dusty thump, like a spaceman stepping on to an unknown planet. Unknown, that is the apt word. The place was always alien to me, or at least I was an alien in it. The fact is, I was never there, not really. I took no part in town life, such as it was. I did not buy a car. I never went on that delicate, spindly, far-famed red bridge. Walking in Arcady's steady sunlight, that seemed trained on me always like the light of an impersonal but ever-watchful eye, I would close my mind to the present and be again in the city where I was born, and walk again in the narrow, secret streets where I walked as a child, and see again the spires and the huddled roofs and the frozen fields beyond, scattered with tiny figures at work or play, as in one of those hackneyed Dutch genre scenes of mingled labours and festivities. Oh, what would I not have given in those unvarying Arcadian days to catch even for an instant the flash of rain-light on an April road in Flanders! And yet, I should have been at ease in Arcady. There, everyone had previously been someone else, at some time, in some entirely other existence, just like me. In all the years I lived in the town I never met a single person who had been born there. Where are you from? Arcadians would ask of each other, and stand smiling, brows lifted and lips expectantly parted, anticipating a story, a history. They would confide the most intimate details about themselves and their pasts, and give that characteristic shrug, shrugging it all off. The future was their legend. I, of course, fascinated them. Unlike the comrades I had left behind in New York, they were not interested in me as a political exemplar, but flocked to me nevertheless, filled with curiosity and wonder, as if they were visiting some ancient, hallowed site of immemorial rituals, battles, bloody sacrifice. They would walk around me, viewing me from all angles, wishing they had brought their cameras and their guidebooks. I encouraged them, the most agreeable or at least the most useful of them, welcomed them, accommodated them, until I judged my authenticity had been sufficiently attested, and then I shut fast the gates and let the portcullis come crashing down, and stay down, its rivets rusted fast.

Magda felt even more displaced than I did in lush and leafy Arcady. She had almost liked New York, its teeming streets, the bustle and the crowds and the ceaseless clamour of human concourse. The farther west we went the more of life was leached from her. The air in those vast spaces we travelled through dried her out, hollowed her out. In Arcady the young frightened her, from the boy on his bicycle who hurled the rolled newspaper against our front door first thing every morning with vicious energy, to the under-age hoodlums racing each other on motorbikes up and down the umbrous avenues, turning the air rancid with exhaust fumes. She began to hide from the world, hardly venturing out of the house and never without me to accompany her. I cannot recall at what point exactly I realized that her mind was decaying. Perhaps the defect was there all along, a spongy patch she had been born with in her brain, that had spread steadily until all within her cranium had turned to pulp. When did she develop her taste for toy food? I would find lollipop sticks stuck to the floors, crumbs of cake between the covers of the bed, candy wrappers floating unflushably in the lavatory bowl. Frequently now I would come into the house to meet her standing in the hall regarding me with a wild, unrecognising look. I would hear her talking to herself, in the bathroom, or on the stairs, a hushed, urgent whispering. Then one morning she walked into the kitchen leaving behind her across the floor a trail of little turds as flat as fishes, and I knew the time had come when she must go.

In the hotel lobby a coach load of elderly tourists was checking in, with much complaining and bickering; they, like me, had suffered delays and loss of luggage. I paused on my stick outside the lift and looked about. Where was she, this persona?Two fat businessmen sat on low armchairs facing each other across a lower table, intent and watchful, as if in preparation for a bout of arm wrestling. A girl with red hair was hiding in the corner of a couch, with a bag at her feet, waiting for someone, hoping not to be noticed. A painted hag passed by, lost in the folds of a fur coat, with a pug dog in her arms. I went toward the reception desk but could not reach it for the milling tourists. I considered simply walking out the door and away, clearly I saw myself go, except that in my imagination my damaged leg was repaired, and my step was youthful, and rapid, and carefree. Even before she spoke I had sensed her behind me. It was the girl, of course, the girl with the red hair; I should have known. Tall; pale; freckles on her nose; eyes that were – what? – greeny-blue, yes, and flecked with amber. I noticed her tall girl's way of standing, one leg back, the forward knee bent, trying to take an inch off her height. She was holding her bag protectively before her with both hands on the strap, as if to ward off a feared and confidently expected assault.

"I am Catherine Cleave," she said. "I'm called Cass."

We sat in the lobby, facing each other from either end of the leather couch, the girl bolt upright with her fists on her knees, her raincoat beside her and her bag on the floor; she had the slightly dazed, disbelieving air of a refugee who no more than an hour ago had made it across the border under fire. I was irritable. The water splashing in the ornamental pond kept distracting my attention: what imbecile had thought to put ferns and a fountain there? I like things kept to their proper place. I studied the girl, or young woman, as I supposed I would be required to think of her. The aspect she presented was at once striking and dowdy. I noted the fine bones of her wedge-shaped face, the delicate, slightly inflamed pink at the canthus of her eyes, the blonde down on her arms and on her long, bare, bony shins. She was telling me in hurried and disjointed detail of a research project she had been engaged on, for years, it seemed, to do with Rousseau's children, if I recall; I barely listened. I was thinking how disappointed I was. I had expected someone far more formidable than this. She might have been a student of mine, one of the more desperate types, from the old days, when I still had to have students. So she hoped to make her name by exposing me, did she? Well, she might succeed, but at a cost, and what a cost, to herself no less than to me, I would make sure of that. As she talked, her eyes, unnaturally wide and bright, kept darting here and there over my person with a flickering, fascinated intensity, so that I felt I was being very rapidly assembled, a sort of living jigsaw puzzle. A faint, fast vibration came off her, as if there were something inside her spinning without cease at terrible, soundless speed. I interrupted the gabbled history of Jean-Jacques' abandoned brats to ask if she would like to have some breakfast and she looked at me in a sort of panic and vehemently shook her head. I felt as if I had come face-to-face on a forest path with a rare and high-strung creature of the wild that had paused a second in quivering curiosity and would in another second be gone with a crash of leaves. I knew the type. They always sat in the highest tier of the lecture hall, fixed on me hungrily, never speaking a word unbidden. I looked at the deep, shadowed cup above her clavicle and was surprised to feel my old libido rubbing wistfully its callused claws. I am afraid I always did favour the crazed ones.

When I enquired where she came from and she told me I said it was a grand place, home of many fine and famous poets. How could I, even on the telephone, have missed that burr, that brogue? I asked which hotel she would be staying at, and saw from the way she faltered and frowned that she had nowhere to stay. Good. Perhaps there would be a room available here, I said smoothly, lifting my eyebrows at her. She looked about dubiously at the marble floors, the chandeliers, blinking. But yes, I said, she must stay here, I was sure there would be a vacancy, I would go and arrange it, right away. As I hauled myself to my feet I saw with obscure satisfaction how she had to check herself from reaching out a hand to help me. At the desk she waited silently at my elbow; in her stillness she was still vibrating. Yes, I announced, turning to her, all airy blandness, there was a suite available, would she like that? Mutely she looked at me. I smiled. "Something more modest, then?" Her forehead reddened. The sleek young man behind the desk was stony-faced. I set a registration card before her and offered her a pen, which she declined, and instead brought out a fountain pen of her own from the pocket of her blouse. She bent to write, with a schoolgirl's frowning haste. I tried to read the address she was putting down, but could not make it out. Her handwriting startled me in its violent uncontrol; the spiked letters in slanting lines were like so many rows of smashed-up type. Deftly I snatched the key the clerk was offering her, and picked up her bag, too, before she could reach for it. She reddened again. I drank her blushes like sips of the most refined and precious cordial. For certain, I would have fun with this one! She turned toward the lift and I followed her. Wide shoulders, long haunches, and much, much too tall. Side by side we ascended, eyes cast upward. She smelled sharply of sweat as well as something dull and faintly medicinal; I sensed a past of institutions – schools, and more than schools; sanatoriums, perhaps? Perhaps her lungs were bad. I was not sure if people have bad lungs, any more. How widely one's musings range on these peculiar, these extraordinary, these fantastical, occasions.

The room I had got for her was small and looked out on a flat roof and a row of odd, blackened metal chimneys like the smokestacks of an ocean liner. I placed her bag on the bed. She stood with her back to the window in a defensive, folded-in stance, shoulders hunched forward around a chest made concave and her palms pressed together in front of her stomach. I said she must be tired, after the journey, and she said yes, it had been hard to sleep on the train. Then there was silence again. She had made no mention of the letter she had written to me or of its contents. I said that she should rest, and men we would go out together and take lunch. "Lunch?" she said, as if it were a word in a foreign language, her mouth slack and slightly askew, seeming to frame something further that she would not say. I flared my nostrils and snuffed up a draught of the room's deadened air, seeking to savour again the civet smell of her sweat. Old friend libido stirred anew. She, and the room, and the bag on the bed, and those ship's funnels outside, all seemed suddenly part of some thrilling, absurd adventure I had suddenly found myself embarked upon, and a thousand years or so dropped from me as lightly as a fall of scurf. "Lunch," I said, "yes!" brooking no objection, and nodded, and turned, and reversed my walking stick and hooked it on the door handle and opened the door, a gamesome gesture, and if I had been wearing a hat I would have tipped it, too. I shall soon be free, I told myself, not knowing what it might mean, and not caring.

Outside the door I paused; my hands were trembling.

I took her to the Esmerelda, thinking to impress her, but she paid no heed whatever to the mournful rococo splendours of the place, the red plush walls and sparkling crystal, the napkins of rich damask, the heavy antique cutlery. She hardly ate, only stabbed with her fork at the food on her plate without looking at it, pushing it this way and that. She had changed into a dull-coloured dress without sleeves that gave her, disconcertingly, the stark look of a recent and very young widow. She sat before me, straight-backed, her tall, narrow neck extended in a birdlike, swanlike, fashion, and although we were level eye to eye I had the curious feeling that she was somehow set above me, looking down. She had done something to her hair, had tied it back, or perhaps had just brushed it in some different way, exposing her broad, flat cheeks and the too-large flanges of her ears; the effect, I am not sure how, was of a not quite concentrated state of desperation. I had no appetite, but a great thirst, as always. I drank first a bottle of red wine thick as blood and afterwards repeated jolts of grappa, each one driven home with a thimbleful of tarry coffee that made my nerve-ends twitch and fizz. She sipped a glass of water. The smoke of my many cigarettes formed a rank cocoon around us and set her coughing. We were seated at a window looking on to a narrow, deserted street, with a crumbling church opposite. So many times in my long and infamous career have I sat like this across from some girl in a restaurant, cigaretted, sinisterly smiling, an arm negligently thrown over the back of my chair, holding myself up before her awed and admiring gaze like a gobletful of the rarest fine old vintage. Now here I was, doing it again, even in my senescence. I was telling her about the first winter when I lived in New York, sequestered in that basement room on Perry Street where in the summer I had feared I would die of the heat and now thought I would never be warm again. Magda showed me how to roll up newspapers to make fuel for the stove. I was working all day and half the night, no let-up, giddy with excitement and fatigue. "I knew what the thing would be called before I had put down a word," I said. "The Alias as Salient Fact: The Nominative Case in the Quest for Identity. I could already see the dust jacket, with the title in big bold lettering above my name in more modest twenty-four point." I chuckled, and drank my grappa, and felt with masochistic satisfaction the sulphurous, oily liquor lifting another layer of membrane from my tongue; surprising, the semblance of assuagement such tiny pains, willingly suffered, can bring to one's sense of self-loathing… Ah, but how cold it was in that room. I would sit wrapped in a blanket with only my face and my writing hand free, my brain buzzing from the barbiturates I ate by the hour. The wind coming in from the river keened in the window frame and tiny balls of soot rolled across the page where I was writing. I had tried to work in the public library, for the warmth, but had been driven out by the presence around me of so many other mendicants who were too much like myself, haggard and sighing, picking their noses and surreptitiously eating sandwiches out of brown-paper bags. Then the thing was published, and at once, as in a fairy-tale, like Cinderella in her pumpkin carriage, I arrived. "Such things were possible," I said, "in those days. One book could do it. Of course, everyone read it" – I waved a hand lazily – "and everyone thought I was speaking directly to him. Or her." I caught her eye and smiled disparagingly. Do you know those smiles, that make the flesh of your face seem to crackle like cellophane from the effort?

She watched me, motionless, her knife and fork suspended; her suddenly going still like this brought a small shock to the air between us, as when the refrigerator, that has been throbbing to itself unnoticed, all at once falls silent, with a lurch. "You convinced them," she said. I shrugged. "It was the times," I said. "Identity was the general obsession, then; identity, and authenticity, all that; the existential predicament, ha ha." Yes, yes, I convinced them. Most of them. Shiftiness: which one of them was it said that moral shiftiness was the most striking characteristic of every line that I wrote? I did not know the word, and had to look it up. "After that everything changed," I said.Yes, everything. Magda and I left that freezing basement and moved to an apartment in a big old town-house up in the West Seventies, a rackety place where mysterious smart people lived, theatre types, and studiedly mournful girls who wrote poetry, and a famous black trumpet player. Success was large and loud and ludicrous. Such euphoria! And the parties, the endless string of parties, where I rubbed shoulders with living legends, all those Edmunds and Lionels and Marys, and was rubbed up against in return. In their brilliant and never quite sober company I learned a new language, one of nuance and nod, of the ambiguous smile, the insider's wink. The comrades, of course, whom I saw now as so unpolished, so gauche – bon mot! – I quickly put behind me. I imagined them, the jeaned and crew-cutted young militants and their attendant, solemn handmaidens in their plaid skirts and white ankle-socks, standing in a huddle on the empty sidewalk, bereft and sullen, blinking in the dust from my departing heels.

Cass Cleave put down her knife and looked at me. I shrugged again, smiling my most candid, my most winning smile. "My dear," I said, "I have turned my coat so often it has grown threadbare."

It was only then that I realized how angry I was, how angry I had been all along, ever since I had opened her letter, and before that, long before that, in the expectation of it, for I had always known it would come, from someone, sooner or later. Cass Cleave had turned her face aside now and was looking out at the street. How much did she know? Beadily I studied her. Yes, I recognized the type: driven, clever, cunning and helpless, prey to secret hungers, nameless distresses, looking for rescue in all the wrong directions. Her nails were gnawed past the quick. I shut my eyes for a moment. Could it really be that the intricate exploit that was my life, this hard-won triumph of risk and daring and mendacity, would at the end be brought to nothing by the yearnings for attention of a half-demented girl? The afternoon sunlight had angled itself down past the high roofs into the street, and something from outside kept flashing through the window into my eyes, some reflection from glass or metal. I was well on the way to being drunk. Without thinking to do it I reached out and took one of Cass Cleave's hands in both of mine and smiled my compelling smile again, showing my teeth. What a spectacle we must have been for the other lunchers in the place, the rank old roué pawing this pale girl and grinning like a horse. "Come with me," I said, gallant and jocular, "I want to show you the place where an old friend used to live." She was looking at her hand resting in mine, her head tilted to one side, with an expression of puzzlement, as if no one had ever held her hand before. I brushed my fingertips along her palm; it was warm and unexpectedly hard. When she lowered her eyes the lids, mauve-tinted, slightly glossy, were so rounded and taut they seemed almost transparent.

I looked about and the waiter came, a spry cadaver nearly as old as myself, bringing the bill, his moist fish-eye not quite looking at the girl's hand and mine where they lay together on the wine-stained tablecloth amid the empty coffee cups and the greasy glasses and the bristling ashtray. Cass Cleave had turned aside again to gaze at nothing, expressionless now. What was she thinking, what could she be thinking? Her hard hand, bird-warm, beat softly in mine, as if it contained a tiny heart of its own. Its serious weight was a sudden, shocking reminder of how much of my life was gone. I was wearing out, I, and my world as well. A wave of bitterness and anger washed over me, taking my breath away. So many of the tilings were blunted now that in my youth would have pierced me like… like what? I did not know, I had lost the thread of the thought. I let go of the girl's hand and stood up quickly, knocking over my chair, and this time she did reach out to help me, and it was as well she did, for otherwise I am sure I would have fallen down. I leaned on her arm, swearing, and beat at my dead leg furiously with my fist. The ancient waiter shuffled forward to assist me, clucking as at a misbehaving child. I shoved past him and staggered to the door. Outside, in the sun, I walked a few steps and had to halt and lean with my back against a wall. I looked up at the sky; it seemed to be throbbing, slowly, hugely. I felt dizzy, and had again that sense of displacement, of shifting and separation, that I had experienced the previous day before the mirror in the hotel bathroom, but more strongly now. I wondered without alarm if I were undergoing a heart attack, or suffering a stroke. Cass Cleave was trying to take my arm again. "It's nothing!" I cried. I vented gas from my rear end without restraint, not caring if she heard, or smelt. I was laughing, laughing and coughing, in a euphoria of drunkenness and dizziness and rage. There sleeps in me another self who at moments such as this will start awake in amazement at all that is happening, all this life, the unlikeliness of it. The girl stood before me, frowning on my disarray. I swore at her. Another flash of light struck my eyes – was it coming from inside the doorway of that church? Ave, Deus caecans! I fumbled and let fall my walking stick, it made a rattling as of bones. She crouched to pick it up and I would have kicked her had I not been afraid that if I did so I would lose my balance and fall headlong on the pavement. My heart was clenching like a fist. I snatched the stick from her hand and turned and poled myself off along the pavement, cursing.

Fury, fury and fear, these are the fuels that drive me, mixed in equal measure: fury at being what I am not, fear of being found out for what I am. If one day one or other of these forces should run out the violent equilibrium sustaining me will fail and I shall collapse, or fly off helplessly with farts and whistles, like a slipped balloon. Even when I was young… but no, no, I do not want to start remembering all that, I am sick of all that. I am done with the past; at a certain point when I look back a line is drawn stark across the view, as if a landslide had happened there. The girl was following me at a careful, fixed distance. Whenever I stopped she too would stop and turn her head away and stare at something intently. The dark dress and thonged sandals that she wore gave her an Attic look: Electra astray in the city of tombs. I pushed myself onward, and presently arrived again in the little piazza before the Cari-gnano palace. The afternoon had woken from its lunchtime torpor. Little cars buzzed in and out of busy streets. Here was the bronze plaque on the wall I had been seeking. Three steps led up to a narrow, tall door. When I pressed the bell a voice squawked at me from the grilled mouth of a metal box on the wall and the door lock clicked. I stepped inside. Grey walls, and the musty, hot smell of an airless indoors. Cass Cleave was still crossing the street; I considered letting the front door swing shut in her face, as I had tried to let the door of the caffè knock over Carrot Head, but I relented, and held it open for her, grudgingly. Yet as we climbed the stairs I saw myself in my imagination stop and turn and take her in my irresistible grasp and rip apart her clothes to press the length of myself against her. Even her nakedness would not be enough, I would open up her flesh itself like a coat, unzip her from instep to sternum and climb bodily into her, feel her shocked heart gulp and skip, her lungs shuddering, clasp her blood-wet bones in my hands. At the top of the third flight the ferrule of my walking stick lodged itself in a crevice in the scuffed marble step and as I levered it wrathfully back and forth in the effort of freeing it I had a vision of the entire building rocking and swaying and tearing loose of its foundations and crashing forward in an avalanche of falling masonry into the astonished and cowering piazza.

Here was a door of frosted glass. I rapped on the pane with the handle of my stick. No response. I cleared my throat, Cass Cleave cleared hers. I pointed to the name painted on the glass of the door in gold lettering. "Fino," I said, nodding. "You see? That is the family who rented him a room." We waited. I knocked again, and at last the door was opened by a diminutive, homuncular voung woman wearing a drab dress like Cass Cleave's and old-fashioned spectacles with heavy black frames. She sidled forward and quickly drew the door to behind her, closing off whatever might have been glimpsed of the room, although a faint smell of something cooking did escape. She greeted us diffidently and stood looking sidelong down at our feet, incurious and still. She held her hands joined before her, moving them about each other in a slow, caressing, washing motion. I asked if we might be allowed inside to see the room where the philosopher had lived. She frowned, and her hands stopped moving. "Nietzsche," I said, loudly. "Friedrich Nietzsche!" The name sounded absurd, like a sneeze; it was swallowed in the stairwell and rang back an echo that seemed to snigger. The young woman pondered, still with her eyes on the floor. There was a small, furry mole beside her left nostril toward which my eye kept straying. She shook her head slowly. No one of that name lived here, she said. She had a strange, low, sibilant way of speaking, pausing for a second on a word and making it buzz deep in her throat, a sound like that which a cat makes when it is being stroked. "I don't mean now," I said, fairly bellowing. "A long time ago! He lived here. Il grande filosofo!" I pointed again to the name on the door, I mentioned the plaque on the wall outside. She would only keep on shaking her head, remote, unapologetic, immovable. Once she raised her eyes sideways for a second and with a flicker of interest took in Cass Cleave's naked throat and the twin pale folds of freckled flesh where the sleeveless dress pinched her at each bare armpit. The landing was a narrow, hot space, and we had to stand close together, we two tall ones and the tiny woman, swamped in each other's heat and the cooking smell that was coming more strongly now from behind the closed door. I cast about for something more to say but could think of nothing, and instead swivelled on my heel and set off in mute fury and frustration down the stairs. At the first landing I stopped and turned and saw Cass Cleave and the dwarf woman still standing up there where I had left them, neither looking at the other, both with their eyes cast down, saying nothing, simply standing, motionless as a pair of manikins.

I was in the hall, waiting inside the door, when she came down at last, stepping from stair to stair with careful deliberation, watching herself as she did so, as if descending like this were a skilled manoeuvre she had only lately learned to execute. I thought, jarringly, of Magda. Slowly the girl came to meet me, avoiding my eye, or no, not avoiding, but looking through me as though I were not there. Yet I knew she knew what I would do. I seemed to be no longer drunk; on the contrary, I felt violently sober. She stood in the circle of my arms quite still and stiff; I might have been a cascade of water falling about her but not wetting her. Her lower lip stood a little prominent of the upper, so that she seemed in permanent expectation of receiving a drop of some sacred distillate from above, yet now when I leaned my head forward I had trouble finding her mouth; when I did, I took that soft, protruding bud of flesh between my teeth. As I kissed her she did not close her eyes, and neither did I, and so we stood and stared into each other, surprised, almost aghast. I caught again from her skin that faint, flat, medicinal smell. It reminded me of something: violets, was it? Her shoulder blades flexed under my hands like hard, stiff wings, flexed, and were still. Clear as if it were being projected before my wide-open eyes I saw myself in the house on Cedar Street sitting opposite Magda at the table in the breakfast nook, feeding her the tablets, picking them up one by one from my cupped palm and dropping them into her offered mouth. It was at midnight, I could faintly hear a clock chime in the next-door house; a moth was bumping against the black and shining window. All around was silence, not a sound save of that baffled, winged thing blundering against the glass. Magda's hands rested flat before her on the table; her fingernails were chipped and there was grime under them. How calm she was, how docile, watching me steadily, with keen interest, it might be, as I poured out the glass of water and put it into her hands. Here; drink. I had told her the tablets were a special kind of candy. They were violet-coloured. I released Cass Cleave from my embrace. Still she did not stir, but stood and looked at me, calmly attending me and the possibility of what I might do next, with Magda's very gaze.

At the hotel, when I followed her into her room she was already drawing the curtains against the glare of afternoon sunlight. Now, of course, came the last-minute faltering, and I did not want to be there. I was tired of myself and my hungers, my infantile need to clasp and squeeze and suck that the accretion of years seems only to intensify. "You realise," I said, "that I am old enough to be your great-grandfather?" I laughed. She did not answer, only unbuttoned the neck of her dress at the back and pulled it over her head, becoming for a second a hooded black beetle with clawing antenna arms. The sound of her falling under things rustled along my nerves. "Do you know that Cranach Venus in the Beaux Arts in Brussels?" I said brightly, leaning on my stick at an angled pose. "The one in the big dark hat and rather interesting black choker?" It had struck me how like the painted woman this living one looked, the same sinuous type, with the same heavy hips and tapering limbs and somewhat costive pallor. "Cupid," I said, "hardly as high as her knee, is an angry toddler crawled all over by bees, although they always look to me, I must say, more like bluebottles. Do you know the one I mean?" She bent to turn the bed covers back, one breast, a silvered bulb, glimmering under the arc of her armpit. "Cranach," I said, "younger or elder, I cannot remember which, was a friend of Martin Luther, of all people. One wonders what the great reformer thought of those lewd ladies his chum so liked to paint." She was sitting on the bed now with her legs drawn up to her chest and her pale arms clasped about her shins. She was not looking at me, but gazed before her with a faint frown, as if she were trying to recall some elusive word or image. I leant my stick against the headboard of the bed and turned and swung myself into the windowless bathroom and locked the door.

Micturition, I find, is one of the lesser annoyances of old age; sometimes, indeed, the copious passing of water can be an almost sensual experience. My urine on this occasion smelt distinctly of grappa. I turned on the cold tap and half filled the handbasin and doused my hands, liking the water's steely coolness, its joggle and sway. Then I spent some time picking idly among her things, her salves and pastes and powders; their mingled fragrance was faintly, pleasurably repulsive. I unscrewed a cartridge of lipstick and applied the scarlet nub to the underside of my wrist, drawing a smeary mouth there, open as in a startlement of desire, and pressed my lips upon it, tasting the sticky, waxen sweetness. In the land of women I am always a traveller lately arrived. I studied myself in the mirror, the flecks of scarlet the lipstick had left on my mouth, then took a tissue and wiped them off, not without difficulty. Still I loitered. Even from within this tombal chamber I could sense the afternoon's hot pulsings all around outside. I put my ear to the door; not a sound. She would be under the covers by now, waiting for me, her leman, with her lemur eyes, waiting for me to come and devour her. I recalled the policeman standing in the kitchen the morning after Magda died. He was a short, muscular young tough fairly bursting out of his uniform, his hair shaved to within a millimetre of his bullet head, his scalp a shade of baby blue and pink. His name, improbable, and yet gruesomely appropriate, was Officer Blank. He had shaken my hand with the courteous solemnity of an opponent before the commencement of a duel, and stood now audibly breathing through his nose, his square jaw rotating around a wad of chewing gum. I had never been afforded the opportunity to study a policeman at such close quarters before, and in my hungover, tear-sodden state I was fascinated by the quantity and range of impedimenta that he carried about him, the bulky gun, clenched in its holster like a steel fist, the long black club, the handcuffs, the complicated, brick-shaped telephone, also in a sort of holster, hanging from his belt. What was most impressive, however, was his stillness, the way he just stood mere, in fathomless silence, hands set on angled hips and only that jaw moving, moving. There did not seem to be anything to be said, by either of us. When I offered to make him a cup of coffee he blinked and looked askance, as if I had advanced a faintly improper suggestion. We could hear the others moving about heavy-footed upstairs. I found it peculiarly embarrassing to have to stand and listen to them like this; it was like hearing someone using the lavatory, or eavesdropping on a couple making love. Officer Blank, perhaps also feeling the indelicate awkwardness of the moment, cleared his throat and shifted the gum from one side of his mouth to the other. "My Pa went the same way," he said, nodding. "Pills." I nodded too, and frowned in sympathy, and then there was silence again, except for those noises off. I could not think how last night I had got Magda up the stairs and into bed. I remembered the leaden weight of her arm across my shoulders, and the eerily contented-sounding, burbling little sighs she kept releasing into my ear, as if she were a drunken lover trying to whisper lewd endearments. Now here she was being brought down again, this time strapped to a stretcher, with the sheet pulled over her face so tightly that I could see not only the outlines of her nose and mouth but even the protuberances of her eyes. Officer Blank said something and with surprising nimbleness stepped quickly sideways past me and went out, and a moment later, clattering over the doorstep, they were all gone, so abruptly and so thoroughly it might have been not Magda's mortal remains they were removing, but a living felon who must be hustled off without delay to secure captivity. Through the window I watched them drive away, the ambulance, and the following police car. Around me the transformed house vibrated, as if I were standing inside the dome of a great bell that a moment ago had sounded its final peal.

I came back from men to now and remembered Cass Cleave. Cautiously I pressed the door handle and opened the door and stepped out into the bedroom's tense and waiting twilight. Ah, child, woman, forgive me.

She could not sleep. The room in the half dark was phantasmally still, like the so many sick-rooms of her childhood. It was late, long past midnight. The air in the room was heavy and hot. In the light of the single lamp beside the telephone Axel Vander lay sprawled across the disordered bed, naked and asleep, breathing through his mouth, an arm thrown up awkwardly as if he had fallen backwards trying in vain to ward off a blow that had knocked him senseless. She moved away from him and rose cautiously and stood at the foot of the bed, looking down at him. The hair on his chest was grey. She could see the sinews in his shrunken arms, the shin-bones inside the stretched, paper-white skin of his legs. His face was ashen, and there was a perfectly round spot of hectic colour printed high on each cheekbone, neat as a dyer's stamp. He was breathing so softly she wondered if he might be only feigning sleep. She saw him in her mind rearing up and catching her by the wrist, could almost feel the grip of those ancient talons on her flesh. She drew up the sheet and laid it over him and he stirred and tensed and then went slack again. She was still leaking from him, she could feel the hot stickiness between her legs. The first time, when he had come out of the bathroom at last and heaved himself on top of her, she had thought of one of those huge statues of dictators that were being pulled down all over Eastern Europe. Crash. It was quickly over. They had lain together in the shadows then, lain there all afternoon long, until the day died, and the night came on. They were like survivors, she thought, washed up on this foreign but not unfriendly shore. Between bouts of dozing he had cradled her in the crook of his old arm and told her stories about himself when he was young; she listened idly, knowing it must be all lies, or nearly all. He did not know that she knew who he really was. Would she tell him? Not yet; not yet. Flakes of ash from his cigarette fell on her breast, tiny, warm, weightless kisses. She tried to picture him at the age he had been when the newspaper photograph was taken, restless, violent, insatiable, stretching out with both hands, straining to grasp at a future that now was long ago in the past. Then he had thrown himself on her again, and this time it was different, he was all chest and churning elbows and quaking thighs, straining and heaving, until she thought she might split in two clean down the middle. He seemed so angry. Then there was the smell of almonds, and then… When he was done he had pushed her aside without a word and gone to sleep, but she could not follow him, for all that she was exhausted. Now she had been awake for hours. Everything was so strange, all pulled out of shape and littered with torn-up things, like a stretch of shoreline after a storm. This old, old man. All at once, as she stood there gazing down at him, he was not he, or he was he and also not. She frowned, trying to unravel it. Perhaps it was simply that he was asleep and hence not present to her even in his presence. No, that was not it, sleep was not the agent, sleep only served to hold him still, the sudden stranger, so she might concentrate on what it was of him that was not there. She heard his harsh laughter in her head and imagined his eyes snapping open, the good one fixing her, the blinded one staring wildly past her into the nothing that it saw.

She could not now remember when she had first heard of him. There had been books of his on her father's shelves, unread. As so often with the people and the things that caught her questing attention, he was first a configuration, a sort of template fitting itself to a need in her she had not known was there. The parts of the pattern assembled themselves almost casually. He had written a famous essay on a play in which her father had achieved his greatest success. She had read him on Rousseau, of whom he disapproved. There was his book on the Italian comedy. Then she saw his photograph in a newspaper, receiving an award, in Jerusalem, and had been surprised that he was still living, since she had thought he must be among the illustrious dead. Now she bought all of his books, and sat in her room above the garden in her father's house and read and read. It was winter, and the garden was a pool of dank green light where a lone bird disconsolately piped. Vander was with her in the room, a living presence, stilling the voices in her head. There was something in everything he wrote, something darkly playful, that spoke straight to her. She knew that she would find him, and now she had.

She took a cotton dress out of her bag and put it on, and despite the lightness of the material she immediately began to sweat. She wondered if she might go outside. The streets round about were quiet, she could not hear a sound except now and then when a lone car went past, its tyres making a watery hiss on the dry street. She thought of the coolness and the dark under the stone arcades. What would he think if he woke up and found her gone? Perhaps he would not care. Perhaps he thought this was all she had wanted of him, that she had written that letter and brought him to Europe just for this one day, this one night, in this hotel room that she could not afford to pay for, so that afterwards she would be able to say that she had slept with the great and notorious Axel Vander. It was not true. Yet why had she written to him, why had she brought him here? What was that thing that spoke to her out of the things he wrote? She cared nothing for Shelley's defacement, or Coleridge's dreams, or Wordsworth's suborning of nature. No; what she heard was a voice calling to her, and her alone. Cautiously, on stork's legs, she backed to the door and reached behind her and opened it, still with her eye on the sleeping figure on the bed, and went out. In the corridor she stood and listened, fancying she could still hear Axel Vander breathing. Behind her the metal-grille doors of the lift cranked themselves open, making her jump. The lift was empty. It stood there, a harshly lighted box, waiting, impassive and patient, as if it had come especially for her. She hurried away from it, looking for the stairs. It was the light in the lift that she was fleeing, it followed her, bluish-white and thin, like watered milk, and still the metal doors had not closed.

Downstairs she stood in the marble lobby with its mirrors and gilt chairs and felt suddenly helpless. How could she go out? It was late, she was naked under her dress, she was not even wearing shoes. The night porter at his station gave her a politely vacant smile and went back to checking off something in a tall, black-bound ledger open before him on the desk. He was old and bald as a baby, and moved his lips as he read down the columns of names or figures or whatever they were. She went and sat on the leather couch where she had sat that morning, yesterday morning now. The water in the fountain among the ferns had been switched off. She wondered again if the ferns were real, and thought of touching them to find out, but to do that she would have had to stand up and go forward and get down on her knees at the side of the pond. Stand, advance, kneel. It seemed, as she pictured it, as intricate and effortful as a gymnast's exercise or a complicated pass in ballet. She did not stir. Soon the silence became oppressive and made her begin to feel dizzy. She felt as if she were holding herself upright in her own hands, a frail, over-full vessel that had been given forcibly into her unwilling care. She made herself rise and walk to the porter's desk, and asked the old man for a glass of water. He nodded, or perhaps it was a little bow that he made, briefly letting his eyelids fall as he did so, and murmured something, and padded off into the shadows. He was gone for what seemed to her a long time. When he returned he was carrying the glass on a little silver tray in one hand, while over the knuckles of the other a folded white napkin was draped. He stood calmly before her, watching as she drank, swallow by long swallow. How thirsty she was! She found the old man's nearness comforting, and somehow appropriate, as if he were the necessary witness to this ritual, this raising of glass and drinking of liquid, that she was required to perform. His soft brown eyes played over her with placid interest, taking in her bare arms, her bare feet, the thinness of her dress, through which, she supposed, he would be able to see the shadow of her nipples, darkened and swollen as they were from Vander's avid lips. She drank a last, long draught of water; really, she had not known she was so thirsty. The porter, still smiling his kindly, melancholy smile, lifted the back of his hand toward her, ceremoniously offering the napkin. Draped there before her on his hand it shone with an uncanny glow, stark as neon against the surrounding velvety dark, making her think with a shiver of the light in the lift. His black uniform was greasy from age. "You do not sleep?" he said. The question had a curious intimacy, like the question a doctor might ask, or a priest, and she hardly knew how to answer. She touched the napkin to her lips, liking the roughness of the linen, its starchy, laundered smell. "The room is hot," she said, pointing to the ceiling to show him she meant the room upstairs, the bedroom, her room, where, if only the old man knew, another old man was sprawled asleep across her bed with lolling flesh and mouth agape. The porter nodded again, frowning in sympathy, in the manner of one seeking to soothe an anxious child. "Si, si, is hot," he said softly, with a soft little sigh, still smiling. She proffered the empty glass and the napkin and he advanced the tray to receive them. She thanked him, and he made another small bow of the head, and a dull gold lozenge of light from somewhere slid over the shiny, pitted dome of his skull. He withdrew, walking backwards, the tray with glass and napkin held before him, then turned and was gone into the darkness, making not a sound. She went back to the couch and sat down once more.

Vander. Vander. Vander. She had not been surprised at all when in the restaurant he had reached out and taken her hand. All after that had happened with the smooth, relentless inevitability of the progress in a dream. And as in a dream there was the conviction that all this had been foreordained, the room, the bed, the sliver of burning afternoon light between the curtains, the man toiling over her with a dream-torturer's intentness; it all seemed merely a set of variations on events that had already taken place, in another, more keenly wakeful, compartment of her life. Since earliest childhood, for as long as she could remember, she had been prey to hallucinations; at least, that is what people insisted they must be. To her, they were like real happenings, or memories of real happenings made immediate and vivid. This was the reason for all her confusions, all her lapses from what they called reality. It was simply that the things she saw in her head were so clear and clearly present, so matter-of-fact, that she could not distinguish them sufficiently from things that were verifiable, by the measurements the others said must apply, and verification was what they were always demanding of her, with more or less sympathy, more or less exasperation.That was why the voices spoke to her, to insist on their different version of events. None seemed to realise, the ones who spoke within her or without, what a deafening din they made, sounding all together. Against such a cacophony how could her pleas be heard? She longed to be able to prove, even if only once, incontrovertibly, not what they wanted her to know, but what she knew. In a film that she had seen when she was a child there had been a man who in what seemed a nightmare had fought and killed someone and then had woken to find himself clutching a real button that in the dream he had torn from his victim's coat. Someday she too might come back from one of her so-called hallucinations and open her palm and show them in triumph one tiny, hard, bright bit of evidence that even they could not deny.

The first time that she knew her mind was unfixably wrong was on a winter Sunday afternoon when she was six, or seven. She had been ill for as long as she could remember, but because she was so young she had not yet realised that she would not get better, only worse. That Sunday her father and her mother had taken her in the car for a drive by the sea. She had said she would not go and her father had laughed and said he knew she only wanted to stay by herself in the house so she could drink whisky and smoke cigarettes. His teasing was a kind of violence. He was in one of his smiling rages because it was Sunday and there would be no theatre performance that night and he would have to stay at home and be bored. They travelled up the coast road, taking the scenic route, as her father sourly said. He did not like to drive and so her mother drove. Along the way they stopped at places but did not get out of the car. In the front her parents sat gazing bleakly out across the sea to the islands lying humped in a grey, salt mist, while in the back she knelt on the seat and looked through the rear window at the cars going past on the road. In many of the cars there were children like her, morose, pale faces floating in the windows, glowering at her. In the silence at her back she could feel the deepening desperation of the adults. Her mother smoked without cease, lighting each new cigarette from the stub of the old one. Open the window, for God's sake, her father said. When they came to the end of the coast road her mother turned the car around and her father muttered something and the argument began. They argued in an undertone so that she should not hear; the vehemence with which they fought was all the more awful for being muffled. The short day was ending, and the undersides of the low clouds in the windscreen were tinged a shade of furnace pink. See, her father said to her in a false voice, his stage voice, breaking off for a moment from the argument and pointing, it is the colour of a coke fire! And he laughed his laugh. She turned her eyes from the louring sky and looked out to the left at the sea that came up to the grassy edge of the road. Long, undulant waves were washing slowly in, wave upon thick wave, unbreaking wrinkles, mud-coloured. She felt her flesh shrink, as a snail would shrink from being touched. A vast weight, the weight of the world itself, was pressing against her, so that she could not breathe. It was as if something frightful had happened and this was its aftermath, this scorched sky, these turbid, relentless waves, the savage murmuring in the front seat. And she was alone; that, above all. The hawser had fallen away, the prow had turned toward the open sea, and she knew that now she would never come back. Her father, sensing her distress, perhaps, touched a fingertip to her mother's shoulder to silence her and turned around in his seat and smiled frowningly and said her name, as if he were not sure that it was still she who was sitting there, his little girl so changed in an instant. That was the first time she had smelled the almond smell. Then the car was stopped at the side of the road with one wheel mounted on the verge and the doors open, and she was slumped sideways on the seat with her head leaning out and the air cool on her brow and warm stuff bubbling between her lips, and her father was kneeling before her peering anxiously into her face, asking her something. Behind him the night, a bank of brownish darkness, was coming in across the sea, and high up there were the tiny lights of an aeroplane, now ruby, now emerald. Suddenly an enormous seagull flashed past, very close, falling diagonally through the brumous air on stiff, extended wings, and for a second she thought its icy eye had fixed on her, in warning.

Her father. She saw him often when he was not there, a ghost of the living man. For instance while Vander was busy goughing and grunting at her that second time, mouth fixed wetly like a sea creature to her shoulder, Daddy had opened the door of the room and walked in, speaking. He was barefoot, and was wearing an old pair of faded blue baggy trousers of the kind that he always wore when he was on holiday. He was young, far younger than she could ever have known him, and sun-tanned, and smiling in that fierce way, showing his fine, sharp teeth, that he always did when he could not find sufficient reason to be angry. His chest was bare, and he had a white hand-towel draped around his neck. He had been shaving, there still remained a moustache and goatee of lather that gave him the look, in negative, as it were, of a dashing Elizabethan villain of the kind he so often played. He was talking to someone in a farther room, her mother, she supposed, telling her something, a joke, or a story that he had just remembered, sketching abstract diagrams on the air with the razor as he spoke, in that way that he had, always animated, always dominating, cutting and carving and moulding the world. The razor was tiny, she noticed; he must have forgotten his own and borrowed this one from her mother. Perhaps it was the razor he was talking about, perhaps it had reminded him of something that had happened on one of his tours abroad; it amused him to tell her mother of his adventures, teasing her, trying to make her jealous with talk of eager actresses and stage-door propositions. The light behind him was a glare of azure and gold, and there was a slash of purple shadow there, and a parrot-green something, a palm leaf, perhaps, that kept moving to and fro in an odd, jerking, agitated way. What caught all her attention, though, was the bead of blood, the size of a ladybird, on his lip, where he must have cut himself with the razor, without noticing. She had always been fascinated by her father's mouth; she liked to watch it moving while he spoke, liked to be kissed by it, those dry, warm lips, the upper one, where the blood was now, shaped exactly like the stylised seabirds she used to draw in her picture book as a child. She liked to feel the prickle of tiny bristles on his chin, liked to smell his laughing breath. He had stopped speaking now, and waited, listening, with a slack smile, his head lifted at an angle and his eyes bright, those lips a little parted, the bleb of blood seeping pinkly into the soap moustache. When no response came to the story or the joke he had been telling, because her mother, if it was her mother, had stopped listening, or had fallen asleep, the light went out slowly in his face, and the smile turned to a vacant frown, and, feeling the smart at last, he dabbed a finger to his lip, and looked at the blood and seemed puzzled, as if he did not know what it was, or how it had come to be there, on his finger, on his lip.

Body: that was a word she did not like, the sound of it, the bubbled b, the d's soft thud, the nasal, whining y.Vander at the end had spoken something in her ear, a hoarse grunt, ugly and urgent. He could break her in his arms, crush the life out of her. She supposed she should be afraid of him. He had sucked at her breast like a child, his eyes closed and his face almost smiling.

She shivered in her thin dress; the night was turning chill at last. So silent, all around, as if the entire building were submerged in the dark deeps of a silent sea. She imagined the other people staying here, dozens of them, hundreds, maybe, all laid out in their beds like so many warm corpses, asleep, dreaming, or tossing and muttering, perhaps, or perhaps sleepless, like her, as some of them must be, surely. She pictured the couples amorously clasped in each other's arms, or lying at opposite edges of the bed, rigid with wordless fury, as so often she had seen her parents, after another of their fights. There might be someone about to die at this very moment, or someone giving birth, it was not impossible, nothing is impossible. All over the world at any instant people are dying or being born, crying out in passion or in pain. Terrifying to think of, terrifying. When she was a child she would lie awake listening to the life of the house around her winding down. Her father would come in late, after a performance, she would hear him below in the kitchen rattling the crockery, or trawling across the radio stations, the volume turned loud, making a great din, for a silent house worried him, or so he said. She would track him in her mind as he prowled from room to room, switching on all the lights, pouring himself a drink, listening to a snatch of music and abruptly turning it off: she could never hear the screech of a needle across a vinyl record without thinking of her father. Or he would talk out loud to himself, or to a phantom audience, practising dialogue, trying it at different speeds and different rhythms, or, if the play was bad, making fun of the lines, declaiming them in a booming bass voice that made her grin into the dark even though she could not make out the words, only their lugubrious cadences. He would sing, too, tunelessly; he knew only silly things, songs from when he was young, or jingles from the radio. Sometimes her mother, annoyed to be woken, or perhaps feeling sorry for him, would get out of bed and go down in her night-gown and sit with him, but never for long. For all that he said about hating silence and solitude, secretly he preferred to be alone. "Oh, Cass Cass Cassy, I'm a solitary boy," he would croon, striking a tragic pose with hands clutched to his heart. Always, last thing, he would open her door an inch or two and look in, and always she would pretend to be asleep, she was not sure why. At other times she liked to have his company, especially after she had suffered a seizure, when they would sit together, at the kitchen table, or in front of the television set with the sound turned down, not saying anything, just being together. But there were times too when she would feel shy of him, or it would be more than shyness, it would be almost revulsion, and more even than that, something for which there was no word. When he had gone on to his and her mother's room and was getting into bed she would hear the bedsprings creak, and the funny, fluting sigh he always heaved; then there would be an interval, and then she would feel a change in the atmosphere, a sort of loosening, or lapsing, that signified his consciousness slipping out of gear, and she would be left to set out on her journey into the night alone.

From far off now she heard a church bell mark the hour, a dark and leaden tolling. Three o'clock. How long had she been sitting here, on this couch? Time always became elastic after one of her attacks. And it was an attack she had suffered in Vander's arms, when her father had appeared to her, holding the razor. Probably Vander would flatter himself that it was he who had brought her to this pitch of passion, as she shook and writhed under him, her head thrown back and her teeth bared and those shaming, constricted little squeals she could not suppress coming up out of her throat. The paroxysm as always lasted no more than seconds, and when the worst of it was over she had drifted into the usual brief doze or daze, curled on her side with the joint of her thumb pressed to her front teeth, shivering a little now and then, shuddering, like a dog that has been dragged out of the sea. Vander was lying on his back beside her, asleep already, mouth jutting open and his lizard's eyelids fluttering. She knew she would not sleep. She lay motionless for a long time, afraid she might wake him, smelling the ammonia smell of their love-making, hearing the hiss and liquid rattlings of the ineffective air-conditioner that squatted behind a grille under the window. Then came the hollow sensation that was the thing she dreaded most; it was as if a huge hand had thrust itself into her irresistibly and scooped out her insides, leaving her an empty cage of bone and flaccid skin. Once she had seen Granny Cleave do that to a chicken, disembowel the bird like that, pushing her fist through the slack hole underneath and with a quick turn of her wrist bringing out the guts intact in their parcel of opalescent membrane. The old woman had shown her the glistening eggs, pale as pearls, that had been growing in the bird, a string of them, increasing in size from a gelatinous speck to one that was almost fully formed.

Smell of almonds, always the smell of almonds. Then her father in slow motion lifting her from the floor and folding her in his arms. There there. Mr. Mandelbaum has been paying a visit. Mandel: almond. So strange, how things strike echoes everywhere. As if…

The old porter appeared again out of the shadows, bearing a bucket and mop. He seemed not at all surprised to find her still here. He gave her his sweetly sad, apologetic smile. He held the mop and bucket with an air of pained fastidiousness, as if, although he had brought them, he did not quite know what they were, or what their exact use might be. She stood up, wincing as she felt her thighs peeling away from the tacky leather of the couch. Her dress at the back was damp; she hoped she had not left a sticky patch where she had been sitting. The porter said something to her, and although she did not catch what he said she smiled and nodded anyway, as if she had understood. As she was going up the stairs she paused and looked back; he was mopping the marble floor beside the pond, in long, unhurried strokes, still with that air of reluctance and vague puzzlement; he had not even taken off his jacket for the task.

She listened outside the door of the room but could hear no sound. For a moment she was convinced that the door was locked, that Vander had got up and locked it against her, had locked her out of her own room and gone back to sleep, and that she would not be able to wake him, or that if she did he would not let her in, and she would be left here, barefoot, in her stained dress, a shivering spectacle for the other guests to see when they began to get up and go down to breakfast. They would think she was drunk and had lost her key. They would think she was a whore that a dissatisfied client had thrown out of his room. Her hands had begun to shake. To her surprise but not relief, although she did not know why not relief, the doorknob turned suavely under her trembling touch. She stepped inside quickly. The bedside lamp was still burning but the bed was empty. Had he got up and gone away to his own room? Perhaps he had left altogether, had gone to his room and packed his bags and checked out. But no, she had been in the lobby all this time, so how could he have gone without her seeing him? Perhaps he had dodged out by a back way, leaving her to deal with the hotel people, leaving her to pay the bill, or bills, his own as well as hers, that she had no money to pay. But no, his clothes were still there in a heap at the foot of the bed where he had shed them, his shirt and trousers, his expensive shoes, that ugly tie. The bathroom door, white and blank, had a look of sullen admonition. She pulled off her dress and rolled it into a ball and stuffed it in the recesses of her bag. At that moment Vander came out of the bathroom. She straightened quickly, pressing a slip against her nakedness. He was naked too; he had been in the shower, drops of water glinted in the tangled bush below his belly, and the long, jagged scar on the inside of his thigh glared redly. He looked her up and down, lips pursed, one eyebrow cocked. Quickly she put on the slip, a blouse, skirt, sandals. He watched her, leaning against the door jamb, coldly smiling. "Going out?" he asked. She did not answer. He was just like any other, all supercilious bravado after the act, a little boy who has stolen a treat and is unsure he will not be punished for it, but not sorry, either. He stood there, displaying himself to her, daring her to turn aside from the sight of that gnarled leg, that crazily skewed dead eye, and all that sagging flesh, the pot belly and the shrunken acorn below and its bag suspended by an attenuated string of yellowed skin like a head of garlic on its stalk. But yes, why had she put on these clothes, where did she think she might be going? It was still the middle of the night. She had dressed only in order to be dressed; it was not the sight of his naked flesh that had made her flinch, but the consciousness of her own; not shame, but simply the being conscious. He had sat down on the side of the bed and was smiling up at her slyly, sidewise. "Venus in fig leaves," he said, writing it with a fingertip on the air, as if it were the title under a picture. He had read her mind; people always seemed to be able to read her mind. Perhaps the voices that spoke in her head spoke in theirs, too, telling them what she was thinking. Now he was buttoning his shirt and saying well, why not, yes, they should go out for a stroll. She looked up at the black shard of night showing between the curtains at the window. "For me it is still afternoon," he said. He showed her the face of his watch and for some reason laughed. "Pacific time." The watch was an ancient piece, perhaps an antique, with a scratched case and a crimson second hand in a little dial of its own; it was too small for him, a lady's watch; she did not know why it should, but it made her think of railway sidings, with abandoned carriages, their windows greyed over with grime, and poppies nodding in misty sunshine among the stones between the tracks. All right, she said, they would go for a walk. How flat and neutral and slowed down everything had become. Hard to think now of what had been happening between them on that bed only a few hours before. What had struck her, as always, was the discontinuity afterwards, the inap-propriateness of everything that followed. When she was younger she had thought that in time she would surely learn to make the smooth transition between that frantic concumbence and its upright, throat-clearing, eye-avoiding aftermath, just as, when she was a child in dance class, she had been taught to rise more or less gracefully from a squatting position on to the quivering tips of her toes. But this bigger trick she had never learned, and there was no one to teach it to her. Vander was leaning far out over his stiff leg, tying his shoelace, with awkward effort. She looked down at his fumbling hands and bent big head with its fright of silver hair that was all tangled and knotted at the nape and saw herself stepping forward and touching him with her hand. She blinked. She had not moved.

They went downstairs. The silence, a kind of miasma, was more oppressive than ever, weighted with the inaudible breathing of so many anonymous sleepers, and she picked her steps gingerly, as if someone might suddenly jump out and chastise her for disturbing the quiet of the place. Vander however clanged his stick deliberately against the brass handrail on the wall and at every other step brought down the heel of his shoe so hard on the edge of the marble stair she was surprised that sparks did not strike from the stone. In the lobby there was no sign of the old porter. The night, glossy and black, stood pressing itself against the glass door that at first would not open for them, but then abruptly did, shuddering, the big pane giving off a deep bell-tone: barang! The air outside was cool and soft and fresh, and the sky, starless, fully dark still, seemed to glisten, and she felt vertiginously as if she were looking up through a shell of crystal, invisible and immensely high. Her fingers brushed the polished leaves of the laurel bush in its pot on the pavement outside the door. Vander was already lurching away up the street. She lingered a moment, then followed. She sniffed her fingers, smelling faintly the sharp, fading leaf-stink. She caught him up and for a time they went on without speaking. The tall, unlighted buildings teetered close on either side. She tried to fit her pace to the syncopations of Vander's gait: step of good leg, stamp of bad, thump of stick. In his way he was almost graceful, stooping and swinging and throwing a shoulder back before leaning into the next long lope. She wondered what she might call him, how to address him. Axel was a metallic bark, and Vander sounded as if a final syllable had fallen off the end. A name is hard to speak. To name another is somehow to unname oneself. Is this true, she asked herself, is this really so? She pondered, feeling the cool night breathing on her face, the deep, wide stillness burring in her ears. So often the train of her thoughts carried her far beyond herself, or went off on its own way, without her. Did she think, or was she thought? She could get no steady hold on things. An idea would occur to her, some notion or theory, with all the ring of Tightness about it, then its opposite would come and that too would seem right, and how was she to judge between the two, not to speak of the myriad other contrary possibilities jostling for consideration?

And anyway, Axel Vander was not his real name. She put a hand to the pocket of her blouse and felt the fountain pen. Her little gun, with its loaded chamber.

They came out into a long, cobbled piazza. A bronze horseman strode motionless above them in the dark air, with a light from somewhere gleaming on his brow. She thought of the night porter and his black book, his silver tray; she thought of the glass of water with air bubbles like tiny beads of mercury clinging to the sides inside, below the water-line; she thought of herself lifting the glass and drinking deep. The rubber tip of Vander's stick squealed on the dew-damp cobblestones. They were walking beside the arcades, each archway an identical domed vault of blackness. A dog detached itself from the shapeless mound of rags that she supposed was its slumbering master and came forward and looked at them, wagging its tail in wan hopefulness. "Who was it that betrayed me?" Vander said to her. Betrayed. She asked him why he asked; what did it matter who, after all? This he greeted with a snort. "How did you know where to go?" he said, persisting. "Why Antwerp?Why those old newspapers?" She recalled, she could not think why, a line from the dust jacket of After Words that a critic had written in envious emulation of Vander's style – "all the glints and flashes of a grand and faintly shivering chandelier" – and she could not keep from uttering a low laugh. He stared at her. "I met," she said, "a man in a bar."

More accurately, she had been accosted by him, on what was to have been her last afternoon in Antwerp. Her father had paid for the trip; he was always happy to pay, she noticed, when it meant she would leave the country. She had come to look for Vander's past, following his trail along the shelves of public archives, libraries, university records; the farther she travelled the fainter the traces of him became, as if a broom had brushed away his tracks. There was an old man, a journalist of high reputation, and also, some said, a one-time collaborator, who she was told had known Axel Vander when they were both young, before the war. When she went to call on him, however, she learned that he had suffered a stroke and was in hospital and was not expected to live. Nevertheless she was taken to visit him. Everything was white, his hair, his long, sharp, suffering face, the robe he wore, the bed linen, the wall behind his trembling hawk's head. Nothing moved except his eyes, which fixed themselves upon her in what seemed a kind of anguished asking. It struck her that he was another ghost, his own. She sat with him for an hour, not speaking, and all the time he watched her, with angry impatience, so it seemed; far from having anything to tell her, he appeared to be waiting to hear from her something that he must know. Perhaps he was confusing her with someone else. When she saw Vander in the hotel lobby that first morning, she felt this other old man's presence behind him, saw it, almost, a shimmering shape there for an instant, a shadow made not of darkness but of cold, white light.

Now on this last day she was in one of those fake old-fashioned pubs near the cathedral, all wood and brass and pewter beer-mugs, while she waited for it to be time to take the train. It was a late afternoon in March, sombre and wet, more like midwinter than early spring. She was sitting at a table in a cramped corner by the window, huddled in her coat, watching the trees in the square outside that now and then shook themselves in a gust of wind, shedding big silver drops of rain that shone like money as they fell. It was out there that she saw him first, the red-headed man. She did not know why she should have noticed him particularly. He was standing under the money-trees. His clothes were shabby: cracked shoes, shapeless trousers too long in the leg, and an old coat fastened so tightly with a single button at his midriff that it seemed his skinny frame must be dependent solely on this support to stay upright. He wore no hat, and seemed not to notice the rain. She watched him for a while. His hands were in his pockets, and he held his elbows pressed close into his sides, as if to aid the coat in its task of general suspension. Was he looking in her direction? An ambulance went past, with its siren howling and its blue light spinning, and she turned away, for she did not like the sight of ambulances, or their sound, and when she looked again he was gone from under the trees. A moment later, though, here he was, in the bar. He appeared from behind her, and sat down at the table next to her. He took a plastic pouch of tobacco out of his coat pocket and rolled a cigarette. She noticed the faint tremor in his hand; it was not a sign of infirmity, but rather, so she thought, the result of long hours, years, of concentration on some tiny, intricate, antique task; he might be a watchmaker, or a scribe, even; she saw him bent over his work table with gimlet or quill.

He was feigning an elaborately vague, preoccupied air, brow distractedly wrinkled and eyes fixed on nothing, and she knew that he was going to speak to her. He patted himself rapidly at hips flanks breast, frowned more deeply, pursed his lips, then with a jerky movement turned about, pretending that he had just noticed her, and mimed entreatingly the striking of a match. She said she was sorry, she had no match. "Ah, you speak English!" he cried, as if hailing a rare accomplishment. "So do I." She wondered what age he might be. Fifty? Seventy? It was impossible to tell. His face was pale as whey and so sharp it seemed it must thin to a fine straight line were he to turn it full toward her. His hair was of an almost orange shade, obviously dyed; scintillas of rain were sprinkled through it, an incongruous jewelling. He put away the cigarette, unlit. She thought she should get up now and go; she looked out at the weeping sky, the street where the daylight lingered; her train was not due to leave for hours yet. He had been eyeing Vander's book where it lay on the table before her, and now with a contortionist's rubbery agility he leaned forward and twisted his head almost upside down to read the title. "Ah," he said. "Do you know him?" She shook her head. "I do," he said. "Or I should say, I did." With long, very white fingers, like the witch's fingers in a fairytale, he turned over the book and looked at Vander's photograph on the back cover and smiled. "But he was not Axel Vander, then." The waitress came, a brawny, blonde girl got up in a flounced blouse and a wide black skirt with a bodice, in what must be, Cass Cleave supposed, a parody of the national costume; she carried a gilt tray that she held lightly by one edge, like a weapon. The redheaded man spoke to the waitress in a language that must be Flemish, or Dutch, perhaps, and when she had nodded and gone he glanced shyly at Cass Cleave, licking a thin lower lip. She wondered unworriedly who he was or why he was speaking to her. She examined him closely, the narrow face, those white hands. He was smiling still, and nodding to himself, as at a rueful though treasured memory. Yes, he said, he had known Axel Vander. "Oh, a long time ago, a long time. In those days he was a writer for the newspapers, like" – he tapped a long, amber fingernail on the photograph – "his friend." He nodded, and his voice sank to a whisper. "Very strong opinions," he breathed, and gave a little soundless whistle. "Very extreme." She was frowning; she could not follow him. "His friend?" she said, looking at the photograph. "Is that not him?" He glanced at her sidelong and his smile became a grin of happy malice. She did not like the way he kept licking that bottom lip, the sharp, grey tip of his tongue flicking out and as quickly withdrawing. "What was his name, if he was not Axel Vander?" she asked, but he only grinned the harder, and lifted a finger and wagged it roguishly, closing his eyes and pressing his lips tight together. The bodiced Amazon reappeared, on her tray a tiny, tapered glass containing an inch of carnelian liquor, viscous, glinting. He paid from a little leather purse, counting out the coins with finical care. Cass Cleave watched him lift the glass, his bloodless lips already pursed to meet it, and drink with dainty relish. He sighed appreciatively and set down the glass and pulled his chair closer and began to tell her the story of AxelVander, who had died, and of this other one, who lived.

High above their heads a tinny bell banged, once, twice, three times, then a quavering fourth, startling her. The gunmetal sky was turning ash-blue all up one side. She was cold now, in her thin blouse. Vander had been silent for so long she had almost forgotten he was there. She watched him stop to poke at an object on the ground with his stick. It was a white plastic bag with something soft in it, and tied at the neck with string. "A man in a bar," he said. "I see. And you happened to be reading my book. What a coincidence." He was not looking at her. "Tell me," he said, "what was the name of this mysterious man?" Max somebody, she said. "Scheindiene, Schaundeine, something like that, I cannot remember." He said he had never known anyone of that name. He was still poking at the bag, turning it this way and that. It was plump and vaguely heart-shaped, and wobbled and flopped under his proddings; the string at the neck had been knotted in a neat bow, with awful thoroughness. "He must have been speaking of someone else," he said. "He must have been mistaken." She had not told him all that the man had told her; she had kept back the most important part. Vander was frowning intently, as if the thing in the plastic bag, whatever it was, were taking all his attention. "But he knew you," she said. "He knew the dates the articles appeared. Five weeks, five issues." At last he looked at her, holding his head at a tilt, thinking, calculating. He had got the bag partly open; something dark was oozing out, a thick, dark liquid. She felt her stomach heave and settle again. "Come," he said, folding a hard hand on the tender underside of her arm above the elbow and turning her about, in the direction of the hotel, "let us go back, you are shivering." Dawn was strengthening rapidly. High cloudlets, tinged with pink. The starlings.

There was a general hesitation, and when the applause did come it was markedly restrained. I lingered for a moment longer than the clapping lasted, smiling menacingly up at the audience ranged before me in the tiered semi-circular rows of benches, my hands clamped so fiercely on the lectern edges it must have seemed to those sitting in the front rows that I was about to pick the thing up and heave it at their heads. They were offended that I had not prepared a paper especially for the occasion, but had chosen instead to read, and in a tone of tired irony at that, a chapter from After Words, the one, justly famous, if I may say so, on poor Nietzsche's last, calamitous days here in Turin, which the majority of them would already have read, of course. What did they expect? They should count themselves fortunate that I had agreed to address them at all. I was about to step down from the podium when Franco Bartoli shot up a hand and asked with false and nauseating sweetness if I would perhaps agree to take a question or two? I heaved a loud and pointed sigh. There was the usual interval of awkward, foot-shuffling silence, and Bartoli rose part-way in his seat and swivelled his head to cast an encouraging glance at this one or that of his tongue-tied students skulking among the audience, which was made up for the most part of middle-aged academics, instantly recognisable by the peculiar drabness of their attire. At last a young man up at the back cleared his throat and asked in an earnest mumble what was, please, Professor Vander's view on the current state of cultural criticism? I lifted my head high and back and smiled. "My view?" I said. "Very fine, from this elevation, thank you." I made a curt bow and stepped away from the lectern and went none too steadily toward my seat – I had taken more than a generous go of grappa with my morning coffee, and was feeling the effects. On all sides there were head-shakings and sarcastic laughter and even some slow handclapping. I glanced to where I expected Cass Cleave to be sitting – five minutes into my reading I had glimpsed her from the corner of my eye as she came in quickly and slipped into a seat near the door – but she was not there. The place where she should have been was occupied by a brawny Brunhilde from Gottingen with massive knees, a Nietzsche scholar, as it happened, who was glaring down on me in pop-eyed indignation at my admittedly skittish treatment of her subject's final transfiguration and collapse on the Piazza Carlo Alberto a century before to the year. Franco Bartoli, one of the slow-handclappers, was smiling at me with angry brightness. I sat down. The room had no window and the woolly air was barely breathable. I was tired, dispirited, irritated. Bartoli, rising and going forward to introduce the next speaker, paused as he passed me by and leaned down and spoke into my ear. "Very witty, Professor," he murmured with honeyed bitterness, "but not entirely original, I think." Kristina Kovacs, at the other side of the room, was squaring a sheaf of papers on her knee and looking toward Bartoli expectantly. No, no, I thought, I could not bear to listen to Kristina tease out another of her elegantly humorous conceits on the phenomenology of comic strips or the soccer star as existential hero – I do wonder sometimes why I chose to spend what I am compelled to call my professional life in that little sphere of preciosities and trivial arcana. I stood up hastily and made my way to the door like a man escaping a fire.

The corridor smelled of pencil lead, musty paper, and young bodies rich with humming hormones. A scrawny, ill-dressed person, vaguely male, a student, I presumed, leaning by an open window consuming a clandestine cigarette, gave me a defiant, surly stare. No call for truculence, pale ephebe – see, I am lighting up one myself. I heard the door of the lecture hall opening and rapid footsteps approaching behind me. It was Kristina Kovacs. She did not stop until she was almost under the lee of my chin – it was a thing I remembered about Kristina, how close she liked to stand to people, even strangers, even former casual lovers. She looked up at me with her knowing, sceptical smile, a fan of fine wrinkles opening at the outer corner of each eye. "Did you think I was next to speak?" she said, amused. "Is that why you left?" I really did wish she would not stand so near, her head tilted back and swaying infinitesimally from side to side in time to her sad, inner melody. I said that I could not have stayed another moment among that herd of earnest idiots. She laughed softly and clicked her tongue in soft reproach. She said she had enjoyed my contribution to the proceedings. "Very naughty of you, to read such a well-known piece," she said with an annoyingly merry twinkle. "Franco was furious, I am sure you saw." I scowled. Do you think, I thought of asking her, do you think the mere fact that we rolled and writhed naked in each other's arms for a few hours one afternoon long ago gives you the right to this insolent familiarity? But Kristina's gaze had turned inward. "Poor man," she said, and for a second I thought it was me that she meant, and was astonished to feel a warm something surge in response within me, with all the anxious eagerness of a dog leaping up at the sound of its master's key in the door. She put her fingers to my elbow as if in urgent supplication. "Poor creature," she said, "those letters he wrote when he was mad, speaking of the great emptiness around him." Firmly I freed my elbow from her touch; it was like being settled upon by a tremulous but insistent butterfly. I laughed. "He also informed one of his much put-upon correspondents, in what I believe is the very last of those letters, that he made his own tea, did his own shopping, and suffered from torn boots. Even Zarathustra must reckon with the dull requirements of the quotidian." She was not listening; her eyes were swimming again. "But writing to Wagner's wife," she said, "that woman, of all people, calling her Ariadne and declaring that he loved her, and then ordering that all anti-Semites should be shot…" She was, I saw impatiently, quite upset. In her agitation she looked suddenly old and drawn. I glanced about in desperation. The young smoker at the window was watching us with incredulous disgust, these two ancients standing together in scandalous intimacy, pawing and being pawed. Kristina linked her arm in mine and I had no choice but to turn and walk off along the corridor with her. I found faintly repelling the way she kept insisting on touching me, squeezing my arm against her side, for instance, making me feel the heat of her meagre flesh and the soft-seeming rib-cage beneath. I registered too the thinness of her arm inside its sleeve: it was as if there were no flesh there at all, just cloth and bone. At the end of the corridor, where a big window faced us, filled with a smoky white effulgence, the figure of Cass Cleave appeared and came forward, elongated and rippling in the blazing light. She faltered at the sight of the two of us advancing arm in arm. She was wearing a loose linen dress, inside which I clearly saw, as if the material had for an instant turned transparent, her lean, big-hipped, naked body. She came on, head down, looking at her feet. We met, and stopped all three. "Kristina," I said with a wave, "allow me to introduce Catherine Cleave." I watched them shake hands. There was something obscurely comical in the moment, and I had a strong urge to laugh. "Miss Cleave," I said, in a mode of lofty patronage, "is my biographer." At that I did laugh. Why had I not thought of it before? My biographer! Cass Cleave stared at me, then quickly looked away. Kristina was still holding her hand, looking her measuringly up and down, this tall, small-headed, affectingly ungainly girl. Magda, I found myself recalling, always hated shaking hands, would go to any lengths to avoid it; I wonder why? I am trying to remember her hands, to picture them; I know their shape, their feel, but I cannot see them. Is this how she will leave me at last, limb by limb, until there is nothing remaining, except my shame? "And have you seen the Shroud?" Kristina was asking of Cass Cleave. "Our famous Sindone." My memory snapped its fingers: sindone, not signore. Kristina set off walking again, and Cass Cleave and I turned and walked with her, me to the right and she to the left; Kristina was half a head shorter than Cass Cleave; I looked down at the little woman's lustreless hair, then up again at my girl, and grinned, and winked. My biographer. "Professor Vander has been reading to us," Kristina said, «till with her head down but addressing Cass. "'Effacement and Real Presence,' a chapter from his famous book. I was surprised," glancing up at me now, "that you did not mention the Shroud: effacement, you see." She laughed shortly. "They say it is the first self-portrait. I always think it was the Magdalene who held the cloth, not Veronica. But Magdalene was hair, is that not so?"

– Long thick brown tresses streaming like water weed in the yellow lamplight, the water sluicing from the white jug. She would kneel beside the bathtub, a votary before the sacred fount, broad shoulders bowed, her white neck bared. Feel of her big skull frail as an egg under my kneading fingers. Where? Newyorpennindi-anabraska. Always moving, moving westward, stepping over the chequerboard land in long, effortless strides. The cities and then the plains, then what they call the high country, with snow and pine, then the mountains, the great peaks, and then the desert, and then at last the Barbary Shore, on whose blue waters her ashes would one day briefly float, swaying -

What?

Someone asking me something.

"What?"

Cass Cleave was standing before me, peering anxiously into my face and enquiring worriedly in a voice that sounded impossibly far-off if I was all right. All right? I said of course I was. I squirmed my shoulder free of her touch. All these damned women, passing me from hand to hand! We were at the end of the corridor, by the big window. Outside, at eye level, there was the improbable ochre and burnt-siena pudding-dome of a church, the stark sun gleaming on its leads. Where was Kristina Kovacs? Somehow she had left us without my noticing. Had I dropped out of consciousness for a moment? If so, why had I not fallen down? Cass Cleave was saying something about an address, my address. I shook my head, like an old dog with water in its ears, struggling to understand. My address? My address where? "Your talk, I mean," she said, gesturing in the direction of the lecture hall, "your reading." I shook my head the more. "What are you saying?" I said. "You were there. I saw you come in." She frowned; she said no, she had arrived just now. "I saw you," I said. "You came in late. You sat at the side, by the door. I saw you." She tried to take my arm but I swung away from her. Stairs, and more stairs, and then a set of double emergency doors with a metal bar to open them that I could not work. Cass was beside me. She put her hand over my hand on the bar. I could feel the faint heat of her face close to mine. "I am all right," I said. "I am all right." The doors swung open like a bulkhead and a dazzling wash of sunlight broke over us.

But the fact is, I was not all right. I said I must have something to eat. What I really wanted, of course, was another drink, many other drinks. At the first restaurant we came to I ordered that we should stop. It was on a big dusty square, Piazza Vittorio Somebody, that sloped down to the Po. We sat at a table outside, under a canvas awning, with a view across the river to wooded heights that were bluish and flat in the noonday glare. I ordered a glass of sparkling wine. As I sipped the sweetish, slightly metal-tasting fizz, clouds of tiny bubbles, cold and sharp, detonated pleasantly in my sinuses. Now and then a strong waft of warm wind would come up from the river and make the awning above us ripple and crack like the sail of a boat. Cass Cleave sat silent, looking down toward the river, a hand lifted to shade her eyes, a mauve armpit bared. "Perhaps," I said, "you really should write my biography. Put all that research to use, all that sniffing along the seams of my life that you have been so busily about." Still she said nothing, still she held her face turned aside, expressionless as a profile on a coin. It was, I was coming to see, her favourite pose; how transparent you were, my dear, after all. "You could write it in the first person," I said, "pretend that you are me. I give you full permission. I grant you the rights to my life. What do you say, mein irisch Kind?" Suddenly I longed to be alone, just myself and my drink. The fact is, and I am aware, in the circumstances, of the grisliness of even mentioning it, the fact is that Cass Cleave was not, as they say, or used to say, my type. I never really favoured the tall, pale, pyriform kind, although they were the very ones who always seemed to seek me out. Given the choice – which I rarely was given, because of my great bulk, naturally – I would have preferred little fat women. There sits at the centre of the by now practically leafless maze of my sensual imagination a small, squat, Buddha-like figure, pink and naked, with heavy, raspberry-tipped breasts and nicely rounded shoulders and smooth, shiny, dimpled knees, and three charming, overlapping folds of fat above each hip-bone. She has no face, this fleshy idol, only a heart-shaped blank on which my venereal fancy, attaining a certain temperature, may hastily stamp a rudimentary set of features. I do see her hair, though, very black and lustrous, parted in the middle and drawn tightly back – the only attribute, incidentally, that Magda, and only in her youth, at that, shared with my secret ideal. Where did the image of this roly-poly little idol originate? Very far back, I suspect, very far back indeed, as far, perhaps, as the birthing bed itself. Unsettling thought.

The pastel roofs of cars parked in the square were shining in the sun, gaudy and heraldic, like the banners and shields of a prostrated, ornate army. "Who is Magda?" Cass Cleave asked, frowning now, and seeming to concentrate all her attention on the traffic speeding along the embankment. "You whispered it in my ear," she said. "Magda." I saw again the room, the bed, the girl. I wondered what the experience had been like for her, poor thing. She must have felt as if she had come to a far-off country, bankrupt and pestilential, where she had been captured and set upon by an ancient beast indigenous to the place, last specimen of its species, rampant and ghastly, with its mouldering pelt and its corpse breath and its single, glaring eye. "Magda," I said, "was my wife. She died."

Lunch was brought, although I could not recall having ordered it. The waiter stopped filling my glass while it was only yet half full – red wine now, I noticed – and I snarled at him and made him fill it to the brim. When I was lifting the glass to my mouth my hand shook violently, Parkinsonially, and the wine spilled over and splashed on the tablecloth. Cass Cleave attempted to mop it up with her napkin but I smacked her hand away and told her sharply to leave it. "Do not fuss," I snapped at her. "I hate for people to fuss." I began to talk then about Hitler at Berchtesgaden. It is a little dinner table turn that I do, for my own amusement if for no other reason. Deftly I sketched a picture of the magic mountain, with its band of trolls toiling to be the first in the Fuhrer's favour, the little smooth-haired fellows and their blonde women all calves and big, square, satin-clad buttocks, and he in the midst of them, the mountain king, dreamy and distant, exquisitely polite, calmly plotting the destruction of the world. She kept her eyes fixed on her plate. "You are wondering if I admired him?" I said. She looked at me. "I did, a little. Do. A little. My friends and I when we were young entertained the beautiful dream of a Europe cleansed and free." I took another deep draught from my glass and leaned back, smiling into her face. "I am an old leopard," I said, "my spots go all the way through."

From a nearby table a raffish-looking old fellow in a straw boater was attending us with interest, who when I caught his eye gave me the faintest little smirking nod of envy. Strange, but people never took us, Cass Cleave and me, for anything other than what we were; there must have been an aura about us, a sulphurous something that we generated, or that I generated, at least, that told them she was no daughter and I no dad. I am not sure why, but old Aschenbach's longing look had set me thinking again of Prague and Kristina Kovacs. When she came to the door of my hotel room that day I had been in bed, nursing yet another after-lunch hangover, most likely. She stood before me in something like a penitent's pose, it had a lewd effect, hands clasped at her breast and head inclined, looking up at me sideways and smiling, not bothering to say a word nor needing one from me. In those days she was famously handsome, in a smouldering, slightly bruised sort of way, and practically every man and not a few of the women at the conference we were both attending – on Molière, Kleist and Amphitryon, as I recall – had been trying to get her into bed, but it was to mine that she came. Why? Afterwards she said it was because she admired my mind, which made me laugh; one unhindered glimpse into that foul chamber would have sent her backing speechless out of the door, with hands uplifted, shaking her head in horror. At the time she still had a husband, in Bucharest, I believe it was, a folly of her student days. She told me about him, Istvan, or Ivan, or Igor, some such name, in that thrilling, chocolatey alto of hers, lying on her back with a hand behind her head, gazing soulfully up at the ceiling through cigarette smoke and absently touching a finger to her swollen lip where my fierce teeth had hurt it. I listened, half dozing. Such dramas! The night their apartment was searched. The day her typewriter was confiscated. The frights they had, the fights. The time when Igorstvan came home after a weekend of interrogation by the secret police, red-eyed and grey-faced, and punched her in the belly because he was angry and afraid, and after that she could not have the baby the lack of which, she said, was the tragedy of her life. "That filthy country," she hissed, her dragon-mouth smoking. "Those filthy people."

But look! here is Kristina herself, and Franco Bartoli as well, sitting with us at the table in the shade of the awning, listening to the girl, who is talking to them, and laughing, in the strangest way. How did they come to be here without my noticing? I have no recollection of them arriving, joining us, ordering these glasses of wine they are toying with. I hear Cass Cleave telling them about someone called Mandelbaum, who comes to call on her. These are the words she uses: "He comes to call on me." The two sit facing her, upright on their chairs, fingers fidgeting on the stems of their wine glasses, blandly frowning with widened eyes and eyebrows lifted, polite and mystified. The girl leans forward at the table, her legs twined about each other and one foot hitched behind an ankle, and speaks very rapidly, stumbling over words, winding a lock of hair around a finger, tightly round and round, and giving that strange, snuffly laugh, as if what she is telling them were the drollest thing. Mr. Mandelbaum has a smell, she is saying, a smell of almonds, that goes ahead of him and warns her that he is on his way. Then he arrives and catches her in his arms and squeezes her, and squeezes, until all the breath is squeezed out of her and she falls down. Seeing that I am attending now, or trying to, out of an alcoholic haze, she gives me a bright, desperate smile, her eyes at once burning and blurred. To my distorted sight she looks like one of those hideous folded-in cubist portraits in which the face is presented simultaneously full-on and in profile, you know the kind of thing I mean. With perfect calm and no surprise I see that she is mad. "He smells of almonds," she said, "Mr Mandelbaum." Her smile stopped as if a light in her face had been switched off and she picked up her glass – or was it mine? – in both hands and drank deeply of the dark wine, watching me above the rim. The lunch things had been cleared, and I was holding a glass of… what is it? Grappa again, it must be. The sun was burning the back of my neck. How was it that no one seemed to have noticed that for some time I had not been here? Where was it I had been? In Prague, yes, with Kristina Kovacs, in her salmon-coloured slip. Cass Cleave, her head back and throat throbbing, finished the last of the wine in a great gulp and set down the glass with a bang and looked at me again. Her expression had gone lopsided, as if the profile half of the portrait now had slipped a fraction. She stood up unsteadily and turned and plunged off into the dim interior of the restaurant. The awning flapped, a car roof flashed. Kristina Kovacs cleared her throat and stirred. "You say she is writing your life?" she said, doubtfully. Franco Bartoli smirked at that. "She is your biographer?" he said to me. "Ah." He palmed another smirk. "Ah, I see." With his shiny bald brow and pouting mouth and scant, soft, downy, slightly reddish beard, he has the look, little Franco, of a rare and precious domestic animal, spoilt and ill-tempered from too much coddling. The rimless spectacles perching on the bridge of his neat nose were almost invisible. I wonder why it is that I despise him so. He began to speak now, in a tone of hushed and sibilant fury, of a fashionable French scholar who had agreed to come to the conference and give a paper and then had cancelled at the last minute. "Nearly alike," I said loudly, interrupting him. "Your Frenchman. Bator, Bartoli: nearly the same." I laughed, and held my grappa glass aloft and waggled it at the waiter leaning sullenly against a vine-clad trellis. "Bator the gnome," I said. "I met him once. Nasty, brutish, and short." The place had emptied, we were the last customers. I could hear myself breathe, a low, stertorous roaring, as if there were a bellows working inside my skull, always in me a sign of incipient drunkenness. There was a watery glare on the white tablecloth, and the objects on it, knife, fork, oil bottle, pepper grinder, stood each one at an identical angle to its own shadow, looking as if they had been set there just so, like chessmen, or runes for me to read. The waiter, scowling, brought the bottle of clear poison, poured; I drank. I tried to light a cigarette and fumbled the match and scorched my fingers and swore. Bartoli and Kristina Kovacs were looking at me in an odd, not to say alarming, somehow mechanical, fashion, sitting very still, very straight, like a pair of magistrates, their hands folded before them on the table, their eyes unblinking. "I know you killed your wife," Franco Bartoli said. I coughed, spluttering grappa. "What?" I croaked, gagging. "What?" Kristina Kovacs patted me solicitously on the back. "He says," she said, "you dropped your knife." Sure enough, there it was, the knife, on the ground; its blade, seen there between my knees, had an evil, knowing gleam. I leaned down to pick it up. Kristina Kovacs rose, purse in hand. I made to grab her; I demanded to know where she was going, afraid suddenly to be left alone with Franco Bartoli. She directed a small, dry smile at me. "I am going to see what has become of your biographer," she said. She made her way between the tables and went into the restaurant, where Cass Cleave had gone before her. Franco Bartoli with a fingertip rolled a bread crumb back and forth slowly on the tablecloth, pensive and tense. "You know she is dying," he said, and looked at me. "Kristina, I mean." His eyes were invisible behind the sunlight flashing on the lenses of his spectacles. And at once I understood that he and Kristina Kovacs were lovers. It came to me, just like that; excess of drink often has a clairvoyant effect on me. How long had the affair been going on, I wondered? Perhaps – and somehow this was funny – perhaps it had only just begun, perhaps as recently as last night. Franco must have seen the light of realisation in my face, for he lowered his eyes quickly and began rolling another pellet of dough, more agitatedly this time. I pictured them in bed after the act, Kristina unsleeping and disconcertingly tearful, and Franco with his pot belly and his little-boy's hands, his shoes with the lifts in them tucked discreetly under the bed, making a silent rictus as he stifled yet another yawn; then, out of the dark, Kristina's awful, blurted announcement of her illness, and Franco thinking at once of the dry feel of her flesh and the brown stench she had panted out of her already failing lungs while he was bouncing up and down on her, and he would want to leap up and flee back along the trail of his discarded clothes between bed and door, and run down the hotel corridor, the stairs, along the street, out of the city itself, away! but having instead to lie there, paralysed with dismay, not daring to stir a finger for fear of bringing everything, this woman, her distress, her life and impending death, all crashing down around his unwilling ears. Then the hours of talk, all her terrors tumbling out, her anguish, using up the air in the room until he could barely breathe. Would she have told him about that afternoon with me in Prague, the drapes drawn and she crying out and my dead leg between her thighs thumping its grotesque tattoo on the mattress? She would; oh, she would. "Have a drink," I said to him, smiling almost fondly into his face. "Have a drink with me, Franco, for the sake of old times." He would say nothing, and would not lift his eyes. "I know you killed her," he said in a whisper hoarse with hate. "I know you did." Kristina came back then, frowning. "The girl," she said, and looked at me. "I asked through the door, but she told me to go away. She sounded…"

There are moments, I know them well, when all goes lax and vacant suddenly, as if all the air had rushed out of things, and the people caught in the moment hesitate, feeling displaced, jostled somehow to one side of themselves. Kristina Kovacs put her purse on the table. Franco Bartoli made as if to rise from his chair but changed his mind, and for some reason looked faintly abashed. I leaned far back and peered upward, expecting something to be there, above me, but saw only the swarming air, and the edge of the awning and a tracery of leaves wreathed through with the smoke from my cigarette, and an invisible jet, very high, inscribing its gradual double chalk-mark across the zenith. That breeze again. The sun on the parked cars. The river, shining.

Cass Cleave stepped out from the dimness of the restaurant, her head down, falteringly. She stopped a moment and looked about, holding up a shielding hand and squinnying her eyes against the glare, as if this – the empty tables, the trellis of vine, the three of us looking at her – as if this were not at all where she had expected to find herself. She came forward, negotiating her way between the chairs – they might have been so many crouching animals – and stopped beside me, bracing the steepled fingers of one hand on the table and leaning forward at a teetering angle. She began to speak but her voice would not work and she laughed instead, inanely, snuffling. There was a bad scrape on her elbow beaded with blood and her dress was stained. I reached out and seized the hand she was not leaning on and tried to use it as a lever to lift myself up but could not, and fell back on the chair, and closed my eyes.

The last gift I ever gave to Magda, one of the very few things I bought for her – like most displaced persons I have a distrust of material possessions – was an ornate and absurdly expensive glass vase. I had, uncharacteristically, I suppose, remembered that this year marked the fortieth anniversary of our life together, and although her mind by now was almost gone I thought that I should mark the occasion. In the shop, a narrow box of plate-glass and angled steel on Euclid – am I alone in experiencing the peculiar and inexplicable soreness of heart that attends the purchase of a gift? – the vase had looked a fine and fetching thing, tall and slender, the pale-green glass shot through with fat coils of a clouded, sugar-coloured whiteness. However, when it had been installed in the living room for a week or two the green of the glass took on a snotlike hue, while the swirls of frozen white syrup made me feel slightly nauseous if I kept them in sight for long enough, and I came to regard it as somehow malignant, even menacing. I wanted to get rid of it, but I could see that Magda had become attached to it in all its horrid viridescence, which must, for her, have been a radiance piercing enough to strike even through the mists of her hopelessly distracted comprehension. She would sit and gaze at it for long hours, in placid quietude, and I did not have the heart to take it outside the back door and dash it to smithereens on the ground, as I was convinced I ought to do. The vase in its turn must have found me equally repulsive, or else must have felt my animosity to be unbearable, and decided to put us both out of our distress. Here is what happened; really, the oddest thing. On the day after Magda's death I was reclining on the sofa in the dimness of the lounge, awash in my new state of widowhood – the word still sounds wrong, applied to a man – with a bag of ice on my brow and a steadily diminishing bottle on the floor beside me, when a loud report, sharp and incontrovertible as a gunshot, brought me rearing up in fright, like the man-monster arching on his table when the big blue spark leaps between the conducting rods. I scrambled upright and swayed at a drunken list into the living room to investigate, thinking, in my befuddled state, of Officer Blank – remember him? – and that blunt blue pistol of his, stuffed full with live rounds. It took much fruitless peering and searching before at last I discovered what had occurred. The vase had shattered, not into fragments in the way that glass should, but into two almost equal halves, vertically, and remarkably cleanly, as if it had been sliced down the middle by an immensely swift diamond blade or a powerful, unearthly ultra-ray. As I may already have remarked, I am not of a superstitious nature – or was not, since this was before Magda's ghost had begun haunting me – and I knew that it was simply that there must have been a fault in the glass, a crack so fine as to be invisible, that had succumbed at last to an infinitesimal shift in air temperature or change of atmospheric pressure. I thought, with a pang almost of remorse, of the once-hated thing standing there, day after day, suffering my baleful glances and the hours of Magda's fond but perhaps no less assailing gaze, locked motionless in agonised struggle with the irresistible forces of the world working on it, straining to hold itself together for another hour, another minute, another few seconds, the last few, of wholeness and poise. I am thinking, of course, of Cass Cleave. For that is how it was with her, too, she was another tall, tense, fissile vessel waiting to be cloven in two.

In the lavatory she had suffered one of her seizures. She did not remember falling, only the familiar, faint smell, dry and sweet, and the voices in her head suddenly starting all together to say something. The stall was cramped and dirty and when she collapsed she grazed her arm on something, aldiough she did not feel the pain of it. Then the Ko vacs woman was tapping at the door and saying her name, and she got herself up somehow and wadded a handful of tissue and scrubbed at the hem of her dress where it was stained from the filth on the floor. It was one of her worst fears that one day she would pass out in some foul place like this and not come round until someone had found her, wedged between the stool and the door with her pants around her knees. When she came out into the sun she felt fluttery and light, and the air seemed to have turned into another medium, a kind of bright, viscous fluid that both sustained and hindered her. It was always like this after an attack, the sense of everything around her being different, as though she had stepped through a looking-glass into the other, gleaming world that it contained. When Vander wrenched himself around in his chair and grabbed her hand she felt an infirm tremor run down his arm, it might have been the last of his life draining out of him, and when his head fell forward on to the table with a frightening bang she thought that he was surely dead. Her father's mother had died in his arms after he had fallen asleep holding her and even that, his mother dying, had not woken him. To be gone like that, without a sound, like slipping out of a room and turning and quietly closing the door; in her mind she saw a hand, it was hers, slowly relinquish the polished knob and her miniature, curved reflection on it shrink to a dot of darkness and disappear. To be gone.

At Vander's collapse Kristina Kovacs and Franco Bartoli sprang up at once and began to bustle about like mechanical figures, as if his fall had somehow switched on a motor and set their parts moving. Kristina Kovacs touched Bartoli on the wrist and he turned aside quickly to go, buttoning his jacket. She said nothing to him, and he nodded rapid acknowledgement of what she had not said. He muttered something in Italian: was it a prayer, perhaps, or was he cursing his bad luck in being here? He glanced at Vander where he lay slumped forward with his head on the table and his arms hanging down past his knees, and nodded again and said that, si, certo, he would go and fetch the car. And he went away, hurrying, with short, purposeful steps, a hand pressed flat against the side pocket of his jacket. Vander produced, as if in scornful comment, a loud, rolling belch that ended in a groan. Kristina Kovacs moved to his side, and, as Cass Cleave looked on, put her hands on his shoulders and with an effort drew him upright on his chair. He groaned again, more loudly, lolling. Kristina Kovacs spoke softly, as to a child, in a language Cass Cleave did not recognise, and then with a strange, sorrowing gesture she extended her arm all the way around his head in a sort of wrestler's hold, but tenderly, and drew him to her, until his forehead was resting against her midriff. His eyes were shut and his mouth was open, and there was a trickle of drool on his chin. Cass Cleave was sharply aware that there was something she wanted to say, or ask, but she could not think what it was, or whom she might address, and anyway here came Franco Bartoli in his little bright-red car, pulling up at the kerb.

Between the three of them they got Vander to his feet and heaved him across the pavement to the car, wheeling him forward lurchingly on his corners as if they were walking a wardrobe. Then there was the difficulty of getting him into the low front seat. He was a dead weight, yet in the midst of the struggle, as she leaned under him to support him, her neck wedged into his hot, damp armpit, Cass Cleave heard him chuckle to himself, or thought she did. Even when they had got him into the seat at last his stiff leg kept rolling out again, with comic obstinacy, until Bartoli braced it with the toe of his dainty shoe and at the last moment, like a penalty kicker in reverse, pulled his foot back smartly and slammed the door. They were about to drive away when the waiter came running with the bill they had forgotten to pay, and Bartoli, the wings of his nostrils turning white with fury, had to get out and wave the fellow's complaints aside and thrust a wad of money into his hands. At the hotel, when they were manoeuvring the drunk man up the steps, the automatic glass door kept opening wide with doltish promptness and immediately swinging shut again, as an outflung elbow or a splayed foot temporarily broke the beam of its electronic eye, while in the narrow street a line of backed-up vehicles bellowed and fumed behind Bartoli's abandoned, cowering little car. In the bedroom Franco Bartoli, with Vander's arm clamped on his neck, lost his footing and began to topple over, slowly, quakingly, and to keep themselves from falling they all three had to let go their hold on Vander, who stood swaying for a moment and then pitched forward and crashed face down on the bed with the force of a felled tree. Cass Cleave went and sat down quietly on a chair, and Bartoli stepped back, panting, and brushing his hands down the front of his jacket and hitching his lapels, like a chucker-out who has just succeeded in throwing a particularly truculent trouble-maker into the street. Kristina Kovacs had got Vander on to his back on the bed now and was taking off his shoes. Cass Cleave, trembling, stood up and went to the window and pulled the curtains closed against the daylight, not knowing why she did it, except that it seemed the necessary thing to do. Suddenly shadowed, the room took on a devotional aspect, and Vander's form supine on the bed and the two spectral people standing by him might have been, she thought, the figures at the centre of an altar-piece.

Kristina Kovacs was looking about her with interest, frowning, as if she had just realised that this was the place where she had lost something once, and were wondering if it might be here still. Franco Bartoli, anxious to be gone, plucked at her sleeve, trying to draw her toward the door. He told Cass Cleave that he would telephone later, and she nodded; she wanted them to go away now, quickly. But at the doorway Kristina Kovacs lingered, still with that distracted frown. "He should not drink," she said, as if to herself, shaking her head. "He really should not drink." Bartoli took her arm then in both his hands and pulled her after him into the hall. However, they must have stopped at the front desk on their way out, for presently, as Cass sat quietly by the bed in the room's sanctified stillness, there came a sharp tap at the door, and a very thin, elegant, elderly man in a pale, shining suit stepped inside. He was, he said, the doctor, making it sound as if there were only one doctor in all the city. He had an Eastern look. His face was swarthy, thin and fleshless, his eyes were dark but not unkind; his sparse hair was dyed black and heavily oiled, and had a fragrant smell, of sandalwood, she thought, although she was not sure she knew the smell of sandalwood. He was carrying a real doctor's bag that snapped open like the thick-lipped mouth of a fish, releasing an ancient and familiar odour. She looked as closely as she dared at the strangely radiant, pearly cloth of which his suit was made; it was less like cloth than a kind of metal, marvellously fine and soft, shining at all angles in the light of the bedside lamp. He waited while at his direction she unknotted Vander's tie and opened his shirtfront, then sat down on the side of the bed with one foot raised and resting on its toe, and listened to Vander's heart, and lifted his eyelids and shone a light into his eyes, and looked into his ears with the light, and prised open his mouth and looked in there, too. Then he took out of the depths of his bag an old-fashioned metal syringe with a glass barrel, and a small glass phial of clear liquid and held the phial upside down and inserted the needle through the rubber seal that was, she noted with interest, exactly the same colour as the inner tube of a bicycle wheel; perhaps, she thought, it was made from the same kind of rubber, and she marvelled again at how despite their seeming disparity so many things are secretly the same. The doctor was working Vander's arm up and down at the elbow like the handle of a water pump. Then there was the business with the swab of cotton that always made her shiver. She watched as the needle first made a dent in the flaccid skin and then broke through and sank smoothly at an angle into the vein. When he had put away the needle and the empty phial the doctor sat for a long moment motionless, as if it were to him and not to Vander that the calmative had been administered. Then he looked at her. "And you," he said, "you have hurt yourself?" He pointed to the scrape on her elbow. "I fell," she said. He nodded, and took her hand in his; his long, slender fingers were dry and smooth, like jointed lengths of smooth, dry wood; with his other hand he made a peculiar gesture, moving it sideways, up and back, imparting a sort of blessing, it might be. His breath smelled of tobacco and something warm and sweet. In the quiet of the room the only sound was Vander's soft and steady breathing. The doctor peered closely at the graze on her arm but then seemed to lose interest and released her hand and looked away again, thinking. She imagined where he might live. In her mind she pictured it, the big, silent, gloomy apartment, smelling like him of tobacco smoke and sandalwood and that sweetish something, with big, dark, vague furniture, and photographs in tarnished silver frames showing pale, solemn-faced children, his brothers and sisters, dead or scattered now, and stern-eyed elders, his father, thin like him, in a high collar, his mother as a girl, wistful and wan. How could there be so many people in the world, she wondered, so many lives? Not to mention the countless dead.

"He will sleep," the doctor said, looking askance at Vander, and then at her again, and smiled, as if it were a magic trick that he had worked. "He will sleep, and then, in the morning, he will wake."

He went away. She sat again on the chair by the bed with her hands in her lap and listened to the sounds of the day subsiding around her, a long, languishing, myriad-voiced sigh. The crack in the curtains turned from molten white to amber to a rich, arabian blue. The last time she had watched over Vander sleeping he had seemed to elude her, drifting out of himself in that strange way, but now, unconscious rather than asleep, he was more vividly present than if he had been awake; lying like that on his back, with his eyes closed, frowning, as if he were concentrating on some puzzle or problem, he somehow populated the room, making it seem there were others here besides him and her, a silent, unseen gathering. But perhaps it was not Vander who was making this effect, perhaps these were not his phantoms, but hers. She went to the window and looked out and up, and saw the moon's scurfy silver face gloating over the city.

Later, Vander woke up. At first he did not know where he was or what had happened. She told him what the doctor had said. "You are exhausted, and poisoned by alcohol. You must not drink so much." He was not listening. He ordered her to switch on more lights, and when she would not he flailed from side to side on the bed, searching the wall for the switches, but then flopped back on the pillows, groaning in anger and despair. He asked where were Bartoli and Kristina Kovacs, where had they gone to. "I told them you are my father," she said, and he lifted his head sharply and looked at her. "You are mad," he said. "And I am a fool." He demanded that she fetch him things, a glass of wine, food, cigarettes, a book to read, slurring his words, his dead eye wandering in its socket. After a while he fell asleep again. He still looked angry. She pulled the bed covers over him and went to her own room, going warily along the corridors, fearful of encountering a fellow guest, or, worse, one of the hotel staff. She thought there was someone behind every door, ready with a hand on the knob to spring out and… she did not know what they might spring out and do, the springing out itself would be enough.

Her room had the look of having undergone a subtle alteration: it was as if a band of intruders had come in and shifted everything around and then put it all back exactly as it had been. She changed out of her soiled skirt, and ran hot water in the bathroom and bathed her grazed elbow. She brushed her teeth, and stood for a long time motionless at the mirror, holding the toothbrush, not looking at herself. She did not know what to do. She returned to the bedroom and sat on the side of the bed and telephoned her mother and told her she was coming home. She kept her hand cupped over the mouthpiece and spoke in a whisper, as if there were someone in the room to overhear her, and her mother had to keep asking her to repeat what she had said. There were silences in which she could hear her mother's breathing. She thought of their voices flying through the darkness, over the city's roofs and then the countryside and then the high, white peaks and then other cities and then the sea and then… and then… "Your father has left me, by the way," her mother said, with a hard little laugh. "He has gone back to what he still calls home, to live with the ghost of his Mammy." She did not reply. She was wondering how telephones work. Do the wires carry the actual words, or are the words turned into signals, impulses, that are then turned back into words again? How would that be done? There must be a device in every phone to encode what is being said as it is said and to decode it again immediately at the other end. But where would it be, such a device? Would it be in the telephone itself, or in the thing she was holding, the what do you call it, the receiver? "Are you all right?" her mother said, unable to suppress a note of impatience in her voice. Was she all right? She did not know. Gently she hung up, and thought she heard the click of the connection breaking, like a tongue clicking, an instant before the line went dead. So her father had left, at last; she was glad. She waited a moment and picked up the receiver again, wondering why it should be called only the receiver, never the sender. She had not said goodbye. The line snarled softly at her, busy with reproof. Again she hung up, and waited for her mother to call back, hunched forward tensely with her arms tightly folded across her chest, gazing unblinking at the phone. But it did not ring. How could it? She had not told her mother where she was. She thought of the moon that she had looked at from the window in Vander's room, with all that space around it, that darkness.

She made her way back through the hushed, humming corridors. Vander was still asleep. She leaned over him, smelling the sick-room smell he gave off, of ash and candle wax and urine. A tiny, fish-scale glitter was visible between the not quite closed lids of his blind eye. She watched the cords in his throat stretching and straining with each breath he drew. She sat down and resumed her vigil. She was calm now, but she knew she would not sleep. She still had that sensation, that had begun after her seizure at the restaurant, of being afloat, dulled and motionless, like a fish in a stream, while everything rushed past her on all sides, the world itself and all that was in it, dense, clear and swift. What time it was when she heard the child singing she did not know, only that it was late, the middle of the night. Perhaps she had been asleep, after all, in a kind of sleep, sitting there by the bed, for certainly when she heard the child she thought that the sound had wakened her. And as sometimes when the dreamer is suddenly roused the dream vanishes, so now whatever it was that had been going through her head, dream or musings or memories, all vanished on the instant, leaving only this moment, in this room, in the lamplight, with the old man breathing on the bed and the sound from the corridor of the child, singing. It was not one of her voices, it was outside her, outside the room, real, a thin, high, wordless crooning. She sat and listened to it for a while, unafraid. It was not so much a sound as a part of the silence, a part of the night, there and not there, like darkness, or the air itself. She went to the door and opened it cautiously. She expected to find the child standing outside, on the very threshold, face lifted, singing to her, but no, there was nothing, and no one. She looked up and down the corridor; it was deserted. She stepped out, and the door shut itself behind her; it was all right, she had the key, Vander's key, she had it in her hand. She walked to where the corridor turned. A faint breeze came from around the turn and put its ineffectual hands against her face, her bare arms. She held back, and saw herself walk forward again. The child was a boy, or a boyish girl, perhaps, very small, a miniature being, more like a midget than a child, with a sharp little white face and a cap of black hair coming down on the forehead in a widow's peak. It was sitting, reclining, really, on the carpet, on the floor, outside a door that was shut, in a peculiar, twisted posture, supporting itself on one elbow. It had a sort of doll that it was playing with. Hearing her cautious step it stopped singing at once and looked up at her with a wide, solemn stare, seemingly unsurprised by her appearing like this, silently, on silent feet. Its lower lids hung a little loose of the eyes, so that from where she was standing she could see the inner edges, two narrow crescents of glistening membrane that were the same texture as the little mouth's pink, parted lips. The doll it was playing with was made of wool, a stuffed beige wool torso and beige limbs and a knobbly, bald head, all swollen and worn; the face, she saw, had no features. Losing interest in her, the child resumed its whining song and set the fat doll to a wallowing, drunken dance. She wanted to say something, but she did not think the child would understand her, whatever the language in which she spoke. So she simply stood and watched it playing, and listened to its droning song. Then the door where it was lying was opened inward suddenly, opened wide, with a suck and a gust, and although all she could see of the room was a wedge of lamplight and the leg of a chair, she had a sense of drinks and discarded clothes and smeared supper plates perched on sofa arms. A voice spoke, and was answered from farther within by a lazy laugh, and a man's shirt-sleeved arm came down and grasped the child under its shoulders and lifted it briskly up and in. The last she saw of it were its withered little legs, dangling jointlessly, like the useless nether parts of a ventriloquist's dummy as it is whisked away into the wings under its master's arm at the end of the act. She went back to Vander's room and without undressing lay down beside him on the bed and fell at last into a depthless sleep.

A clatter and crash woke them both at once. It was broad day. For the space of a held breath they lay staring at each other from pillow to pillow in baffled alarm. The crash came again. Cass Cleave rose and drew back the heavy inner curtains and opened wide the two tall panels of the window. A shutter outside had corne loose from its catch and was swinging against the wall. There were white horse-tails high in the scoured sky and over the whole city an oceanic wind was pouring in luminous billows. She leaned out and hooked the shutter fast. Vander sat up, bleary and blinking, smacking gummed lips, long strands of white hair floating and flickering about his head like charged electric filaments. "You," he said, glaring at her. "Still here." She did not answer, but came and started to rearrange the bedclothes around him. He made no move to help her, would not even shift his haunches to let her pull the sheet straight. "I am sick," he said. "Was I asleep?" Still she did not answer him. With a groan he got himself out of bed and shuffled past her into the bathroom and slammed the door. The bedclothes when she pulled them back released a stronger waft of his ashy, waxen odour. From the bathroom came the sounds of retching followed by a loud moan of fury and disgust. She went to the window again. In the building opposite a man was leaning out of his window, smoking a cigarette. She could see an office behind him, with a desk and papers and office machines, all stark and shadowless under the unreal, icy glare of strip-lights in the ceiling. They regarded each other for a moment in faint, humorous desperation, like two castaways trapped on their separate islands, the deep, unfordable channel of the street running between them. She could feel the wind buffeting the building.

She was hungry, and went to the telephone to order breakfast. The voice that answered her was shrill and tinny, seeming to come up to her from a series of deeper and still deeper, echoing cisterns. She could not think what to ask for. She thought she could hear the wind rustling in the receiver. The voice from the kitchen, losing patience, said something she could not understand and the line went dead. Vander came out of the bathroom, naked and white-faced and shivering. "I'm sick," he said again, not looking at her, and made for the bed, his shoulders hunched, rubbing his palms together with squeamish vigour, like a trepidant swimmer approaching the dreaded water's edge. There were chocolate-brown moles on his back, and long grey hairs sprouting on his shoulder blades, and the loose flesh of his lop-sided rump wobbled when he walked. She had never seen anyone so huge, so naked and so defenceless. She pondered in mild amazement the mystery of time and time's damagings. Soon, in a very few years, a decade at most, surely, he would be gone, and all that he had been and was now would be no more.

He had got into bed and pulled the covers to his chin. She could see the bristles on his sunken jaw glittering like spilt grains of sand. When the knock came she turned quickly with a wild look as if whoever it was outside might be about to hurl a shoulder against the door and break it down. For a moment she thought in terror that it might be the doctor come back to make sure that she had done all he had told her to do, that Vander was resting, that he had stopped drinking, that the graze on her arm had healed, that everything was as it should be and nothing amiss. It was not the doctor, however, but a waiter, bringing the breakfast she had not ordered. It was all set out on a sort of trolley that he could wheel into the room, leaning forward over it like a billiard player and casting his hooded gaze circumspectly to right and left as he advanced. He was an elderly, bald fellow; she recognised him, she could not for the moment think from where. He glanced from her to Vander behind her in the bed and frowned: there was breakfast only for one. It was all right, she said hurriedly, lifting her hands, it would be enough, it would do. She was afraid she would scream if he said a word, a single word. She contemplated the food with something like despair, helplessly. There were eggs, and cold meats, and slices of pale, glistening cheese, and bread rolls and rusks, and miniature pots of honey and jam, and jugs of milk and hot water with tea bags and sachets of instant coffee, and a big wine glass of impossibly orange orange juice under a frilled paper lid. The waiter wheeled the table to the window and turned it about, setting it just so, aligning it to invisible markers on the floor, and looked at her, and lifted the paper crown from the orange juice glass with a strange, grave movement of his hand, like a priest lifting the white cloth from the chalice, and she recognised him. He was the night porter, the one who had fetched her the glass of water and the napkin – how was it she had not known him straight away, how could she have forgotten? Vander's trunkless head said something to him in Italian that he seemed not to hear, or chose to ignore, and he continued gazing at Cass Cleave out of his dark and melancholy eyes that were just like the doctor's eyes. She scooped a jumble of coins from her purse and gave them to him, and he made a little bow with his head, bobbing it sideways and down with a little grimace denoting gratitude, and pocketed the coins and stepped past her nimbly and went to the door and turned and bowed again and silently, silently, withdrew.

Vander was watching her, turning his head on the pillow to follow her about the room with his eyes. He bade her eat. She brought a chair and sat down before the food. She was not hungry now. She was thinking. She was excited. Her gaze gleamed. She put a tea bag in the cup and poured hot water over it. She nibbled at one of the stale-tasting rusks. "You should not bite your nails," Vander said. "Look at them." They could hear the hot wind gusting outside, and in the room everything seemed taut and thrumming, and they might have been in the cabin of a ship under full-bellied sail. "I did see you come into that lecture room," he said, sullen and accusing, not looking at her now. "It must have been your ghost." She said nothing and took a sip of tepid tea. Thinking. "You came in," he said, "and sat down, and I was talking about the inexistence of the self." Suddenly he gave a loud laugh that ended in a cough, making the bed shake. He drew his hand from under the bedclothes and held it up for her to see. "With this I wrote those articles that you found," he said. "Not a single cell survives in it from that time. Then whose hand is it?" He, I, I saw again the empty bottle on its side, the mauve pills in my palm. I closed my eyes. I listened to the wind washing over the rooftops. The girl rose and came forward and knelt beside the bed and took my hand in both of hers and brought it to her lips and kissed it. I.

It was all so simple, so simple and so clear. She should have seen it from the start. The signs had been there all along, or rather, all along everything had been a sign, those high white peaks glistening in the moonlight that she had glimpsed from the train, the fat man who had almost fallen on her, the flock of pigeons at the station flying up out of shadows into the dawning sky, everything: the strange young woman at the Nietzsche house; the doctor taking her hand and making that sort of blessing over it; the child, singing. She had seen all this and yet not seen it. That was how it always was, with her, she would go along for a long time, just looking, noticing things, taking them in, but not connecting them, not recognising the connections; not understanding. It was only when the waiter had lifted the paper lid off the glass of orange juice, turning his wrist in that slow, solemn way, that at last it had come to her. It was as if a light had switched itself on in her head. Or no, no, it was as if she had been submerged in something dense and dark and suddenly had risen up and broken soundlessly through the surface into the light, the radiance. And it was all so clear, and so simple.

What was not clear was whether the signs were really signs, and meant especially for her, or if they were parts of the thing itself, the thing for which she had no name, yet; those parts, that is, that she was to be allowed to see, to notice, to register. The pattern she had suddenly discerned might be only a superficial aspect of a far deeper and infinitely more intricate order, to which she would never be allowed to penetrate. She would not mind if this were to be so. Indeed, she liked to think that there would be a level she could not reach, could never reach, a mosaic beneath the mosaic she had uncovered. A mosaic, yes, set in the floor of a temple, and she on her knees, the priestess bound to the shrine by immemorial, unbreakable vows. She even had her sacred sceptre, in the form of a fountain pen, with its profane relics wrapped safe inside it.

She did not expect to be able to understand the full meaning and significance of what had been… of what had been put in place. If she were to understand, that would mean there was no mystery, and the mystery was essential. No, she must simply perform the rites in the way that was required. She did not doubt that she would know the rites and the proper manner of their performance. She would be told. She would be shown. Or it might be that she was already doing what had to be done, that she had been doing it all along. It might be that what she did, every smallest action, was in fact precisely what was necessary, without her knowing it. Thinking this, she experienced a moment of such intense – she did not know what to call it – such intense something, that it made her blench. Everything had a meaning, a function, a place in the pattern, and nothing would be lost.

She was glad when Vander in the bed fell into a doze again, leaving her alone to think. It was to do with him, he was at the very centre of it, he was that centre itself. Was it that she was meant to save him? She sat looking down at his ravaged head resting in the deep pillows as if sunk in gleaming marble. His blue-veined eyelids were like two miniature globes of the world set into his skull, mapped all over with the figurations of tiny, blue rivers. She felt shivery, she was shaking, as if the searing wind blowing outside were blowing in her, too, sweeping through empty spaces inside her. She rose as quietly as she could and went out and went to her room and packed her bag and brought it back to Vander's room. She was hanging a dress in the wardrobe when she looked in the mirror in the wardrobe door and saw that he was awake again, and had turned his head on the pillow and was watching her. He asked her what she was doing. She said she was unpacking. "I am going to stay here with you, and take care of you." His gaze was listless and remote. "I dreamt of my wife," he said. "She was with me, here, in the room." He was tired, tired and ill. His brain felt molten, swollen in its bowl of bone. Perhaps he really had suffered a stroke in the street that first day with her, or at that restaurant, yesterday. What would a stroke feel like? He tried to flex his arms, to move his good leg. The covers seemed uncommonly heavy. "I think I am paralysed," he said mildly, and seemed to find the notion almost funny. "I cannot move." Cass Cleave, rearranging his pillows, paused, leaning over him, and looked into his eyes. Is that how it was to be, she asked herself, would that be all her task, simply to take care of him? She saw herself tending here, the bed a sarcophagus and his swaddled corpse topped with its living head; she saw the days rise from dawn to burning noon, then the long, slow fall to evening and the night. The head would speak, it would be the oracle, it would tell her things; she would understand; she would be given to understand; she would know. Suddenly, with an animal quickness, he reached from under the covers again and clamped his clawlike hand on her wrist. His fingers were dry and burning. She looked at the agate nails, striate, chipped. He let her go, his strength failing; his hand withdrawing under the sheet was like an animal slithering away. White weals on her wrist, and then the blood rushing back, under the slackening skin. She bent and put her mouth against his ear, saying something in a hot whisper, saying something I could not make out. Her burning breath. Saying something.