Fred W. Jenkins

For now, the Amsterdam morning sparkled, gleamed, shifted around me. Even this morning I found something comforting in the walk along canals from our house to the station, the scent of bread baking and the humid smell of the canals, the not-quite-elegant, busy cleanliness of everything.

It was good to walk into a library again; it smelled like home. This one was a neo-classical treasure house, all dark-carved wood, balconies, galleries, frescoes. But what drew my eye were the books, hundreds of thousands of them lining the rooms, floor to ceiling, their red and brown and gilt bindings in neat rows, their marbled covers and endpapers smooth under the hand, the bumpy vertebrae of their spines brown as old bones. I wondered where they had been hidden during the war, and how long it had taken to range them again on these reconstructed shelves.

'This is Mr Erozan. He welcomes you to the collection,' Turgut told us with a look of satisfaction. 'He would like to be of assassination to you.'