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II. DON'T MESS WITH ME

Her words carried a strange, mysterious charge to them, however much she didn't intend them to be that way. I suggested an encounter in Paris at the end of the month since I planned on spending New Year's Eve there; 2005 was drawing to a close. We arranged to meet at the Café de Flore in Paris at noon on the 27th of December.

12



OF THE many ways of knowing people, the eye's appraisal is surely the most com-plete; but Spud Latham's eyes, which saw only enemies, would never have perceived that the boy ahead of him was not like the others. Spud's eyes were bandaged now and for guidance he had to depend on his right hand, which was resting on a naked shoulder. The shoulder was very thin.

In the short chill of dawn the four boys gathered round the black smudge where the fire had been, while Ralph it. Ralph knelt and blew. Grey, feathery ashes scurried hither and shining thither at his breath but no spark shone among them. The twins watched anxiously and Piggy sat expressionless behind the luminous wall of his myopia.

His tone conveyed a warning, given out of the pride of ownership, and the boys ate faster while there was still time. Seeing there was no immediate likelihood of a pause, Jack rose from the log that was his throne and sauntered to the edge of the grass. He looked down from behind his paint at Ralph and Piggy. They moved a little further off over the sand and Ralph watched the fire as he ate.

It seems to be historically constant that among founding members of secret societies, there is always one who likes to contradict the rest. In the Shandy's case, all of those who dined in Port Actif were great lovers of life except for Rigaut, who declared himself, from the outset, on the side of death ("Vous êtes tous de poètes et moi je suis du côte de la mort"), more concretely of suicide......

Ralph moved impatiently. The trouble was, if you were chief you had to think, you had to be wise. And then he occasion slipped by so that you had to grab at a decision. This made you think; because thought was a valuable thing, that got results.

. I felt such a fresh longing for her at that moment that we might have parted only yesterday. The pain of losing something precious - be it earthly happiness or material wealth can be forgotten over time. But our missed opportunities never leave us, and every time they come back to haunt us, we ache. Or perhaps what haunts us is that nag-ging thought that things might have turned out differently.

Neither of us spoke. And how I savoured that silence, even as I ate myself up, rack-ing my brain for something to say. But my beautiful thoughts had deserted me. The more I searched for them, the more my mind emptied out, until it was nothing more than a throbbing, piteous piece of meat. But when I glanced over at her, I saw not a trace of agitation. She had her dark eyes fixed on the ground before her.

I was still taking German lessons from the army officer three evenings a week. I spent my days visiting museums and newly opened galleries. Returning to the pension in the even-ing, I'd catch my first whiff of cabbage from a distance of a hundred paces. But I was no longer as bored as I'd been in the early months. For now I was slowly learning to read properly in German and this gave me great pleasure.

It was this summer that I met Knut. For the first time for at least ten years I saw Knut again. I came walking down along the road, was going to the library, it was a fine summer's day, a little late in the afternoon, and then, toward me on a bend, I saw Knut appearing, first Knut and a few meters behind him came his wife,

'Of course his mother killed him.'
I looked at the mouth of the boy Jody had wanted me to meet. His lips were thick and pink and a baby face nestled under the silk of white-blond hair. His name was Cal, which thought must be short for something, but I couldn't think, what it would be short for, unless it was California.

'How can you be sure she killed him?' I said.

I started out by dressing in a white coat and sitting on a tall stool in a room with four cadavers, while Buddy and his friends cut them up. These cadavers were so unhuman-looking they didn't bother me a bit. They had stiff, leathery, purple-black skin and they smelt like old pickle jars.

Ivan is standing on his own in the corner, while the men from the chess club move the chairs and tables around. The men are saying things to one another like: Back a bit there, Tom. Mind yourself now. Alone Ivan is standing, wanting to sit down, but uncertain as to which of the chairs need to be rearranged still, and which of them are in their correct places already.

The scene, if I may ask you to follow me, was now changed. The leaves were still falling, but in London now, not Oxbridge; and I must ask you to imagine a room, like many thousands, with a window looking across people's hats and vans and motor-cars to other windows, and on the table inside the room a blank sheet of paper on which was written in large letters WOMEN AND FICTION, but no more.

It was still very early in the morning when he crossed the river and came dripping up the other bank. He wouldn't have expected anybody to be about. The bungalow, the tin-roofed shed, the flagstaff: he had an idea that all Englishmen lowered their flag at sunset and sang 'God Save the King'. He came carefully round the corner of the shed and the door gave to his pressure.

Suddenly, from about five feet away, there came a tiny scream - a woman's. A tired voice said, 'Can't you be quiet? Among the furtive movements came again the muffled pain-less cries. He realized that pleasure was going on even in this crowded darkness. Again he put out his foot and began to edge his way inch by inch away from the grille

They were the elec-tric kind, with flame-shaped bulbs on top of plastic candlesticks. Sometimes I stood at the window in my parents' bedroom on the second floor and waited for a car to come, and as it neared the house, I rolled the ridged wheel of the switch to light the candle so that someone in the car might see the light come on, and in that, feel delivered good luck or cheer, a flashing sense of human presence..

I am up early enough to see the stars. The porch light on the house across the street shines bright enough to bring shadows into the room. The neighborhood is still. The rattling newspaper deli ery van has not yet been by, the morning news not yet tossed on stoops. Frost not dew, the grass is stiff. A woman scrapes ice off her windshield and I feel it in my teeth. Mothwinged darkness opens itself widest now.

The squad of police made their way back to the station. They walked raggedly with rifles slung anyhow: ends of cotton where buttons should have been: a puttee slipping down over the ankle: small men with black secret Indian eyes. The little plaza on the hill-top was lighted with globes strung together in threes and joined by trailing overhead wires.

That summer he did not teach; and he had the first illness of his life. It was a fever of high intensity and obscure origin, which lasted only a week; but it drained him of his strength, he became very gaunt, and suffered in its aftermath a partial loss of hearing. For the entire summer he was so weak and listless that he could walk only a few steps without becoming exhausted;

He turned his grades in on the Monday following the Friday closing of the semester. It was the part of teaching he most disliked, and he always got it out of the way as soon as he could. He gave Walker his F and thought no more about the matter. He spent most of the week between semesters reading the first drafts of two theses due for final presentation in the spring.

And because he had no family or loved ones to mourn his passing, it was Stoner who wept when the casket was lowered. as if that weeping might reduce the loneliness of the last descent. Whether he wept for himself, for the part of his history and youth that went down to the earth, or whether for the poor thin figure that once kept the man he had loved, he did not know.

REMEMBER A JEWISH house in a barrio in my native city called the Alcázar, because it occupies the location, still partially walled, where a medieval castle stood, an alcázar, a fortified citadel that belonged first to the Muslims and then after the thirteenth century to the Christians—after 1234 to be exact, when King Ferdinand III of Castile, who in my textbooks was called the Saint.........

"A normal passenger never thinks of himself as a passenger," said Khan. "So if you know you're a passenger, you no longer are one. They could never imagine that it's possible to get off this train. Noth-ing else exists for them, apart from the train."

In a letter Kafka wrote, I recognized the symptoms of my illness: ennui. I was like a dead man, having no desire to communicate, as if I did not belong to this world or any other; as if during all the years that led to this moment I had acted mechanically, done only what was required of me, while waiting for a voice that would call out to me.

WOULD WAIT IN MY ROOM with the lights off until the bells in the tower of El Salvador Church struck midnight. Cautious, though I hadn’t gone outside yet, cloaked so no one could recognize me on the street, although at that hour and on those raw winter nights there weren’t many people venturing out to face the wind or rain that beat down on the large open plaza.

THE NEW HOUSE, recently occupied, sparely furnished, still echoing empty, the paint fresh on the walls, wood floors smelling of varnish, all trace erased of those who lived there until a few months before, presences of long years’ standing abolished overnight, like the rectangles on the wall where pictures once hung.

SUCH A NOVELTY IT WAS WHEN I finally met the Spaniard who had planned and executed half of the one thousand one hundred pages I so intrepidly continued to correct, the Basque named Joseba so loved and ad-mired by everybody in the archbishop's palace, accord-ing to what my friend Erick and the little guy named Mynor told me when they introduced him to me, a Basque and by profession a psychiatrist......

WHEN I WOKE UP THAT MORNING I could never have imagined the dirty trick that had been played on me. For a few minutes I remained serenely between the sheets in my apartment in the Engels Building, dozing, receiving in my cupped hands the warmth of my testi-cles, happy in the knowledge that it was Friday, listen-ing to the cries of the street vendors that rose to my fifth-floor apartment very early in the morning

Berghof

A DARKENED WORKROOM, abstract as a cell, with white walls, wood floor, and a table of sturdy, rough wood, like the tables you used to see in kitchens, in our kitchen when I as a boy. Places become echoes, transparencies of other places, they rhyme with austere assonance. Walking into the room at this indeterminate hour of the winter afternoon, I am reminded of García Lorca’s room in Huerta de San Vicente...