 
### Tales of Mystery and Truth

Jeffrey K. Hill copyright 2013

Smashwords Edition

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

Thank you for downloading this free ebook. Although this is a free book, it remains the copyrighted property of the author, and is licensed for personal use only. This book may not be reproduced, copied, or distributed for commercial or non-commercial purposes. If you enjoyed this book, please encourage your friends to download their own licensed copy. Thank you for your support.

### Tales of Mystery and Truth

In an incredible bookstore called The Beggars of Azure, a reader can find every book ever written—and a list of books that have never been written. But in The Beggars of Azure, what you find is less important than what finds you.

The following tales of mystery and truth grew out of the novel The Beggars of Azure. Some of these tales feature characters or detail events from the novel. Some of these tales are tangential to the mood and themes in the novel. All of them testify to the fact that reality answers to no one.
Table of Contents

Antinomies of Time

The Living Dead

The Court of Love

The Freedom of Pavko Krizova

Landscape With the Fall of Icarus

Petsuchoi

The Book of Zambullo

* * *

Excerpt: The Beggars of Azure

Colophon

Available Now

About the Author
Antinomies of Time

The front door to The Beggars of Azure swung open, and Peter entered. Heading toward the section of Apocalyptic Vision, he caught a glimpse of a woman at the counter near the front of the store. He thought he recognized her from somewhere, but he could not remember. She struck him as classical in manner and dress, yet modern in assurance and confidence. She spoke to Callimachus, the proprietor, who in her presence seemed to be relieved of the burdens and memories of many years. Peter caught a glimpse of the gilt title on the book she was buying: _Love Among the Maidens_.

For reasons Peter could not explain, he felt compelled to meet this woman. His heart pounded at a rate unmatched since he had first met Violine, his wife—perhaps even faster. He was happily married and had no desire to be unfaithful, not even when Violine was working away from home for months at a time. But something told him that if he did not go after this woman, he would be haunted for the rest of his life.

She slipped between two corridors in Horologia, heading toward the back of the store with her book clutched against her chest. Peter watched from a hidden distance. He found he could see her better, more brightly, if he did not look directly at her. He wondered if she would settle into the quiet of the rear carrels and read, although he had never seen the carrels used by anyone other than one dusty monkish figure. So maybe she was searching for another book she had just now recalled, or browsing for one she had not yet remembered.

Peter glanced back at Callimachus. The old man looked withered and aged again. Perhaps his momentary youthful appearance had been an optical illusion of the sun pouring through the upper shop windows. Perhaps, Peter thought, infected by a hint of romance, it had been his immersion in the pure white radiance that seemed to imbue this mysterious woman.

When Peter looked for her again, he saw only one stockinged leg disappearing past the rear door of the bookstore. He panicked, not having expected her to leave any way other than through the front. He was not even sure where the rear door led. But he had no time to think, if he did not want to lose her.

He slipped through the door just before it clicked shut and emerged on an unfamiliar street. The sun had set, rendering the scene in shades of pink and gray. Peter stood still, disoriented. Then, as he glanced around in confusion, he caught sight of the woman rounding the corner of the bookstore.

His first urge was to approach her, but he suppressed it, unsure what he would do then, what he wanted from her. He followed at a safe distance as she walked. She waved to the old man at the corner newsstand. The same man greeted Peter as he passed, as if they were old friends.

She kept walking, through the medieval wall, across the river. Darkness had fallen by the time she turned up a short street and then up the walk to a well-kept bungalow. Peter paused and watched her step inside. He looked around but was alone on the street. The world seemed to have gone to bed early, for complete silence surrounded him. He did not hear any cars, or music, or planes, or even whispered conversation. Just a gentle rustle of leaves overhead, the soundtrack of a night as quiet as a Christmas snowstorm.

He took several cautious steps closer to her house. The shades were drawn, but he could see two or three shadows moving inside.

He noted the address, sure that at some point in the future he would come back. He would have to talk to this woman. But now was not the time. A path must be made first. And before that, he must understand what compelled him, what he expected, why meeting her was so important to him.

He turned, glancing at surroundings strange to him, as if he were in another city, in another time. And yet the setting felt comforting, like the quiet idyllic street that people fantasized about, the place where happy families lived. The houses were cozy, far from the sprawling mansion he called home, far from the wealth of fame. It would be a fine place, he thought, to raise a child.

He was engulfed in the night now, a moment shared only with the stars. He stared at one or two floating there alone, then looked away and realized they were surrounded by millions of other smaller stars, like servants. He knew those stars were just as big as the ones that shone brighter, perhaps even bigger; they were simply farther away.

Somewhere, far out across all that space, perhaps there was someone looking back at his star the same way. But they would not be seeing the same moment at the same time. He knew if that other person could see him looking up right now, that other person would be far in the distant future. Just as the light that Peter admired now came from stars that perhaps were already dead. He stared out, deep into the silent night, where all he could see had already happened.

* * *

The next day, Peter canceled a meeting with a client and slipped away from his history shop for an extended lunch.

Reason told him that he could return to the bookstore every day for the rest of his life, waiting only to see the mysterious woman again, and he never would. She was but one in a city of many people; The Beggars of Azure was but one in a city of many bookstores. She had not met him or anyone else inside. She had simply purchased a book and left.

He followed his foolish hopes to the bookstore and returned to the exact place where he had been standing when he had first seen her. He waited. Callimachus stooped at his counter, scratching in a dusty ledger. An hour passed, but the mysterious woman did not appear again.

The bookstore was like a second home to Peter, a place to share a drink with friends, work on his writing, or have a game of chess. But, as if to underscore his disappointment, none of his friends were to be found in the café, and only a few strangers lurked among the stacks. He needed a distraction from his sudden and inexplicable fascination. Though his weekly dinner with his father was in three days, he decided not to wait.

His father was surprised but pleased to see him. "This mean you can't come on Saturday?"

"Of course not."

His father ruminated. "Won't leave us much to talk about then, I suppose."

"We'll just have to find something. Maybe we can go into the city for a beer."

"Got beer in the fridge," said his father.

They sat at the family table, Peter in the chair his mother used to occupy. His father stared at Peter, who remained silent for several minutes, full of things he could talk about but unsure what to say.

"Dad," he finally ventured, "where are the old photo albums?"

"What do you want them for?"

"I thought it would be nice to look through them."

"Just like that?" His father grumbled and waved a dismissive hand at Peter.

Peter shrugged, knowing his father rarely indulged in memories.

After a minute of silence, his father said, "They're in the closet in your old bedroom."

Peter retrieved an armful and brought them to the table. He and his father sat beside one another and Peter opened the first one. As was his mother's custom, they flipped backward through the albums, end to beginning. Pictures of forgotten holidays from his childhood gave way to highlights of Petey and Frannie growing younger with each page.

"I miss your sister," his father said.

She had married and moved to Virginia, taking her mother's laugh with her.

"So do I."

"Said she might come out in October."

"We should go there," suggested Peter.

"Have you seen the fares?"

"How about next month?"

"You're crazy."

They flipped through a second album, this filled with photographs of Peter's father and mother as small children, one on the farm, the other in the newly built suburbs of some fair city. A third album was dominated by his younger sister, who always appeared cheerful and confident.

"Do you mind if I take some of these?" Peter asked.

"What are you going to do with them?"

"I want to frame them."

His father stared at him as if he were still the child who could not be trusted. "Go ahead."

They opened the fourth album. His father looked happy in the old photographs. He had no need for glasses back then, but did need a comb. And Peter was surprised to see him posed in several shots with a cigarette, for he had never remembered his father smoking. In another, he ran beside Peter, who wobbled on a bicycle, while his mother waved from the background, hunched over to catch her breath.

Peter glanced at his father who smiled, though with a shadow of loss.

They turned further back into the past. Peter's sister reverted into a wriggling infant. Then, as he turned the page, he felt his insides collapse into a black hole at the sight of his mother cuddling a tiny baby. He noted the familiar seductive droop of her right eyelid, but had never known if the mannerism was purposeful or uncontrolled.

He stared for a moment, feeling closer to his mother than he ever remembered when she was alive. She looked different from the older woman of his recent memory, and yet he felt as if he knew her well, knew her golden voice, knew precisely how a summer dress would hang on her body. He had a disorienting sense that she was still alive.

"Oh, the next picture is my favorite," said his father, motioning with his hand.

Peter glanced at him, shocked by the realization his father had often looked through these photographs on his own. He turned the next page of the album, the first page, and saw his father's face light with joy.

"I took that the day after we were married," his father said with pride. "She was just so vivacious."

The confusion that had plagued Peter's mind was seared away by a white-hot clarity. The face in the favored photograph of the newlywed woman who became his mother was the same as the face of the mysterious woman he had seen in the bookstore.

* * *

When he returned to The Beggars of Azure, Peter was not surprised to find none of his friends present. With Violine so often away from home, Peter spent more time in the café than did the others. But he had not wanted to come for them anyway.

He waited for the reappearance of the mysterious woman by flipping through large tomes in Oeirocritica. Though several interested him, he could not allow himself to become distracted from his watch. He thought of his wife, of his mother, of the mysterious woman. As the day wore on, he searched his memories for clues or proof that the mysterious woman was his mother. But even if his father could provide more information, he knew his mother was dead, and the past could not be recaptured.

Another patron emerged from the stacks and gave Peter a compassionate nod, as if they had shared the same experience, and he understood the lonely feeling.

Peter decided to return to the house of the mysterious woman. He went out the back door of the bookstore, oblivious to his surroundings, and headed to the corner. He turned up the street where he thought he had followed her several nights earlier. But the farther he walked, the less it corresponded to his memory. He looked around in confusion and wondered if he had lost his way. A gasoline station, a strip mall, and rows of cheaply constructed apartments lined the street where he expected to find her quiet bungalow.

His eyes wandered back and forth around the neighborhood. Everything looked different from what he remembered. He assumed it was merely a result of being so flushed with emotion when he had rushed after the mysterious woman. He guessed he could not have expected to remember with any certainty the details of the surrounding area, when his complete focus had been on her and the confusion she had created in him.

He had no indication of the time that had passed, except for the descending chill and the fading light. With some reluctance, he decided to pack away his waiting until the next day. He trudged back to the rear of The Beggars of Azure, looked one last time up and down the street to make sure he was not lost again, then stepped inside.

The dusty hermit in the carrel was still there, and still had not moved, as if time had turned him into a stone statue. Peter heard the roaring laughter of his friends from the café just beyond the shelves. He did not feel like facing them again; he also did not enjoy the prospect of returning to an empty house. Before he could decide his next course of action, the door bumped into his back. He stumbled forward, then turned around.

"Oh, dear! I am so sorry."

He recognized her immediately, and all his senses tunneled into singular focus. This day she wore a light sweater over her dress, and had pulled her hair back into a ponytail. She smiled. Her eyelid slowly drooped shut and then opened again. The only person Peter had ever seen do that was his mother, and he stared at her as if she was a miracle of time.

"It's okay," he said with wonder. "I shouldn't have been standing there. I was—Peter," he said, holding out his hand. "My name is Peter."

She took his hand. "Francine."

"It's my pleasure," he said.

She chuckled and began moving toward the interior of the bookstore. "Well, again, please accept my apologies."

"You like Robert Deansleigh," Peter said, following after her.

She turned and looked at him brightly. "Yes."

He nodded. "I noticed you a few days ago buying _Love Among the Maidens_."

"You did?" Her fingers played with a button on her sweater. "Have you read it?"

"Yes."

"I rather envy Evangeline Hull."

Peter smiled.

She gazed at him. After a moment, her eyelid drooped, alluring, and she said, "What did you notice, Peter?"

"In the book?" he asked.

"In me," she said, smiling. "You said you noticed me."

He thought better than to say that he knew her. She seemed like any woman he might befriend. But he was also convinced she was his mother, despite the impossibility.

"I just noticed," he said, "just how vivacious you were."

"I do not think I have ever heard anyone use that word before." Her eyes sparkled. "And to describe me..."

* * *

Without a word of preamble, Peter drew Violine into their home, into his arms. He tried to entrust his heart to his wife by pressing his confession directly to her lips with his own. He made desperate love to her before she even had time to unpack, and then held her as if fearful of being swept overboard a ship buffeted by red-sky storms.

The outpouring of emotion seemed, the next morning, a mere mask to hide the things he was not able to share with her. He knew better than to tell her what had happened. He could explain himself, he could give her all the details, and she would probably believe him. She might even say she understood. But no words could make her believe that time had somehow slipped gears, and he had met his mother, in his past or her future. What Violine would hear with her heart was that her husband had been smitten by another woman, and followed her.

For the first time in his life he felt a tinge of sadness that Violine had come home.

Thankfully, she had plenty to tell him about her three days of recording in New Amsterdam. There was the joy of working once again with Raul Bernardo; the obligatory pilgrimage to the Statue of Ecclesia; the delay of an afternoon when the conductor became ill after lunch. Peter asked lots of questions, probed her for details, but his attention soon wandered.

"I don't mind if you want to go to the bookstore for a while," Violine told him.

He wondered if she could perceive the secrets he was trying to hide. "Do you want to come along for a bit?"

"No, go spend some time with your friends."

Outside The Beggars of Azure, Peter peered through the front window, looking for possible explanations, but seeing only reflections of a man unhinged. Inside, he passed the counter where Callimachus was installed and thought the old proprietor appeared shrunken and frail. Then he heard bold laughter spill from the café—and there sat his friends, papers and coffee cups strewn about as if they had been there for hours.

"You look like you just came out of a reader's trance." James slid a glass of beer in front of Peter. "What happened?"

Peter simply shook his head and drained his glass.

"From the looks of you," said Cara, "I'd guess Violine is back home again."

"What do you mean?" asked Peter.

She shrugged. "You always seem a little distracted when she's home. I think it's sweet."

Peter sat with his friends, morose. He could not conceive that, though burdened with so many things to talk about, he could not find the words to do so.

After another beer, he said, "I've told you how my father hates television. He takes his entertainment on the radio and his news from the papers. Well, the other day he told me he turned on the baseball game and sat out on his balcony to listen."

"We used to sit out and shoot at squirrels," said James.

"We used to sit in the car and get drunk," said Cara.

"Well," continued Peter, "he said as soon as he got settled, the signal faded. He figured it was just some momentary interference, maybe a plane or something. But the signal didn't come back. He got tired of the static and tried to tune it in better. So he's just nudging the dial this way and that, when he picks up this old hollow voice that sounds vaguely familiar. He listens for a minute to this man describing the musical career of someone who again sounds familiar. He said it was like a presentation,"—and Peter dipped into his best imitation of his father's stern voice to quote—"'not that mindless chatter you hear these days.'"

" _Laudator temporis acti_ ," said James.

"Which is?" prompted Cara.

"A praiser of times past."

"I thought he must be going senile," said Peter. "He said he suddenly realized they were talking about Arnold Dale, a bandleader from the Fifties. I told him it was probably one of those old radio programs."

"Saturday night?" asked Cara.

Peter nodded.

Cara smiled. "There's a couple stations that replay those programs."

"Did the baseball game ever come back?" asked James.

Peter shook his head. "He lost all signal after that. He said there isn't even a station at that spot on the dial."

"Maybe he was picking up a bounce from New Amsterdam, or something," said Cara. "I've had that happen before, when conditions were right."

"Or maybe," said James, "he was picking up the real show—sort of a delayed live broadcast." He looked at the others, giving them a moment to contemplate the possibility. "I mean, what is radio but waves? If a radio wave can go out from New Amsterdam and bounce off a cloud or something and then end up here, why couldn't a signal originally broadcast in the Fifties go out to space and just finally be bouncing back down now?"

* * *

The next time Francine returned to the bookstore, she asked Peter to walk her home. Though at first he had considered this almost his right, it now seemed to him an honor.

Peter put all his senses on alert. He wanted to make sure he would recall exactly where they went, every sight and smell along the way.

They departed through the rear of the bookstore into a scene that appeared to Peter like a film set from the past. Awnings drooped like great eyelids over the front of buildings. Wooden shingles advertised a barber, a cobbler, a druggist, and a butcher. Along the roadway, which was paved with bricks, an old horse pulled an empty wagon. Peter did not know if he was noticing things for the first time, or if the way he saw the world around him had changed.

The unreality of their surroundings surprised him. But Francine's arm, linked with his, kept him calm and grounded. Life felt serene, and he felt safe.

As they turned into her street, the wind picked up. The moon peeked from behind wispy clouds that glided quick as ghosts. A perfect random pattern of tumbling leaves accompanied them along the sidewalk, and others began to leap down to join the procession. A sustained whirlwind raised the leaves aloft, swirling through the evening like oversized snowflakes. By the time they arrived at her house, they were enveloped in a snowstorm of red, gold, brown, and yellow.

With a sudden tug on Peter's arm, Francine ran up the walk to the cover of the porch, her laughter dancing among the leaves. She leaned against him breathless, as they stared out at the dry deluge.

"I have never seen anything like it," she said.

It looked to Peter as if time had again slipped its gears and was accelerating forward.

They smiled at one another. The night had been full of comfort and joy, but Peter felt awkward. He saw them in a scene from a film, a medium distance shot that showed them standing close on the dimly lit porch, the leaves floating around them to represent the perfect harmony of nature with this romantic moment. The script would next have him declare his love and kiss her passionately. But he knew this was his mother, in the flesh, and so his one and only desire was for her time.

"I had a beautiful evening, Peter."

He nodded. "I did, too."

"I am not sure," she said, indecisively. "I mean, I enjoy being with you. Is that wrong?"

He shook his head. "I know precisely what you're trying to say."

The door opened behind them and Peter turned around to face a man who appeared of a similar age as his father. The man smiled and held out his hand, but Peter could not move. He was frozen by what seemed to be a future image of himself.

"You must be Peter," the man said. "I am Francine's father, Earl Winfield."

And my grandfather, thought Peter.

He desperately wanted to hug the man, to tell him how much he missed him. He wanted to say so many things, things he had not had time to say, things he had been too young to articulate before his grandfather had died. But of course such actions would have made him seem crazy, and elicit suspicion. He could only take the man's hand and shake it with due respect.

His grandfather glanced at his mother. Peter smiled at her. She returned the smile, her eyelid drooping seductively, tugging at his heart.

"You look magnificent, Francine" her father complimented.

"Breathtaking," whispered Peter.

"Thank you," she replied. "But I am afraid it is time for me to give up all this admiration and go to bed."

"I'll never forget this night," said Peter.

"You mentioned you spend a good deal of time at the bookstore?" she asked.

"I do," he replied.

"Well, Father, I foresee I will be spending more time at the bookstore," and addressing Peter, she added, "and I do hope I will see you there."

Before either man could respond, she leaned forward and pecked Peter's cheek. Then, bowing her head, she grabbed her skirt and scurried into the house. Both men watched her fly away up the stairs.

"I am glad to have met you, Peter. Francine has spoken of you a lot. She considers you a good friend."

Cool drops of relief splashed Peter's face. "I'm glad."

"She is a very special girl," said her father.

"Impossible to believe."

Her father smiled. "What?"

Peter shook his head. "Oh, just her. I mean, she is very special."

Her father nodded. "You know, I have no doubt she is growing into an amazing woman, that she is on her way to a glorious life that is really just beginning. But when I saw her just now, looking so alive, I could not help wishing I could stop time, freeze the moment so it would last forever. I guess that is the curse of seeing your children grow up."

* * *

Despite Francine's declared intention of spending more time at The Beggars of Azure, she did not return for several days. They were cool damp days, and Peter wondered if she was simply trying to avoid the elements. But he also began to wonder if she was trying to avoid him. Perhaps she sensed some deeper emotion in Peter, something inappropriate. He assured himself his motives were pure; but he wondered if it was possible for a man to meet his mother as a young woman and not fall in love with her.

His will told him to go to her house, to find her. But he did not want to give her the wrong impression. He did not want to seem to be pressuring her. He was frozen by the fear of losing a living miracle.

On the third day, Peter resolved to unburden himself. He decided a healthy dose of perspective would be good for him.

When he was alone with his friend James, Peter asked, "Are you familiar with the antinomies of time?"

James stroked his beard in contemplation. "Is it science fiction?"

Peter shook his head and waved his hand. "Come on. I need to show you something."

They walked down the long rows of books, deep into the mysteries of the store. At the back door, Peter held the latch for a moment, and without a word, opened the door and stepped out the bookstore.

The day was beautiful, crystal clear with a breeze that had the slightest chill.

Peter looked around in confusion, then took two quick steps into the paved street. A car honked, and he jumped back on the curb. The scene looked nothing like it had the last time he had escorted his mother out the back door. Everything seemed faded and dirty with modernity.

"I don't understand," he said.

"What?" asked James.

The corner building was occupied by a franchise coffeehouse, not a druggist. The ramshackle newsstand that he remembered at the edge of the roadway had been replaced by a row of telephones. A bold bank of marble lined the street where he remembered seeing a butcher. A pedestrian bumped his shoulder, responding to an urgent beeping at his waist. Peter worried he was going crazy, losing his mind, hallucinating.

"What did you want me to see?" asked James.

Peter kicked a discarded soda can into the street. There was not one hint of a past or alternate reality he thought he had found out the back door of The Beggars of Azure. He wondered if the things he had seen and experienced had been nothing more than his creative imagination, or a waking dream.

"I don't know," said Peter in defeat. "I don't know."

He had failed twice in trying to return to whatever time or place it was in which his mother existed. He came to realize that, in some way he did not understand, he was prevented from going to her; she could only come to him.

Then, as miraculous as a leafstorm, she reappeared. Peter left James in the café without a word. In place of his mother's normal radiance, he found her head hung in dejection as she remained just inside the back door.

"I was beginning to worry—" He stopped midsentence.

"It is not you." Her mouth formed a polite smile. "I have not left my room for days."

"What happened?"

He stared at her, searching for some indication of her distress. She would not meet his gaze.

"I am sorry," she said. "I should not have come."

She turned to leave, but he grabbed her hand and she stopped. He wished he could tell her that he was her son. But he knew she would not understand, and she would reject him—or perhaps have him arrested—and he would end up losing her once more. He was determined not to lose her again.

"Please," he said. "Tell me what's wrong."

She turned back and threw her arms around him, sobbing uncontrollably. He held her and whispered in her ear as if he were comforting his child. After a minute, she sniffed, wiped her eyes on his sleeve, and drew back.

"Oh, Peter," she said, "it is horrible."

He took her hand and led her to a secluded table where they could sit and talk.

"What happened?"

"My boyfriend dumped me."

"Your boyfriend?"

"Stupid Bradley Lippert."

Peter had not even realized she had a boyfriend. He felt a twinge of jealousy and wondered if he had fancied himself in that role. Then he realized his feelings were in defense of his father.

"I know it sounds silly," she said.

How it broke his heart to see his mother's heart broken. He wished he could tell her all the good things that would happen to her, the wonderful life ahead of her, the joys she would experience—without this boyfriend.

"I wish there was something I could do," he said.

"He let me look forward to such wonderful things, all the happiness in the world. He made me believe in forever. Why would he do such a cruel thing?"

Peter wanted to tell her it was probably for the best. "I don't know," he said.

"I would bet you never stood up your girl."

"No," he said.

"Oh, why must bad things always happen to me?"

"You shouldn't think that way."

"But it is true," she said, as tears began to return. "You just do not understand."

Again, he did not know the right words to say. To her, it was the end of the world, and she could see no other reason to live. But he knew there was so much more to come.

"I must go home now," she said, standing. "Thank you for listening to me."

She turned and faltered toward the back door, as if she carried an immense burden on her back. He rose and followed. There was only one way he could help her, ease her burden, soothe her pain. He wanted to save her, but feared his action would somehow condemn himself.

On one side of the door was the past. On the other side was the future. For Peter and Francine, the present was but the door that swung between them. Such definitions of time were, after all, merely matters of perspective. He could not know for certain whether the times and places he had recently inhabited with his mother, which he thought of as the past, were not truly the present, and what he had already experienced in his life was the future.

She reached for the door. He opened his mouth and said her name again, and again she stopped.

"Will you come back tomorrow?" he asked.

"I do not know."

"I want to see you again."

She turned to him, her face wet with tears. "I know."

"Would you," he said, "I mean, I don't know if—"

Her right eye closed slowly, seductively. He felt the roots of his heart tremble.

"There's an art show this weekend, some friend of Cara's." He realized she did not know who Cara was. "Anyway, would you come with me?"

She smiled. "Peter, you are very kind—"

"No," he said. He did not want her to think that he pitied her. And yet it was true he hated to see her this way. But he also knew there was a small part of him that wanted just a little more time with her.

"Then what?" she asked.

"We could make a day of it. A picnic?"

She did not respond.

"I just..."

The story of his mother's life, it had always seemed, began when she married. But now Peter had learned of an unpublished prologue. He knew how the story would end, so he was not interested in plot. He cared only to know about the heroine, her motivations, her dreams and desires, her triumphs and failures, the themes of her life, the key to her character.

"...Yes?"

He wondered what she expected him to say.

She let go the door and crossed the three steps separating them. "Well?"

"I think we would have a very nice time together."

She smiled again, and her eyelid drooped. "I think we will."

* * *

"How did you meet Mom?" asked Peter.

"I met her at a dance." His father, usually so closed and uninterested in the past, smiled. "Me and some friends went there on the batter, to cause trouble, you know. I didn't even know how to dance. Who knows why we do the things we do as kids."

"I probably did some goofy things."

"Goofy is right," said his father. "Anyway, your mother caught my eye right away, dressed like the Christmas beef. She was looking all around the place, so I strolled over and said 'Can I help you?' And she said, 'I'm looking for someone.'"

"Who was she looking for?" asked Peter, though he feared what the answer might be.

"It didn't matter. I told her that maybe she shouldn't look so hard for something that wasn't there, because maybe then she would see what was right in front of her. So then she stopped looking around and looked directly at me." He looked directly at Peter without saying a word, as if trying to convey the feeling of that moment. "I had never been more scared in my entire life."

"Scared of what?"

"Scared of what?" He waved a dismissive hand at Peter. "Here was this vivacious woman giving me her complete attention, and I had no idea what to say or do. I only told her that to be cocky, you know, never thinking about what if she actually listened to me instead of just telling me to bugger off like I expected."

Peter chuckled at the unusual image of his father as a devious little instigator.

He shook his head. "Somehow her look, her response a complete surprise—somehow it changed me right then and there. I was different. I could feel it. At that moment I stopped being a boy and became a man." His smile returned. "A gentleman, in fact. Because I knew right away just from looking in her eyes that she was a real woman."

Peter wondered if that was the unidentifiable characteristic that had attracted him to his mother: pure womanhood.

"Somehow I knew she was challenging me to be serious, she was saying, 'OK, I see you, now show me you can be what I'm looking for.' I didn't know it at the time, but she was hurt right then. She expected nothing more than for me to back down, crawl back into a corner, run away at the most crucial moment and live up to her belief that all men were worthless. And I would have done just that. But, like I said, I changed in that very moment when I looked in her eyes. And so without even really knowing what I was doing, only thinking to myself, this is it, I held out my hand and asked her if she would dance."

"But you said you didn't dance."

"Son, when you have to dance for your life, you dance."

* * *

The day was picnic-perfect, a fantasy of spring misplaced in the middle of fall. Peter met Francine at the bookstore and they strolled to the park to eat and read to each other. He imagined they had done similar things together when he was a child, but he had not remembered. Only as an adult had such an event become for him a memorable occasion.

The sun rounded into afternoon. An old man ran by with his dog trotting alongside. A young woman in a bright green scarf skirted the park carrying a basket of groceries. A boy and a girl sat together on a park bench, and the girl leaned over, kissed the boy.

They spent over an hour watching people and inventing fantastic pasts and futures for them. At every available moment, Peter forced himself to behold and appreciate his mother in her flowered sundress, the way the light glowed off her cheek, the wisps of hair floating around her face in the breeze.

He went home with her so she could change her clothes before heading back toward the bookstore where they planned to meet his friends and go together to the art exhibit. As they walked, she again took his arm, as in the old days, as if he were a gentleman and she a lady. It made him feel like a gentleman. It made him feel proud. He had often experienced the same feelings with Violine. But somehow this was different. She was, as his father suggested, pure womanhood.

He imagined the boyfriend who had stood her up seeing them walking together, feeling remorse, feeling regret. And then the momentary satisfaction this thought gave him faded, because he cared nothing for that boyfriend. Or, perhaps, he owed everything to that boyfriend. He realized if the boyfriend had not stood her up, she might never have met her future husband, and his father.

It was all too confusing to contemplate. He simply forgot all his thoughts and enjoyed the moment.

This was what he thought so many men had dreamed of: being young again, but with the knowledge they had gained as old men. He could hold his mother's hand and enjoy it, actually commit the moment and the feeling to his adult memory and not suffer it to fade as childhood memories surely did. He could kiss her cheek and note her smell, not simply have it register within himself subconsciously. There was so much he wanted to do; so many possibilities seemed to exist there in the past that did not in the future.

They turned the corner and far ahead he could see the crooked tin flue on the ramshackle newsstand that stood beside The Beggars of Azure.

"How long can this last?" she asked, without apparent motive.

He smiled, fascinated, trying to read in her face the destination of her thoughts.

"I have a dear friend," she said, giving his arm an affectionate squeeze, "and a wonderful job. Do you think either thing inappropriate for a respectable woman?"

"I think friendship is rare, and should be valued highly when found."

If he had any doubts, her smile won him.

"As to the other," he said, "why shouldn't you work?"

"Well, I was brought up how to cook and wash and keep house. It was meant for my husband to earn a paycheck; but I just enjoy it so much."

"There's nothing wrong with that."

She tilted her head, as if taken aback, or perhaps amused. "Would you want a wife who worked in a place of business all day long, instead of keeping your house for you?"

His mother, he knew, would stay at home, keep their house, raise him and his sister. Only when Frannie was well into her teenage years would their mother go to work outside the home. But Peter was not sure if she gave up her work for his father, or for him. He thought of Violine and wondered if she would give up her professional career for a child.

"I would want a wife who was important to me," he said. "Whatever she wanted to do, inside or outside the home, I would support her decision."

His mother's eyes twinkled, and her lid drooped as if on cue. "What an unusual man you are."

They walked on in silence, admiring the day. Smells of baked goods suffused the air, and children shouted with urgency. His mother seemed to take delight in their games, in their tiny earth-shattering disputes.

As they approached the corner, Peter was overcome with a mad desire. They would not turn for the back of the bookstore as usual. He no longer cared about possibly destroying the stitches in the delicate lacework of time. This day he wanted to enter the front of the bookstore with his mother, as if he might bring her back, from the dead, from the past, into his own world.

"Should we cross here?" she said.

"I want to go this way," he said, a shiver of excitement running through his legs.

To distract himself from the nervous anticipation, he began telling her some story which he would be unable to remember later—which, later, it would not even matter to him—and she was looking at him, laughing, and he was rapt in her attention and delight.

They stepped into the roadway. Peter heard a horn as if inside his ear. He felt no impact, only a jerk on his arm.

When he turned around, he was unscathed at the edge of the roadway, and she was limp on the bricks in front of a trolley car.

"Francine!"

Peter stared in disbelief. His mother lay crumpled and still. The memory of her death struck him with horror. Then he had an awful fear for his own survival. The newspaperman came to her side and cradled her head. Peter's only thought was to call for help, and he darted toward the back door of the bookstore.

Inside, he went straight behind the coffee bar and grabbed the telephone. He dialed the emergency number, and in the few seconds he waited for an answer, James and Cara rushed to his side.

He barked at the operator to send an ambulance. She asked for details, but Peter had no patience. He thrust the phone into Cara's hand and headed back toward the scene, James in troubled pursuit.

He burst through the rear door and heard it slam behind him as he leapt into the street. Already a siren wailed in the distance. A moment later James and Cara emerged, and she called Peter's name. He suddenly stumbled to a stop, praying the voice was his mother's calling for help—but the street was empty.

* * *

Peter was racked with guilt. There was no doubt in his mind that he had been with his mother. Yet the sudden unexpected accident, leaving her, for all appearances, dead, meant she would never marry, and Peter would never be born. He had tried not to drop a wrench in the gears of time. But the moment had carried him away. He worried he had condemned himself, and his father, by his selfish actions. That could be the only reason the trolley had not touched him, in spite of the fact he was standing right beside her when it struck.

He telephoned Violine, once again across the sea, and they talked quietly about nothing in particular for two hours before she reminded him of the time difference, and begged to be allowed to sleep.

In those empty waking hours, he cursed himself for hubris. As an historian, he should have known better than to tinker with the past. And he cursed himself for stupidity. The bookstore was the only thing familiar to him—the image of the telephone behind the coffee bar had flashed instantly in his mind. He might have run into the butcher shop, which was closer by fifty feet perhaps, but without knowing where to look he would have lost time asking, and more than likely explaining. He had simply reacted. And he cursed himself for running heedlessly into the bookstore, despite a twinge of some unidentifiable apprehension as he let go the back door.

Once he fell asleep, he dreamed of a future. The Beggars of Azure crumbled into ruins. The city shivered with hunger, buffeted by a wild storm of blood. Cattle withered, stumbled, and fell to the ground where flies gathered to simmer on their bloated tongues. Stroke after stroke of lightning flashed down, igniting God's fire everywhere until the air glowed like smoking metal. Into this scene Peter stumbled, confused and covered in slime. Somehow he knew he had caused this destruction. This was his domain.

For days, he played over every detail of the accident. He grasped at the thought of the newspaperman by his mother's side, a tiny glimmer of hope that she would receive the help she needed to survive.

James telephoned and Cara visited. Peter was neither relieved nor irritated by either of his friends. He was in the worst place he had ever been, with no prospect of escape. He had killed the first person who had ever cared for and comforted him. Violine, the only other person who had done the same for him, was not there. And for days he had been unable to reach his father.

Peter wondered if this was how his father had felt after his mother had died the first time: alone at the edge of the abyss. Then he suddenly smiled at the faint ironic, though illogical, thought that the horrors he had done would at least now spare his father ever knowing the pain of Francine's death.

When Violine returned home late in the afternoon of the third day, Peter was, by then, so cold and lost he felt no relief. Her existence as his wife was no better proof of his own existence than his friends or anyone else around him. He felt that only the presence of his absent father could relieve him.

He spent an excruciating night with Violine. He looked at her as if she were a stranger. She slipped into bed warily. Her hair smelled like smoking metal. He could feel her looking at him, but he kept his back to her. He saw an image of himself lying among blood-soaked sheets, and he shivered. A hand brushed his shoulder, and he rolled out of bed. Despite the degree of his torment, he scorned the peace she tried to offer.

After a few moments she followed him downstairs. "God, I hate to see you like this," she whispered. "What happened?"

He shook his head, staring at the wall. He knew he could not look at anything again without being reminded of what he had done.

"You know I love you, Peter. You can tell me anything."

Whatever had happened was to others like the blank margins around the pages of text in the book of Peter's life. They might scribble their own perceptions or interpretations there, but they would never know what truly belonged there.

He turned to look into her despairing eyes, and said, "This is my hell."

She went back upstairs. He heard her weeping, then silence. He recognized the low murmur of her voice, and assumed she was calling a friend, a doctor, someone.

He stared, unseeing.

When the murmur ceased, he saw her form at the edge of his vision, probably checking on him. Then she retreated, and the silence of nonexistence blanketed the house for the night.

But night and day no longer had any meaning for Peter. There was just breathing to the steady slide show of images that flashed behind his blind eyes. All lies, he told himself. Though they had the semblance of life, he had no expectation of the imminent arrival of Death. He knew the waters of Purgatory were too kindly for drowning.

The light of morning brought only a dimmer focus on the images of his torment. They were a sort of waking dream, and though he could not control what he saw, he could prevent himself from deriving any hope or satisfaction from them.

Violine set a tray with oatmeal and fruit in front of him. He wondered how she did not know they would still be there, untouched, when she returned. He heard her voice again on the telephone, this time more resolute, but he could not make out any words.

She returned an hour, or a day, or perhaps years later to collect the wasted breakfast.

"You're going to make yourself ill," she said.

"I'm not even alive," he replied.

She banged the tray and dinnerware in the kitchen. The sharp sounds of frustration continued without any effect on him. Then the telephone rang, and he jumped, startled. He heard Violine's voice again, this time pleading. The next moment she was at his side, holding out the telephone.

"It's your father," she said.

* * *

"Dad, did Mom—" Peter stopped. He had recovered from despair with the knowledge nothing in the present had changed. By the same evidence, he realized the mysterious woman he had met could not have been his mother. He was left with confusion. "Was she ever in an accident that you know of?"

He stared at his son. "What makes you ask?"

"Well—"

"You know we never meant to hide anything from you kids. It's just that we didn't want you to think anything was wrong with her."

He had thought he did not know his mother's past. He had imagined a secret life, a life incomprehensible to him, but only because it had predated his own existence. And a few things had genuinely surprised him: that he resembled his grandfather so much; that his mother was on her way toward a career, at a time when there was no such thing for a woman; that if not for the stupidity of an unknown boyfriend, Peter might never have been born.

He nodded gravely. "What happened?"

"She was hit by a trolley car."

His heart clenched, and tears erupted from his eyes.

"Her elbow was sprained," his father continued, "but a muscle in her leg was torn pretty bad, and a collapsed lung. She never really recovered from that."

Peter recalled that his mother had often experienced a shortness of breath, and she always had difficulty walking up the stairs.

"The doctor said he was surprised her injuries weren't more extensive. Of course she had lots of bumps and bruises, and—oh, a broken fingernail that she would have made you think was the worst that had happened."

Peter laughed through his tears with his father. He wondered if his mother always remembered him. Did she carry for her whole life, like a keepsake locked away, memories of the man she had met in the bookstore, of the picnic they shared, and the look of wonder on his face as they watched the leafstorm? Perhaps she named her first son after the memory of that man.

"I'm sorry, Peter." His father reached out and touched his hand.

"No," Peter replied, shaking his head and wiping his wet cheeks, "I'm fine. I'm happy, really. I love you both." He smiled with trembling lips. "And I miss her."

"Me, too."

They were both silent for several minutes while Peter recovered and watched his father blink away his tears. Peter looked around the room, enjoying the sunlight, savoring the clear recollection of his mother as a young woman. From then on, he and his father could share that past. They could harvest the memories they had gathered together, and would feast.

"And you met at a dance," said Peter, "so she was fully recovered by then."

His father smiled. "She could barely get around, but the doctor said it would be good for her. That's probably the real reason I danced with her, because she sure wasn't going to be any better than me." He laughed and then in a conspiratorial tone, added, "And, of course, I knew she couldn't get away."

"At the hospital," Peter said.

"Their annual fund-raiser, our annual hell-raiser. It was the first time I didn't get hustled out by my pants." His father smiled broadly. "Pretty lucky, huh?"
The Living Dead

The last day of Ezra's life dawned clear and dry.

The morning before Ezra's death dawned clear and dry.

It was Sunday, so he had slept late. He and his friends were going to visit Pavko and Milada and their newly born second son George. Afterward, he hoped, he and Cara could go to dinner and spend some time alone together.

He dressed with that last hope in mind, choosing his only pair of pressed pants and jacket. Beside her wardrobe, even his best clothes were as mere rags. His friends would surely take note of the ploy, but he was in earnest.

Just as he opened the door to leave, the telephone rang. He went to the side table to answer.

"Ezra, I'm glad I caught you," said Cara, breathlessly.

"Are you okay?"

"I'm fine. I just don't need a ride to Milada's."

His hope disintegrated and he stood holding the receiver to his ear, unable to respond.

"Ezra, are you there?"

"I'm here," he said quietly.

"Did you hear what I said?"

"You don't need a ride."

He heard a muffled voice, as if she had covered the mouthpiece. Then she said, "I have to go."

"Maybe when we leave we I can take you out for dinner?" he said.

"I can't go, Ezra. That's why I don't need a ride. Tell Milada I'm sorry."

Before he could reply, Cara had disconnected the call.

Now he could take a more direct and faster route to Pavko and Milada's apartment, and so he had time to spare. To his despair, all he could do was wonder why Cara had canceled at the last minute.

He wished he could go back to sleep, but he wasn't tired. He wished he could inebriate his sorrows, but he had nothing to drink.

After pacing and puzzling for five minutes, he left. He decided to follow the side streets, so to keep out of the main traffic and to extend his unexpectedly shortened travel time. He never enjoyed the awkward attention of being the first to arrive at any gathering. In a failed attempt to take his mind off Cara, he tossed around ideas of a lovelorn swain for his next novel.

In one section of the street, children were playing stickball. Further along an enormous purple ball bounced into the road. Ezra stopped easily and allowed a chubby child to waddle out and retrieve it safely. He wondered if he would ever have a family of his own.

At the edge of the business district, he noticed an old man pushing a cart full of goods from the market. Several people congregated at a tram stop, smoking and laughing. Ezra stopped and proceeded at the two major intersections. Then, passing several cross streets, he saw no one else around.

He imagined himself a stranger entering a deserted city and learning the history of its demise through the books left behind. It seemed a more promising premise than the lovelorn swain, but he knew such a story would be better suited to Peter's voice and style.

A black panel truck shot out from an access road to an empty factory. The driver never even slowed down for the stop sign, or looked for cross traffic. Ezra reacted, slamming his foot on the brake while spinning the wheel to the left, with only the hope of reducing the impact of the crash.

The car spun. The side of the truck loomed in the passenger window. Ezra flinched, anticipating a barrage of metal and glass.

He heard his tires screeching, his horn honking, and Cara saying, "Tell Milada I'm sorry."

There was nothing he could do to halt the slide of the car across the pavement. He turned, to protect his face, and out the driver window he saw the other side of the black panel truck moving away.

When the car come to a stop, Ezra stumbled out the door and stared at the truck, stopped in the middle of the intersection. The driver appeared around the front of the truck, his hands held up. Ezra stepped forward.

"Hey, man, I'm sorry," pleaded the driver.

Ezra ignored him and stepped to the side of the truck. He stared at the pavement where swirling rubber tracks down the center of the intersection marked the path his car had taken. But the clearance below the truck didn't extend above his waist.

"What happened?" asked the driver.

"You cut in front of me," mumbled Ezra.

"I thought you were gonna T-bone me." The driver glanced at the pavement, then at Ezra's car, then back at Ezra. "You passed right through."

Ezra shook his head. "Impossible."

The driver leaned forward to look at Ezra more closely. "You're okay, aren't you? Nothing broken or bleeding?"

Ezra breathed deeply and checked his clothes for any sign of injury.

The driver laughed. "It's like Somebody wanted you to have a second chance."

Ezra wiped a speck of dust from his glasses and stared at the truck driver.

The driver took a step back. "You're not going to sue me, are you? You're not hurt."

"What chance do I have when I'm already dead?"
The Court of Love

One day, as Pierre de Boscosel de Chastelard talked of poetry and patronage with his friend and mentor the Comte de Damville, he was ambushed by fate. Damville offered Chastelard letters of introduction to the court of the Queen, who, he said, was a great lover of lyric. Chastelard had already heard the princess complimented in the verse of Étienne de Maisonfleur. But it was Damville's whispered aside that he would abandon his wife for just one night with the Queen that inspired a mimetic desire in Chastelard for which he expiated with his head.

Marie Stuart, Dowager of France and Queen of Scotland, was a twenty-one-year-old widow seeking her destiny in a world of men. Tall of stature with a swan-like neck, she possessed a talent for dancing and attracting admirers. Bright golden-red hair and heavy eyelids suggested a woman of sultry passions lurked beneath her regal bearing. Fluttering eyelashes and wan, pensive looks lured all souls towards her like a net.

Since the age of thirteen, Marie had maintained as one of her duties a cultivation of the lettered arts. Damville's letters gained Chastelard inclusion in the retinue of glamor and entertainment that was to accompany Marie to Scotland. During the voyage, he recited a verse that he dedicated to the Queen, averring, though moon and stars be hidden on the blackest of nights, her eyes would light up the whole sea with their fire. Marie found the gallant poet's ardent and frivolous lyrics suitable in a chivalrous man of literary aspirations. Though he was to return to France after Marie's journey was complete, he would always find himself welcome at her court.

His return to Holyrood was not long delayed. Marie received the poet with a soft, sweet, and agreeable speech, at once majestic and modest. Such a gracious reception, though given to all, Chastelard took as amorously special for him. Thus emboldened, and burning with epic lyrics of love, he soon found opportunity to await Marie in her own chamber, by sneaking inside and hiding under the bed. His presence was discovered by Marie's ladies-in-waiting who, though finding Chastelard attractive in appearance, were appropriately scandalized. As a woman, Marie enjoyed the romantic attentions she was paid, but as a Queen she could never allow her majestic reputation to be blackened by such rakish actions.

Though Chastelard swore he would do anything his lady love asked, he would not abide her command to return to France. He believed her reprimand was attributable to the presence of her ladies-in-waiting, and had she alone found him, she would have forgiven him with complete submission. In secret he followed Marie to Burntisland Castle and flattered his way into the graces of one lady-in-waiting. She helped to disguise Chastelard in dress and wig, then installed him in an ante-room to Marie's chambers. A scratch at the door signaled the Queen was alone, and Chastelard burst in, panting with passion and making audacious advances. Marie cried for help. The love-struck poet backed away, assuring her he had intruded only to explain his first intrusion: while walking in search of inspiration for his verse, he had been overcome with sleep and sought the nearest place to rest. This account of his actions touched her woman's heart, but did nothing to stop her Queen's mind from seeing his boldness as rashness, and his fault of loving her too well a crime.

Upon the scaffold, the Earl of Mar and Murray pronounced the sentence of _lèse majesté_. Chastelard bowed his head, confident Marie was watching from the castle windows with tears in her eyes. Chastelard rejected the services of the Queen's priest, not because he was a Huguenot, but because he preferred the gods of verse provide him with absolution. Taking from his pocket a volume of Ronsard, Marie's favorite French poet, he recited part of the hymn to Death: "I salute you, happy and profitable Death, since I must die, grant that I may suddenly encounter you either for the honor of god, or in the service of my lady love." He then turned to face the unseen Queen, and concluded, "Adieu, thou who art so beautiful and so cruel, who killest me, and whom I cannot cease to love!" What that avowal imported, lovers will divine.

But for his madness of love, Chastelard would have left no shadow or shred of himself behind.

* * *

One day, as Marie-Henri Beyle accompanied his friend Pietro Missirilli to a salon often attended by illustrious Carbonari, he was ambushed by fate. He held out his hand to meet General Dembrowski, while his eyes met a woman who looked like Luini's depiction of Salome. The wife of the Polish officer, Métilde Viscontini would never allow Beyle to cross the line of friendship with her. And fallen immediately and irrevocably in love, Beyle would be haunted by this woman's melancholy beauty for the remainder of his life.

When his first encounter with Metilde had ended, Beyle stepped into the broad street, gazing at the facades of deteriorated buildings dull against one of Milan's famous grim skies, and declared his surroundings the most beautiful place in the world.

Beyle was a great admirer of the music of Rossini, which would induce in him a state of reverie that was matched by the presence of this woman, and she became the great musical theme of his heart. He could not hide the outward signs of his inner feelings, for a delicate sweat would accumulate on his brow and he would tug at the side of the beard that many thought was pasted on his rotund face. Pietro warned his friend to forget Metilde, to which Beyle replied, "A woman can always be seduced, and it is the duty of every man to try."

Beyle found Metilde to be a clever woman of sensibility and strong character, dedicated to the national cause. His every thought and action was in service of his duty to try to seduce her, yet the lengthy letters he would write to her were full of assurances of his pure intentions. Once she accepted those assurances, he pushed further and swore that anything that seemed to her indelicate was nothing but the desire of a supplicant lover longing to be near his beloved. This the good lady would not accept. She restricted Beyle's visits to twice a month, and she warned him his letters should show no traces of love, his feelings for her should never again be mentioned. Beyle abided the conditions for a year, all the while believing that his obedient discretion was soon to be rewarded by Metilde's affections.

Beyle knew one of the surest methods for winning a woman's love was not to shower her with gifts, but to oblige her to give him a gift. In Metilde's younger days, a sculptor had made a plaster cast of her left hand as an offering of love. Beyle expressed a desire to possess this cast, which Metilde gave him out of consolation. To Beyle, his beloved had granted him a small wish and had given him a small piece of herself, a sure sign she would soon grant and give him all.

One day, Metilde travelled to Volterra to visit her two sons. The hope that Beyle harbored suggested that Metilde took this trip alone to give herself the opportunity to succumb to his passion. He followed her, disguised with a bushy moustache, a velour hat, green spectacles, and waistcoat of Werther blue, watching from the shadows for the right moment to make his appetent presence known. What glory was his when he realized his beloved recognized him and was giving him meaningful looks!

The letter that would summon him to her arms arrived. He congratulated himself on at last becoming her secret and familiar companion. With adolescent excitement he opened the prized invitation and instead found a cold command not to compromise her any more. She would never accept anyone as a paramour, and now she could no longer accept him as a friend.

The pendulum of passion swung from the fierce hope of winning her favors to the crushing fear of having already lost them. Had Beyle known only satisfaction, he would have become disappointed in Metilde; had he known only frustration, he would have forsaken her for another. But in the space between these two shifting poles, the flame of his passionate love kept burning brightly. In Beyle's mythology of love, what mattered most was inner tension and desire.

Every letter Beyle sent to justify his feelings and behaviors was returned by Metilde unopened. Beyle was grim as the Milan skies. He spent hours sitting at his writing desk, contemplating the cast of Metilde's left hand. A slight crookedness in her ring finger drove him into paroxysms of passion he had never known. The memento was now all he had left of her, of his life.

Beyle's friend Pietro tried to relieve him of the obsessive rumination over his shame and humiliation. Beyle instead used his obsession to stimulate his imagination into producing an eternal book for Metilde, written to her alone, about her alone, and for her alone to read, by which she would understand him. Fear of defeat returned to hope of victory.

Beyle spent months writing his great meditation on love, regaining his emotional equilibrium. Then his romantic purgatory was brought to a sudden end by an order from the Austrian police to leave Milan, on suspicion of plotting with the Carbonari. How to explain such a cruel twist of fate, when on the horizon he had just sighted the mirage of joy and reconciliation?

The heart can find justification for feelings and behaviors that reason cannot abide. Beyle knew that Metilde was not unaware of his appreciation of Italy, and his attendant political interests. It was because of a shared spirit of nationalism that they had first been introduced to one another by Pietro Missirilli. She could only have hoped to free Beyle from his revolutionary acquaintances so that he could devote himself to her. In order to do so, she had betrayed his political leanings to the Austrian authorities.

Despite the irony of the actions he believed Metilde had taken, Beyle felt lost, abandoned, and impoverished. He now faced a future in which he would never see her again. He considered killing himself, then worried what his friends would think of such a suicidal passion for a woman he had not even slept with. Yet he could think of nothing worse than to live without passion—it was the pure essence of Beylisme.

He turned the mad catastrophe of his love into a scientific treatise. In his eternal book he dissected his unrequited love, he classified it, and he indexed it. With ambition, imagination, and vigor he transmuted a lived reality of indignity, selfishness, and debacle into a dreamed reality of romance, passion, and delight.

Upon publication, Metilde was sent a personalized copy of the book written to her alone, about her alone, and for her alone to read. She did read it, and took it to be a most cruel revenge, her behavior towards Beyle punished by laughing. She burnt the book, thereby ensuring the flame of Beyle's passion would never be extinguished.

His friends began to wonder what had become of Beyle after he disappeared. He began a career of compensatory fiction in which his life was embellished with success. He produced romantic heroes whose soaring passion for women enslaved by timidity and prejudice doomed them to sacrifice themselves. For the first time in European fiction the Outsider appeared, a character at odds with society, and Beyle's metamorphosis was complete. Errico Beyle, Milanese, who lived, wrote, and loved, had become the great writer Stendhal.

* * *

One day, as Francesco di Petracco was heading across the public square of Avignon on his way to deliver to his friend Soranzio a copy of the Bergando manuscript from the eminent library of Giacomo Colonna, he was ambushed by fate. Midst a scene of dole and penance appeared a vision of loveliness emerging from the church of Santa Chiara. The wife of Hugues II de Sade, Laura de Noves would turn down all advances Petrarch would make towards her. And fallen immediately and irrevocably in love, Petrarch would be haunted by this woman's beauty for the rest of his life.

Petrarch was a man of extraordinary talent, one of the first great Renaissance men. What most people knew him for was his poems of love written to a woman who did not return his feelings. And what we know of that love today is based upon what he wrote. This has led many to question the true nature of his relationship with and his feelings for Laura.

Whenever he recounted many parts of his life, Petrarch did not hesitate to change a time or a place or even a person in order to create a better presentation, a more engrossing story. He wrote and revised the events of his life into a drama dripping with meaning. Some scholars have even suggested the name by which Petrarch designated his beloved might have been chosen because of its kinship with laurel, which represented the poet's other grand desire: fame. Petrarch's legendary _Letter To Posterity_ , which purported to tell his own life, was a carefully edited and revised account intended for general consumption.

Colonna, with whom Petrarch resided at Avignon, questioned Laura's existence. Petrarch replied that he wished "she indeed had been a fiction and not a madness." He felt no less than captured by her person. Considering he might never have even addressed her, his description of his experience of Laura bespoke of exaggerated comparisons and conceit: "born to inspire, obsess and also to distract, perhaps even to mislead, she comes close to signifying life itself: lovely but transient, beguiling, exhilarating; hence the tenderness, the melancholy, the devotion, the irresolution, the yearning forever destined to be unfulfilled."

Petrarch also was a great lover of books. He believed they were not mere objects, but emanations of personality, and he made friends with every one he read. Unable to win the heart of Laura herself, he must have imagined the book of his love poetry as the next best thing, and wrote it to serve his hopes and desires. By this the love he could not achieve in life has become immortal.

In the series of poems which he titled Triumphs, Petrarch gave form to his fantasy. In the _Triumphus Pudicitie_ , we read of Laura and her Virtues defeating Cupid in battle. Far from having his spirit crushed, Petrarch was instead inspired by his lover to forsake what he called "the vulgar path and ordinary trade."

The _Triumphus Mortis_ is the final reconciliation of Petrarch's love and its rejection. Laura appears to him in a vision on the night following her death. She grieves for him because he is still alive and can not enjoy the greater gladness she has found. During their conversation, he asks her if, within the bounds of honor, she ever returned his feelings. She claims indeed to have cared for him, but to have tempered their relations for his sake. He doubts her, and she admonishes him, explaining that what he sought to disclose to the world, she sought to hide. Her proof was in acceptance of the gift of his verse with the song " _Dir piu non osa il nostro amor_ "—our love dares not say more. She leaves him with the assurance his time on earth without her shall not be much longer.

Though Petrarch's sonnets to Laura produced no more results than did his scathing speeches to the corrupt clergymen of his time, death soon joined him with Laura and won his fame.

* * *

One day, as Henrik Ibsen was strolling through the summer in Gossensass, he was ambushed by fate. Seated with a book on a bench amidst squirrels and birds, framed by the vibrant colors of nature, a princess smiled. In that moment, Ibsen conceived an idyll of love from little more than a look and desire. The elegant, soft-spoken eighteen-year-old Viennese socialite called Emilie Bardach would spend the rest of her life tempering Ibsen's ardor and fighting his overpowering will.

Though the gulf between their worlds was large, including the forty-two years difference in age, Ibsen was intent on overcoming all obstacles to the object of his desire. He termed his passion "a simple necessity of nature." Emilie, according to some scholars, suffered from an assortment of psychological disorders collectively termed _mal du siècle_. To them she would have been ripe for Ibsen's attentions.

By her own admission he inspired her with his passion, and she thought him no ordinary man, but a man who dominated the world. By the playwright's own admission, he had been a demonic writer.

In _The Master Builder_ Ibsen wrote of life taking hold of a man and transforming him into poetry. He believed in finding truth through pain and renunciation. Perhaps for no other reason, the breakdown of Ibsen's relationship with Emilie was inevitable.

Emilie soon came to view Ibsen's love as a mirage in the desert of her life. She would never marry, and the playwright would try to forget his passion for her. In the end, spouting Ibsenities into the cold Norwegian night, he indicted her as a bird of prey that had sought him as her victim. If he had lived long enough, he might one day have accused her in a dramatic Court of Love.

* * *

One day, as Johann Wolfgang Goethe took a break from the Marienbad spas to pay a visit to an old acquaintence at Trebivlice Chateau, he was ambushed by fate. Amalie von Levetzow had met the great writer and scientist many years earlier at a local theatre, and ever since she had arranged her family's annual holiday to coincide with Goethe's. Though he found Amalie to be a thoughtful and intelligent woman, his first interest in her was for her husband, a chamberlain and lord steward in Mecklenburg-Schwerin. He had often enjoyed the hospitality of Amalie, even staying with her family at the chateau, but he did not recall ever meeting the oldest daughter. Now Ulrike von Levetzow had come of age and could appear among the wealthy and privileged in the spa triangle of Bohemia, where she was to become Goethe's last love.

The German man of letters had extensive experience in love. Indeed, some scholars suggest he had never spent a single day of his adult life out of love. The list of women who were the objects of his affection was long, longer even than Rilke's. And though the duration of each love varied from days to decades, the intensity was always powerful. After seventy-two years, the intensity of his feelings for a ravashing seventeen-year-old maiden was strong as ever.

The day after they met, Goethe inscribed and gave to Ulrike a copy of his newly published _Wilhelm Meister's Wanderjahre_. Though he had not yet met her when he wrote the book, he now believed he had somehow already known her, that something of her soul inhabited the book. She seemed to enjoy reading the book, perhaps only as a girl would enjoy a book that her grandfather had given to her. Goethe imagined that every night while reading in bed Ulrike would fall into a blissful sleep, the book held tight to her breast.

Goethe and Ulrike did not miss a day walking together. At first she accepted his interest with childlike impartiality, and referred to him to her mother as a kind old gentleman. But their first summer spent in each other's company stretched from July to September, allowing ample time to learn about one another. To Goethe's delight, they discovered they shared an interest in the natural sciences, by which Ulrike developed a fondness for him. Goethe imparted his knowledge with enthusiasm, and Ulrike soon had amassed an impressive collection of rocks and minerals. At the end of their holiday, Goethe made the short journey to the Vestrev mine where he purchased a necklace from which dangled a small golden key encrusted with the Pyrope garnet native to the region. On the final day of the season together, Goethe presented to Ulrike this gift of remembrance and promise. She locked the chain around her neck, and between her white breasts the jewel appeared like a blood red fire, the flames of which became engraven on Goethe's heart.

By the next June, not even the hot mineral baths could cool Goethe's desire. When Ulrike arrived, he was beside himself with joy to see she still wore the garnet around her neck. She came full of acquired knowledge about gemstones, and appeared eager to match wits with Goethe. Their attachment deepened through the long walks of endless summer days, and she spoke to him with excitement in her voice. Did he know the garnet was believed to fulfill the wishes of sweethearts? Did he know the garnet was reported to aid in the connection of our conscious mind and our unconscious? Did he know the garnet was thought to give light to the dark undiscovered portion of our souls? Did he know the garnet was used by healers to help open and purify passages to the heart? All Goethe had known for sure was that the garnet was Ulrike's birthstone, and it was a symbol of his love.

When they saw each other again the following year, Goethe thought she had become the loveliest of the loveliest. Somehow he managed to follow his daily routines when not around Ulrike. In Marienbad, however, everything turned to her. With Ulrike beside him, he saw things in sharper focus. The spa had become like a festival site, a place outside everyday life. The steam, the landscape, the luxury, and the intemperance combined to heighten and intensify every experience for Goethe. In Marienbad, they both crossed some invisible threshold into an existence where everything was possible and nothing was denied.

This burning infatuation led Goethe to consult the local doctor as to whether marriage might be detrimental to his health. Still in his vigor, Goethe hoped to take Ulrike with him back to the court of Weimar, where she would lead an aristocratic life as his wife. He dispatched a message to Karl August, asking the Grand Duke to propose marriage to Ulrike on his behalf. Though Karl August painted life at court in colors more luminescent than garnet, and used all his ducal influence, Goethe's proposal was rejected. Amalie von Levetzov told her old friend that the difference in age between him and her daughter was too great. Although the future would present Ulrike with proposals from another fifteen suitors, she would remain single until her death.

The relationship ended, though not without progeny. Goethe left for Weimar with passion unrequited and uncontained. During the return trip, he composed a sensitive and searing poem of suffering. The Marienbader Elegy became part of his _Trilogie der Leidenschaft_ , but at the moment of composition it was a complaint to the gods for abandoning him when he had been in his most passionate condition.

* * *

One day, as Charles de Sainte-Maure, duc de Montausier was returning from a tour of service in Saxe-Weimar, he was ambushed by fate. He rode to the gate of his ancestral home where arrived at the same moment a message that his brother had died. What affected him most about this news was that his brother's death left him, Montausier, the foremost aspirant for the hand of Mademoiselle Julie-Lucine d'Angennes, the chief attraction at the Hotel de Rambouillet. She was said to be surrounded with an atmosphere of perpetual sunshine. With amiable temper, ready wit, and gracious manners she did win without effort the love of men and women alike.

At her mother's eminent salon, Julie was the soul of the serious conversations, as well as of the amusements that relieved them. Often the Precieuses indulged in practical jokes and surprises, and not a week passed without a grand mythological fete. They would drape themselves as antique gods and goddesses, and assume some _nom de parnasse_ , by which they would address one another. These courtly dames and plumed cavaliers would discuss dreams of disillusioned lovers, recite romances of the troubadors, and enact Arcadian fantasies, making love in pastoral fashion, with pipe and lute. Montausier, though, longed for something much more, and for seven devoted years, he tried and failed to penetrate the gay heart of Julie.

Informed by a dream of his dead brother, Montausier conceived of a gallant gift: a collection of verse, composed by nineteen of the salon members, to celebrate the charms of Julie. Like a fine bouquet, this was wrapped and delivered to Julie on her fete day in 1641, along with a quarto by Montausier's own hand, containing the madrigals alone, without illustration. Four years later, as crowning proof of his love, the Huguenot Montausier converted to Catholicism, and through the earnest entreaty of her family, "the incomparable Julie" yielded to Montausier's persevering suit and became his wife. So, much adoration did finally touch the most capricious and obdurate of hearts.

Julie had kept two books in her personal library. _La Guirlande_ she cherished, not because it was a gift from her long-suffering husband, but because in it she could read of her own endless allure. _L'Histoire de Gustave Adolphe_ provided her with an ideal hero to which her affinity for Montausier would never compare, and proving Montausier's religious conversion meant less to Julie than to her family. "The incomparable Julie," once become lady-in-waiting to Queen Marie, even encouraged and abetted King Louis' passion for Louise de la Vallière. Pure as the bloom of the orange tree Julie surely was not.

The unique gift of _La Guirlande_ , meant as a tribute to the graces of Julie-Lucine d'Angennes, instead proved a grand memorial to Montausier's patient and enduring devotion. Though he never left her, the charms of Julie seemed to have wilted fast as flowers once Montausier had won her.
The Freedom of Pavko Krizova

Once upon another time, the extraordinary sound of music brought a young man called Pavko Krizova to his window. He had slept late that day, it being a Saturday and the chores such as queuing all morning for bread able to be put off until the following day. With any luck the light snow that had already begun to coat Barungrad would by then be replaced by a low-slung sun that would help dispel the despair. Of course it meant he would spend most of this day hungry, but that was not new to him. Sleep helped him ignore it. And as long as there was enough food to keep Milada fed, that was enough for him. But now this music in the streets had awakened him too early. And he could not simply ignore it, like the hunger, and roll over and curl tightly against Milada and forget for a while longer the world around them. This was a sound he had never heard before. This was music, not like the regimental dirges and oppressive hymns of the Regime, but light and joyous. This was music that drew everyone to their windows. This was music that rose to the sky and made him want to sing. Indeed, he quickly recognized the voices that followed the approach of the drums and cymbals and something he thought must be, despite its improbability, a clarinet.

"We are free, Friends!"

"Jakupovic is dead!"

"We are free!"

Pavko stood at his window and watched the flag-waving procession in the street below make its celebratory way towards the Lebenbrucke. Young people danced and shouted and ran about as if they had all lost their logic and their moral compass. The noise was unlike anything he had heard before, a happy din that seemed to feed on itself, happier for its complete opposition to the numbed silence of oppression, which had preceded it for so many years. The people exercised their newfound voices like babies. Pavko had never known this sound, and it frightened him.

One of the first things the Regime did after it came to power was shutter all the asylums and turn the people into the streets. They seemed to have learned a lesson of history that they needn't kill those helpless people, but simply withdraw the government safety net and they would die on their own. But as Pavko stared into the streets, he felt he could not tell the lunatics apart from everyone else. Freedom had apparently made them all insane. And looking across into other windows in other buildings he saw people just like himself, staring down at the frenzied mob in silent fear. Where once he had seen resignation in the faces of these older people, now he saw misery.

The implications kept Pavko silent. He was trying to understand what this all meant. He knew his life was changing, would be changed by the change of living going on all around him, sweeping him into its current. But he kept himself firmly on the banks, safe in his flat until he could determine where the current would take him, where the people would drop the silt of this newfound freedom it carried, what body of water they would empty into.

Now he searched the crowds for Milada, who had not been content to stand aside with him, but had eagerly jumped into the river below. He thought he could just see her head, appearing and then disappearing in the crowd at the end of the street before it turned east behind the buildings. His heart ached. He wanted to be with her, to experience this moment with her, to share her joy. He didn't care for the rest of his country, he cared only for what this freedom meant to Milada.

She had dreamed so long of freedom, and now she finally had it she would take full advantage. She sought only to be herself. She wanted to stay out late into the night and early morning and not have to explain herself to an authority. She wanted to express herself without fear. She wanted to be able to seek her own truths, to make her own discoveries, to decide for herself what was acceptable and what not. She wanted a direct experience of everything.

He wanted her to be there, in the window with him, sharing his trepidation, for he knew the risks of freedom. He had read reports from other countries of an increase in crime with the rise of freedom. Under the various autocratic governments people had been too fearful of punishment to commit random crimes. What crime did exist in those regimes was sanctioned by the government itself. But with freedom came the ease of random crime, of opportunist crime, where a man might, for example, steal an old woman's purse, because he believes there will be no unhappy consequences for himself. He can dispose of the evidence, he can have a friend provide an alibi, he can get a lawyer to represent him in a court, and the chances were good he could get away without punishment. But the autocrats needed no proof, no court, no procedure. They would come to his flat in the middle of the night and take him away.

To Pavko, freedom was a child that would test its parents. He knew it would improve, mature into liberty after suffering its growing pains. He had dreamed so long of freedom, but now he feared the free future more than the proscribed past.

* * *

For days Pavko did not eat or drink. He did not go out or invite in. He did not speak to any one, because without Milada there was no one left in the world. His father tried to talk him into another endless game of cards, but all his interests had suddenly died. He existed solely in waiting for Milada to return.

Pavko believed first that she would spend a night in a hotel, or in some private place, just to have a drink and a shower and reflect. When she did not return the next day, he had to reassess his beliefs.

What Pavko suspected most was that it had been the Regime that had kept he and Milada together. They had both shared only one thing in common, and that was a dream of freedom. Now the dream had come, he feared Milada had found no more reason to stay with him.

He began to replay those last days before she left, hunting for hints, looking for explanations. At first he could recognize nothing unusual. But as days passed, he began to suspect every little hesitation, every momentary separation, of influencing her leaving. He felt betrayed, and desired nothing more than to avenge himself with the first woman he met on the street.

But then he thought perhaps this was a test. Were they, or perhaps was God, testing his faith, his trust, his ability to remain true to Milada in the absence of any moral imperative?

He hated the new Republic. Milada was as much a child of the revolution as anyone he had ever met, and despite his love for her, he hated her for it. Her leaving was a victory of nihilism over him. She had made her choice, and he was faced with the decision to either follow her into the sort of debased existence he saw all around him, or try to forget her and all he had ever believed in and find another living.

Pavko tried to fool himself into waiting with faith in her devotion. He entertained the belief that each passing day brought him closer to the day she would return. He hoped she would return, they would be reunited, because he refused to believe she would leave at the first note of music without any explanation. He began to think the failure must somehow have lain with him.

He did not know how many days and weeks passed before he began to think she might never come back. This determined passage of time insisted he entertain the possibility of their eternal separation. He began to suspect she was hiding, both from him and herself. Could this loving, which he believed defined his life, merely have been a prelude to something else? Suddenly he could see beyond the borders of his passion, into the abyss of forever.

His imagined solitude began to affect a real consequence. Pavko needed to look away from the void, which held such fascinations for those mired in despondency. He needed to solve the riddle of her leaving. He needed to forge through the uncharted hinterlands of solitude a road that would lead her back.

* * *

How long was the time since she had left? He did not know. There was no way for him to tell. He only knew there was no life. Freedom had come, and he felt more oppressed than before. Under the Regime men could always dream of freedom, of a better life, of the things they would do. Indeed, the Regime worked hard to monitor the dreams of its people, knowing well that as long as people kept dreaming of freedom, they would not actively pursue it. Without Milada, Pavko had no more dreams. He could only wait for inevitable death.

What he saw on the streets was people running madly about. What was really loose on the streets was dreams. Each person was a different dream, running amuck, looking for a hold in its newfound freedom.

He had always gone to bed and enjoyed the same dream every night. It was a dream he shared with Milada. They would dream together of a life together in a land of freedom. Their shared dream was their promised land, their Eden to which they were permitted to return by virtue of their pure and devoted love for one another.

How could he sleep now? Every night he lay awake in bed, staring at the blank ceiling. Part of Milada's dream had been to have a mirror on the ceiling, so when they were both lying beside one another, their bodies sharing their warmth, their dreams touching, she could look up and see them, cherish the image, burn it into her mind forever. Now it seemed to Pavko that all along she had a reason to keep for herself, hidden in her heart, the image of them together, the memory. And now she was gone, separated from him without that image to keep, the secret vault of her heart empty. And Pavko was left staring up at the reflection of his blank life.

He no longer dreamed. She was his only dream, and now she was gone. Freedom had come to the land and had stolen his life.

Where did she go? When would she be back? How did one recapture a dream? Could he convince himself, or obsess himself, into dreaming about one particular thing? But he knew it would be impossible. Not only was she and his dream gone; he no longer even slept.

He spent his empty days in search of her. All he found was confusion. Once the celebrations had ended and the statues were pulled down and destroyed, the last figures of the Regime were either transformed into directors of corporations or they slipped into hiding. All that remained behind was a vague sense of emptiness, of purposelessness. No one seemed to be in charge, and without the strength of leadership, a country—free or not—would not grow, would not survive. It would fall apart at the seams, each individual carrying his or her own piece away in a different direction.

Gone forever was the poverty, the long lines, the water shortages. Under the Regime the steaming coffee and ripe banana he enjoyed immensely were unattainable to anyone outside the government. Now coffee and bananas were available at nearly every corner, but they were unaffordable. The intimate relations that he enjoyed with Milada, scheduled for every third week by the government, now could be had with anyone on demand. Young women strolled through the streets wearing almost nothing and without a hint of scandal. All around him he saw a denial of ideals and a numbing of moral imperatives.

Finally one day he realized she was gone for good. Perhaps she was dead, trampled in the stampede of joy. Perhaps she truly had been only a dream, meant to get him through his dreary life. He certainly had no concrete evidence she had ever existed. There were clothes he recalled she had worn, but he could well have purchased those himself. What he did not have was a photograph, a painting, a letter, a recording—nothing to show him she had been real. Only memories; or perhaps only fleeting dreams. If this were so, then, could the Regime have been so bad? If she had been only a dream inspired by life under General Jakupovic, was he not sad to see freedom come?

Something of this was true, for he encountered small groups of people dedicated to uncovering and resurrecting those old dream files. They swept through the headquarters of the Regime, they searched the homes of the generals and high officials. Of course they knew all the best hiding places, because for years the people had used them to hide things for themselves. Yet nothing was discovered. Even the secret black market of dreams had disbanded without the Regime to give them reason and purpose. And so, to Pavko's utter surprise, in place of their dreams of freedom, a new dream began to take shape: nostalgia.

Once life had seemed worth living. Now life was horrible, tragic, empty. He was merely a pile of rubble, the pitiful monument of his life pulled down and destroyed in the wake of freedom.

Everything was gone with her. He did not sleep. He could not write. He had no dreams. His only desire was to find her, to bring her back to him. His only desire was to have back the life he had so often dreamed of escaping.

But no, it could not be true. She had been real. He had felt her lips on his. He had not imagined such mad passion. She had been real, and she was out there, somewhere, still alive, still burning inside of him. His life was dead, but he could still feel her warm heart beating in his body. There still remained a faint glimmer of life.

Then all at once he knew where she was. The dream they had shared together had been of a place of true freedom. They had dreamed of running off in the middle of the night, taking the tram to the end of the line and then scampering to another land, boarding a boat, taking each other away, taking each other back to paradise. How could he have forgotten their dream, when they had written it so many times, every morning of their life together. Escape, to a place where he didn't have to spend time writing out his dreams, where he could write his stories, the stories he would whisper in her ear at night when they lay beside one another. Escape, to a place where she could paint the pictures she would describe to him on the warm days they would sit on the tiny ledge that served as their porch, as if they were two bugs clinging to the side of the building. Looking out into the distance, not toward the smoke of distant battles where the Regime was said to be burning villages of its own people, but out toward the river, that snaked toward the sun, that crept almost imperceptibly across the sky toward the peaceful west. Escape, to a place where their lovemaking was not scheduled, where they could come together at any time, in any location, where he could make love to her in infinite varieties and with such fervor and regularity that she would be sweating and exhausted and glowing with satisfaction.

* * *

With Milada he had suffered the desire to do everything, but lacked the freedom. Now the freedom had come, but without Milada he had lost the desire.

The structure of life once provided by the Regime was missing, and in this great void yawned a vast emptiness of feeling and experience. Not even sleep, now void of dreams, could comfort him. He wandered in a daze through the streets, searching for Milada, for clues, for any remnant of her existence. What he really searched for was himself.

He had been searching for seven months of freedom. He had found nothing, the few clues leading to dead ends. She had disappeared into freedom, as if Pavko were the Regime and he had been repressing her all along. As he troubled over this thought, he wondered if he was sad for the loss of her, or for the overthrow of himself.

There was a knock at his door. A young boy of perhaps ten years stood in the corridor. He held out a box. Pavko took it. The boy turned down the corridor.

"One minute," Pavko called. "What is this? Who gave it to you?"

The boy gave a startled look over his shoulder and fled.

Pavko brought the box inside and opened it. It was full of papers, notebooks, and photographs. One was a grainy black and white print of himself standing outside a brick building on a particularly gloomy day, his coat turned up against the wind, checking the address he had been searching for against a scribbled note held tightly in its hands so it too would not be swept away by the winds of change.

He remembered that moment vividly. He had been certain he had found Milada that day. And he had. But when he knocked at the tiny chilly flat within the run-down building, the woman who emerged was not his wife, but an elderly aunt of the same name living amid the squalor of an embittered couple with five children.

Where the photograph came from, though, he did not know. Nor did he know what it might mean. So he quickly took up the top paper to read.

The paper was a facsimile of a report on himself. He read his name, his height, his weight. He read his given occupation, and his occupation before the Regime. He read a list of his known maladies. He read his prescribed period of lovemaking. He read a listing of everyone he had ever known or come in contact with.

All this and much more information was presented there in the document. For a moment he thought this was his own legend, the personal profile the Regime had gathered on him. He thought for a moment that the new government was sending these out to all its citizens, returning their lives, freeing them.

Then his eyes fell on the photograph again. It had been taken after the defeat of the Regime. It had been taken at least two months after freedom had fallen like a miraculous snow on the country. It was proof he was still being followed.

Whether a personal enemy with a grudge no longer repressed, or elements of the overthrown Regime still operating unobserved behind the chaos of freedom, he did not know. But this box of surveillance also contained something the sender did not know about. Inside this box Pavko also found a clue to Milada's whereabouts. This box of Regime horrors was proof Milada would never be found in his country. The Regime had fallen, and the wind, which had so long been forbidden, blew in and carried her away like a seed to another garden where she was now blooming, free of the insidious weeds of tyranny and repression.

Under the Regime people had quickly learned to ignore the atrocities of the police and government officials out of a desire for self-preservation. News had spread quickly that if you involved yourself in any type of dispute, you would surely be shot for "crimes against the government."

Milada had come home distraught one evening after encountering an old woman who had been her school teacher when she was a girl. The woman was being accosted by a young policeman who wanted to commandeer her bicycle. Milada had wanted to help her former teacher, but instead she had run as fast as she could, until she got home. Pavko knew what the consequences were, and he was glad she had chosen to come home. But it troubled him to enjoy the repression of her better instincts to help another human, the swallowing of her compassion, the subtle and sinister destruction of her humanity.

He wept because he knew that when the police came for him, she would do exactly the same thing.

He hated the thought of not knowing what had happened to her, of losing her. He knew he, or Milada, or anyone could be taken at any time without warning or even cause. Public laundromats were notorious places of disappearance. He knew of a woman in their own building who had been handed a slip of paper asking her to come to the postal exchange to pick up a package, and she was never heard from again. No one knew when, where, or for what reason the next disappearance would occur. Perhaps, though, whatever death the government had in store was preferable to being spared: someone had recently told him about a perfectly healthy man who had been seized on his doorstep and thrown into an ambulance. At the hospital the doctor decided in order to save the man's life he would have to remove both his legs.

Nostalgia made life seem almost easier under the Regime. At that time everyone knew who the enemy was. The government and its operatives were to be avoided, for they could turn on you at any moment. Now the government was to be regarded as a friend of the people, a protector, and had so far proved itself in this regard. But the enemy was suddenly everywhere and unidentifiable. What appeared to be a student on his way to university might suddenly rip the necklace off you. The good man who came to repair your burst pipe in the middle of a cold night coldly charged an exorbitant fee for his services.

Pavko's random searching was like this new freedom: blind. He realized to have any real chance for success, his search for Milada would have to be given the form of a thorough investigation. He had no money to pay for an investigator, for they were in overwhelming demand. What he had to do was operate as his own investigator.

He spent a week drawing up checklists to guide his search. He wrote down the names or identities of everyone Milada would have come in contact with during her daily routine. He wrote down any relatives he could think of, especially those in other countries. He wrote down the names of places she had indicated as hoping one day to visit, or vacation, or even simply mentioned in passing. He wrote down all the contacts and avenues he might explore at university, from professors to classmates to other schools she might need or want to transfer to. Then he wrote down the names of every government official they had ever been in contact with, for whatever reason. He even wrote down the policeman who had commandeered the bicycle of Milada's teacher, and the teacher, too. He wrote down the names of hospitals. He wrote down the names of cemeteries. At last he wrote down the Ministry of Census, which was where he started his new investigation, asking for her legend.

Though her legend provided no clues to her disappearance, it did give him many other items to add to his checklist. Some places, such as the cordwainer and the bakery, he was surprised to learn she had gone to. But then, he also knew that much disinformation appeared in the legends, falsified or invented by the Ministry of Information, and as such he wrote those off. The one thing he knew for certain about Milada was they never had secrets from one another.

So with the grim certitude the entire population had developed through years of living under the Regime, he set off next to the cemeteries. The fact that he did not find her name on any lists of deceased, or discover her unidentified under a frozen sheet, filled him with both joy and exhaustion. It seemed almost as if it would be easier to know for certain she was dead and buried somewhere, than to have to go on wondering what had happened.

Next he set about visiting every hospital. He showed her picture. He checked admission records. He examined the descriptions of unidentified patients who had been treated since the collapse of the Regime. Again, to both his relief and dismay, he found no evidence of her anywhere. He knew, because of the records kept, these were his two best hopes of finding official documentation. Except, perhaps, from the university, what clues he might now uncover would be tinged by gossip and hearsay.

The university had been a major part of the Regime's public relations campaign, and so, like individual artists, had been spared much but guarded most. This bipolar character had been a feature there for centuries. From the old monastery beside which it arose rode crusaders consecrated to God who were determined to kill as many infidels as possible. More recently, the central building had been converted into the largest Lebensborn in the country. But while still surrounded by the façade of an institute of learning, what began as a much-needed maternity home soon evolved into a eugenics laboratory. The building now housed the Physical Sciences, and it was there Pavko met a young female student who claimed to know Milada.

"Have you tried The Beggars of Azure?" asked the student.

His brow furrowed. He grew suspicious immediately, a wave that came surging back, something he had not felt since the Regime had fallen. "What do you mean?"

"She used to go there a lot," said the innocent girl.

No place had been more familiar to him than that bookstore. Everything he had ever loved, including Milada, he had found there. When the Regime tried to shut it down, the bookstore became a symbol of resistance. Pavko recalled one brave man who stood on a burnt-out automobile in front of the building, brandishing a book in each hand, vowing the Regime would never destroy what was inside. Armed troops came and found it surrounded and protected by people, writers, readers, students, and Milada. General Jakupovic quickly realized to shut down the bookstore would be to cause harm to himself. To shut it down would only force the readers and writers underground, and foment dissent. But to leave it open and controlled he would always know where to find the most likely dissenters. And there would always be spies. And the worst books—those that described circumnavigation of the world, or the American Revolution, or romantic love—could be removed, hidden, banned, destroyed.

But most of all leaving the bookstore open and accessible allowed the Regime to show the rest of the world it was not bad or repressive. The Beggars of Azure became, along with a former beauty pageant winner appointed Minister of Truth, the bright and shining face the Regime had presented to the world. And so the Resistance was crushed.

Milada had stopped going there then, once the battle to keep it open had been conceded by the Regime, which lent that supposed victory a taste of failure.

"You mean you've seen her then?" Pavko asked. "She's been there recently?"

The same look of confusion fell over the girl's face. "The last I saw her she was headed there for the new book by Ernesto Savonthary."

* * *

Pavko became obsessed with the idea that Milada had been living so near him all this time and he had never known. If it was so, she had been hiding herself away from him. There was nothing that would have prevented them from being together now the Regime was overthrown. But why? Did she hate him? Did she fear him? Was she living with another man? What had all their time meant together if she could so easily just walk away without ever looking back, taking nothing with her?

He returned home that evening fuming with these thoughts. Whatever her choice had been, why could she not have had the decency and respect to tell him? All this time he had thought she was dead. Surely she could find her way home if she wanted. Was she so content to deny her entire previous existence? How could she live as if he was dead to her?

All around his tiny cramped one-room flat he saw signs, things left behind that he thought signified she would one day return. Some things were objects they had acquired together. But many more were things she had brought into their relationship. There was a cherished book, which had been given to her by her father. Pavko opened it and read an inscription inside the cover, and an image swirled inside his head.

He saw perfectly, as if he had been there himself, a man enter a house, covered with snow, carrying a Yule log in one hand and a package in another. He saw a young girl run into the room and throw her arms around the man, and then together brush the snow off his heavy coat. Through a tear that swelled his eye, he saw the girl rip open the package and caress the book.

The sudden appearance of this image, which he could not have known, sent him scurrying through the flat. He looked at a glass and saw another exactly alike being thrown, its contents creating an abstract mural on the wall where it crashed. A black skirt brought a feeling of jealous rage and embarrassment as he saw another man's hands caress beneath the material the soft skin Pavko once knew so well. When the skirt began to rise, and Milada bent forward, Pavko shut his eyes, slammed the wardrobe, and growled into the night until the image was banished from his mind.

She had left, and left everything behind, including every one of her personal memories. He hated her for walking away so casually, so readily. She had left everything with him, except for an explanation. But he had to reconcile the fact that she seemed to be living so near and yet avoided all contact with him. And as he lay awake all night, alternately hating himself and hating her, finding hope and suffering despair, a tiny spark lit in his mind, and he fanned it into a flame. By dawn he had convinced himself that the only logical explanation was she had truly lost her memory and had been unable to remember where her home was, who Pavko was, or even who she was. And at last he had a clue to her whereabouts, and he was sure if he could just find her, stand in front of her, show her these things from her life, it would all come back to her, and she would come back to him.

When the rest of Barungrad had finally begun its day, Pavko set for the place they had met; the place he had once visited every day until the Regime tried to make him into a tool of propaganda; the place Milada had found a purpose against oppression and for freedom: The Beggars of Azure. To his frustration he could no longer find the street, nor anyone who knew the street. After wandering inside the medieval wall for nearly two hours, he happened upon a blind man propped in the doorway of an abandoned shop who, when asked if he knew the street, responded by asking what Pavko was looking for there. Pavko told him of the bookstore.

"Follow me," the blind man said with a wave of his hand.

Pavko stood watching him, waiting, wondering where the man might lead him in his blind condition, and how long it might take. The man never moved. Pavko glanced up and down the street, wondering how long he should wait, suspecting now that his sightless would-be guide was also saneless.

"Well?" Pavko finally said with impatience.

"Right around the corner," the blind man replied, pointing.

Pavko followed his finger back in the direction from which he was certain he had just come.

The sightless man nodded.

Pavko retraced his steps to the corner. Where he thought he had passed a row of dilapidated and abandoned buildings that all had windows blind with newspaper, now he found a narrow street busy with people. Perhaps he had circled one too many times and lost his bearing. Then, all at once, he realized what had happened.

Everywhere he went—the cemeteries, the hospitals, and even his own flat—things had changed. But what he discovered was the things themselves did not change in essence, only in name. His cramped one-room flat that was once located in Josef-Wurmsdorf-Platz was now, without moving, to be found on Revolution Square. The Beggars of Azure, once situated between Havixbeckenstrasse and Grestainweg, now occupied the block between Liberty and Independence Streets. And perhaps this was what could account for Milada's long absence. Perhaps she had been swept up in the celebrating crowds into a strange part of the city, into a part of the city that had long been forbidden to the masses, and therefore unfamiliar; so that when she tried to find her way home, she was hopelessly lost, the names of everything having changed in the meantime, literally, overnight. It was in this thought of Milada lost, wandering the streets in desperate search for their home, that Pavko regained the belief they were still meant to be together.

The exterior of the building was dirty, and one side had been painted with propaganda, which in turn had been violated by graffiti. The edges around the door had crumbled away, and looking up Pavko saw an entire corner of the top of the building was missing, probably destroyed by a mortar attack in the early days of the Regime. Gone was the wooden shingle that had once hung outside, and the picture window that had displayed the most important propaganda to passersby. Several men, white dust sticking to their sweaty skin, blocked the entrance, apparently making repairs to the door.

The blind man from up the street grasped Pavko's arm and led him around the building. They past a newspaper stand that offered hundreds of different publications where only one had been available under the Regime. The blind man released Pavko's arm, opened a door, and nodded.

Pavko hesitated, still with the lingering fear that to be there and go inside, to be a part of the bookstore at all was only serving the Regime. Yet his certainty of finding Milada inside urged him forward. He thanked the old man and stepped through the door.

And so it happened that sometime during the seventh month, or perhaps the seventh year—he could not be certain—he found himself standing inside The Beggars of Azure in search, not of a book, but of a woman, of a living.

For a moment everything seemed unfamiliar. The store seemed as cramped as his flat. The stacks came nearly to the door, leaving no room for patrons to get acclimated inside, no indications of where to find anything, no obvious place to even make a purchase. Only after he realized he was standing in the back of the bookstore did he begin to feel confident.

There were many unusual elements to the interior, things he had not remembered from his past visits. More noticeable was the multitude of languages he heard, a veritable babble. He wondered if the speakers were all come to study at the university, or simply to relax in an inexpensive and fledgling country that would certainly welcome all the foreign interest it could get.

People milled around, casually, as if time had no power over them. A woman greeted him with a smile and a hello as he strolled by her. He paused and asked if she had seen Milada. She stared at him incomprehensibly until he repeated the question in clumsy English. She politely shook her head and returned to her glossy magazine. Just at the end of an aisle stood a man engrossed in a book that lay open in his hands. Pavko approached him and watched him for a moment. The man was intent upon reading, sheltered within the covers of the book from the outside world around him. Gently Pavko reached out and touched the man's elbow. The man looked up, startled.

"Milada Krizova?" asked Pavko.

The man stared from the corners of his eyes at Pavko, as if wondering why this deranged person had mistaken him for another. Then his eyes widened, and he turned full face to Pavko. With a nod of comprehension and a wave of his hand, the man walked two aisles over and three sections down and pointed. There in front of him was _The Toaster Who Wanted to Be a Lifeguard_ , by Milada Krizova.

"Very entertaining," said the man, and with another approving nod he departed from the aisle.

Pavko ran his finger across the spine, remembering the pride Milada had displayed upon completing the novel. It had survived the censors, but that was certainly no condemnation of it. He knew there was nothing inside which the Regime had been able to use as propaganda. But the moment he noticed the book beside hers, written by Donald Krocker, his joy and confidence were crushed. The books of Pavko and Milada would never be together again. The Regime had separated them forever.

The sound of laughter bounced down the aisle, entering his ear and piercing his heart. He followed that sound like an aural trail leading him out of the wilderness of books. Into a clearing at the end of the aisle he emerged and glanced back and forth. To his left was an open area with a wooden counter where purchases might be made, although he saw no cash box or clerk in attendance. To his right, tucked into the corner, was a café the likes of which might be seen on any street in Vienna. People were arrayed in gay splendor, and contentment, and rapture. A few people were resting at these tables, drinking coffee or flipping through magazines or studying. One table had its chairs turned over on its top, either ready for the end of the night, or neglected all day. Then the laugh came again, clear and penetrating, from a group of people gathered in the center of the café. Seven people sat around two large tables pushed together, nudging one another and emptying bottles of beer. They smoked and laughed, with books and chess pieces and empty glasses spread out in front of them. Revolutionaries they definitely were not. Then one of the people stood and walked away, and Pavko could see the three who sat facing him. Between two men sat a young woman, and it was from her that another of the same laughs was emitted. The laugh Pavko knew so well. And when she looked up and saw him, the laugh faded away. But the smile on her face remained, changed subtly from one of gaiety to one of serenity.

Though she bore no resemblance to the photograph in her legend, and Pavko did not ever remember seeing her, he recognized her immediately. In a strange time, and a strange land, and a strange woman, Pavko at last had found what he had lost.
Landscape With the Fall of Icarus

Daedalus, with his son Icarus, was imprisoned within a labyrinth of his own deceits. The inventor, full of pride and ego, set his mind at work upon unknown arts—to change the laws of nature, and fly to freedom. Icarus gathered the feathers of mourning doves, which Daedalus fastened together with twine and wax. Arranged short to long, like rustic pan-pipes, he bent them in a gentle curve until they appeared as real wings.

With wings affixed, Daedalus took flight like a bird leading forth a fledgling from the nest into the unsubstantial air. Icarus, though agreed to follow the path of his father, relished the feeling that they were gods who could fly. Deserting his leader, following his desire, Icarus set his course on a greater height.

The starlings were shocked to see such a strange creature sharing the air. Daedalus was distraught, fearful his son had lost his sense. On Dolichi, a plowman, shepherd, and angler paused in their toils to witness the triumph over God and nature.

Icarus marveled at the plushy sea below, and wondered at the tinyness of the men on earth. As if in love for the first time, buoyed by balmy winds, he lost all reason. He knew his flight could not long last, and so he seized the moment. In pursuit of his fatal rapture, he flew higher than any man or bird had ever flown. On his neck he felt the heat of the sky's bright eye, but he was blind to danger. Daedalus could only stare helpless as Icarus soared extravagantly, and was swallowed by the sun.

Even as the fragrant wax that held his wings melted, Icarus knew nothing but the sheer exhilaration of living. His sensible father flew to safety. The plowman, shepherd, and angler all ceased watching. The sun reclined on the horizon. All the while, despite the failings of fathers and feathers, Icarus tunneled through the sky in a glorious fall toward the dark blue sea, his short life suddenly forgotten.

* * *

The painting was discovered behind a faded tapestry. At first glance, it was mistaken for the original. Given the peculiarities of the previous owner, the possibility was not ridiculous. But the Musée des Beaux Arts still possessed Bruegel's masterpiece of genre and myth, _Landscape With the Fall of Icarus_. This piece of art was unknown.

Individual brushstrokes were apparent, but they lacked texture. The support was flexible like canvas, but smooth like glass. The painting looked to be framed and mounted on wood that was not hung but firmly attached to the wall. When a switch was flipped, a light that previously shone on only a portion of the tapestry now illuminated this entire work of art.

Upon earth, sea, and sky, the setting sun dominated the unchanging scene: a brilliant glow against the clouds; golden ripples on the blue-green sea; mellow hues awash the bucolic countryside. In the left foreground, the plowman, bright in his red shirt, led his horse and guided his plow with ease, turning over the soil in the last section of his field. In the middle center, a shepherd leaned on his staff and, with faithful hound by his side, dreamed at the skyline, while his sheep grazed along the cliffs. In the middle of the sea, a man-of-war headed west as several crewmen scrambled among the rigging to unfurl their sails and catch the fat wind. In the right foreground, an angler cast his line into the churning water. Mystery shrouded the background of obscure mountains and cloudy city.

Like a Nabokovian dream, the painting begins to move. In complete harmony with its formerly static state, the scene comes to life. With far more sophistication than mere animation, appears the living tale of Bruegel's vision.

A pair of pink legs wiggle briefly, splashing, and then disappear beneath the water. Three feathers ride the tiny ripples. The angler, thinking the fish are biting, flexes his tremulous rod. The ship picks up speed as it sails away. The shepherd reaches down to pet his panting hound. The plowman trods lightly on his furrows, intent on completing his labor before dark. None care that Icarus has fallen. Alone, a partridge, fearful of high places, claps its wings in approval.

The sun melts into the sea. The ship disappears over the horizon. The angler hauls in his catch; the shepherd gathers his flock; the plowman unharnesses his horse; and all pass from the window of the painting, heading for the security of home at the finish of another day. Icarus never emerges on the surface, to swim away, and try in vain to reform his wings and fly once more. Nor does he ever become a corpse neglected in the bushes. His passing goes quite unnoticed; but because he flew without fear and full of imagination, concerned only with the triumph of unknown arts, he will never be forgotten.
Petsuchoi

The man walked out of the store with parcels under his arm and anticipation on his face. A well-dressed student asked him for a moment of his time to answer a few questions. He had no time, and yet somehow he felt as if he had all the time in the world, that everything was beginning now.

He held the bouquet close to his face and inhaled deeply. He loved the smell of the flowers. They reminded him of her, of her smell. They reminded him of the first time he leaned close to kiss her. For five crazed months he had paused to savor every moment with her. At last, it was as if all those moments he had saved, he had not wildly spent, had finally and miraculously accumulated. They would have all weekend—three full days—entirely to themselves.

He imagined her standing in front of the mirror, trying to make herself look as beautiful as she could for him. Trying to get her curls to fall around her face just the right way so that he would not be able to resist. He would stand in the doorway as she draped her arm around him and kissed him into their weekend getaway, and then with a flourish he would produce the flowers from behind his back, seeming almost to her as if he had produced them from his sleeve. Their love was a sort of magic, a conjuring of things, a fantasy that would never end, as long as he could maintain the illusion.

He followed the wide corridor, smiling at one shopkeeper who tried to entice him inside. He noticed that people walking toward him gave him a wide berth, frowning, scampering into the nearest stores. One turned and went back hastily the way he had come. Some who were walking in front of him looked over their shoulders and increased their pace. Then he slowed to a stop and demanded of one woman what the matter was.

She opened her mouth but no sound came forth.

He saw the pity in her eyes. The child beside her stared in terror.

He turned around, as if finally understanding that what they were retreating from was not him, but something behind him.

He turned and saw only a flash of crocodile-headed beasts before the heavy butt of a rifle smashed against the side of his head. He fell, and his parcels skidded across the shiny floor. His cheek landed atop the roses. His sight was distorted and rolling. He heard screams and shouting and rapid footsteps. And he heard the towering blackened figures who assaulted him, commanded him, accused him, threatened him, and taunted him in some guttural language he could not comprehend. Seven—or maybe ten—of them kept pounding him, and shoving him, and spinning him round as if they were playing some schoolyard game. He felt his arms being crushed, and his legs being yanked, and his neck being held immobile against some cold scaly leather thing. He could barely see from between his attackers, and then noticed the mall drifting away from him. He was being dragged away somewhere, and no one came to his aid. The last thing he recognized before blacking out was the bouquet of roses, crushed and trampled, stray petals like blood splattered across the shiny floor.

* * *

Darkness surrounded him. When he knew for certain he was awake but in a room without light, he became aware of the pain. His lungs burned, his head pounded, his muscles cramped, and his neck ached. He was too weak to move. He felt the pangs of hunger, his stomach demanding food. Then all at once he was sick.

He rolled away from the vomit, moaning. He propped himself up against something and looked around, moving only his eyes. He could see nothing. He could see not even one faint glimmer of light. Even after a few minutes, he had been plunged into such total darkness that his eyes, once adjusted, still could not bring in any light. For a moment he wondered if he were in a hospital, but then realized he would be surrounded by machines, or nurses, or there would at least be some indication of this. He was certainly in a sealed room somewhere, because he could feel the stone wall, and the air felt regulated, neither cold, nor warm, and no breeze, but with a hint of stale. He was not in a well, because there was no earth, or damp, or water, or echo.

He had no idea where he was.

Apparently it seemed as if he had been kidnapped. For what reason he could not conclude, or to what end. He wanted to explore the room, but it would require a step by step search with his hands, being so dark, and at this point he did not have the energy to move any more than required. He could only wait, and heal, and then later, if he was still here, he would investigate.

But until that time he would have to wait. And then he realized he had no idea how much time had already passed since his assault. He had guessed only a few hours, or perhaps a day. But conceivably it might have been all weekend, or all week, or even longer perhaps. He might have been drugged for a time. He felt stubble on his chin, but that was his only indication.

His thoughts jumped to his girlfriend, waiting, becoming anxious when he was not a few minutes early, then wondering what had delayed him, then becoming angry when he was obviously late, and eventually beginning to worry when he didn't show. Her weekend would have been spoiled, and then she would have been struck cold with fear. And what could she do? Could she call the police and report his disappearance? Of course not. They would ask questions which she would not be able to answer. Could she call his house? Of course not, for what if someone else answered? She couldn't ask where he was, say she was waiting for him, say they were supposed to go away together. It was a secret. It was their secret. And now he was gone from her, without any explanation of his disappearance, and she could do nothing but sit and agonize and wait and despair and feel guilty for feeling so helpless. He hated the anguish his attackers had caused her.

Or perhaps she knew better than he where he was. Perhaps someone had kidnapped him and informed her, demanded a ransom. Perhaps she was at this very moment collecting the money, or talking to police—but then she wouldn't talk to police. She would get the money, some how, some way, and she would pay. She would just want him back, without care or concern to see the perpetrators caught and punished. She would just want him back safe in her arms. Then, of course, when she was sure he was safe, she would want to see punishment. She would demand justice. But it would be too late. The police could not be involved at all, at any time. And he hoped if this were the case, they did not know his kidnappers, because, if they did, he was sure his girlfriend would seek revenge on them.

Then his mind turned to his wife. He prayed it was not her. He prayed she had not found out and hired someone to kidnap him. He prayed he could get out of this alive and return home and live quietly and peacefully and appreciatively of what life had given him.
The Book of Zambullo

The uniformed guard held out his large hand and, in a tone that matched his posture in stiffness, said, "Your card."

The bespectacled man handed his identification card to the guard and glanced at his watch with a frown. To the young woman queued behind him, these apparently random verification checks were never as random as they seemed to the man. She nervously fumbled for her own card, and was suddenly shoved against the counter.

"In the name of the People," said the guard, "I am placing you under arrest."

The guard ratcheted two iron cuffs to the man's wrists.

"On what charges?" pleaded the man.

The guard seized the books the man had hoped to purchase. "Intent to possess subversive propaganda."

Two more guards hustled to the scene and took custody of the man and books. They escorted the man for a few steps before dragging him against his resistance.

"The charges are false!" the man shouted over his shoulder.

The young woman watched, along with the other patrons, in silence as the three men clamored their way toward the rear of the bookstore. No one seemed to know the exact fate of such people; but she had heard that once a person was taken out the back door, the person was never seen again.

The guard at the counter straightened his uniform and posture. He held out his large hand to the young woman and said, "Your card."

With great trepidation, the young woman focused on his hand as she placed her identification card there. She would not look up to meet his gaze, but glanced down at her own feet. He verified her authorization to make purchases—she was one of the few, elders mostly, approved in fiction categories.

"Ja, I remember you, Fräulein," he said, a little less stiffly.

She raised her eyes up to his muscled soldier's chest and stopped. His acknowledgment seemed remarkable, yet it also made her uncomfortable. She preferred to remain anonymous, to make no impression on people. Any notice could imperil her safe existence within an unsafe Regime.

She did not move until the guard held her card forward, and then she retrieved it quickly, her eyes returned to her feet. When the guard moved down the queue to the next person, the ancient bookseller Callimachus placed the young woman's book on a brass scale to determine her bill. She glanced cautiously at his fatherly countenance. His eyebrows moved up and down as if on march, while his lips twittered in accompaniment. She knew from experience he had no interest outside his books, and so she felt safe in watching him. His skin appeared wrinkled by the millions of lines he had read. She could easily imagine he had never set foot outside his shop, had experienced the world through the window of written words, and she admired his life of complete dedication.

When the scales were balanced, she paid. His stylus recorded the transaction in a dusty ledger, and he handed her a receipt. She took her new book and lowered her eyes before turning to walk away.

In addition to books, The Beggars of Azure offered tables in a café setting where patrons could refresh themselves and relax, spend a few minutes or a few hours with a favored or newly discovered literary treasure. Here she purchased a steaming coffee and sat in her regular place in the dim corner. She did not look around to observe others, or scan the crowd for a friendly face, or eavesdrop on conversations. She sipped the coffee, enjoying its warmth as it flowed through her, and opened the book to read.

In the middle of the opening paragraph, a form appeared beside her, as if risen from the edge of the book. Startled, she adjusted her glasses and looked up at the intrusion into her world. Words caught in her throat the moment her eyes fell on him.

He stared at her without moving, as if wary of frightening a small animal. Some unseen force prevented her from averting her eyes, and she gazed back blankly, as if across a blackened sky. She felt he must surely recognize her idiocy and turn away, but he remained longer than she thought reasonable.

She knew better than to allow anyone access to her safe existence. She had survived this long only by remaining alone and thereby insusceptible to being hurt. Whenever someone would happen to catch her eye, she would take care not to smile in order for them to understand she did not wish to be disturbed. If anyone spoke to her she would reply in clipped language of a weary tone until they left her alone again.

But this man had caught her at a moment of weakness, lulled to reverie by the book, and she had been unable to defend against his intrusion. She sat as if witnessing some marvel, unable to move or speak. She had not discovered a new world but, remaining in her own, another had entered. She wanted to invite this nameless stranger to join her, accept this gift of unexpected beauty.

She had always taken precaution against outside intrusion, had defended against the oppression of the Regime. She had locked all feelings into a dungeon in the pit of her stomach. But now those feelings, working so long forgotten and hidden in the dark, had risen in rebellion and freed her spirit.

Without resistance the man had breached the fortress of her solitude. His smile conveyed a timeless sensation, and she resigned herself to his presence. Her eyes slipped shut and a tingle ran through her body just beneath the skin. She felt a great rending, a death and birth, stars rising inside her.

When she reopened her eyes, he was gone.

She watched for a moment the place where she had last seen him, hoping he might suddenly reappear around the corner. Where she had once cultivated her solitude and worn it like a badge of honor, in his wake she felt a shortness of breath and a lonely despair. He had somehow uncovered her isolation, and she felt herself sitting naked and exposed to the rest of the world, a figure to be mocked.

She slowly turned in embarrassment to see who might be watching her. An old couple sat sipping tea and flipping through an oversized volume of propagandist art; a student sat surrounded by open books, running his hands through frazzled hair; and at two tables pushed together in the center was a group of four rowdy patrons whom she always saw there, no matter the hour, as if they had no homes. A few other people wandered about in various states of reverence in their huge private temple of books. No one seemed to have seen her encounter with the mysterious man, or to have noticed her at all. She was as anonymous as she had always tried to be.

In her mind that moment stood as if out of time. The nameless man had appeared so abruptly, and passed so quickly, yet she felt he had stood before her forever. As she gazed at him a lifetime had passed in her mind. In that instant her view of life through the analytical eye of the senses had been superseded by a view through the inner eye of the soul. That was how it felt when she awoke from impossible dreams.

Shaken by grief and relief, she fled the bookstore. Her existence could not resume unchanged until she was once again safe at home. But a woman stood on the walk, directly outside the entrance, and did not move. She pressed herself against the rough wall to slip past the woman, brushing her elbow inadvertently. She offered a half smile that, since she also lowered her head, could only have been half-glimpsed, and hurried down the steps to the street.

From behind she heard a long-forgotten name called gently.

She did not recognize the voice. She had not recognized the woman. But she knew the name well. It was not her given name, and it could not be a coincidence this stranger knew the pet name her mother had given her as a child. The encounter with the man had left her vulnerable and she was swarmed with fear, wanting to run. She did not remember stopping, but when she tried to continue walking slowly, anonymously, she felt a tug at her rucksack.

She turned cautiously to face the woman.

"Gutenabend," the woman said.

"Good evening."

The woman was a little taller, a little thinner, with shoulder-length black hair to match the color of her clothes. She dragged luxuriously on a cigarette, as if time waited for her. From her lips, to her posture, to her scent, everything about this woman was supremely seductive. Everything except her crooked and wrinkled fingers.

"Don't call him," said the soft voice.

"What?"

The woman smiled and raised the cigarette to her lips. She extended her long leg forward, and leaned close. "Where are you headed?"

"Nowhere."

She suspected this woman was an undercover operative, perhaps an official censor. There could be no other explanation for the woman knowing her name. The Regime allowed almost no privacy. She had even heard whispered that couples were often assigned a time for sexual relations. But she did not understand why they would watch her so closely.

The woman smirked and sucked her cigarette. "Nowhere?"

"Home," she replied quietly.

The woman dropped the end of the cigarette on the stones and crushed it beneath her black boot. With a smirk, she turned and sauntered away.

The street was empty.

She walked home quickly, confused by the seductive woman and the nameless man and her own unfamiliar feelings. Everything seemed strange, as if she had never walked these darkened streets before. Now she saw danger in her surroundings, and felt watched by unseen eyes. She was no longer safely insulated in her own world, but exposed and vulnerable to everything around her. Twice she turned down the wrong street, only to realize her mistake several blocks later. Then, at last, at the dark end of the street where she had once heard someone say only artists lived, she found her squat building and hurried inside.

The smell of the disinfectant sprayed monthly in each apartment by the Regime was overpowering. She threw her rucksack on the ground and crept to the window. As she parted the blinds with caution, she half expected to find the woman in black standing under the single lamp at the corner below, smoking another cigarette and watching her window. But she saw nobody outside. This frightened her even more, because she felt sure someone was hiding, concealed in the shadows. Then she heard the faint sound of Irmgard Seefried singing " _Ainsi frémit mon coeur, prêt à se consoler_ ", and everything was safe and familiar again.

When she had first taken this dreary apartment, she had thought a soprano resided nearby and spent much of her day practicing. But the practice continued day after day and throughout the night without variation. She soon realized the aria was a recording from a French opera. And though it was absolutely the most touching piece of music she had ever heard, the constant repetition had irritated her to the point she determined she would be forced to move elsewhere. Then one day, like the man who sleeps through the rumble of the commuter train past his hovel, she ceased to notice the song. At once it had changed from a nuisance to a welcome reassurance.

She opened the window, eager for a breeze. Her own heart slowly ceased its trembling. She walked back through the cell of her apartment to pick up her rucksack. When she had dropped it, everything had spilled out across the parquet floor. She picked up the thick journal, which she carried with her everywhere to scribble her thoughts and feelings, and two new books. She had purchased _Sky in Narrow Streets_ , but could not recall choosing the other. She remembered sitting down with an armful of selections, as always, but finally choosing only the one, and returning all the others to the shelf. She was certain she had not even browsed through this one, so memorably individual with its blank cover and spine, and its hand-bound detail. But somehow it had appeared in her possession. She wondered if, in her haste, she had gathered it into her pack by mistake.

She wondered at the unidentified book. Something did not feel right. She knew only that she had not paid for it, and the consequences of theft were severe. Her mind flashed back to the woman in black, and she worried this might have been a member of the police in disguise. For all she knew, the woman might have been following her throughout the bookstore, witnessed her take the mysterious book, though only by accident, and was now amassing a force to apprehend her.

She opened the bottom drawer of her bureau and shoved the book under an old blanket. She checked the locks on the windows and put the chain on the door. With a sigh of relief she turned, and from the wall the pretty young woman in her favorite painting smiled as if all were well.

She lay down on the bed with legs pulled to her chest, surrounded by an ever-growing void from which she suddenly despaired at seeing for a brief moment a possible escape and then learning she would never be able to free herself. Slowly she gathered around herself the resignation necessary to stand up and carry on an existence that would forever be sabotaged by thoughts of what might have been. She would remain trapped forever, and in its neglect her desire would grow and press down upon her until eventually she suffocated, the tiny struggling new life snuffed out without a chance, leaving only the discarded shell of a person twice-briefly beautiful.

* * *

The inner eye of her soul opened. The singing startled her from her reading. She listened for a few minutes, waiting for the end of the aria, but the singer started again from the beginning. With reluctance she marked her place in the book and set it aside to search out this endless soprano.

On the floor she found the staff of notes being sung, and followed its trail into the adjoining room. As soon as she opened the door, the singing ceased. Though midday, the windows were shuttered and her mother lay in bed hidden beneath a mound of sheets and blankets.

"Mamma, what's wrong?"

"Ah, my child." A maternal smile crept over her face, and an arm appeared faintly from beneath the covers, reaching out to be touched. "Only lovers die lonely deaths."

She took her mother's hand. "You're so hot." She placed her own hand on her mother's forehead and wiped away the sweaty, sticky hair. "I think I should call the doctor."

"Is that how you would finish me?"

She stared at her mother's horrified eyes. "But I would have you cured."

Her mother scoffed. "They will take me and put me in one of those dirty cells and I won't be human any more. I'll just be another of their specimens to observe and study and keep."

"They don't do that any more."

Her mother looked around the room from behind the cover of her blankets. "I hear their screams at night. The women howl like dogs."

She suspected her mother was delirious again, and knew she would need the doctor. But after two months of this wasting illness, her allotment would allow for only one more service call: that of the undertaker. She crossed to open the window and let in some air. When she unlatched the shutter, she discovered the window had been sealed with bricks.

"Were you singing?" she asked with a smile.

"It was you who was singing," said her mother, turning her head to look away. "Always the center of attention."

She walked back to the bed and patted her mother's hand. "You should sleep for a while."

"You have made me so lonely."

Her mother's words made her wince. She had spent every day at her side, nursing her alone, and after being treated as little more than a showpiece through her long childhood.

"I'm right here."

Her mother's hand shot out and grabbed her arm. "Promise you'll stay with your mother and take care of her."

"I will. I promise."

She looked up at the clock. Two enchained figures came upright together. The chimes began, and she found herself counting along. But after sounding twelve, they did not stop. The sound continued,—Bong!—slowly,—Bong!—relentlessly—Bong! She turned to replace her mother's arm on the bed, so she could go stop the clock. Her mother's eyes flared, her body trembled. She could feel her mother's pulse race. The chimes continued.

"What is it?" she asked.

Her mother stared beyond her toward the errant clock, as if possessed, mouthing words that had no sound. She released her mother's hand and turned back to rise. Then she saw it too. From the clock spread a black apparition of Death.

"Love her you leave, Lover—"

"Mother."

"—leave me I die."

When she could not move to save her mother, no matter how hard she tried, she knew it was a dream. Yet she could not rouse herself either. The clock continued to sound. She watched grinning Death swoop to embrace her mother. She felt her body held down, her head shoved against the wall, her ears ringing with the relentless chimes.

"Tell me why," she cried.

Her mother made no reply.

Death bared its toothy grin and said, "The will stops the tiny purple girl after thousands of sad and sweet chocolate parts."

* * *

She woke, eyes wet with weeping. She lay tense in bed, listening for any sign she was no longer alone. The only sound she heard was of her own labored breaths. But she could not relax, given the unknown nature of the book and the strange circumstance by which she had come to possess it. It even seemed the book had triggered her troubling dream, and every breathless second it drew a lurking evil closer. The book was an unwelcome intruder in her apartment. With it she did not feel alone, she could not feel safe.

She had seen in the bookstore the rows and rows of empty shelves where thousands of volumes would have been if they had not been banned. Possession of the remaining books was subject to approval by the Regime, and the consequences of disapproval were terrifyingly unknown. Her own father had disappeared under strange circumstances, gone to work one innocent day just after the Regime had come to power, and still, after fourteen years, not yet returned.

Her feelings of guilt alone convicted her of wrongdoing. To hide the book, or burn it, or do anything but return it would simply be incontestable proof of her crime. She could not live day after frightful day wondering when and how she would be taken into custody and convicted. She could readily imagine the Regime testing the loyalty of its citizens by planting sensitive material in their possession. Especially the more radical students and artists, who were tolerated only as a benevolent front to the world behind which lurked an exacting tyranny. The tortures of the imagination inspired by the Regime were often more terrible than any discipline they might mete out.

She dressed and, with a momentary shudder of trepidation, retrieved the book from the bureau. It looked ordinary and harmless in her hands.

She glanced through the blinds to be sure the street was still deserted. She listened for a moment at the door, and heard nothing from the corridor. Still she hesitated, fearful of opening the door and exposing her insecurity.

She took a deep breath and glanced back at the painting on the wall. The pretty young woman with the wide innocent eyes and the enigmatic smile soothed her nerves. Her identification card and papers were in order, so she would dutifully return the book to the bookstore and free herself from suspicion and guilt.

As she neared The Beggars of Azure, she found herself slowing, wary of encountering the seductive woman again. When she could see the entrance was clear, her pace quickened. But once through the door, she paused, fearing the presence of the guard. Inside, she saw several of the permanent patrons already at their table, though considerably less rowdy. The rest of the bookstore appeared empty, and the guard was not at his post. Breathlessly she approached the kindly owner, who, in the slowness of early morning business, was himself crouched over a musty tome.

"How may I help, Fräulein?" he said.

She casually placed the book on the old wooden counter and stepped back. "I wanted to return this."

"Let me see," Callimachus said, adjusting his glasses and pulling the book close to his eyes. He opened the cover and frowned. "I do not know this title."

Patiently he held the book forward until she was inclined to take it back.

"I'm sure I must have picked it up here," she said, staring at it in her hands. "Perhaps you could check your records?"

The man peered at her over the rims of his tiny spectacles and then bent below the counter with a creak of joints. He hefted up a huge tattered volume that was secured by a chain. The cover was inscribed in gold leaf with the title _The Book of What Is to Be Found_. He began to flip through the pages.

She looked around the bookstore. A stooped old lady hobbled through the timeless aisles of History. A little girl ran babbling toward her mother, waving a colorful primer. The group of regulars had become eerily quiet.

Callimachus passed his long craggy finger rapidly across a page. "How did you get this?" he demanded.

She suddenly worried this man whom she had trusted, who had fooled her into vulnerability, would now turn her over to the authorities. Her hope for deliverance from this unsettling episode crumbled into dust. Her fear the book was banned seemed all too real.

"I believe there was a slight mistake. I was here yesterday to purchase another book, and when I returned home I found I had this book as well, though I know I did not pay for it."

"Ah, you would like to make payment now."

She shook her head. "I just want to return it."

He peered at her for a moment and then bent below the counter with another creak. He hefted up a second huge volume that was also secured by a chain. The cover was inscribed in gold leaf with the title _The Book of What Has Never Been Written_. He began to flip through the pages. His long craggy finger passed rapidly across a page and he looked up again.

"Unmöglich," he mumbled.

"What is it?" she asked again.

"There is no record," he replied.

"How can that be?"

"I am afraid," he said gravely, " _The Book of Zambullo_ simply does not exist."

* * *

In the dark, like a monk studying a heretical text in his cell of persecution, with only a candle casting a fluttering light on the book, she began to read.

The first scene described a boy and girl. She thought she once had read the same description elsewhere, but struggled to remember. So strong was this sense of prior experience she could picture the scene vividly in her mind. She thought perhaps she had seen these very children in the park one day, the same scene the author had coincidentally seen and so accurately captured. But in spite of her mental exertions, she simply could not take firm grasp of her flickering memories.

She set the book aside in confusion and despair. The images conjured by the first page of _The Book of Zambullo_ would not sleep. They swirled seductively through her mind, tempting her, building her desire into a frenzied need. Then with the instantaneousness of a camera shutter, the image of the children flashed clear and complete in her mind.

From atop her bureau she picked up a tattered photo album and opened to the last page. The photographs calmed her frenzied nerves, and she sat down for a momentary repose. She flipped backward through the pages of familiar sights and memories, enjoying the safe harbor of more innocent times. Those times suddenly seemed so long past, and yet it seemed her loss of that joyous innocence had come only last evening.

She stopped at the picture so precisely described in the book. She had been told this was she and a boy from the neighborhood. They were sitting on a park bench, and the girl was leaning over, kissing the boy. She squinted, trying to make clear her clouded memory. She had always enjoyed the story of her first love, but recently it seemed nothing more than a myth. She could not remember the boy; she did not recognize the girl.

She pulled the picture from its sleeve and carried it to the bathroom. She gazed carefully at the picture, admiring the girl's luminous hair, fine posture, and confidence. Then she looked into the mirror for any sign of that child. She found none, and as she stared into her eyes she felt as far from that girl as possible. Her appearance set them apart, but also her look of innocence. Life had drawn her into that tiny kiss with the boy, and she feared the absence of life was now drawing her toward what suddenly seemed like self-immolation. But as she stood before the mirror searching for those elusive qualities she felt to be essential to her self, she saw that at the same time a child was dying, a new woman was being born.

If only she knew who that nameless man was, or what _The Book of Zambullo_ meant, she might be able to recapture just a hint of the fleeting beauty of the girl in the photograph. The one possibility she could conceive was that the nameless man was the little boy grown, writing her this book in hopes of reclaiming the past.

She glanced back at the photograph, suddenly able to reconcile the image of that vibrant child with the languid young woman she had become. The photograph captured a girl the moment before something had smothered the spark of incomprehensible beauty. One night she had fallen asleep wanted, loved, attractive; the next morning she awoke unwanted, unloved, and unattractive. Now, nothing remained but smoldering ruins. A resentment began to pound at her, a resentment for everything that had prevented her from being who she should have been, from realizing the promise in that little girl's kiss.

Tears of yearning and desire tumbled down her cheeks and she quickly wiped them away. She would allow nothing to deny and deceive her like her mother's piercing abandonment, or leave her empty and scared like her father's crippling disappearance.

She stepped out the bedroom to get a glass of water. In the hall a shadow swept at her head and she cried out into the engulfing silence. She pressed herself against the wall, listening for sounds of an intruder, and fearful the sounds of her own heart and lungs would give her away. She glanced into the next room and saw the shadow reach long across the wood parquet. It darted up the wall in front of her and was joined by other similar forms on the floor. She stepped cautiously forward and noticed she had forgotten to close the blinds. The light from the lamp outside was sending the branches of an old tree swaying in pursuit of her.

She reached across the wall to turn on the light, hoping to eliminate the remnants of intrusion that still lingered. As she touched the switch, branches like long bony fingers beckoned her forward. She dropped her hand and hurried with a chair toward the window.

She sat with her elbow on the splintered sill and her chin in her hand, forehead pressed against the cool glass, enjoying the breeze blowing down her shirt. She took a deep breath of air tinged with the ash of smoldering villages, a welcome relief from the sweet disinfectant of the apartment. Tree branches waved up and down, back and forth, dancing to their own rhythm. Out the corner of her eye she thought she saw a black figure retreat from the circle of light on the pavement. She peered into the darkness, and one red eye from some nocturnal creature seemed to glow back at her. The sound of the constant aria was lifted and carried down her street by the greedy wind.

Within her safe, enclosed apartment existed a world of books and studies where nothing threatened her; but neither did anything challenge or inspire her. Her plastic plant did not wilt or wither. The unused electrical outlets were capped. The door was bolted and chained. She had hoarded her food coupons and filled her pantry with canned goods to last a lifetime, a stockpile against any official rationing. But something had gained entrance, and shaken her poorly constructed world to its foundations. Now nothing was the same, could ever be the same again. Her soul had awakened and been left brutally exposed in the center of her sheltered world. _The Book of Zambullo_ seemed to offer the only chance to escape the ordinary existence into which she had wandered in her sleep.

* * *

She jumped atop the bed, took a deep breath, and allowed the calm assuredness of the pretty young woman in the painting to overcome her. With great care and anticipation, she opened the mysterious book and read ravenously.

The written words rang true in her heart, and seemed so familiar, as if she had lived each thing. The book described a great old tree, and she felt the tree's roots growing winding inside her. The book described a bird, and she saw the bird take wing, and felt it flying through her. With each page her fears retreated, replaced with an aching desire to do nothing but read the next page. The story absolutely captivated her. Every free moment of every day had become filled with thoughts of the book and the nameless man.

The story brought her an inexplicable exhilaration. The words echoed through her mind and resonated through her body. The indifference of her existence was swept away by the same feeling she had the moment she had looked up and seen the nameless man standing before her in the bookstore: a disconcerting mixture of joy and sorrow.

She tried to recall every tiny detail of that flashing moment. She told herself the story of the encounter over and over again until it became a creed of her new life. She had never felt as alive as in that moment, when the nameless man had stood before her, and in this moment, when she read the book. She understood how much emotion could be found in life, if she would only embrace it. The nameless man must have seen what the book now revealed to her, something that she had never believed to be there, which all along she had thought lost with her father, or stolen by her mother.

Ordinary time had ceased.

She turned back to the book, reading with wonder and awe, with fear and comfort, taking from it little meaning but great understanding. Each word seemed to carry with it forgotten memories and unimagined dreams. Between the two leather covers of the book she explored a whole world of living which she had never thought possible, and yet found strangely familiar.

Though she read to experience that new wonder and awe, she also suffered a growing sense of emptiness. Perhaps the nameless man had been but a first step, and the book had led her further along a path of rebirth, and now she was prepared for the next part of the journey.

The end was near. She turned the second last page and a tiny slip of paper fluttered to her chest. She stared at it for a moment, as if expecting it to move, then turned it over to read what was written on the other side: a series of numbers.

Someone rapped on the door and she realized the perpetual accompaniment of the nearby aria had ceased.

She leaped up, her intuition trembling at the danger outside her apartment. She looked down at the book and paper held meekly in her hands. Instinctively she stuffed the paper back in the book and set it atop her bureau.

Another heavy knock.

She scurried to the entry and paused. With a deep breath she cracked the door just as another knock began.

In the dimly lit corridor stood three men in black overcoats. The one closest to the door held his identification for her to read through the opening: "Ministerium der Kultur, Unterkommissar."

Before she could step away, the men poured inside, forcing her backward. The first stood before her looking at the floors, walls, and ceiling while the other two nosed around the apartment.

All her fears were realized. To run would be foolish. To claim innocence would be useless. Her fate was already sealed; they had but to locate the mysterious book.

The kommissar stood directly before her but looked beyond her. "You know why we are here."

A cold heavy net of resignation fell over her. "Nien."

She remained where she stood, unable to move, unwilling to raise her eyes. She could feel the kommissar's cold expectant stare going right through her. She could hear the other men rummaging through her belongings.

To her surprise, the kommissar turned and slowly wandered about. He perused several books stacked on a shelf. He took down Kafka's The Trial and flipped the pages.

She could no longer watch, so she stepped to the window. Through the blinds and bars she thought she saw a black form fade back into the shadows on the street below. The protection her apartment had always afforded, the feelings of security and contentment it had always provided, faded away. Like a wolf weary of its lovingly constructed zoo enclosure, she paced aimlessly round the room that seemed inexplicably cluttered with emptiness.

"Your card," said the kommissar, without looking at her.

She padded lightly to the bedroom. One man was turning out the linens in her bureau. She wanted to grab the book and throw it at him, shout, "Here! Take it!" But she could not even breathe while she waited for the inevitable. She retrieved her identification card and brought it dutifully to the kommissar, who had taken her place at the window, glancing at the deserted street below.

He returned the card between two stumpy fingers and said loudly, "She's a student."

His lips maintained their rigid line as he spoke, as if his words came from somewhere else. She was suddenly unsure what was happening. The whole moment seemed detached from reality.

The two other men met at the door. The only reason she could imagine that they had not noticed the book was that their search was purely arbitrary. They did not know what they were searching for.

She held her breath as the kommissar strolled past her. He paused as if in thought in front of her favorite painting, hung opposite the door. From behind she saw his head tilt slightly. He turned slowly and for the first time looked directly at her. With furrowed brow he studied her face. The embarrassment she felt was surpassed only by the horror of knowing she had somehow, at the moment of her exoneration, provoked in the kommissar the more wary, individual scrutiny she had at first feared.

He started to turn back, paused, his eyes peering directly into hers, and finally faced the painting again.

The pretty young woman in the painting seemed to smile at her over the kommissar's shoulder. A notion of understanding flashed through her mind and, before she could interpret it, disappeared.

"In the name of the People," the kommissar announced, "I must confiscate this."

He lifted the painting from the wall and strode out her apartment.

* * *

Each morning she awoke to repeat the same meaningless day, ever since the day of her father's inexplicable abandonment. She had been unable to find joy after that, and though she knew the processes of her existence continued, she also knew that her father's unexplained action left her feeling as if she no longer lived.

Then the book had appeared in her possession. And she was slowly beginning to realize she had not been irreparably damaged by her father.

After careful consideration, she determined _The Book of Zambullo_ existed only for her. The Ministry had not noticed it; Callimachus had denied it. And if the book was meant exclusively for her, she assumed only she could understand what the numbers on the slip of paper meant.

She tried for a moment to recall the important numbers of her forgotten past. She felt certain none of them were correct, the ones she needed now; and she believed every number she could think of was correct: her childhood address, her mother's identification, so many dates of birth. Then, in a desperate instant, she believed with heartbreaking sorrow that this was the solemn date of her father's crippling abandonment.

She looked at the numbers as if she had found a mathematical solution to the question of life. They were simply numbers, and yet, as she read them in sequence to herself, she was convinced they held some power, some magic.

Once more she sought some explanation in the mirror in the bathroom. The image she saw did not match the image she had of herself, or even the image she had seen the day before. She looked in the mirror as if at a stranger. Then, as she peered into those deep weary eyes, she remembered the seductive woman in black and her inexplicable words: "Don't call him."

She hurried back to pick up the slip of paper, excited beyond measure. She lay back in bed with the telephone on her stomach and the numbers hot between her fingers. As long as she had the numbers and the telephone she could make the call any time she wanted. She was in control. Yet she wanted to make the call now. The images running through her head made her dizzy with desire. She wanted the promise to be made true. She wanted to play a part in the events of the book, to see the written words transformed into reality.

The light from the morning sun leaped into her bedroom and blanketed her legs. She dialed the numbers.

The telephone rang once and released butterflies into her stomach. The nameless man seemed to promise a love that led to the impossible infinite.

The telephone rang again, sending a current of electricity through her lower body. She had always found it easier to secure herself away safely where she could never be hurt—hurt could come only from leaving that security to strive for the unattainable. But she could not go on the same any longer. She would either have to be reborn or die.

The telephone rang again, and she quickly hung up. She would not fall for the trap.

Alone, the infinite was nothing more than an abyss. She had no reason to expect love. And then, even if she found it, what could stop any man from disappearing, like her father, from the life they enjoyed together?

She would burn the book and those numbers with her hope attached to them, repair the walls around her heart, and return to her safe life, where she would not be harmed, but, she knew, too, she could never be healed.

But something had changed within her. She could no longer stand to observe emotions and experiences through a paper screen across an author's window. She needed to live and breathe emotions and experiences for herself.

She closed her eyes. Before she could take another breath, the telephone rang. In surprise she picked up the receiver immediately.

"I've been waiting for your call," he said.

She started at the sound of his deep voice. His unexpected familiarity seemed normal, and made her feel special.

"I wasn't sure—"

"You have nothing to fear," he said. "I've seen to every detail. You need only tell me when you are ready."

His voice sounded intimate, like the voice of her soul. He had come to the gate of her wall and slipped within. Then from the inside he had thrown wide the gate, he had torn down the wall and left her heart raw and exposed. She knew that if she hung up, he would only call back. She had to risk this once-in-a-lifetime experience, or be buried alive under her own ruins.

"I think I am," she replied, her own voice sounding cramped.

"You must be certain."

She was silent. She did not fear an unknown, for he made her feel as if everything was already arranged, and she had read it all in the book, she had played it all in her mind. And she did not fear him, concerned he was a stalker or psychotic; he had given her a book and nothing more. She had made the decision to call; she did not feel pursued or threatened; she still felt in control. And yet part of her feared she had lost all control, that now everything was inevitable, there was nothing she could do to change the path. The moment of her departure had arrived, and as she imagined any adventurer might feel, she was experiencing her last doubts.

"Are you certain?" he asked.

The bright flash of her emotions blinded her, washed out all space, time, and sensation. She blinked, and her vision became sharp, aided by the explosion of this flare over the no-man's-land of her life. The gray solitude surrounding her faded into the shining silvery light. Time dissolved with the eerie illumination. The dreamlike image that filled her sight felt so familiar, so intimate, it rendered her safe and secure existence a mere illusion. What had been shuttered outside now shone with clarity in her heart. Air rushed to her lungs clean and bracing as pure oxygen. Her body pulsed with a new rhythm, the sign of its own awakening.

"Yes, I am."

"Then listen carefully..."

* * *

She hoisted her rucksack on her shoulder. For some reason she glanced around her apartment, feeling vaguely that she was leaving something undone.

Old newspapers were stacked recklessly in a corner beside a useless box. Several plastic plants always seemed to thrive when she spoke to them. The pot in which she boiled water, often as if preparing a feast, sat empty. A few metal dishes were dripping dry in the rack. Her bed, awash in soft morning light, looked obscenely like a coffin.

Everything that caught her eye detailed a woman she would never have recognized as herself. She wondered how and when she had become this way. Had her life deteriorated into this pretense of living over time, gradually, so she had never noticed the change? Or had her life been battered into submission overnight by a disappearing parent?

Perhaps it was her life, here in this tiny cold apartment, that was undone. If that was so, when she returned she would be forced to make several changes. Since reading the book, she no longer had any desire to remain the same. When she looked at the objects around her now, it was with the eyes of one who might be seeing it for the first time, searching for clues to a stranger who had once inhabited it.

She turned down the hall and stopped abruptly beside the blank wall opposite the door. The vast yawning emptiness drew her attention. The Vermeer reproduction, which the kommissar had confiscated, had been all that remained of her father.

On that fateful day when her father disappeared, so had the painting. Her mother had cultivated a cold hatred in her heart, leading her to believe her father had preferred to take with him a work of art and leave behind his daughter.

"Your father would stare at that painting like it was a piece on display in a case," her mother once told her. "He admired its 'mathematical clarity and sense of order.'" She scoffed. "I wouldn't be at all surprised to learn he is behind this 'Bolfsumwälzung.'"

Her mother claimed to hate it for all the reasons her father had admired it. But somehow she knew there was much more to the painting. She knew for both parents it must have been much more than an exercise of the mind.

Over the years the image of the pretty young woman bathed in cool silvery light acquired sinister qualities: seductress, insurrectionist, infanticide, and eventually uxoricide. But after her mother's death she discovered the painting in the attic, wrapped in a blanket covered with the dust of forgetfulness. On the brittle brown paper covering the back someone had scribbled a strange sentence: _For death and life alike I am unfit, and you, my lady, are the cause of it._

Since its recovery, she had come to cherish the painting. When she took the apartment, she immediately hung the painting opposite from her door where she would see it every day, and be reminded of her father. For her, its sudden and unexpected reappearance symbolized hope of one day seeing him again.

All those years since its recovery she had been unable to figure out why such a simple portrait had inspired such admiration in her father. Just as confounding was the apparent threat the kommissar had discovered in the painting. Now all that remained was the sadness of the empty wall, the emptiness of her life within these four walls.

Her stomach gurgled and she realized she could never return. There were already too many blanks in her life. She cursed the crippling Regime and ran out the door.

Her sudden emergence in the street startled a scrawny brown bird, which flew peeping into the overcast skies. She watched its fluttering form disappear from view. With a twinge of anxiety, she wondered where the bird would alight, where it had been, how it would survive.

Despite the clouds and lack of sunshine, she recalled images of beauty along the French Riviera she had once seen at a photographic exposition. The feel of soft sand embracing her tanned body, the soothing sound of the ocean in the dark of night, the tempting smells of living richly were all parts of her promised land. If she closed her eyes and gave in to the anticipatory mood and spirit of the day, she could imagine with perfect clarity a pristine forest overlooking a glittering sea on which the sun bobbed brilliantly, never to be seen by mortal man.

The constant zip and electric clicks of rusting trams filled the air. Everything but the bakery and the bookstore smelled ominous gray. The Regime tried to snuff out life in the city, but somehow her spirit had sprouted from the filth. Now, she thought with a mixture of hardy persistence and pitying hopelessness, she would stand out like an insidious weed.

She hurried along the street, paying careful attention not to notice anyone, partly of her hope to remain unnoticed, but also of her well-learned fear of catching someone at something illegal, immoral, or incomprehensible. At the station she proceeded to the end of the cracked concrete platform to wait for the tram she normally rode to her evening classes. Aboard she searched out the seat beside a legless man that everyone always left empty. She knew she would not be disturbed there.

The tram rumbled between neglected buildings and passed high wooden fences, which kept barely hidden and confined things she glimpsed frighteningly through cracks. No one spoke, but the squeals and growls of the tram mimicked conversation of a threatening nature. The walls screamed graffiti jokes and revolutionary slogans with an air of obscenity. In the center of what could become anyone's nightmare with but a mistaken word or gesture, she felt safe in this one seat beside the legless man, which was ignored almost out of existence.

Often she would sleep or study her texts. Today, though, she could not concentrate on anything. Words she read on the page meant nothing, and the words she strung together on paper proved even more meaningless.

She drew her rucksack into her lap and reached inside. With a mixture of dread and awe, she pulled out the photograph of her inexplicable youth. She stared at it and first smiled at the promise of soon recapturing that child, then frowned at the thought her father would never know. Suddenly a hated feeling of childhood returned, that she had become the center of attention, conspicuous in the seat beside the legless man chosen for its anonymity. She shoved the photograph back and let the bag drop to the floor with a bookish thud. She closed her eyes and sat motionless, conjuring the glorious sunset of her unsullied paradise.

When she opened her eyes, she was gazing into the emptiness where a pair of legs should have been. Slowly, so as not to arouse attention, without moving her head or even breathing, her eyes glided up the seat into the legless man's lap. His hands were folded. She could see no higher without moving, so she coughed, adjusted herself in the seat as if uncomfortable, and with a quick turn of the head raked her eyes across his torso and face.

His sad eyes met hers. They both smiled uncomfortably. She turned away.

She tried again to picture the comfort of her eternal sunset, but the legless man persisted in her thoughts. She wondered about the endless struggles he must face just to live, and suddenly her own life seemed grand. At least she always kept with her that hope of one day escaping. But for him there was no escape. She thought in his condition she simply would not want to live.

How did he reach the seat? How did he even board the tram? Where did he go every day, and why?

She wanted so to see through his eyes, to know him and perhaps learn what life really meant. She stared at him intently, until he turned once again toward her. But this time she forced herself not to glance away in shame or embarrassment. She forced herself to look directly into his eyes, as if gazing into the forever eyes of a lover.

He was nothing like she expected. She had never taken notice of him, gray after gray day, only noticing, like so many others, what was missing.

He could not run away and escape her scrutiny. This fact gave her a strange feeling of control over the moment, of power over events she had never enjoyed. She held his eyes with her own and made him look at her, made him not turn away, made him see her and recognize her. To her surprise, he smiled at her without a hint of self-consciousness, then returned his attention to the state newspaper he was reading.

She tipped her head back, suddenly exhausted. All she could do was marvel at the unexpected discovery of his dignified beauty. The thrill of power she had experienced was gone, banished, not by indifference or abandonment, but by his generous acknowledgment and casual composure.

* * *

The inner eye of her soul opened. She sobbed, wiped at her nose, sniffled. Her stuffed kitten was damp with her tears. She shuddered against what felt like a sudden draft of cold air, and tugged the blanket to her sides. She tried to recall the dream, remember why she had cried, and to place the face of the stranger. She could not remember details. She knew only that she had been sad and frightened, and had wanted something more than she had ever wanted anything. But even as she grew warmer and calmer and her eyes became accustomed to the darkness, the vague images and emotions slipped away. She stroked the kitten's plush body and sighed.

Another draft of air came through the half-open window. She tossed back the blanket and skipped across the room. Cautiously she separated the blinds and peered into the night. The leaves of the towering trees rustled in the gusting breezes to the faint rhythm of a cricket's chirp. Across the street in another open window, a bluish gray light glowed brightly, then dimly. For several minutes she watched with gratitude the stillness that shown outside her window. Then somewhere too near she heard the boom of distant artillery signaling the start of another day's hostilities, and she pulled down the window to shut out the obscene noise.

She scurried back toward her bed, eager to leap under the blanket and snuggle down with her kitten. But just before her feet left the floor she restrained herself, bumping into the bed and then falling forward. With arms outstretched she held her head and body away from the bed and stared at the cause of her sudden uneasiness.

Slowly she pulled the stuffed animal to the safety of her arms. Comforted herself by the kitten, she rose and backed away from the bed. She reached behind her with one hand for the lamp, never taking her eyes off the object of her apprehension. Her fingers met the stand and crawled toward the tiny chain. She held still for a moment, listening, watching, preparing to confront this mystery. Then all at once the terrible yearning from the dream returned, her whole body shuddered, and a blindness crept in upon her. She jerked the chain.

The room remained in darkness. She sighed with growing apprehension, glanced quickly at the uncooperative lamp, and pulled hard on the chain. It came off in her fingers. With a grunt of frustration, she threw it on the floor and backed further toward her bureau. Still without looking away from the bed, she ran her hand along the front of the bureau until it reached the third drawer. Inside the drawer she groped among clothes and keepsakes for the candle which she used to read late at night so there would be no light under the door to betray her. To her relief, it was there, with the matches too. She placed it atop the dresser and lit it. A dim glow suffused the room. With candle held before her, she started back toward the bed. The light moved slowly with her, creeping up on the object of her apprehension. When she reached the side of the bed, she raised the candle over her head and stared down in surprise.

On the pillow beside where her head had lain was a book. She stared at it for several minutes, trying to identify its size and shape, searching her bookless memory, wondering where it had come from. The last time she had been reading in bed had been several nights earlier. She did not recall placing this book there before falling asleep. There were no shelves or stands it could have fallen from.

She stroked her kitten again and began cautiously circling the bed. Even as she watched and drew nearer, the book did not move of its own accord or reveal itself in any way; it simply lay there. She placed her animal on the bed at arm's length, then reached for the book. It felt heavy as she drew it near. Across the top of the cover was written the title, along the bottom the author's name. Between, a detail from a Vermeer, which she recognized from her art books, gave the book a gentle, contemplative, but significant, appearance. She admired for a moment the woman of the painting and suddenly felt certain the book had been a gift from her mother, who always encouraged her reading habits. Inside the cover, no inscription had been written, so with book in hand she headed toward her parents' room to question and thank them.

She padded down the corridor, tapped on the half-shut door, and stepped inside. She whispered, "Mamma," but from the massive oak bed came no response. She stepped further into the shadows and whispered again, louder. This time she saw a figure move, an arm arc in the dark, trailing the ghost of a sheet behind. Her eyes had adjusted and now she could see her father lying alone.

For a moment she pondered her mother's whereabouts. She listened for noises from other parts of the house, but heard only the gentle rasp of her father's steady breathing. Unable to thank her mother for the gift, she felt sad. Then a quick succession of thoughts flashed through her mind, nothing she saw clearly as an image, but more strongly felt as a premonition: her mother was on the run, wanting never to be found, and then stranded somewhere alone, wishing anyone would find her. She stared at the book, now bending in her tight grip, then stared at her father who continued to sleep oblivious to the crisis of his child. She struggled with her portentous feelings, wanting to visualize them, wanting to help her mother and be helped by her father, wanting to run away herself and never to be found.

Her father remained asleep, sprawled out trusting and content as an innocent. She marveled how still he could be. She thought only of him moving, always going, never staying in one place. She always thought of him cold and unaffected, but now in bed, perhaps dreaming wildly, she saw him vulnerable and open. She wanted to sit down and talk to him, tell him all the things he had not had time or care to listen to. She wanted to tell him how much she loved him and how much she needed him.

"Where's Mamma? I didn't expect to find you here." She sat down on the edge of a chair and looked at the book gripped tightly in her hands. "Did you give this to me?" She smiled at her father's figure. "It's nice, if you did. Maybe we could read it together. Or could I read some of it to you now?" She opened the cover and turned the first few pages.

From her father came a low groan and a sudden spasm of movement. She watched as he seemed to grapple with unseen demons, then finally fall still again. He mumbled something. She wanted to brush the hair from his forehead and hold his hand, but feared coming too close. Something deep inside her warned that if she were not careful, he might at any moment disappear.

"Are you all right?" she said quietly. "Don't worry, I'll take care of you like I took care of Mamma."

He grunted something, deep within a dream, then shouted "No!"

She sat up in the chair, alert and frightened. His head turned from side to side, and she reached out to touch him, to give him comfort, to wake him from his demons, but his arms suddenly waved twice, as if to keep her away.

"Don't, Pappa," she said, tears suddenly filling her eyes with the presentiment of what was coming. "Please don't."

Her plea seemed to calm his nervous movement. He continued to mumble low, as if in argument, and she watched, nervously gripping the book. For an instant she wished she had brought her kitten for comfort.

In a clear firm voice her father said, "I can't."

"What?" she asked. "What's wrong, Pappa?"

"I'm leaving!"

Somewhere deep in her mind the past and present collided in a desperate act of dreams and fears. She saw herself alone again, staring through tears across that which separated her from her father: the endless wasteland she called her life. Once more that terrible yearning seized her soul. In a flash of hope and fury, she raised the book over her head to pummel her father into only a mere fraction of the pain he had caused her. She opened her mouth with a scream she did not hear and let the book come down. It sliced clean through his legs, just above the knees, causing only a trickle of blood to stain the bedclothes.

Her father opened his eyes, suddenly painfully awake. She glanced down at the limbs lying useless at the bottom of the bed, and her father's twitching stumps. Her hands shook and she dropped the book to the floor. She met her father's beseeching look of horror and awe. A rush of strength and power flooded her body, then quickly receded, leaving behind a gentle, fertile care.

She smiled and said, "I love you, Pappa."

* * *

"Fräulein."

She opened her eyes and reared back from the grizzled man who leaned close to her face, his hand pawing at her shoulder.

"The end of the line, Fräulein."

She looked around then. The tram was empty; even the legless man was gone. She opened her mouth to ask the conductor what had happened to him, but merely sighed instead.

Across such a short distance she had come so far to bring change to her life, to bring life to her living, and for a moment just before falling asleep to the steady rocking motion of the tram, she had believed the legless man was a good omen. Now she realized nothing had really changed at all. Despite all her hopes she was once again alone.

"Where am I?" she asked.

"Grozny Station," he replied.

The thought occurred to rid herself of the book of false hopes, leave it behind to appear to some other anonymous rider as mysteriously as it had appeared to her. But this was where she had been instructed to come. Though she knew she could not affect the past, she clung to the belief her future might yet be decided. With any luck her dream would be made manifest just outside the station.

She slung her rucksack over her shoulder and clutched the book to her breast. The conductor offered her his hand, which she took for a promise. She stretched her stiff muscles and, with a smile of appreciation, and mounting anticipation, she squeezed between the groaning doors of the tram.

The station was underground and inadequately lit. To the left, a massive wall screamed graffiti at her; to the right, the track curved abruptly out of sight; above, grim air-ducts collected soot. The unexpected chill of the evening and the abandoned loneliness of the station hit her at the same time, and she shivered. She thought she saw a rat leap down into the abyss of gleaming rails. The only other movement came from a man nodding his head in the corner beside a ventilation grate. She took a step forward, thinking him the legless man, then halted when she noticed shoes poking from beneath his tattered blanket.

She pulled her coat tightly around her, as much for warmth as for reassurance.

In front of her, the barred ticket window was unattended. Beside the window stood a ravaged wooden telephone booth. She crossed the platform, wary of the homeless man now stirring beneath his blanket, and consulted the schedule on the wall. The last train back into the city had left ten minutes earlier.

A wave of despair came over her. Despite having come eagerly in search of her dream, Grozny Station was bringing her worst fears to fore, and now her one apparent chance for retreat was gone. She looked around not knowing where to go next, or what to do. Her instructions had only been to take the tram to the end of the line. She thought the answer would present itself here.

Several nonsensical mumbles emerged from the other side of the telephone booth. She feared when the homeless man found her, he would not welcome her in his station. Or, perhaps, he would welcome her with greater affection than she would ever consider returning. She did not want to explore either possibility.

Then she remembered the book in her hand. She found stuck between two pages the slip of paper on which was scribbled the numbers she had called. Cautiously she approached the telephone booth and stepped inside. She tried gently to slide the doors shut, but they resisted. She applied more pressure; abruptly they jerked shut with a metallic screech and a rattle of glass. With a glance through the thin side windows she saw the homeless man turn his back toward her, as if intent on sleeping through what must have been for him just another disturbance.

She breathed relieved and turned quickly toward the telephone. Without hesitation she began dialing the numbers. There was no sound. She shook the receiver, then tried for a dial tone, but could get none. The telephone was dead.

She slammed the receiver back in its cradle as tears welled in her eyes. Suddenly she felt as if she was trapped in the tiny booth, and spun around to find the homeless man sitting up now, smiling and nodding mischievously at her.

She fought frantically to open the doors of the booth, and darted toward the stairs to the street. Night had settled quickly, and the eerie calm that normally remained after dusk had been swept away by strong winds pushing low dense clouds and pulling thunder behind. The street was nearly as deserted as the station below. The buildings were all old and dirty. Garbage rustled along the walkways. She saw a tiny glow in a doorway across the street. A man took a half step from the shadows, and she thought that perhaps he had been waiting for her. But the signal she had hoped for did not come, and he vanished back into the shadows like a faded vision.

A block away to her right several people were going to and from a well-lighted shop. Two young men were hurriedly loading a van with large boxes from within the shop. Each time they emerged from the van doors, they glanced up and down the street before proceeding. She guessed, because of the dark, unmarked van, they were employed by the Regime or the black market. In either case, she was certain they were criminals.

She looked to her left but saw only darkness.

No cab awaited her. All of the buildings seemed to be places of dubious business, either closed for the day or abandoned. For some reason she had imagined, as she ran up the stairs from the station, she would find herself at the entrance of a glorious cathedral bathed in stained-glass colors where her dream awaited.

Thunder rumbled overhead. She looked around once again wondering what to do. She began to think she had made the wrong decision in coming this far, in succumbing to romantic hopes. She was foolish to have given up contentment and safety for this. Yet if she chose now not to continue, not to go forward, she would be forced to spend another night alone, but this one without food or shelter or the security of her apartment.

She heard shouting from down the street and her hopes rekindled. She turned and saw one of the young men beside the van arguing with the other and gesturing toward her. He took a step forward and shouted again in some vulgar dialect she could not understand. The second man restrained the first, and she turned her back to them. She shivered, sensing their hidden danger, and descended back to the station.

She did not dare to spend the night in the station with the homeless man. She knew she could never rest for fear he might at any moment attack her. But she decided she would implore the kindly conductor to allow her to sleep inside the tram for the night. They could shut the doors against the outside threats, and the mere presence of the conductor would certainly quash any evil designs the homeless man might have on her. She would not see the joyous end for which she had hoped; it was a plan to allow her to survive the night and in the morning return safely to her apartment.

When she reached the platform the tram was no longer there.

She looked across at the homeless man, who still remained sitting up and nodding his head at her. She looked away, trying to give no indication of her fear, and hence her vulnerability as prey, yet growing ever more fearful by the moment. At the edge of her vision the homeless man continued to stare at her. She turned and remounted the stairs.

A steady rain began to fall. Down the street the young men continued to move between the store and the van, now dripping and cursing at one another. She watched as they scrambled into the van. The engine started, and backfired. She flinched, then looked up in time to see the van chugging away over a bridge in the distance. Across the street the man under the awning remained in his place, the faint glow of his cigarette barely lighting the shadows in which his face was hidden.

In the sky far to her left she saw bursts of light and wondered if it was lightning or exploding shells. The thought she had at some point unknowingly crossed into a portion of the city controlled by the Resistance crippled her. That would explain why the telephone was dead. And it might also mean there would not be another tram. Perhaps this place had been fought over many times by the Regime and the Resistance, until now, when it no longer held value for any one but lurkers and looters.

She checked the clock on the wall, wishing the light of day was not still so far away. From underground she heard what she thought was the grating and snapping of a tram, and she hurried back down the stairs. With only a cursory glance at the homeless man, she strode toward the edge of the platform. She waited, listening, hearing nothing now, but still craning to see a tram approaching around the bend. Eventually she turned round and saw the homeless man smiling and nodding.

She headed back toward the screaming wall, staying as close to the edge of the platform as possible, concentrating on the metal rails that, seeming to writhe in the darkness, produced in her grotesque nightmares of infestation, but let her avoid meeting the homeless man's disconcerting stare. The silence began to frighten her. She could not go back on the street where there was no shelter from the harsh weather. And she did not trust the homeless man, who every moment appeared stronger and more agile than any indigent she had ever seen. She saw no ready means of escape, and though she knew better, her mind became wild with thoughts of imminent freezing or starvation.

She felt truly at the end of the line.

When she had just passed the homeless man, a shrill ringing suddenly pierced the silence of the station. She screamed.

The homeless man laughed and she looked at him, pressing her hands against her racing heart. He continued the inexplicable nodding of his head as he glanced up at the telephone booth against the wall just a few feet from his grate.

The ringing continued as she and the man stared at one another, neither moving nor speaking.

"Answer it," mumbled the homeless man.

She was sure she had already found the telephone dead. Its sudden inexplicable operation made her even more mistrustful of the homeless man. She looked up and down the empty platform and back at him, wondering what to do, where to run. He nodded his head.

With as much composure as possible, she returned to the stairs and skipped back to the street. The rain poured down like thick iron bars, pelting the pavement like machine-gun fire that disrupted the rhythm of her heart.

Below, the ringing continued.

A wicked wind began slinging the rain into her face. She retreated a few steps until she could just see across the street. A playbill tore from the lamppost in front of her and was thrown to a watery grave. From below the awning she saw the glow of the man's cigarette arc into the street and then die. For a moment she considered approaching him and asking for help.

Suddenly she noticed the ringing had ceased.

"Hey!" came the gravely voice from below.

She glanced back across the street but could see no sign of anyone. She listened carefully for a moment, but could hear only the heavy rains.

She dared not move.

"Are you there?"

She thought the voice sounded closer. She adjusted her position to be ready for action. Should the homeless man accost her, she decided she would run first across the street and pray the man under the awning was still near to help her.

"It's for you," he shouted. "He wants to talk to you."

She remained still but alert, listening, waiting. She moved to the edge of the stairwell to get a better angle on the platform below, but she could not see the homeless man. With great caution she crept down the stairs. Further and further she descended. The homeless man had stopped beckoning her, and she could hear no more movement below. Water now ran quickly down the stairs, past her cold quivering body. When it reached the bottom she could hear it trickling into the drain.

She came only a few steps from the platform and still could not see the homeless man.

"What do you want?" she called in a loud, firm voice, hoping to mask her fear.

The rain streamed urgently around her feet.

She leaned against the wall and slowly descended the remaining steps. She leaned her head out around the corner. Through the long narrow windows of the telephone booth she could see the receiver swinging to and fro. The blanket lie on the ground below the grate where the homeless man had been, but he was nowhere in sight.

She stepped out from the stairwell, never looking away from the telephone booth. The homeless man's unexplained disappearance shifted her fear of him to a more general and gripping fear of the unknown.

"Talk to him."

She froze.

He was directly behind her. She could feel his breath against her neck. She stood in tense wait for him to assault her. The receiver continued to swing gently back and forth.

Nothing happened. The homeless man did not speak, nor did he move, but she could sense his presence, feel his threat. She began to fear she need only make the slightest move to send him into action. But when what seemed like an eternity had passed and still nothing had happened, the anxiety of the situation finally overwhelmed her.

As slowly as she could, making sure to avoid any sudden movement that her would-be attacker might take for flight or, worse, fight, she turned her head. When her face had come right beside his, she stopped. He merely stared at her, nodding his head as before.

A tear began to flow from her eye, as she mumbled in desperation, "Please don't hurt me."

He laughed.

She shut her eyes, sobbing, waiting for the worst.

"Zambullo," he said.

On hearing the name her tears stopped and she opened her eyes. She glanced down at the book, clutched so tightly to her breast she was certain the homeless man had not seen it.

"He wants to talk to you."

The receiver still swung from its frayed cord.

She slowly backed away from the homeless man, in the direction of the booth, without turning her eyes from him. She stumbled on his blanket, and then held out her hand to feel her destination. He remained still and smiling.

When she reached the booth, she stepped around to the front and darted inside, pushing the doors shut behind her. Immediately she grabbed the receiver and turned her back on the homeless man for privacy.

"Please, help me," she said.

"You are in no danger."

"I'm afraid," she said through her tears. "I can't go on."

"There is an automobile waiting for you on the other side of the canal."

Her heart constricted. "I can't," she said.

"In twenty minutes it will be gone."

She opened her mouth to beg for more information, but heard the click from the other end of the line. She held the telephone against her ear and fought against the tears. She wanted to think her situation through, to weigh her options, but she knew if she waited too long, she would not be left with any.

She looked at the large clock that seemed to grin on the station wall. Nineteen minutes remained.

She hung up the telephone and turned swiftly around. She felt immediately relieved to see the homeless man still stood against the wall by the stairs, as if he hadn't moved. Then, as she stepped out of the booth, she began to wonder if he planned to stop her on the stairs, or even if he had set a trap for her while she had been in the booth.

A sudden boom of thunder made her jump. The homeless man laughed.

She looked around cautiously and started toward the stairs. Once again she tried to make her outward appearance mask any fear. She moved calmly and finally with a specific purpose. She hoped she would be able to convince the driver of the automobile to take her home, or at least to a safer place. She would pay him whatever he wanted. But without transportation she would be stuck.

The homeless man remained absolutely still, watching her. She forced a half-smile for him as she passed, and then began calmly to mount the stairs.

"Fräulein," he said.

She stopped.

"May I present you with a gift?"

She turned around slowly. He waved his hand for her to approach.

From behind his back he drew his other hand and held it forward, presenting to her a brown egg.

"For a beautiful lady," he said.

She looked at him smiling and nodding and suddenly felt guilty for suspecting him of any malice. She realized he was nothing but a crazy lonesome man.

She shoved the book into her rucksack, then reached out and gently took the egg from his hand. For an instant she thought she might step forward and embrace him. Then the idea was gone, and she turned and ran up the stairs into the freezing rain, the laughter of the homeless man echoing through the station behind her.

* * *

Since the revolution, only the Regime, or fugitives from the Regime, possessed private vehicles. One night the city had been invaded by troops who rounded up all the automobiles and herded them away to a destination no one knew. The Ministry of Truth had termed it a "program of city enhancement."

She was certain now she was involved in some hoax. She determined to see for herself, so there would never be a doubt, so one day thirty years from now she would not think back with regret on something that might have changed her life forever.

Within moments she was soaked and shivering. The deserted street stretched long before her as the rains fell in drafts, lashing at her. She kept her face down, cradled the egg against her breast with one hand, and held the rucksack over her head with the other. She didn't run because the water was beginning to freeze on the walk. She feared slipping and falling, hurting herself and becoming stranded there without any aid. So she walked quickly but carefully.

When she approached the store where the men had been unloading boxes, she slowed down. The windows were papered blind on the inside, and streaked with grime on the outside. She could only guess what business or service was rendered within. She glanced up and down the street, across at the dark awning, then hurried along.

Behind her the flashes of light still littered the sky as battle or weather refused to rest for the night. She had heard of it often in talk in Barungrad, and in the evening papers, and she often heard the booms of artillery shatter a silent night, but she had never been this close herself. The reality of the hostilities made her suddenly cross herself. Then, conscious of the appearance of a religion she had never before kept, she apologized to God, and then prayed, all in the same heavy breath.

After a few moments, and what seemed several more inches of rain, the bridge rose before her. It was much larger than it had seemed from Grozny Station. She began to cross, not knowing for certain where she was. A feeling gripped her cold body, a sense the canal was a boundary and she was crossing into another region, crossing some unmarked border of silence.

The bridge arched slowly above the surrounding land, the two small towers on either side rising to be seen from many miles. When she reached the stone tower, she paused under the overhang to look behind her at the tiny patch of watery light that was Grozny Station. In contrast, ahead of her glared the sodium bulbs of the sleepless Keppler Steelworks. Without regard for weather or time or the smallest most beautiful life, the sprawling industrial complex ceaselessly produced the fuel of world history. The bridges of their fathers had become fodder for the middle-aged adolescents toying with armaments.

She peered over the side of the rusted steel girders. The water churning below her was the canal, which encircled the city and provided a link to the river Schnau. The color was deeper than she had ever seen, Zeppelin-black. Here, in the center of a soaked night, the canal was a liquid void, a gaping emptiness scarring the land, not bringing it life. Even in the obscene light from the steelworks, she could see nothing. The light did not illuminate the canal; the canal consumed the light. If she jumped, she would sink down and down and never touch the bottom of that watery abyss.

Her gaze met a spot moving on the surface. She thought it was a sea creature or some animal wading across. She watched as the current brought the object closer. When it passed into the light she saw it was a small woven basket, inside of which wriggled a tiny baby. She leaned further over as the basket floated far below the bridge, and a sensation of delirium overwhelmed her. She leaned away from the edge before falling over and stood still for a moment to regain her sense of balance. Then she rushed to the other side of the bridge and looked down into the black water again, searching for the basket and baby.

They had disappeared.

For a moment she asked herself what she had done. Her eyes swelled with tears as she wondered how she could have let herself into such a mess. Then she remembered the automobile, and looked ahead at the other side of the canal. Through the pouring rains she saw on the road a lone automobile parked under a streetlamp.

She looked back at the empty street. The station was but a tiny glimmer in the distance. The steelworks had an eerie pasty glow. She was completely alone.

A flash of light sliced into the darkness and she felt the bridge rumble beneath her. Like a ghost emerging from nowhere, a train, black and sleek and full of dread, tore across the rails directly in front of her. She fell back, assaulted by the noise and wind and rain like bullets shot into her face. The stone towers creaked, and the metal girders groaned. Then, as fast as it had appeared, the train vanished into the consuming night.

She suppressed the tears that wanted to burst free. With a deep breath she began to feel her way along the bridge toward the other side. She now understood the boundary this river marked, the separation she had sensed of its two sides. On her side was the Regime, and a life of complete control. On the other side, where the automobile waited, was freedom.

Her pace quickened. The rain whipped against her harder than ever. She wondered how much time had passed since the telephone call, fearing it was nearly twenty minutes, feeling it was certainly an eternity. But the automobile was still there, her automobile, her freedom. She lowered her head and began to run.

The automobile was a Glas 1958 Goggomobil T-400 Coupe. The small vehicle was in perfect condition, as if it had never been driven before. She expected to find someone waiting with the vehicle for her—Zambullo, a driver, or even the police—but saw no one. She tried the door, which was not locked, and thrust herself in out of the rain.

She sighed, dripping. The heavy cold rain pelted the roof like machine gun fire. She did not know what to do. She looked around, wondering if the driver perhaps had left for a moment, to make a call, or to get a drink in a nearby tavern. She decided to wait, catch her breath, try to wring the water from her soaked clothes. She wiped the drops from her eyes and on the seat beside her placed the rucksack and the egg.

She considered that egg with surprise. She wondered at its meaning. She had kept it, even guarded it against harm as if it were a treasure, as if it were her child. She was certain it was nothing more than a country egg, at worst snatched from a local hennery. Something—the mystery, perhaps—kept her from tossing it in the trash, or dropping it into the river. But she had no idea what to do with it. Perhaps it had no meaning, no purpose beyond turning the perceived threat of the homeless man into the grace of a simple holy figure.

She had no such doubts about the book in her pack. This was her inspiration and her guide, her promise and her hope. This was, she realized with a shiver of fear, her life. In a way, _The Book of Zambullo_ had given birth to her. She had gestated for twenty-odd years, warm and safe, and now she was finally coming out of her shell, emerging into a world she had never known before. The book had offered her hope of something better, and now it offered her some comfort from the unknown. Simply having it beside her gave her the courage to go forward.

The rain continued its assault.

She looked around outside but saw no activity. She leaned over and back, searching around inside the automobile for something, anything, for what she did not know. She glanced out the window and saw a figure wriggle between two buildings across the street. She watched, unmoving. The rain pounded on the automobile. Then in the water sheeting down the window she saw a lamppost wriggle, the street writhe, the two buildings shimmy together as if in some erotic dance. What she had thought was a man must only have been a trick of the rain and shadows and her already eager imagination.

She breathed deeply, steadily, wondering what to do. She knew at the very least she could not remain in the automobile, waiting for something that she did not know and which might never come. The only thing that approached with regular certainty was the twenty-minute deadline. As she dripped away the seconds approaching it, her hopes that someone friendly would come for the automobile faded into a dread that she was not free, that upon the deadline the police would come on their rounds and seize the vehicle and take her into custody.

She saw no one outside. The rain now seemed to slash at the automobile, and she shuddered to think of being exposed again, of trying to walk back to the station. And if the police were about to come on their rounds, and they found her alone scrambling across the bridge, soaked with the same water that now dripped from the seat of this automobile... With each moment it became more obvious that she was alone with her egg and her guidebook and she had no choice but to move.

She placed the two talismans at her feet and slid into the seat beside her. She reached forward and opened the tiny compartment in the dash. A single leaf of paper fell out, startling her. Then she picked it off the floor and examined it in the diffused light of the steelworks.

One side was clearly a piece of Regime propaganda, featuring a stylized drawing of a couple happily turning over to a fatherly official an illegal book which their one child had somehow come to possess. In return for this good deed to the benefit of their society, the official handed the child a lollipop in the shape of the head of General Jakupovic. On the back someone had scribbled a crude map. After only a moment she realized it showed her present location, and her next destination: a large red X some three hundred kilometers to the north.

She looked to her left again, but only the rain moved across her window. She looked to the right and saw huddled in a doorway opening on the steelyards a mass of men smoking cigarettes. She looked at the map again, and then around the automobile. She glanced in the open compartment, then stuck her hand inside. To her surprise, her fingers found a key.

She had no doubt the key would start the automobile. She had no doubt she was alone. No man would come to take her, as she had expected. Everything had been left for her to find her own way. The rain did not abate. The workers slowly filed back inside the factory. The night waited.

The automobile started immediately. Now her heart raced. The last time she had driven an automobile had been in Hammelburg four years earlier, before her transfer to the University of Angstadt and the bloody Bolfsumwälzung. She looked around quickly to see if anyone was approaching at the sound of the engine. She pulled into the empty rain-swept street. She drove a block and turned right, intending to head back in the direction from which she came, back in the direction Barungrad and home must lie. But she had driven only two minutes when she came upon a barrier in the road. She thought she could easily drive through it, and there appeared not to be any guards manning the blockade. But then she spotted the roll of barbed fencing that extended across the road and in either direction on both sides. It was an endless tangled mess of wire that absolutely prohibited any further progress. She was cut off and had nothing to do but continue forward.

When she reached the town again, she turned on an impulse back over the bridge. She drove past Grozny Station, then turned left, again in the direction of Barungrad, hoping these roads were yet open. But again, as she had feared but hoped against, further ahead the road was blocked with wood barricades and impenetrable wire.

She picked up the map and tried to orient herself. It was a map drawn by an unsteady hand, but showing in great detail the roads and landmarks surrounding the town on either side of the canal. But beyond this yawned a vast empty space, like the uncharted regions left blank by medieval cartographers where it was assumed monsters dwelled. Into this infinity a thin shaky line inscribed the route she was to follow.

She began to think she had made it through the worst and, even were it possible, there was no longer any reason to go back. She thought about how strong she had become, and how easy this journey had become, deciding she had only turned back toward her home as a reflex. If the road had not been blocked, she would have returned home, lied down safely in bed, and immediately found her mind wandering back to this point, wondering what lay ahead, what she had missed, and desiring to these unexplored regions. She had become so different a person that she realized she could never go back and be the same.

She drove back over the bridge and turned on the road marked by the map. Her ultimate destination was indicated only with an X, and once again the image of a grand cathedral came to her mind. The cathedral destroyed, bombed and gutted by fire. Stone saints toppled and limbless, accusing her with their stares.

She settled down for the long lonely drive deeper into the storm, growing tired now as the night seemed to wear on, closer to the fighting, further from home than she had ever been. Yet, somehow, she felt as if she was coming ever closer to herself.

* * *

She drove through a forest that, if not for the road, she would have believed had never been seen before by humans. On either side of her she was threatened by monstrous trees with twisted branches and knotted underbrush. They spread round her and hung low over her, confining her into this tiny tunnel which led to a distant brightness. Slowly, as the hole of light grew in size and magnitude, chinks began to appear in the cover of trees, and she glimpsed snatches of cloudless sky like tiny photographs held for her viewing by long trembling limbs. Then at last the trees parted, opening like gates to a promised land, and nothing remained to confine the sky or horizon. Suddenly her stomach dropped, and she felt as if she were falling from a great height into the endless azure.

* * *

She stepped cautiously, fearful of being pulled out into the open seas. The first thing she noticed was the vast low-pitched roar of the glittering sea. The port broke the strip of beach and dipped tentative toes into the water. The sand sparkled in the sun and turned a perfect tan where it was caressed by gentle waves. She had come to the end of the line and, despite her earlier eagerness, she found she could go no further into what was no longer a paradise but suddenly a mysterious void.

The ship sounded its deafening horn twice.

She remained standing, paralyzed, one hand on the automobile so she would not lose her balance and tumble into the water. She watched as her mother ran up the stairs to the deck of the ship, joining other waving passengers. Then slowly the gates to the port began to swing shut directly in front of her, and her heart began to rush with the thought of darting through them into the unknown. But instead of feeling liberated, the freedom that beckoned only froze her. She could do nothing but watch as the gates clanged shut and locked her into the same safe existence she had always known.

The ship cast away and from the back of the deck she saw her father waving at her, his arms swaying in huge arcs through the cool bracing air. She ran forward and gripped the gate with each hand, pressing her head between the bars. It was too late now to join him, and she would never be able to find him.

Slowly the ship cut across the waves toward a sun blinding as it dipped into its watery bed, lighting the sky with fire.

* * *

The automobile bounced hard on the edge of the road, jerking her neck back. Her muscles tensed at the sight of the dark silvery forest rushing past. For a moment her mind struggled to make sense of what seemed a confusing dream. Everything swelled and sparkled through tears, through raindrops.

This could not be the end.

In sudden desperation, she turned the wheel abruptly, sending the automobile jumping back on the road and across both lanes. Just ahead an animal stood still in her path. Frightened and nervous, she swerved back to the right side. This time she did not turn so hard, but the pavement was wet with the torrential rains, and the automobile skidded back onto the shoulder. The front tires hit a deep gouge and the automobile popped up and veered further off the road. Gravel spewed into the air and fell mingled with the rain. Before she could turn the wheel again, the back of the automobile slammed into a tree. The trunk flew off. The automobile spun and the front end hit the same tree. The windshield shattered.

Shards of glass lay in her lap. Rain poured in through the broken windshield. Blood trickled into the corner of her eye. Everything around her seemed still to be spinning. The automobile hissed as if angry at her careless treatment. A thin white smoke began to engulf her. She thought, climb or crawl, she must get out of the automobile. But when she could not move, no matter how hard she tried, she knew it was a dream.

She peered through the smoke into the surrounding blackness, not knowing where she was or what she would do now. Already she could feel the cold creeping greedily around her. She saw the large animal still standing in the road, oblivious to the weather, or to the accident it had just caused. It simply stared at her with shining eyes. Then, as if apologizing, the animal bowed its head. She feared it might attack her, and she tried to move. She could see she was not pinned against the wheel, or crushed against the door, but the dream—or the hand of Death—kept her immobilized.

When she looked back toward the animal, she found it standing directly beside the automobile. Steam from its breath clouded the window. It appeared to be a deer, or moose, or possibly a horse. And in a sudden flash of lightning she saw protruding from the center of its head a single auradescent horn.

Then she lost consciousness.

* * *

The tiniest taps brought her back. For a moment she sat with her eyes still closed, listening to those dreamy little sounds, wondering what they were. Then she felt the cold and the rain on her body, and shivered.

She opened her crusted eyes and looked around. The automobile was damaged completely. The rain had changed to a heavy mist. The animal, or whatever it had been, was nowhere to be seen. After a moment she realized even the unremitting skirmishes of the revolution had paused for the rest of the night. The forest slept without a breath to send the mist floating through the trees, yet she felt it watched.

The timid clicking noises continued. They seemed to be coming erratically from under the seat beside her. Though apparently unhurt, she could not move. She struggled vainly to free her pinned legs, then leaned over as far as she could. There was silence, then two small taps that she could not interpret. She lay against the seat, listening, wondering. She closed her eyes as a feeling of exhaustion blanketed her from the situation. How relaxing, she thought, to slumber with the comfort of these innocent taps.

She listened dreamily until several loud raps on the unbroken passenger window sent her bolt upright, erect with fear. She heard two deep voices, and then more urgent pounding. She stared straight ahead through the shattered windshield. All she saw were monstrous trees with twisted branches and knotted underbrush that hid the demons of her spinning mind.

For a moment her heart despaired at waking alive. Her mind immediately rebelled. Then without any control, she wept.

A light appeared inside the auto, and then shone directly in her face.

"Out of the vehicle," someone commanded.

She looked beside her but could only see a shape through the glare of the flashlight.

"I can't move," she tried to explain between tears.

"What?"

"I can't move," she said more loudly. "Please, take that light away from my eyes."

The man shined the light down where her legs were wedged between the seat and the steering mechanism. In the sharp-edged shadows it appeared as if she were now legless.

"Are you hurt?" he asked.

"I don't think so," she replied.

He shouted something and several others approached. "Just stay calm and we'll try to get you out."

What seemed to her a whole army of men swarmed into the automobile from all sides and began struggling to remove her. She sat silent and rigid, uncomfortable with the feeling of strangers pressed against her body, touching her, maneuvering her as if she were something less than human. They pounded on the automobile, groaned, yanked on her limbs for several minutes. Finally a multitude of arms wrapped around her chest and waist, hands gripped her thighs and arms, and all at once they pulled mightily, stretching her until she thought she would tear in two. Then out popped her legs.

The men helped her to her feet outside the automobile. On the side of the road sat rumbling a large armored transport vehicle. She sighed with relief as the uniformed men stepped back. The man with the flashlight stepped forward. She could see only his dirty whiskered face, and a small bandage above his right eye.

"What were you doing out here?" he asked.

"Driving," she replied, feeling a little dazed and complacent.

"Where?"

"I have a map."

She gestured at the automobile. Alone and unsure of her situation, she wished for the reassurance she believed only the book could give her. But when she stepped toward the wreckage, the man immediately blocked her path. She looked up and noticed several men had brought weapons into view. For the first time she realized these were Regime soldiers and she could possibly be in grave danger.

She held her breath in fear as one soldier began to search the automobile. His hand passed the map out to another soldier, who brought it forward. The lieutenant examined it in the light, paying more attention to the propaganda on the front side. His hands slowly lowered the map, which in turn raised his eyes to stare at her. She realized the paper on which the map had been drawn caused more suspicion than the map itself abated.

From the automobile came a tiny peep. The soldier emerged suddenly and came forward.

"I found something else, Leutnant."

Into the light he raised his right hand, and in the palm shivered a tiny wet chick.

"What is this?"

"A baby chick, Leutnant."

The lieutenant turned his stare on the soldier. "Get rid of it, Soldat."

The soldier turned aside from the company and tossed the chick into a muddy puddle. It shook again and tumbled forward. Then just as it seemed to stand steady, a shot ripped into the night. A splash, and she shut her eyes to the horror.

"Now," said the lieutenant, "where are your identification papers?"

She opened her eyes to see two tiny feathers floating lightly on the water.

"Your papers?" he repeated.

She did not fear her papers were in order; but she had nothing to show for the automobile, and the book, which did not even exist, had obviously not been approved by the Central Ruling Committee.

"In," she said, "my pack."

The lieutenant nodded his head. Two men stepped forward and took hold of her arms. The soldier put away his weapon and ducked back into the auto. The lieutenant turned toward the wreck with his flashlight to aid in the search.

With rucksack in hand, both men rose from the auto and glanced at her. She could not tell for sure whether to trust these men or fear them. For a second a feeling she could not describe rushed over her, recalling the unsettling meeting with the woman in black.

All around them swayed the twisted branches of monstrous trees. The fox of her desires, loosed by the note in the bookstore, was cornered, and awaited capture with breathless submission.

Before her papers were produced, a light passed across the scene and the soldiers all turned. A black sedan approached slowly and came to a stop on the edge of the road directly beside the armored vehicle. A few men trained their weapons on the automobile as the door opened and a hunched figure appeared. The figure ambled past the soldiers and stopped beside the lieutenant, who shined his flashlight around. An old toothless man who smelled of formaldehyde was grinning at them.

"Who are you?" the lieutenant demanded.

The toothless man began mumbling excitedly as he produced his papers. The lieutenant scrutinized the documents under his flashlight while several others examined the waiting sedan.

"Nothing here," came the report.

The toothless man continued to mumble, pointing at her. She realized he was speaking, but his words emerged so badly jumbled she could not understand anything he said. The lieutenant stared at the old man intently, as if trying to decipher his message. He glanced over his shoulder at the woman, then back at the man.

The toothless man withdrew a small package from under his long coat. Without looking at it, the lieutenant stuffed the package into his uniform and nodded at the soldier.

The soldier inclined his head respectfully and held the rucksack out to her.

Her fears were dispelled. The two men released her. The toothless man resumed his incomprehensible jabbering. The lieutenant remained before her, staring at her, smiling. She wondered again if these soldiers were loyal to the Regime, or the Resistance, or to anyone at all.

The toothless man nodded and babbled eagerly. He motioned her to get into the sedan. Into the rucksack she shoved the map and tossed it on the back seat. The lieutenant watched her suspiciously as she bent inside. The toothless man began to chuckle as he chattered over his shoulder at her. She smiled uneasily and nodded. As the sedan began to pull away, she glanced out the window and saw the lieutenant raise his hand in a vulgar gesture.

The toothless man drove with unerring precision, and spoke continuously words that were mumbled beyond understanding. For a while she smiled and nodded in reply, but soon she gave up and let him go on and on without any indication from her that she knew what he was saying or even cared.

As the automobile sped through the deep night, all her worries began to fade. She realized she no longer felt cold or hungry. Though she felt no heat, and had eaten nothing, now she felt refreshed, ready to finish her journey. And despite not knowing where she was headed, or understanding her journey, she was also eager to see it to the end.

* * *

_The Book of Zambullo_ was familiar. She remembered the story, but not the experiences of reading it. There were no golden memories of her mother reading this story to her, sitting on her lap and looking at the words with fascination. She couldn't recall reciting a passage to her father and asking him what it meant. At some point the book had been set aside as nothing but a mundane fantasy that held no interest for her. Now she knew she had once lived that story.

It was a magical book, and not a book at all. It possessed powers beyond her, powers that made it more than a book. It was thrilling, exciting, immediate. It was as if someone had dictated her soul onto one hundred fifty pages of parchment. And the hidden mystery, the secret her soul would reveal, still lurked in the last page. She had not read it yet. She had not been able to. She didn't know if she wanted to.

She had picked up her life and finally, after so long, was ready to live. After all the strange events of her journey, she needed reassurance from the book. She needed to recapture the first emotions of joy it had given her. She opened the covers and began reading once again.

The book healed. It exposed her and comforted her at the same time. It tore away every safety the demons of her soul had constructed in order to hide its secrets, but in return it gave her hope. It gave her promise. It filled her with the beautiful possibility of being loved, of being someone, of having a special meaning in the world, a meaning beyond her own. It broke holes in the walls of her soul so she could peer out at the world around her and see the vastness of life.

She turned the page.

She had suspected the book had been written specifically for her, to her. Now she wondered if the book had been written by some higher source, some greater authority, about her. This thought comforted her. She was no longer the person who drove others away, who was left alone in the world. She touched another being, someone else was there suffering with her, she was no longer alone.

She turned the next page.

The book made her entertain thoughts of love. It was like a guidebook to the infinite, where she would go beyond mere existence. But now she began to think what she really wanted was commiseration with another being, a togetherness, a shared experience. This, she believed, was the person she was meant to be. A girl born and proclaimed smart and pretty and blossom of life would finally live up to her billing, exceed expectations, and this time—no more worrying what mother might want, or fearing, every time she made the smallest mistake, it would drive father so far away—without trying to make anyone but herself happy.

She turned another page.

She had opened the book and a warm breeze had swept across her. Another world was revealed to her, a world she had once known but long since forgotten existed. And now she was being consumed by the story. The mystery and adventure dragged her in deeper and deeper, and would not let her go. Every time she came to the end of a chapter, she could not stop. She could no longer put the book aside to be continued later. She had to keep reading, had to find out what happened next. And yet, the closer she came to the end, the slower she read. She wanted most to savor the story, to find out what happened next without learning what happened last. She feared if she finished the book, the emotions and experiences would suddenly disappear, and she would find herself home again, safe again, the imprisoned slave she had become instead of the liberated beauty she might be.

* * *

The toothless man grunted.

She looked up from the book to see a thick gray cocoon spreading all around them. Ahead she saw nothing. It was impossible to know where they were going, but the driver did not slow. Indeed, as they plunged deeper into this immense void of fog, she felt as if they were moving faster and faster. She held tightly to the door as they became further encased in the elements. Her eyes stared wildly ahead as the sedan hurtled uncontrollably through space.

She hoped she had already died at her crash, and was now being transported to a heavenly abode.

Suddenly they emerged out the other side, and she felt a phantom jolt as if they had crashed into another object. But the automobile sped into a new scene, more horrible than the impenetrable fog because its horrors were visible.

Spread ahead over the trees on the horizon she saw a faint glow like a huge fire from an explosion. Out the side of the automobile she saw dark deformed shadows of a burned-out farmhouse. On the other side the pocked earth where shells had fallen looked like some inhospitable planet. The light ahead had seeped through the trees and into the sky, and she realized it was the dawn advancing on the lingering smoke of battle and the low dark clouds to retake the day. She could now see more small houses squatting in the dusk, and what she thought, after only a glimpse, was a bloated dead cow, its legs stiff in the air. Further on some large structure had been reduced to a huge pile of rubble where several small figures scavenged along the edge of a forest littered with human limbs. And now the morning light was strong enough to show her the view of a small village, its deserted streets, crumbled buildings with gaping holes, and frightened refugees.

She began to wonder again about the soldiers and the toothless man. She had absolutely no idea who they were or who they worked for. Perhaps the soldiers were a renegade unit, highwaymen who extorted whatever they could from anyone who passed through their territory. Or perhaps they were traitors.

A reality untainted by hope began to creep into her again. She had thought herself freed from the soldiers. She had assumed the toothless man was her rescuer, if not her savior. But why had he given a package to the lieutenant, and what had it contained? Regardless of which side the parties represented, she had been part of an exchange between them. Instead of being freed she had been bought.

The driver slowed the automobile through the village, and mumbled something. His head turned quickly back and forth, always looking for something. She tried to follow his darting glance and everywhere saw only destruction. Then he looked over his shoulder and said one indecipherable word, as if in command, and stopped the automobile. In front of them stood an ancient church, its steeple toppled and precariously dangling, by what she could not tell, along the tiled roof.

Instead of a renewed hope at the sight of the cathedral she had all along been expecting, she was horrified by the possibility she had been diverted from her course, and was now caught in a web of power and control in which she had no business.

The driver looked in all directions again and then hurried out the automobile. He opened her door and she recoiled from his reach. He leaned inside and grabbed her arm to hurry her along. They scurried across blackened earth and into the side of the church.

Inside, the dim morning trickled down through several holes in the roof. To her surprise, all it illuminated was the dust of disuse. Offerings had been taken from the altars. Each niche had been vacated by its apostle. Every relic had been confiscated from its shrine. The stained-glass windows, once shining, were now blind. Even the crucifix was gone, though separated from its triumphant Christ, Who lay defeated on the floor of the sanctuary, headless. Invading armies, or retreating troops, or even the few hopeless desperate refugees in between, had ransacked the church and left it for dead on the field of battle.

The toothless man urged her along. She followed him across the nave to the transept, and then he climbed into an emptied niche. He smiled back at her over his shoulder and mumbled pleasantly. She pushed aside the sinister thoughts that were overtaking her mind. A panel opened, and he beckoned her through the wall.

The smell of earth hit her first. She moved slowly into the passage, unable to see. The toothless man grabbed her wrist and continued to jabber, which helped allay her fear. She kept her other hand extended to feel her way along the rough innards of the church. After several meters they began to descend stone steps which turned gradually but enough, along with the darkness, to disorient her. She could feel a cold draught from somewhere. At last they came into a large chamber where a torch waited. The toothless man let go her hand and took up the torch before proceeding.

Now she caught glimpses of what appeared to be a storehouse. She saw stacks of books, a large pile of garments, various statuary, a row of empty frames. When the light of the torch reflected off a piece of colored glass, she realized someone had wisely stashed the contents of the church here, underground, before they could be stolen or destroyed.

Suddenly she bumped into the toothless man, who had stopped while she was peering into the dancing shadows. He mumbled something sternly, and then produced from his pocket a black cloth that he wiggled before her eyes. When she remained still and uncomprehending, he wiggled it and mumbled again.

"I'm sorry," she said, "I don't understand."

He draped it over his own eyes and then handed it to her, nodding.

"You want me to put this over my eyes?"

He nodded.

"Why?"

He wiggled it and grumbled.

She stared at the cloth. The momentary relief of seeing the church, dismantled and stored, disappeared in the surrounding darkness. Her sense of wonder and discovery had been usurped by the returned forces of her fear. She could not run, because she would be in the dark with no idea where to go. She had been lulled into letting down her guard, and had willingly become a prisoner.

The toothless man mumbled something calmly and then dropped the torch, startling her. He spun her and wrapped his wiry arms around her from behind. Like a snake he held her still until she stopped struggling, then pushed her against the jagged wall. With his body pressed against hers, he tied the cloth tightly over her eyes. Then he let go.

She stood still, her tears soaking the cloth, surrounded by silence and darkness. She could not imagine what atrocities awaited her. She realized what she had seen was not a safe-keeping of possessions, but a trove of booty. The soldiers on the road must certainly have been of the Regime. She would have preferred to have been shot then, with that innocent chick, than to face whatever was ahead. They would have done it, she knew, if someone did not plan for her something far worse than death.

She felt the heat from the torch glide by her face. A hand closed tightly around her upper arm and pulled her close to another body. The toothless man mumbled and gently urged her to follow his lead. She stumbled at first, then found a steady pace with small timid steps. He did not hurry. She did not hesitate. With her eyes blindfolded she could see nothing to fear. She walked confidently and excitedly where the strong hand led her—straight for what seemed many minutes.

Her body and soul opened upon the dark world around her. The images that had grown in her mind into a fantasy too real to withstand any longer sparked a shiver of sensations. The moment she had looked forward to with fear and anticipation was at last upon her. She knew she had made this choice, that she alone had the power to allow this to continue or to end it; and yet she felt too weak to resist. She had succumbed, and at that moment her life had smelled to her as sweet as the perfumed cloth that now cruelly blinded her eyes.

She was tumbling into a desire that had been cultivated to betray her.

She heard nothing but their footfalls and her own quickening breath. She could feel the pressure of the hand around hers, feel the gentle bruise it was forming. She could not tell which way they were going, or even if they turned. But she sensed something else pulling her, an immaterial force that dragged her forward and down.

They paused. She stood absolutely still, yet quivering, loathing the anticipation.

The toothless man let go her hand. Footfalls moved slowly away and echoed back, steadily, to the beat of her anxious heart. She stood still, feeling exposed. Once again, as when she had looked out her window and seen no one, she was certain she was being watched.

Silence.

She waited. No sound, not even of her heart. She had grown deaf. And the smell of cold earth now surrounded her and masked the perfume of the blindfold.

If she removed the blindfold, the fate that awaited her would become real. But, if she left it on, remained in the dark, perhaps she could prolong her life, leave it suspended on this threshold.

But she had come this far not by holding her future in check. If anything, that way of life had kept her from reaching this moment sooner. She felt all that had ever really happened to her had been during the last two days. She had grown older and bigger, but, until now, her living had stopped the day her father had left. That was why she could not recognize the girl in the photograph—it was a girl alive.

A passionate dance of images resolved into a canvas of brilliant colors that began, ever so slowly, to fade deeper into darkness. Her head traced tiny circles and then began to pitch on the rising tide of her desire. Suddenly she felt herself falling. Her soul floated away as her body plummeted into a swirling whirlpool. She ripped the blindfold from her eyes.

Impenetrable darkness.

She could see nothing, and all her other senses had died. But she had caught her body, and she was standing inside the very void she had believed she was escaping.

With sight, her fears returned tenfold. She knew she must move, try to escape, but she was blinder now than with the cloth tied over her face. She looked around at nothing. She held out her arms, felt the empty space surrounding her, took a hesitant step to her left. She stopped immediately, frightened of falling somewhere, nowhere. She held still, waiting, cringing.

A minute passed. Perhaps another. She thought her eyes would adjust, but there was simply no light at all to be absorbed. She began to wonder how long before the darkness starved her powers of vision; how long before fatigue and weakness destroyed her body; how long before she was forgotten.

She was trapped. In her moment of freedom she had been led into a prison of her own construction. And now she had nothing to do but await the arrival of some distant and dawdling death.

But she was certain someone still lurked in the darkness.

She opened her mouth and croaked.

"Zambullo!"

She listened breathlessly.

"Zambulloooooo," came the timid reply.

* * *

She slept as if drugged, drifting in and out of consciousness, dreaming lucidly. She heard a man telling a story.

"Once upon a troubled time," he said, "an evil king controlled the land, and did not like babies, especially those called Lebenfreude. He had begun to drain the possibilities and hopes from all his subjects. He arranged marriages and sanctioned births and even declared deaths in cases where the person could no longer serve a purpose in the kingdom.

"So it was in secret that a man and woman decided to begin a family, and soon the young woman gave birth to twin girls. Now the midwife who attended the birth was also a respected seer in the village. When she looked upon the twin girls she immediately turned her head away, for she could not bear the awful vision of their future.

"'Why do you look away?' asked the mother. 'Tell me what you see?'

"The midwife averted her eyes and said, 'There is a girl who glows with all the beauty in the world, and another who sulks with all the world's ugliness.'"

In her sleep, she mumbled, "I see her."

"The mother," continued the man, "asked the midwife to take away the ugly baby. The midwife had to do just as she was told, for the father was in some distant land in pursuit of a monster, and could not offer her and the babies protection. With despairing heart the midwife, who was herself considered ugly, bent to pick up the girl with the unpleasant features. As she did she saw the other girl smile, gurgle, and giggle. The midwife paused. She looked at the baby in her arms and saw eyes mournful and pleading. She set down the first girl and picked up the second instead.

"And even as she cast her into the river, the pretty girl kept smiling and laughing."

She laughed in her sleep, rolled over, and drifted away.

* * *

She felt her body caressed by chill air, and she shivered awake. A bright light shined down upon her from almost directly overhead. She could see only an immense grandfather clock against the wall, its pendulum swaying too quickly.

She flinched at the appearance of two pasty hands floating into the light above her. The fingers wiggled diabolically. She could not see the person the hands were attached to beyond the ring of blinding light.

"You knew this would happen," a man said.

His voice sounded familiar, like the one that had spoken to her on the telephone. The homeless man had identified him as Zambullo; but she felt his presence touch her more deeply, to her soul.

"You would not have come otherwise," he said.

Whether she knew this would happen or not, she did not know. She was certain only of a desperate craving within her body.

His hands reached around her and raised her to a sitting position. The rest of the man floated into the circle of light, and she threw her arms around him.

Her soul expanded as fast as the universe. She felt released from her carefully constructed shelters, open wide to the experiences of life. No longer could she deny her need for communion with another, the one thing, she was now certain, her father had left behind for her. At last, as she stared at those hands fluttering through wild wisps of her hair, she could acknowledge the emptiness she had tried to hide.

With her eyes shut tightly to hold back tears of joy, she said, "Father, I've missed you so much."

She opened her eyes, swooning in the sudden onslaught of her senses. Her heart swelled inside her head. Her mind raced with unknown images conjured out of feelings she had never before encountered. She could see in all its shining glory a new world she had discovered and would claim for herself.

She could hear her heart. She could taste her glory. She could feel her father's presence in the champagne sensations of her body. But even more distinct and sure she could feel herself. She was there not only in her mind and in her soul, but there in her trembling body. It was not traitorously but authentically she.

"I apologize," he said. "For everything."

She did not move or speak, but only held him.

"It is I who is the victim, if you only knew."

He began to explain why he had left. He told a story about a Regime coming to power, and forcing people into a total subversion of mind and body.

"Eventually they demanded I do something that I refused."

"What was it?" she asked.

He shook his head and looked away. "Even now, it is too horrible to say, especially to you."

She grasped his hand and squeezed.

He smiled. "It was that moment that I was pulled from the rubble of my own moral collapse. And I knew if I did not disappear, they would hurt you."

"Where did you go? How did you survive?"

"Far away, and not very well. But that is not living."

Somewhere inside or under this church a vast private museum had been created. The haphazard arrangement she had witnessed told her it had not been constructed as such, but put together suddenly, with the collection gathered hastily, out of necessity. She had the feeling of being hidden in the countryside away from the barbarian hordes. She had an intimation that in this place lay the truth.

Though free from the Regime, her father seemed imprisoned here in this monastery of artifacts and wisdom. He could never leave his darkened existence. In a strange way, he was already dead.

"I saw Death," he said, "standing over you, while you were sleeping."

Tiny gasps escaped as her body trembled with a feeling she was suddenly within the grasp of Death.

"It said, 'I am sweet sky mad with desire to rain on you.'"

"You saved me?" she asked, tears again moistening her cheeks.

"It lives there," said a female voice from across the room.

She stood and walked toward the voice, while her father simultaneously moved away from the voice. In a dark corner, behind a cloud of incense, the seductive woman in black was sprawled inside a coffin the size of a bed, her arm draped luxuriously over her head, finger pointing to the grandfather clock.

She heard someone breathing heavily, and saw the wooden sides of the clock swelling and contracting with each breath.

"She can't give you what I can," the seductive woman said, staring across the room.

She glanced at her father, who had his back to them.

"I know what you want." The seductive woman pursed her lips and beckoned him with her finger. "Come, and I will please you."

She was not sure whether, in this battle of wills, she was prize, witness, or intruder. She felt her father's loneliness and fear fall over her as if they were her own. Then he turned and his lips moved. She did not hear so much as experience him say her name.

She moaned and gasped as her strength suddenly faded. She felt claustrophobic, as if the walls were closing around her, as if there were no more room for life. The grandfather clock began tolling angrily.

The darkness fled from a brilliant white light that seemed to emit from her body. She no longer felt the chill in the air, or the constriction in her chest. The clock chimes rang loudly in chaotic fury.

The light from her body expanded all around her and refracted into a galaxy of colors. In the distance, beyond the church walls, she saw her mother, dressed as if in clouds of gas from the farthest reaches of the universe, holding open her arms and smiling. Across the room, her father looked on nervously as the light from her body gradually dimmed, and the chimes suddenly ceased.

"Are you all right?" her father asked.

She heard raspy, unsteady breathing, and approached the coffin. The seductive woman in black lay stiff upon the red silk bedding, smoldering, her face a putrid mask of flesh. Her body quivered with the feeling of her life coming to fruition.

On the other side of the room, her father settled into his chair. A smile spread across his face. As if possessed of some special knowledge, he seemed ready to embrace death, and did not despair but rejoiced, like an artist.

"Of course," he said, "you know you are free to go at any time."

Those words bound her tighter than any straps ever could. Though she never expected to find herself in a place such as this, she could no longer remember or imagine what her apartment looked like. It was here, lost in this darkness, that she had the fullest and deepest experiences of living. Would she really know what to do or where to go in the apocalyptic vision she had witnessed surrounding the church? Could she really return to what she had escaped from?

All she had ever cherished had been a sense of security, which now appeared as little more than another enclosure around her life. She had been a prisoner of herself; there was nothing for her to return to.

"I want to stay," she said.

Her father clasped his hands together and raised them to his forehead. "You are more than I ever imagined."

Her soul, once immured in the concrete walls of the Regime, took flight around her sweetly. Up until this very moment she had pondered everything that she had not yet done. She had thought how terrible it would be never to escape this dark room, to be trapped here forever. She had feared never marrying and having children. She had feared never becoming an acclaimed artist, never leaving behind a legacy. She had feared never knowing her father. And just as fast as those fears had swept over her, they passed into perfect calm. And with that calm she finally felt she did know her father. Perhaps even as much as a child can be its parent, she was most profoundly her father. And all those fears fell away as superficial and meaning nothing beside her joy, her freedom to experience this joy.

Her father said, "I have been painting you."

For the first time, she saw an easel beside the chair where he sat.

"Would you like to see?" he asked.

Her body trembled with anticipation. Then a peaceful calm settled over her. She walked slowly across the room.

Her father stood, smiling. He placed one hand on the shelf of the easel. When his daughter stood before him and nodded, he turned his work of art for her to see.

The portrait of a pretty young woman glowed upon the canvas, captured in an exquisite and fugitive moment for all time. The subject projected a smile mute with the secret knowledge that nothing existed beyond art and desire.

She immediately recognized the fragile features, the porcelain skin, the eyes of fulfilled desire.

"Vanessa," her father said, "how do you feel?"

"Beautiful," she replied.
Excerpt: _The Beggars of Azure_

On the day Janet Feffle's novel _Dream of the Seven Sleepers_ went into a second printing, I received an unexpected delivery. The package, wrapped in plain brown paper, leant against my door. It bore no address.

I turned to the office secretary. "Who sent this?"

She looked up from her terminal. "I don't know, Mr. Gugel."

"Was it here when you arrived this morning?"

She shook her head. "I didn't see it when I put the regular mail on your desk."

I picked it up, glancing first at it, then back at the secretary, who shrugged. I sat at my desk and unwrapped the package. Inside was a book: _The Court of Love_ , by Ernesto Savonthary.

For me to receive a book in finished form such as this was unusual, unless I was involved in its publication. I had never heard of this title or author. The publisher was a small press called Furst and Sons. I peeked inside for some note or inscription that might explain the book's appearance on my doorstep. There was none.

I glanced at my schedule and hailed the secretary through the open door. "Will you get Miss Feffle on the line?"

Many of my new authors were tiny stars with originality and charm but whose individual light could not be discerned from the vast surrounding galaxy of the major publishers. Miss Feffle still had a day job to pay her bills — writing, she said, paid her soul. I suspected the continued success of her debut would go a long way toward freeing her days.

The secretary called back to me that they were paging Miss Feffle, and I picked up the handset. While waiting, and hoping to drown out the dreadful electronic music in the background, I turned to the first page of Mr. Savonthary's book.

Thou hast awakened this book in me, thou hast given me it.

The dedication haunted me. When I heard Miss Feffle's cheerful voice of greeting, my lips moved, but my mind could form no response. The tether of time had been severed, and I drifted into a mental void. I replaced the handset, disconnecting the call.

The secretary was typing at her desk in the outer office, oblivious to my unease. I walked to the door and shut myself inside. When I turned back toward my desk, the book I saw there appeared inconspicuous.

I sat erect in the chair, directed the desklamp on the book, and browsed the first few chapters. I stopped once, then twice, grasping bits of familiar narrative and dialogue. My heart seemed to be pounding in my ears. Lured in by what seemed like a fantastic coincidence, I scanned several more pages, until reaching the telling words that confirmed the impossible:

The soul remembers how the heart laments.

The words on the page echoed a disembodied voice I thought I would never hear again. At once, the weight of improbability caused me to go limp in the chair.

"It can't be," I said, without conviction.

I knew the story, and I knew the author, though not as they were represented in this mysterious book. And there was just one other person who might know of my connection, and that was the author himself. Only he was a man who I was certain had killed himself five years earlier.
The Beggars of Azure

There are plausible answers to every mystery, but reality answers to no one.

In an incredible bookstore called The Beggars of Azure, a reader can find every book ever written—and a list of books that have never been written. But in The Beggars of Azure, what you find is less important than what finds you.

The Beggars of Azure by Jeffrey K. Hill copyright 2012
Colophon

Tales of Mystery and Truth

Jeffrey K. Hill copyright 2013

A Quilldrivers Book

Thanks to Quilldrivers for help with the text. Special thanks to Stella Telleria for invaluable feedback, support, and creative design.

For other Quilldrivers works of fiction, literature, art, and history, visit Quilldrivers.com.
Available Now

Fiction

The Triumphs by Jeffrey K. Hill copyright 2012

The Beggars of Azure by Jeffrey K. Hill copyright 2012

The Last Courtesan by Jeffrey K. Hill copyright 2012

The Last Decadent: A Novel Of Paris by Jeffrey K. Hill copyright 2011

Non-Fiction

Safeguarding American Ideals by Harry F. Atwood & Jeffrey K. Hill copyright 2013

Columbia: America Personified, and Other Essays by Jeffrey K. Hill copyright 2012

Keep God in American History by Harry F. Atwood

Annotated, and with an Introduction, by Jeffrey K. Hill copyright 2011

Poems for Patriots Edited by Jeffrey K. Hill copyright 2011
About the Author

Jeffrey K. Hill is a writer from Illinois whose novels focus on love, loss, and the varied affairs of the heart.

Be sure to follow all his literary adventures on Facebook.
