long lines with her bony toe in the sand while I watched, lying back on my elbows in the body of a much younger man which I sensed, like a nimbus at the edge of that bright day, didn’t belong to me. When I woke, the blow of her absence made me gag. I stood gulping from the bathroom tap, and when I tried to urinate there was only a drip and a burning sensation, as if I were trying to pass sand, and suddenly, out of nowhere, the way news of oneself so often arrives, it dawned on me what a ridiculous thing it was to have dedicated one’s life to being a scholar of the so-called Romantic poets. I proceeded to flush the toilet. I took a shower, dressed, and checked out of the hotel. When the receptionist asked if everything had been to my satisfaction I smiled and said that it had been.
A long walk in the hours after dawn, of which I remember little. Only that I arrived at the house before nine, though Elsie Fiske had asked me for ten. All my life I have arrived early only to find myself standing self-consciously on a corner, outside a door, in an empty room, but the closer I get to death the earlier I arrive, the longer I am content to wait, perhaps to give myself the false sensation that there is too much time rather than not enough. It was a two-story terraced house, indistinguishable from the others on the road apart from the number next to its front door—the same dull lace curtains, the same iron rail. It was drizzling, and I walked up and down the opposite side of the street to stay warm. Something about the sight of the lace curtains filled me with a sickening guilt. The boy was dead, the story I’d asked Mrs. Fiske to tell would end badly. All those years Lotte had kept from me the story of her child. However he had haunted her, he had not been allowed to intrude on our lives. On our happiness, I should say, since that was always ours. Like a strongman under an enormous weight, she’d borne her silence alone. It was a work of art, her silence. And now I was going to destroy it.
At ten o’clock sharp I rang the bell. The dead take their secrets with them, or so they say. But it isn’t really true, is it? The secrets of the dead have a viral quality, and find a way to keep themselves alive in another host. No, I was guilty of nothing more than advancing the inevitable.
I thought I saw the curtains move but it was some time before anyone came to the door. At last I heard footsteps and the lock turned. The woman who stood there had very long gray hair, hair that must have gone all the way down her back when it was loose, but which she had plaited and coiled on top of her head in the style of one who had just stepped off a stage where she’d been performing Chekhov. She had a very erect carriage and little gray eyes.
She showed me into the living room. Right away, I knew that her husband had died and that she lived alone there. Perhaps a person who lives on his own has a special sense for the shades, tones, and peculiar echoes of that life. She gestured to the tasseled sofa decorated with an abundance of crocheted pillows, all of which, as far as I could tell, pictured various species of dogs and cats. I took a seat among them; one or two slipped onto my lap and nestled there. I proceeded to stroke a little black stuffed dog on the head. On the table, Mrs. Fiske had laid out a pot of tea and a plate of digestives, though for a long time she didn’t move to pour it, and by the time she did the tea was too strong. I don’t remember how we began to talk. I only remember that I made the acquaintance of that stuffed little dog, a spaniel of some kind, and then Mrs. Fiske and I were deep into conversation, a conversation that both of us had been waiting a long time to have, though neither had known it. There was very little (or so it seemed, sitting in that room that I soon realized was filled with canine and feline likenesses