full of things to tell us.
I hadn’t thought about it until just now, but the night Daniel rang our bell in the winter of 1970 was the end of November, the same time of year she died twenty-seven years later. I don’t know what that’s supposed to tell you; nothing, except that we take comfort in the symmetries we find in life because they suggest a design where there is none. The evening she lost consciousness for the last time seems further away to me now than the June afternoon in 1949 when I saw her for the first time. It was at a garden party to celebrate the engagement of Max Klein, a close friend from my student days. Nothing could have been more lovely and genteel than the crystal bowl of punch and vases of freshly cut irises. But almost immediately on walking in I sensed something strange about the room, something interrupting an otherwise uniform light or mood. I found the source without trouble. It was a small woman, like a sparrow, with short black hair cut straight across her face, standing by the doors to the garden. She was at odds with everything around her. To begin with, it was summer and she was wearing a purple velvet dress, almost a smock. Her hairstyle was completely unlike any other woman’s there, something like a flapper’s, though seemingly cut for comfort over style. She wore a very large silver ring that seemed to weigh too much for her bony fingers (much later, when she took it off and put it on my bedside table, I noticed that it left a green mark of corrosion on her skin). But it was really her face, or the expression on her face, that struck me as most unusual. It reminded me of Prufrock—There will be time, / To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet—because she alone in that room seemed not to have had time, or not to have thought to take the time. It wasn’t that her face was open or revealing in any way. It’s just that it appeared to be at rest, completely unaware of itself as the eyes took in all that happened before them. What I first took to be an uneasiness emanating from her now seemed, as I watched from across the room, to be just the opposite: the uneasiness of others, brought to light when standing in opposition to her. I asked Max who she was, and he told me she was somehow related, a distant cousin of his fiancée. She remained rooted to the same spot the entire party, holding an empty glass. At some point I wandered over and offered to refill it.
At that time she was living in a rented room not far from Russell Square. The other side of the street had been bombed, and from her window you could see the piles of rubble where the children sometimes came to play King of the Castle (long after it became dark, you could still hear their voices), and here and there was the shell of a house whose empty windows framed the sky. In one, only the staircase with carved banisters remained rising out of the rubble, and in another you could still make out the floral wallpaper that the sun and rain were slowly erasing. Though it was melancholy it was also exhilarating in a strange way, to see the inside turned out like that. Many times I saw Lotte staring at those ruins with their solitary chimneys. The first time I visited her room I was amazed at how little was in it. She’d been in England for almost ten years by then, but, aside from her desk, there were only a few sticks of plain furniture, and much later I came to understand that in a certain way the walls and ceiling of her own room were as nonexistent to her as those across the street.
Her desk, however, was something else entirely. In that simple, small room it overshadowed everything else like some sort of grotesque, threatening monster, clinging to most of one wall and bullying the other pathetic bits of furniture to the far corner, where they seemed to cling together, as if under some sinister magnetic force. It was made of dark wood and above the writing surface was a wall of drawers, drawers of totally impractical sizes, like the desk of a medieval sorcerer. Except that every last drawer