looked up and saw him in the full light of the fire now, and I realized he was wearing a suit of blue velvet trimmed in an old gold motif around the collar, the ends of the sleeves, and the pant legs. He wore a thick belt of the same color embroidered in gold and his face looked slightly older than it had before.
I stood up and came close to him as politely as I could. What had changed, precisely? Well, his skin was slightly darker, like that of a man who lived in the sun, and his eyes definitely bore more detail, the lids having softened and become less than perfect and perhaps more beautiful. I could see the pores of his skin and the small random hairs, dark, fine, at the edges of his hair.
"What do you see?" he asked.
I sat down, near to the tape recorder. "Everything is a little bit darker and more detailed," I said.
He nodded. "I can no longer summon the shape of Gregory Belkin at will. As for the semblance of anyone else, I cannot hold it very long. I am not a scientist enough to understand it. Someday it will be understood. It will have to do with particles and vibration. It will have to do with things mundane."
I was in a fury of curiosity.
"Have you tried to take any other form, the form of someone you like perhaps a little more than Gregory Belkin?"
He shook his head. "I can make myself ugly if I want to frighten but I don't want to be ugly. I don't want to frighten anyone. Hate has abandoned me, and it's taken some power with it, I imagine. I can work tricks. Watch this."
He put his hands up round his neck, and slowly drew them down the embroidered front of his coat, revealing as he did a necklace of graved gold disks, like ancient coins. The entire house rattled. The fire flared for an instant, and then became smaller.
He picked up the necklace, to demonstrate the solidity and the weight of it, and then he let it drop.
"You have a fear of animals?" he asked me. "A distaste for wearing their skins? I see no skins here, warm skins, like bearskins."
"No fear at all," I said. "No distaste."
The temperature of the room rose dramatically, and once again the fire exploded as if someone had fanned it, and I felt myself surrounded by a large dark bearskin blanket, lined in silk. I put my hand up and felt the fur. It was deep and luxurious and made me think of Russian woods, and men in Russian novels who are always dressed in fur. I thought of Jews who used to wear fur hats in Russia, and maybe still do.
I sat up, adjusting the blanket more comfortably around me.
"That's quite wonderful," I said. I was trembling. So many thoughts were racing in me that I couldn't think what to say first.
He gave a deep sigh and rather dramatically collapsed in his chair.
"This has exhausted you," I said. "The changes, the tricks."
"Yes, somewhat. But I'm not exhausted for talking, Jonathan. It's that I can only do so much and no more . . . but then . . . who knows? What is God doing to me?
"I just thought that this time, after this ordeal was completed, you know, that the stairway would come ... or there would be deep sleep. I thought ... so many things.
"And wanted a finish."
He paused. "I've learnt something," he said. "I've learnt in these last two days that to tell a story is not what I thought."
"Explain to me."
I thought to talk about the boiling cauldron would send the pain out of me. It didn't. Unable to hate, to muster anger, I feel despair."
He paused.
"I want you to tell me the whole story. You do believe in it. Than why you came, to tell it all."
"Well, let's say that I will finish, because . . . someone should know. Someone should record. And out of courtesy for you because you are gracious and you listen and I think you want to know."
"I do. But I must tell you how difficult it was to imagine such cruelty, to imagine that your own father gave you up to it. And to imagine a death so contrived. Do you still forgive your father?"
"Not at the moment," he said. "That's what I was talking about that telling it did not produce forgiveness. It drew me close to