Stahl was shaving. The dye in his hair would take weeks to grow out. The shaved patches at the forehead just as long. The moustache could come off now. He shaved blind, eyes closed, feeling for the bristles with his fingertips, braille-tracing. He had managed not to look in a mirror since they brought him in. Now, the moustache gone, he opened his eyes, saw a face in the mirror he could not recognise, and the presence or absence of a moustache seemed to have nothing to do with it. He did not know this man. He reminded him of someone he once knew years ago before . . . before all this nonsense began. A talented Viennese youth, a bit gawky, with blowaway, fine blond hair and bright blue eyes, who had played piano with an occasional quintet at school, made up of the school’s usual string quartet and him. Schubert. Always the Schubert. The school’s principal insisted on hearing it every year. He tried to think when he had last played the Schubert Trout Quintet in A. 1927 or ‘28 perhaps – and when had he last seen any of the quartet? That required no thought, he knew that. It had been in the March of 1938 – he had seen Turli Cantor, second violin, scrubbing flagstones with a brush in the gutters of Vienna. Vienna – her greatest son Franz Schubert. Dead at thirty-one. Stahl was thirty-one.