The Depths of the Depths

‘SO YOU THINK you’re Uncle Herman’s son,’ said Nina. She was standing in front of the fire, her back to the flames, arms folded.

I nodded.

‘The evidence is a bit … shaky.’

‘Not really,’ I said. ‘I had to clear out Uncle Herman’s apartment in New York.’

Nina put her hands in her pockets.

‘I’d hoped to find our letters, but I found something else instead.’

Nina sat down. She tucked her right leg under her and turned towards me. ‘You’re going to do this like a real storyteller, aren’t you? With dramatic pauses and unbearable suspense and all that.’

‘They wrote. He and Sophie.’

‘And?’

‘They loved each other.’

‘I’m sure they did, but that still doesn’t mean …’

‘No, it doesn’t mean a thing, but if you add it all up …’

Nina sighed. ‘But you’ll never know for certain.’

‘No.’

‘Just as I’ll never really know if Zeno was my father.’

‘No.’

‘What a mess.’

‘It’s family life, Jim, but not as we know it.’

‘How are you feeling?’

I felt good. Once the fire had warmed me, my joints were supple again and my blood, fluid. It was going on seven and I was starting to get hungry, but I couldn’t think what we should eat and I had no desire to go down into the cellar. I wanted to stay right here in this warm chair and gaze at the fire. I wanted our imprisonment to come to an end, all that chopping through Zeno’s barricades, the traps within his traps.

‘A Parmentier,’ I said.

‘A what?’

‘I think we should make a Parmentier.’

‘I heard you, but what is it?’

I explained it to her, that one of the pilots on the record flight of the Uiver, the KLM DC – 2, was called Parmentier and loved fried eggs and cheese and that that was why the dish had been named after him.

‘Uiver,’ said Nina.

‘Stork. It’s an old word for stork. Parmentier was the Dutch Neil Armstrong.’

We went into the kitchen, where I started up coffee and watched as Nina made eggs from powdered eggs and milk from powdered milk. She put a frying pan on the flame and poured the yellowy mass into the hot butter. I told her about the Uiver, the pride of the KLM, how Commander Koene Dirk Parmentier and his men took part in a race to Melbourne and had to make an emergency landing somewhere in Australia. That was in the town of Albury, where 2CO, the radio station, saved the plane and its crew by calling on local motorists to come to the race track and light their way with their headlights. I told her how the Uiver had landed in a flood of Biblical proportions, that’s how hard it was raining, on a track less than three hundred yards long, and how several hundred spectators had pulled the plane out of the mud the following morning. Parmentier had to leave his passengers behind to get the plane back in the air. When the Uiver finally arrived in Melbourne, it finished first in the handicap section and second in the overall list of rankings. The mayor of Albury received a medal and the whole of the Netherlands contributed to a monument that was erected in the little Australian town. The Dutch consul general came to Albury to present gifts to all those who had assisted the crew.

‘So, you put the cheese on top,’ said Nina, who was standing by the stove.

‘Yes, and then the lid on the pan, so it melts.’

‘Do you think anyone will come and save us?’ She picked up the jar of rosemary standing on the counter and sprinkled some in the pan.

‘No.’

Nina looked over her shoulder.

‘No, I don’t think so. Why? Because no one knows we’re here. The house has been vacant for years. If we want to get out of here, we’ll have to wait until the worst of the cold is past. And even then: there’s too much snow. We can’t go out until we’re feeling strong enough to dig.’

She lifted the pan off the stove and slid the Parmentier onto a plate. ‘There’s not much bread left.’

‘We’ll bake some more tomorrow. What day is it?’

‘This is the third day. We came on Monday.’

Wednesday. The third day. The middle.

Nina got out the plates, I poured coffee.

‘It hasn’t been snowing for quite a while now,’ said Nina, looking outside.

‘Maybe we should go out tomorrow and have a look around.’

We walked through the icy-cold hall to the library. Our plates were steaming. The marble floor was strewn with splinters. I could feel them under my shoes.

While we were eating, I said, ‘I think he concentrated on the entrance to my bedroom because he knew I’d want to go there first.’

‘Then you’re assuming that all this was meant for you.’

‘Yes.’

‘Why?’

The faint bitterness of the coffee and the earthy flavour of fried eggs and cheese had filled my mouth and head. I thought of all the times I had eaten this and how Nina had just sprinkled rosemary over the eggs and, in doing so, had let me taste this old, almost too familiar dish anew. Just as she let me taste life, my life, anew.

‘What makes you think this is aimed against you?’

‘Against? I don’t know if it’s aimed against me. If Zeno did do it, then perhaps it’s a sort of …’

‘A sort of what?’

‘Have you ever heard of The Way of a Pilgrim?’ Nina shook her head. ‘It’s a book. I had lent him Franny and Zooey …’

‘Who did you lend what?’

‘Zeno. A book by Salinger, two novellas about a sister and brother. The sister, Franny Glass, reads this little book, The Way of a Pilgrim, and because of this, and because she can’t seem to love anybody, she becomes confused. It’s a description, that book, of the attempts of a simple Russian peasant to discover the secret of the Jesus Prayer. He sets out to find a teacher and learns the prayer and …’

‘What the hell is the Jesus Prayer?’

‘The endless repetition of a line from the New Testament. I think it’s something like, “Jesus Christ, have mercy on us.” That one line is repeated over and over again, all day long, until it becomes automatic, as automatic as breathing, until you’re saying it with your whole body.’

Nina looked dubious.

‘It’s an old mystical technique, a sort of self-hypnosis through repetition. In any case, Zeno read Franny and Zooey and I believe he identified quite strongly with those brilliantly bizarre Glass children. And being as mystically … er … inclined as he was, that Jesus Prayer was right up his street.’

‘What does that have to do with the house and the traps?’

I ran my eyes over the walls of books. ‘Zeno believed in submission. Only through submission, not subjection, could you experience the essence of something.’ I reached for the cigarettes. Nina shook her head. I lit one and blew my smoke towards the darkened ceiling. ‘Submission is the mystic’s trademark. If you read the biographies of mystics, St Theresa of Avila, St John of the Cross, Luria, De León, the chassidic rebbes, you’ll see that they always set off on a journey, as it were, a spiritual journey, and get lost along the way, find their way back again, meet helpful travellers and others who try to thwart their plans. Everything that happens on such a journey is part of the process that eventually leads to submission, to leaving behind what we call dignity and self-awareness.’

‘In other words, if you’re lying in the gutter in your own shit, you finally see God.’

‘Something like that. But by that time, God is about all you have left. And that, I said to Zeno, is the danger of this type of venture. If you torment yourself long enough, mentally or physically, you leave yourself very little choice. I’ve always felt that the decision of a healthy, free man to embrace the Divine is far more meaningful than a cry for help from someone who’s already trapped in limbo.’

‘Coffee?’

I nodded.

Nina stacked up the plates, hooked her finger through the coffee mugs, and left the library.

If Zeno’s submission theory was correct, I was just about halfway there. That afternoon I had reached the stage at which I had stared up from the depths, and felt a longing that, until now, I had fervently denied. A house, a place of my own where I could feel at home. It was a wish that was a contradiction of my entire life. When Nina and I made love, I had given myself to her. I had allowed her to prepare my bath, to wash me and dry me. I was sixty, but up until this morning my whole life had been dominated by independence, self-reliance, self-sufficiency. Whenever I was ill, I crawled into a corner where no one could see me and waited until I was better. No nursing. I was alone, and I was good at being alone. I didn’t need anyone. I wouldn’t even have wanted to need anyone. I was the helper, not the helpless. But with Nina … Did she love me, or did I love her, or both, and was that why I had been able to put myself in her hands? Or was it the pull of some deep-seated genetic code that compelled a young woman to care for an old man?

Why, Nathan, I asked, can’t you believe that it’s love? Because you have no certainty? You want certainty about something that can only ever be uncertain?

I’m no lover, I thought. I remembered Nina’s words: ‘Uncle Herman had a way with the ladies.’ She had meant it as an antithesis. You, N, she had wanted to say, have not.

Herman had predicted that I would make Molly unhappy. ‘No doubt about it,’ he had said. ‘And I’ll tell you something else: you’re going to make every woman you ever meet unhappy.’

Was I unable to love women? Women, or people in general? And if so, why?

Herman had once criticized one of my fairy tales, because he felt it lacked development. ‘Kei was in love with the miller’s daughter and the miller’s daughter loved him, but one day Kei’s love disappeared. He gazed, as always, at his young wife, but her hair was like straw, her eyes, dull grey pebbles, and her skin, unwashed linen. Kei knew this wasn’t so, but that was how he saw her. He decided to go in search of his love.’ That was how the story began and Herman, after reading that part aloud, had cried, ‘What sort of nonsense is this? In and out of love in a single line. Where’s the development?’ I had my answer all ready, of course, but now, for the first time, I began to think about the question of how that worked in my own life. How did I fall in love, with whom and why and how did I lose my love? Sixty, I thought. I stood up and searched through the pile of wood for a piece suitable for the fire. Sixty years old, and for the first time in my life I’m thinking about my dealings with the rest of the world. It’s too late. Everything has already happened.

I had loved Molly, but it was no great love. Herman had been right. I did make her unhappy. She came home, and went away and came home again, and each time she stood there with her hand on the door knob, I could see the uncertainty in the way she bowed her shoulders. She was thinking: When I go out, what does he do? She had no idea who I was. I thought there was nothing to know. What she saw was who I was. Or so I thought. But at night, when we sought and found each other in the darkness, at night she knew me and I didn’t know her. The hair I had fallen in love with glided over my face, I pressed my eyes into that hair and closed them and thought: Who is she, to be doing this with me? When I came and her arms closed around me, when she pressed her body against mine, to feel all of me, feel me in her and on her and around her, then she was certain – she knew me – and I was uncertain, I didn’t know myself. And as I emptied into her, my self-confidence drained away. She broke me down, brick by brick, and I didn’t understand what was happening.

One morning, after she had left for a rehearsal with her enormous bag, I had packed my things and hailed a taxi. I drove to Heathrow, through the London maelstrom of people and cars, and all that time, forty-five minutes long, I stared out the taxi window and felt nothing. I thought nothing. I knew nothing. It wasn’t until half a day later, when another taxi dropped me off at the Hill and the great stone house stared down at me, that I finally put down my suitcase. The taxi was already gone and I stood there, the woods behind me, the stone stairway and the heavy green door before me, and fell to my knees. With my head in the grass, hands over my eyes, I screamed into the earth.

Nina hated Zeno, she said, but her feelings for him could never run as deep as the hate I had felt for myself that day. I had walked to the door, opened it and gone inside, like a machine, a mechanism that can do nothing but move, and in my mind a feverish repeat of the same scene played over and over again: Molly coming home to an empty living room, empty kitchen, empty bedroom. I walked up the stairs, down the hallway, opened the door to my bedroom and put my bag on the bed. And I saw her screaming. Her eyes … The image was so sharp that I turned my head away, so I wouldn’t have to see her eyes, far, far across the ocean.

In the bathroom, I soaked my shaving brush, lathered up, and laid the razor in a bowl of hot water. Meanwhile, in the steamy mirror, Molly went running from room to room. She pulled open drawers, didn’t see my things, looked on the kitchen table, in the bookcase, next to the phone, but found no note, not even a stubbed-out cigarette in a barely soiled ashtray to say: I was here, but now I’m gone.

I ate a tin of haricot beans and drank two cold vodkas. Molly washed her face and got ready to go to the theatre. I went to the library, bottle in hand, and poured another glass. The hearth was a cold, empty hole. I drank and stood up, paced back and forth along the walls of books, and sat down again. And I drank, stood up, ran my finger along spines and went back to the bottle for more. I heard Molly’s voice in the chorus. The high beam of a spotlight on her red hair.

At the end of the evening I crawled up the stairs, grinning. Halfway there I tumbled back down, and I thought it was so funny that I did it all over again. In the bathroom I stood for a long time in front of the mirror. I tried to force myself to be serious, but each time I looked myself in the eye, I burst out laughing.

In the middle of the night Herman phoned to give me hell. Molly was with him, in Manhattan. ‘It’s time you started asking yourself,’ he roared down the phone, ‘why you fall in love with someone, before you make any more victims!’ And as his voice echoed in my pounding head, I couldn’t help thinking of the flaming sword at the entrance to Eden.

Less than two days later, Uncle Herman phoned again. He was curt. A letter had been forwarded to New York from a large estate agent’s that was interested in the house. They wanted to send someone over to look at it. He wasn’t planning to sell, he said, but he did want to know what the agent was offering. And since I was up there anyway, coming to terms with my sorrow (he sniffed when he said that), he expected me to receive this person. It would take my mind off things. He laughed a short, dry laugh and hung up.

The estate agent was a woman, and when she arrived the sun was shining so brightly that for a moment I thought Uncle Herman had appealed to the Lord of the Universe Himself to show me how little my ‘sorrow’ actually mattered. I stood at the foot of the stairs and watched as Miss Sanders disappeared into the woods on her bicycle, then crossed the field in front of the house and took the path that led downward. It was the height of spring. The forest was just coming to life. The sun had released scents that had been hidden all winter long and the wood, the rotting leaves and the first grasses made it smell like early May. High above me, in the treetops, the birds were telling each other about their nests and what good parents they were. Rabbits came hopping out of the woods, stopped in the middle of the path, looked about, as if wondering whether to go left or right, and disappeared again between the trees.

I had been walking for several minutes when I met a young woman. She was wearing a dark blue blazer that I could tell was much too warm. A few strands of her long honey-coloured hair lay, dark with moisture, across her forehead. I was about to pass her with a polite nod, when she stopped me.

‘I’m looking for the …’ she glanced down at the card in her hand, ‘the Hollander house.’ She looked up. ‘Do you know it?’

‘Come along with me.’

Her face clouded. ‘That won’t be necessary. Perhaps you could just tell me which way?’

I turned round and pointed to the path lying before her. She nodded quickly and hurried off. I watched her go, the back of her dark jacket gently fluttering.

When I got to the house, she was standing on the veranda, her back to the door. She started visibly at my sudden appearance, and my slow approach didn’t make her any calmer.

‘They don’t seem to be home.’ Her voice sounded tense.

‘No,’ I said. N, I thought, put the poor girl out of her misery.

‘I have an appointment, but perhaps they forgot.’

‘Why?’

She looked at me in terror.

I climbed the stairs. She shrank back, until she was nearly touching the door. Any minute now, I thought, she’s going to threaten to call for her father. When I was standing right beside her, she let out a tiny squeak. I put my key in the lock and heard the woman sigh. She swayed slightly. I smiled and looked at her as reassuringly as I could. She held out a slim hand, ‘Annelies ter Borg.’

‘Miss Ter Borg. Nathan Hollander. So, you want to buy the house?’

She laughed, relieved.

‘Come in.’ I turned round and went ahead of her. As I swung open the door, I thought: What the hell am I doing?

In the hall, we paused for a moment. Her mouth moved. This was the point at which she was supposed to speak. If I hadn’t disrupted the standard procedure and been a normal client, nervous, eager to sell, yet mute with excitement, my vanity flattered by the pretty blond estate agent, she would have made the little speech that the staff had met to discuss that morning. ‘It’s certainly a large house, Mr Hollander, a house with a history. But difficult to sell, I’m afraid. Huge maintenance costs. Not easily accessible.’

But she said nothing.

‘Are you from these parts?’

She nodded.

I led the way to the library. The sun shone low through the windows. The walls of books glowed in the soft light. I took her jacket.

‘I don’t normally handle large projects,’ she said.

I laid the jacket over an armchair and showed her to a chair at the reading table. She looked around in amazement. I walked out of the room, fetched a bottle of Gewürztraminer from the cellar. In the kitchen, as I rinsed the glasses, I looked out for a while at the spring grass. I’m making her wait, I thought. Why?

When I returned she was staring straight ahead and resumed the conversation she had wanted to begin earlier.

‘Annelies, they said, this one’s for you. At first I thought they had finally decided to give me a promotion, but then I saw your name.’ I drove the corkscrew into the bottle and pulled. ‘You have a … a certain …’

‘Name …’

She nodded.

I went and got the ashtray, which was on the mantelpiece. ‘Do you mind if I smoke?’

She shook her head.

‘My name,’ I said, as I sat down. ‘What sort of a name might that be?’

‘You’re that poet, aren’t you?’

I shook my head.

‘Oh. I thought …’

‘No.’

I smoked and looked at her. She sat across from me at the big table. Between us lay books, an empty coffee mug, a plate full of crumbs, my notepad, and a pile of paper, on top of which was a text covered with deletions. Annelies ter Borg. She looked as if she had a rough time of it, a young woman who had chosen a job in a world of men who were amazed that this girl took her career so seriously. The light shone through her hair, giving it a deep golden sheen. She smiled at me, two full lips, painted soft red, that seemed to swell as her smile faded.

‘Miss ter Borg,’ I said, aware of the formality in my voice, ‘what exactly are your instructions?’

‘Excuse me?’

‘I said …’

‘What makes you think I would tell you a thing like that?’

I reached for the bottle and filled our glasses. I slid one towards her and picked up mine. The yellowish wine smelled strongly of grass and herbs. I let the fragrance fill my nostrils and rise up into my head. Spring, nearly summer.

‘It all depends on what one chooses,’ I said. ‘You were sent to me because apparently, I have a certain “name.” A pretty girl does wonders – is that what your colleagues thought?’

She shook her head.

‘No?’

‘No.’ She ran her hand through the shining hair. ‘I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that, about your name.’

‘Just tell me your limit.’

‘No.’

‘Fine,’ I said. ‘Then tell me how far you’re willing to go.’

She didn’t answer.

I looked at her from beneath arched eyebrows and raised my glass. She took hers by the stem and we drank a toast.

‘I’d prefer to negotiate openly,’ I said. ‘I’m not in the mood for wheeling and dealing. It’s not my style, offering thirty-five so I can get forty. Shall we have a look around?’

We stood up and left the library.

‘Five-fifty,’ she said in the hall.

‘Five …’

She shook her head. ‘That’s as far as we can go.’

I nodded. ‘So, the associates have decided to use me as their pension plan?’

Her heels rapped sharply against the floor.

‘I’ve told you what I know. What more do you want? For them to throw me out?’

I sat down on the stairs. Her face was on a level with mine. Lovely, carefully painted lips. I admired the angry look in her eyes. When was the last time I was angry? I wondered. God, that was ages ago. Before the Flood. Way before.

‘How long have you been with the company?’

‘Three years.’

‘How long does it take to get a promotion?’

A wall of great coldness rose between us. I got up and went to the hunting room.

‘Six-fifty,’ I said. ‘And why don’t we call each other by our first names?’

I’m not being nice to her, I thought. I don’t want to be nice to her.

One by one I threw open the doors. I showed her the kitchen and the lawn with the wooden shed where the garden things were kept. The sculleries, the attic, the guest rooms – the grand tour.

In the hunting room I pulled aside the canopy and offered her a seat on the bed. She shook her head.

‘You can’t stand around all day on those heels.’

She shrugged her shoulders in a weary sort of way. We stood there for a while facing each other, two animals in silent combat, and then she sat down.

‘You know I can’t go any higher,’ she said.

‘Where did you go to school?’

Her mouth dropped open, she slowly shook her head.

‘I have the feeling I know you.’

‘Jesus.’ She sank back onto her arms, her face to the canopy. I could see that she was tired, of me, most likely, her feet were turned inward, her shoulders slightly bent. Something came to mind, the vague, fluttering image of a girl of eighteen.

‘The Park School.’

‘When did you graduate?’

‘Would you also like to know whether I’m married and have children, and if I use a company car … Why are you so curious?’

I shrugged.

‘Five-fifty,’ she said.

I offered her a cigarette. She sat up straight. She drew one out of the packet with her fingernails.

‘We went to the same school,’ I said.

I walked over to the window, on the other side of the room, and sat down on the windowseat. I looked out at the woods and wondered why I had told her that we had gone to the same school. If nobody slaps me in the face, I thought, I’ll just carry on until I’m somebody else.

‘If you sell it,’ she said, ‘what will you do?’

I shrugged. ‘I’ve never needed a house. I’m a traveller.’

‘Why?’

I turned my head towards her and tried to think of an answer. Her question surprised me. Why? I was doing a scene from The Lonely Man, my version of a Swedish art film, but that one word had turned up the lights and shown me that the forest was cardboard, the rooms, painted wooden panels, and the chairs, mere imitations.

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I think it’s just the way I am.’

I got up from the windowseat. She got up from the bed.

‘How old are you? Late thirties?’

‘Something like that.’

‘What are you waiting for?’

‘Waiting?’ I said.

‘That’s how it sounds.’

Waiting, I thought, she’s right: waiting. But for what?

‘May I ask you if you’ll have dinner with me tonight?’

She nodded.

‘Will you have dinner with me tonight?’

She laughed. ‘I’m married,’ she said.

‘So?’

We walked around the house a bit more, avoiding the subjects that needed to be discussed (why did I want to eat with her? which offer was acceptable? why did she think I was ‘that poet’? and why had I said that I wasn’t?) and went through the rooms like two people saying goodbye.

‘I have to get back,’ she said finally.

We were standing in the library, next to the table. The bottle was half-empty. The prints of our fingers on the glasses looked almost guilty. The sun had disappeared behind the trees. Her face was a chalkmark in the twilight. I picked up the bottle and poured. She opened her mouth. I picked up my glass and she raised hers and drank, pensively. I put down my glass and looked at the window. The blood pounded in my head. When I reached out my hand, her hair was as soft as I had expected.

‘I’m married.’

‘Yes.’

From close up her face was a charcoal sketch: her eyes, dark smudges in a blurred, two-dimensional face. I saw her rounded lips. I leaned forward and kissed her.

‘Oh God,’ she said. She pulled away, the back of her hand against her mouth. Her eyes were wide.

The twilight turned thick and grey. Although I was standing right beside her, I could barely see her face. But I could hear her breathing, quick, agitated.

She lowered her hand and looked down. Then she raised her head. She sighed deeply. Her kiss was that of someone who, after a long desert journey, had finally reached the oasis.

Nina, where was Nina? I had been sitting here for at least half an hour, daydreaming about what had happened and why. Nina had gone for more coffee. I jumped up out of my chair, staggering slightly, grabbed the candle that was standing on the mantelpiece, and hurried out of the library.

There was no one in the kitchen. Our mugs stood on the counter, the coffeepot beside them. I put down the candle and laid my hand on the metal. Cold. I ran out of the kitchen, to the hunting room. No one. Out of the hunting room, up the stairs. Left. My room. Empty. Darkness everywhere and in the darkness the crunching of wood beneath my shoes, stumbling over bolts and hinges that had fallen from dismantled cupboards. Downstairs, into the cellar. From the cellar to the kitchen door and shivering in the frosty night. Snow, snow, snow. Untrodden snow. The front door. I sank down on my knees at the threshhold and looked out at the creamy layer of snow that rippled over the stairs. No one had come or gone. In the middle of the hall, at the foot of the stairs, my clothes frozen and my breath a fluorescent cloud, I called out her name. No, I didn’t call, I shouted. The silence ripped like a piece of cloth. Her name bounced off the walls and the ceilings and the floors, it echoed through the empty rooms, bounced off icy windowpanes and disappeared into the impenetrable darkness. When the last sound had died away, silence rustled through the house once more. Nina was gone. This time she had left without a trace.

I felt guilty. The first time she had run away, I didn’t know why (and she hadn’t told me either, I had just assumed she had left because she was scared, wanted to get back to civilization, but that was, I realized now, a ridiculous explanation; why would she leave in secret? there was no reason at all), but this time it wasn’t hard for me to work out why she had fled. She was fleeing from me.

I stood in the kitchen, in front of the glowing stove, turning the knob on the radio. A slow tapestry of notes rolled out of the speaker. After a while the voice of Billie Holiday rose up from a cloud of violins. It was a number she had recorded at the end of her career, an old standby that, in her ravaged voice, was charged with such emotion that it hit me like a blow to the neck. The words were those of a woman saying she didn’t miss ‘him’, not at all: ‘except when snowflakes fall, or when I hear someone call your name, I do.’

I had grown cold on my search through the house, on the veranda, and by the stairs behind the front door, but only now, in front of the roaring Aga, did I truly feel what cold was. The ice on my bones pierced through to the marrow. My back arched as a shiver rippled up from my toes. My hands began to shake. God, Nina, I thought. And then, clenching my teeth to hold back the tears: I love you, I love you more than you can ever imagine. I stared into the candle flame and tried to make it stop. Then I spilled over. I threw back my head and took a deep breath. There were voices inside me. One said: Sixty? You’re sixty? And you’re crying about love? And another whispered: It’s all regret, regret for lost time. And yet another said: Letitgoletitflowjustthisonceleteverything … Tears welled up in my eyes. They streamed down along my nose, over my lips, past my chin, down my throat.

‘This is Radio East, on the air twenty-four hours a day. Here’s the weather with Ronald Jongsma.’ The voice of the announcer came in loud and clear.

‘Ronald, what’s the story? Have we seen the end of that frost yet?’

‘Don’t think so, Jochem. The wind’s still coming in from the east, all the way from Siberia, and everywhere between Russia and us it’s freezing cold. In Poland, night temperatures have dropped to forty below and …’

‘Now that’s what I call cold!’

‘Yep. Ha ha. You can say that again. But we’re not doing too badly ourselves. For tonight we expect temperatures here in the East to fall to around minus twenty-five. Slightly warmer near the north coast. Tomorrow we should see a slow rise in temperature to minus fifteen, but that’s about as high as it’s going to go for now.’

‘Great news for all you skaters out there! What do you think, Ronald, any chance of an Eleven City Marathon this year?’

‘If frost were the only factor, I’d say yes, but as I understand it the organisers met earlier this evening, and they’re pretty worried about all the snow. Skies are clear now and the chance of more snow is unlikely, but we’ve had so much in the past few days, it hasn’t done the ice any good.’

‘So, the snow’s ended?’

‘Certainly looks like it. But there’s mist on the way, not too great for the skaters, either. Tonight and early tomorrow morning, it’ll become dense to very dense …’

I turned the dial. It would be a long time before the mist had filtered through the forest, to the Hill, but if Nina ever reached the car she was in for an arduous journey.

If she ever reached the car.

I emptied the pot of cold coffee, shook out the filter, opened the door and filled my bucket with snow. As I scooped coffee into the filter, put the pot on the stove, as the snow turned to water and hissed on the hot surface, I paced up and down. I had to follow her. I couldn’t follow her. But if she couldn’t find … Maybe I could … I loved her. She …

Then the boiling water in the percolator began to rise. The glass turned brown and there was a soft gurgling sound. The candle flame bobbed on the current of air from the windowpanes.

‘Cold as a dream of ice.’

Uncle Chaim was standing beside me, staring at the bubbling pot.

‘An old Dutch winter, Nuncle.’

‘Bah.’

‘Where’s Magnus?’

‘Where’s Magnus? How would I know where he is? No one has ever known. He’s wandering about somewhere, looking for the way back, or the way out.’ He took something out of his pocket. It was a small watchmaker’s loupe. I had seen him fiddling with it once. Long ago. He had been in good spirits then. The last few years I had watched him trudging down the long road to ponderous gloom.

‘Nuncle?’ He looked up, the loupe in his right eye. ‘Where has Magnus been?’ He made his eyebrows dance and caught the little copper cylinder in his hand. ‘Where?’

‘Before he came here?’ He put his hand in his pocket and shuffled towards the table. I poured coffee. When I set down the mug in front of him, he looked up in surprise. ‘We don’t drink, Nathan.’

I nodded.

When I was sitting across from him, he looked at me for a long time, the old man. There was something like fear and gratitude in his eyes.

‘Magnus,’ I said. ‘Where was he?’

Uncle Chaim shrugged his bony shoulders.

‘Nuncle. You and Magnus wander around like two Beckettian half-ghosts, all these centuries, and you’ve never once asked him …’

‘Asked? Yes. Got an answer? No.’ He used both hands for the dismissive gesture he made. ‘Magnus,’ he said. His face took on a pensive look. ‘As a child,’ he said. ‘The light of my eyes.’ He raised his head and rested his gaze on me. ‘The light, I tell you. He came to us, Friede, she should rest in peace, and me. All day long. Sat beside me at the workbench. Quiet child. And a memory, oy! what a memory. Where I’d lost a screw. What was whose. Friede loved him …’ He bowed his head and stared at the steaming mug. ‘But then Chmielnicki came.’

‘And Magnus left.’ After Friede had felt the sword of history. After the little house, less than a year later, had been burned to the ground and Uncle Chaim was hung from a tree in the great Lithuanian forest, between a dog and a whore. After after after.

‘Where is she?’

She? I looked at my great-great-grand-uncle. ‘She,’ I said, ‘is gone.’

He stared back.

‘And just as you don’t know where Magnus was, I don’t know where she went. She’s gone.’

‘A family of boy scouts.’

‘A family of second-rate boy scouts, Nuncle. One is on his way for twenty-one years. Another gets lost in the snow, twice. And I don’t even want to talk about Zeno.’

‘Herman,’ he said, ‘was a good boy scout.’

I sipped my coffee and lit a cigarette. ‘A terrific boy scout. Just look what he brought home with him.’

Magnus had appeared behind me. I could tell, because Uncle Chaim looked over my head, one eyebrow raised.

‘You drink coffee?’

Uncle Chaim shook his head. ‘Nathan poured me a cup.’

‘We don’t drink,’ said Magnus.

‘He knows,’ said Uncle Chaim. ‘After fifty years. You think he doesn’t know?’

‘I know everything,’ I said, in a cloud of smoke. ‘Ask away.’

Magnus grinned.

‘From 1648, or even before, up until this very moment. I know.’

A look of suspicion crept into Magnus’s face.

‘Coffee?’

He nodded mechanically. I got up, picked up my mug and went to the counter. As I was pouring for him and myself, I heard the wordless conversation that took place between him and Chaim.

‘Sugar? Milk?’

‘Yes, please,’ said Magnus.

There was a silence. I picked up the candle from the counter and put it on the table. ‘Have a seat, Magnus. Stay a while.’

He walked round the table and sat down next to Uncle Chaim. I brought the mug to my lips. The smell of black coffee curled upward. I drank. The sweetness of the sugar, the smooth bitterness of the coffee. Sweet and bitter. I looked at the men across from me.

‘Fifty years. I’m sixty now. I may be younger than you, but I’m not your child anymore. It’s time to ask questions.’

Magnus wanted to say something, but Uncle Chaim was quicker. ‘Ask.’

I stubbed out my cigarette. ‘Was he a madman or a genius?’

This completely threw them. ‘Who?’ asked Uncle Chaim. ‘Zeno?’

I shook my head. ‘This is a question for Magnus.’

Magnus looked away. His hand moved towards the coffee, but stopped just before it reached the mug.

‘Did he know he was a fraud, or did he believe in his own stories?’

‘Who?’ cried Uncle Chaim. ‘Who!’

‘Did you believe him?’

‘Nathan. Who are you talking about?’

‘Magnus?’

‘I believed him,’ said Magnus. He was having trouble squeezing his voice through his larynx. ‘Me, and others.’

‘Hordes of others,’ I said.

Uncle Chaim was wriggling about in his chair like a frenzied weathervane.

‘And you went running after him,’ I said.

Magnus nodded. He looked down at the steaming coffee.

‘After him … After …’

‘Shabbetai Zevi,’ I said.

Cause and effect are winding roads, history meanders. Time creeps forth like a dungbeetle, struggling to roll its ball of dung: pebbles cling, and grains of sand, and the ball grows heavier and heavier and the beetle crawls more and more slowly. Time has weight.

Through the dark catacombs of Europe Magnus Levi travelled, wooden clockmaker’s chest on his back, grubby linen hose round his legs, shoes of birch bark on his feet. He didn’t know where he was going. He hadn’t even thought about it. When he had bent over Uncle Chaim’s charred possessions and found the chest, he had hoisted it onto his back as if it were only natural that he be next to carry the weight of time. Was there a direction? Was there a road he had to follow? He had no idea. All roads, thought Magnus, were the same, and they all led to each other. With his clockmaker’s mind, Magnus thought: Life is a beginning, with a middle and an end, and he now found himself in the middle and had to move on, because man’s fate is to travel, he has no choice, even though he knows that he will never arrive.

And while Magnus was leaving the Lithuanian forest, choosing a path to the left here and a path to the right there, someone else was setting off as well. He, too, had found himself in the middle of his life. But whereas Magnus was thinking only of the journey itself, because he had no goal, the other traveller had a goal, and nothing else. For him, the journey was merely a way to get to where he wanted to be.

The other traveller was called Shabbetai Zevi. He was the son of Mordecai, a poor poulterer who had made his fortune when the mighty English mercantile houses left Constantinople and Salonika during the Turkish-Venetian War and settled in Smyrna. Mordecai earned his living cutting chickens’ throats, but, soon after the coming of the English, was hired by them as an agent. He proved to have a talent for the twists and turns of international commerce, and before long he had become one of Smyrna’s nouveau riche. Because of this, Mordecai was able to send his son to study Talmud and Torah with the great rabbis.

Shabbetai was born in 1626, on that formidable day of mourning known, in Judaism, as the Ninth of Av, the day on which, long before, the temple had been destroyed. It was a Sabbath, and the boy, as often happened in those days, was named accordingly. From an early age, the child had felt a bond with that peculiar birthday, and the stories of the old men who foretold that the Messiah, too, would be born on the Ninth of Av, also on a Sabbath, were as real to him as the wondrous accumulation of gold in his father’s treasure chest.

The boy liked nothing better than to study Kabbala, and there was one book more precious to him than all the rest: the Zohar, the Book of Splendour. And while others contented themselves with studying the text, comparing interpretations and discussing difficult passages, the son of Mordecai entered the world of the words themselves and sought the Kabbala within the Kabbala. He was a traveller, in search of the heart of the heart of things, the depths of the depths. He had, like most Kabbalists, no conception of time. Just as the great mystics would traverse entire deserts, cross raging rivers, and travel from Damascus to Safed in a single night, Shabbetai wandered about the woodland of words in the Zohar. Time, for him, was not something that began in one place and ended in another. Time was a forest. There were clearings, paths, some overgrown, some wide and sunny. He could walk down a crooked path from 1626 to 1648. He’d come out in 1666, a meadow between oak trees, and struggle through the undergrowth to the lake of 1548.

He starved, he prayed, he strengthened and weakened himself, anything to reach where the great Kabbalists had once been: in the shadow of God’s presence.

Even before he had reached manhood, Shabbetai’s name was known throughout Smyrna. And not only his name. He was handsome. His voice was captivating. There were some who claimed that a heavenly scent emanated from his body.

At the age of eighteen, Shabbetai was ordained a rabbi.

Although he enchanted nearly everyone, there was no one who could enchant him. His first – arranged – marriage lasted only a few months. So did the second, which was performed shortly afterwards. Neither union was consummated.

And in the meantime Shabbetai wandered farther and farther into the tangled wood of Kabbala.

One day, on Yom Kippur, in the synagogue of Smyrna, surrounded by notable and less notable members of the Jewish community, he uttered the Ineffable Name of God.

It was 1648. It was the year of redemption, according to the Zohar. It was the year of the birthpangs of the Messiah, according to the Kabbalists. It was the year Shabbetai began to hear voices.

The rabbis of Smyrna sentenced him, because he had uttered the Name, to thirty-nine lashes. Shabbetai was unimpressed. He was outlawed, but remained in Smyrna. Then he heard a voice that told him that he was the saviour of Israel, the true redeemer, the only one who could bring salvation. The prophet Elijah appeared to him and anointed him Messiah. People began to demand a more suitable punishment for the young rabbi, some even wanted him put to death. But none were prepared to do the irrevocable.

The new messiah left his birthplace and went to Salonika. There, soon after his arrival, he regaled the rabbis and rich men of the city with a sumptuous banquet. As the wine flowed like a river of sweetness and the tables steamed with exotic delicacies, Shabbetai sent for a Torah scroll and, in the presence of his bewildered guests, married himself to the Torah, the daughter of God.

He was forced to leave Salonika. For ten years he wandered about, until, in 1658, he arrived in Constantinople. He walked the streets carrying a large fish dressed as a baby, in a cradle. The rabbis of the city summoned him. Shabbetai heard them out, but their words had no effect. Israel, he declared, would be redeemed under the sign of Pisces. Once again he was dealt thirty-nine lashes and, once again, outlawed.

Shabbetai began to speak in paradoxes. He praised Him who permitted that which was forbidden.

Then a scroll appeared. Abraham Yachini, an esteemed Constantinople Kabbalist, had found it in a cave. It was an age-old text, he said, and it described Shabbetai as the slayer of the great dragon, the conqueror of the serpent. He was the true anointed one, he would sit upon God’s throne, his kingdom would last forever. He was the sole redeemer.

Shabbetai returned to Smyrna and from there travelled to Palestine. On the way, in Egypt, he was received by Raphael Joseph Halevi, a wealthy mystic and benefactor, who had fifty Kabbalists to dinner each night and wore a sackcloth under his fine clothes as a sign of mourning because the age of mercy still had not arrived. He was quickly won over to Shabbetai’s cause and presented the Messiah with a vast sum of money. On his arrival in the Holy Land, Shabbetai distributed the money among the poor.

His name was like fire in dry straw. His followers multiplied like grasshoppers in a ripe cornfield.

In Gaza, Shabbetai met a Kabbalist and clairvoyant named Nathan Levi, who was soon his most zealous advocate. He became the voice and legs of the Messiah and travelled the world proclaiming and expounding Shabbetai’s kingship.

Time crawled on. Time was a tortoise. The year 1666 was drawing near. The bride of the Messiah made herself known.

Her name was Sarah. At least: that was what she called herself. She had been found in a Jewish cemetery in Poland, wandering about in nothing but a shirt. She was sixteen years old and so beautiful that, beside her, the sun was as pale as the moon. For nine years she had been locked away in a nunnery until one day, the soul of her dead father came to her and ordered her to jump out the window. In the cemetery she had shown her rescuers her wounded body. Her father had held onto her so tightly as he lowered her out of the convent window that you could still see the marks of his nails in her flesh.

Sarah was taken to Amsterdam. There, she told all who would listen that she was destined to marry the messianic king. She travelled on to Italy, leaving behind a trail of sinful rumours and tales. She behaved like a whore. That, she said, was because she had permission to live life to the full before giving herself to the Messiah.

Magnus had been wandering about for thirteen years when, one afternoon, cold and weary, he began his descent down the Alps and, in the low light of the sinking sun, saw Italy lying before him. He was not alone. On his way to the mountains he had sought the company of other travellers headed in the same direction, and there were four of them, when they were joined by three more. They, too, were travelling from France to Rome.

Ever since leaving Lyon, Magnus and a German monk, who was on his way to his order in Lucca, had walked side by side. It had been a silent journey until the monk, miles out of Lyon, caught sight of Mont Ventoux, and a cry of recognition escaped his lips. Brother Anselm had dropped his staff and said something Magnus couldn’t understand.

‘Mons Ventosus,’ said the monk, pointing to the misty mountain top.

Magnus gathered that this was the name of the mountain. He shrugged, the clockmaker’s chest tinkled and chimed. He wanted to walk on, but the brother called him back.

Had Magnus ever heard of the great poet Petrarch?

Magnus could read – the Hebrew of the Torah, though not very well – but poetry was unfamiliar to him. The monk, who was twice his age, had motioned to him to walk on, and as they did, he told him about Petrarch and his struggle to free himself from the world, his love for Laura, his journey to Mons Ventosus, the Mountain of the Winds, which the French called Mont Ventoux. They came closer and closer to the mountain, the landscape was already bending to its flanks, and Anselm explained how the modern age had begun with Petrarch.

For thirteen years Magnus had been on the road, nearly always travelling alone, and now he was walking beside a monk who spoke of poetry and the modern age. Magnus came from the forest, where bison roamed and where the winters were so cold that people froze on their way from one village to the next, a world where God was addressed in the language of a distant land and foresters, herb gatherers and tanners longed for the supernal. Anselm was the son of a nobleman. His mother, the wife of a tenant farmer, had been seduced by her lord. When Magnus asked how the monk, or his mother, for that matter, knew who the father was, the old man had pointed to his hooked nose, a formidable beak that plunged down at the bridge and made him look rather daunting. ‘The Haguenau nose,’ said the brother. Magnus suddenly thought of his own thumbs, which had also been Uncle Chaim’s.

At the age of seven Anselm had been set to work on the Haguenau estate, as his father’s page. Every morning he had to hand the nobleman his bowl of water and wait until he had finished washing. Then he helped him dress and when that was done, he was allowed to wait on his master at the table. They were landed gentry, Anselm told him, and life in the big house, which was more of a fortified farmstead than a castle, lacked the refinement that he was later to encounter in certain monasteries. Breakfast consisted of gruel and cold meat from the day before, washed down with watery beer. But what the big house did have, and the farmers on the estate did not, was a teacher, and he taught not only the lord’s legitimate children, but the bastard as well. That was how Anselm learned to read and write, Latin and astronomy. By the time he was sent to the monastery at the age of twelve, he was ready to work in the printing room.

And on they went, they traversed the forests, hills, and valleys and the monk told the clockmaker about his first few years in the monastery, how he had been put to work in the fields until one day, Brother Francesco, who was in charge of the library and the printing room, saw the novice reading a book of hours. A week later he was allowed to turn the heavy crank of the printing press, fetch blank paper and deliver it, printed. He wasn’t an apprentice for long because Master Francesco let him do more and more until the young man, because that was what he was by then, became not only a monk but an accomplished printer. They used to cut their own ornaments, he told Magnus, and some were so popular that even secular printers came to buy them.

They passed the Mountain of the Winds and headed further South, towards Marseille. They were to remain there for several days, after which they would set out on the journey to Savoy. Magnus would stay behind in Turin, while Anselm travelled on t Lucca. At the end of the first day, they were sitting in a shabby wayside inn. The weather was mild and the shutters were open. This was fortunate, because the fires in the kitchen were blazing and it was hot and smoky inside. Magnus was drinking a mug of weak beer and the monk had a jug of wine in front of him. Night fell quickly, the way it does in the South. The two men sat on the wooden bench against the wall of the inn and stared out at the blue-black sky, at the stars that were just beginning to prick through and the little bats that tumbled about in the velvet of the early night.

‘You’re a silent man, Magnus of the Lithuanian Forest,’ said Anselm.

‘No more silent than you, Anselm van Haguenau,’ Magnus had replied.

A broad grin had appeared on the monk’s face. ‘If you mean that all my talk about Petrarch and the art of printing say about as much as your silence, you’re right. Perhaps we ought to say, instead, that you are more talkative than I. What brings you to Turin?’

‘I’m a clockmaker,’ said Magnus.

‘I know.’

‘I want to see the clocks of Savoy.’

‘I didn’t realize that they were so special.’

Magnus drank his beer.

‘You mustn’t fear all men, my fellow traveller. Though you may not believe this, there are some in this world who are not out to get you and your kind.’

Magnus stared into the dark mug, barely visible in the dim light.

‘I know what you are and I know that there are reasons to remain silent about what you are. But how much longer do you expect to walk before you reach home?’

‘Maybe forever.’

The monk had shaken his head. ‘So, you think you’re the Wandering Jew, Magnus?’

Magnus closed his eyes and thought of clocks, he thought of a timepiece that would tell all of time, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years, centuries, the whole of Creation, a timepiece that, in all its completeness, would be superfluous, the clock of clocks.

‘Let me tell you something. There are many among my brothers who obtain their wisdom from your books. Many of us know that you were the beginning. No doubt there are some who would say that you are the end. I myself believe that you and your people are the Petrarchs of this world. You seek a new way, a better way. But I don’t think you’ll ever find it if you continue wandering. One day you’ll have to make up your mind to settle down. Take the advice of someone who has always lived in the home of others.’

The following day, in the tepid morning sun, they had set off for Marseille. A farmer let them ride part of the way on the back of his wagon, among a load of sloshing barrels, so that they reached the great road to Marseille sooner than they had expected.

In the city, Anselm took it upon himself to assemble a travelling party. He found two men who were on their way to Pavia with a bag of legal documents. They bought bread and wine and set out on their journey. They were a silent foursome. The two strangers came from Perpignan and spoke an unintelligible dialect. They took the coastal road, an easier route to travel. Near Toulon, a curious sight met their eyes. They were coming round the bend and walking uphill, when they saw a figure lying in the middle of the road. Two men were standing beside it. One of them had his arms folded and was looking down impassively at the figure on the ground, the other was speaking, but to no avail, because neither the first man nor the person on the ground seemed to hear him. When they came closer, Magnus could hear that they were Jews. The second man was speaking Yiddish, in a strange dialect, but Magnus had no trouble understanding him. He braced himself and began to walk more slowly. Then he saw that it was a woman, a young girl, lying there. She was staring up at the blue Mediterranean sky, completely ignoring the talking man.

‘May we be of service? Gentlemen? Mistress?’ It was Anselm who had spoken. He mopped his forehead and let his blue-grey eyes go from one man to the other, and then to the girl. She was a beauty: her skin was the colour of pure wax, her hair was a red shock of gleaming curls, tied back with a white ribbon, her lips were full and her eyes, black and glittering as jet, were large and shining. She didn’t look at the monk.

‘Good brother,’ said the man who was looking down at the girl with his arms crossed, ‘we are from Amsterdam and we are accompanying this young lady to Rome, but it seems that the young mistress is tired of walking. I’m afraid you can’t help us.’ He spoke flawless German, far better than Magnus.

‘If the lady prefers not to walk, she prefers not to walk,’ said Anselm. ‘And then we certainly can’t help you because we, too, must walk even though we’d rather not.’

The two men from Perpignan looked at the girl from under their dark eyebrows. One said something to the other and they both began to laugh.

The man who had spoken to Anselm glared at them and then turned to his companion. ‘Come,’ he said. ‘We’ll follow these gentlemen to Toulon. I’m sure the bride will follow us if she feels called upon to do so.’

‘The bride? But gentlemen, surely you wouldn’t leave behind a young bride?’ said Anselm.

The man smiled. ‘She is the bride of a man who does not yet know that he is the groom. If she, in her omniscience, has seen that she shall marry this man, she’ll surely know when to start walking again.’

Anselm grinned.

The party moved off and the dust flew up from their heels and settled back down. Magnus, who was walking at the rear, heard the girl say something. He turned round and looked back.

‘Dogfaces,’ she said in Polish. She didn’t raise her voice. It was more of an observation than a curse. Magnus grinned: ‘Dogfaces? Shoe laces.’ The girl laughed a tinkling laugh. She jumped up and shook the dust out of her dress. When they were standing face to face, there was something in her eyes that nearly made him recoil.

‘Where are you going, pan?’

‘Don’t you “sir” me. I’m going to Turin. Where are you from?’

‘From the dead.’

Although she laughed when she said it, a shiver ran down Magnus’s spine.

‘Come,’ she said. ‘The dogfaces are getting away!’ She began walking briskly towards the cloud of dust in the distance. Magnus followed, hesitantly at first, then more quickly. He had the feeling, as he watched her nimble young body striding on ahead of him, that none of this was real.

I had finished my coffee and watched Uncle Chaim’s and Magnus’s grow cold, and then, when Magnus turned his gaze to the dark kitchen window, I had got up to feed the stove. None of us spoke. I piled the logs into the black iron mouth and watched the flames die down. When I banged the door shut, the fire started raging again. I picked up the coffee mugs and put them on the counter.

‘Wine, gentlemen? Or should I say: pant? Is that the correct plural?’

Uncle Chaim shook his head, not to say that he didn’t want any wine, but in response to Magnus’s account of his peregrinations through Europe.

In the cellar, I walked past the racks with a candle. Though Nina and I had polished off a good many bottles in the past few days, we had barely made a dent in Uncle Herman’s wine supply. I hunted around until I found the Haut Brion I was looking for. It was a ’78, an excellent year, as far as I could remember. By the time I had finished this, I would not only be glowing to the tips of my ears, I would also find the world a much more pleasant place.

At the kitchen table, I carefully twisted the corkscrew into the neck.

‘You do that,’ said Uncle Chaim, ‘like a clockmaker.’

I smiled. ‘This is a clock, Nuncle. The only clock that doesn’t tell time, but preserves it.’

I filled my glass and took a sip. The smell of earth and grass and chocolate. The wine was on the cool side, but wouldn’t be for long. I set out two more glasses and poured.

‘Waste,’ said Uncle Chaim.

‘I know,’ I said. ‘But I want it this way. Think of Elijah’s cup.’

Uncle Chaim grimaced.

It was my favourite part of the Seder, on the first night of Pesach, when the exodus from Egypt is commemorated with a meal that bulges with symbolism: the filling of a cup for someone who isn’t there – the prophet Elijah. For thousands of years in exile, scattered all over the world, Jews have continued to fill that cup. Never actually believing that Elijah will come and take his share – but you can never know for certain. Just as, on that night, the door is left open a crack, so that anyone who happens to be passing can join us in celebrating the liberation from Pharoah’s Egypt.

Years ago, when I was still a boy, when everyone was still alive and Sophie and Emmanuel were still together, Elijah’s cup was, for me, the highpoint of the Seder. I was probably the only one in the family who would have thought it perfectly normal if Elijah had strolled in and drunk it down. But I was also the only one who, each night, travelled hand-in-hand with two dead men through the Kingdom of Shadows.

The thought of Nina rose up inside me like a sheet of paper tossed in the fire that went twirling up on the heat, caught, burned, and fluttered down again as brittle ash. Where could she be? Had she made it to the car and, if so, had she been able to get it out of the snowbank? Pointless thoughts. I shook my head, like a wet dog shaking its fur.

Magnus wouldn’t look at his uncle and Uncle Chaim was acting as if the spot where his nephew was sitting wasn’t even there.

‘So,’ I said, as I sat back down, ‘you travelled with the bride of Shabbetai Zevi to Italy.’

Magnus nodded.

‘And from there, to Cairo?’

Uncle Chaim looked up. ‘How. Why don’t I know anything? You do?’

‘Books, Nuncle. There are so many books about Zevi. Zeno has a whole collection of them in that crazy library of his.’

He sniffed.

Sarah was a slut. No one has ever known who she really was, where she came from, or why she did what she did. What went on in her mind, was a mystery.

That evening they arrived at a coaching inn, where they rented a large room with straw on the floor and a smoking oil lamp hanging from a collar beam. Downstairs, a steaming pot hung over the fire, and from that pot they were given something to eat. It was a reddish-brown soup filled with shellfish. Although Magnus had learned to bend the dietary laws during the last few years, the sight of all those boggle-eyed crustaceans floating in the thick broth was more than he could bear. He confined himself to the heavy grey bread that had been set down on the table, along with a hunk of sheep’s cheese.

Sarah ate as if she hadn’t eaten in days. When she looked up and stared Magnus in the face, her mouth was a red stain, an obscene, cruel gash. She grabbed a feelered creature out of her bowl, broke its back, and sank her teeth in, her eyes never leaving Magnus’s, her teeth white and bared, her lips gleaming with fat. Then she seized the jug of wine, filled her glass to the brim, and emptied it in one draught. Magnus averted his eyes and looked at the innkeeper, who was scolding a servant. A foot crept along his instep, up along his calf. He froze. Sarah was talking in a loud voice to Anselm. The foot glided over his knee. He tried to change position, but there wasn’t much room on the bench. Toes ambled along the inside of his right thigh. He felt his member swelling. Sarah pulled the bread towards her and tore off a piece. She bit in and chewed. The foot rested against his groin.

Magnus sat up straight. He felt the pressure of her soft foot between his legs, the toes bending and flexing. His head seemed detached from the rest of his body. It looked around, drank beer, and took in its surroundings as if none of this must ever be forgotten. Down below, the toes glided under his groin, pressed against the spot between his anus and scrotum. He had never made love to a woman and knew that any expectations he had might be the wrong ones, but this was beyond his wildest imaginings. She was so young. How could she know that she … He coughed loudly. The foot crept back up until it lay against his crotch. Magnus felt the blood throbbing in his sex. It was like the handle of an axe. It ached with hardness. A thought flashed through his mind. He looked up at the ceiling. A tortoiseshell cat was sitting on a collar beam. It had its front paws together and was looking down imperiously at the rabble below.

The innkeeper had come, cleared away the plates, and set a new jug of wine on the table and more beer for Magnus. The foot slipped away, Sarah washed her face over a bowl and when she looked up, her skin beaded with water, her eyes suddenly moist and soft, she smiled at him and he knew for certain, if he had ever doubted it, that it had been her foot he had felt. He raised the tankard and buried his whole face in it.

That night he was awakened by screams. On the other side of the room, where a bed had been prepared for Sarah, stood a bowed figure. The girl’s voice sliced through the darkness. Magnus was not the only one who had been startled out of his sleep. When he ran to her bedside, Anselm and the Dutchman came rushing over, too. Next to the bed stood one of the men from Perpignan. He was naked, and tried to cover his shame with his trousers. Sarah was holding on to one of the trouser legs and was tugging at it, cursing loudly.

Anselm grabbed the trousers and pulled them out of her hands. ‘What’s happened?’

Sarah began screaming at him in Yiddish. Anselm turned to Magnus.

The man from Perpignan had tried to lie with her, he translated, but she had woken up and pushed him away.

Anselm looked at the man. He started getting dressed, babbling in his unintelligible dialect. The monk said something in French. Sarah was still ranting and raving. ‘Bastard! Do you think you’re the best I can do? I’d rather have three farmhands than a piece of soft cheese like you!’ Magnus grinned. Anselm and the two men from Perpignan – the other had come over and joined them – spoke at great length, in French. Then the monk turned to Magnus again. ‘They can’t stay here. But they refuse to leave the room. They’re proud, those French. I’ll call the innkeeper.’ The Dutchmen protested, but Anselm was adamant. He strode into the hallway. They could hear him stomping down the stairs.

One of the Dutchmen, the one who had spoken with Anselm earlier, turned to Magnus. He spoke Yiddish. ‘It’s always the same with her. Everywhere we’ve been, we’ve had trouble. She doesn’t seem to understand that we have very few rights and that no bailiff would ever believe her.’

Magnus nodded. He knew what the Dutchman was talking about, and why the man from Perpignan was being so obstinate. All he had to do was call the authorities, and Sarah, her escorts and probably Magnus, too, would be thrown in prison. And they’d be lucky to walk out of there alive.

Anselm returned with the innkeeper, grumpy and ill-tempered, in his wake. One of the other guests had left after receiving a message from Toulon. The vacant room was small, more of a garret. Sarah could sleep up there.

‘Not alone,’ said Anselm. ‘One doesn’t let a young bride sleep alone in such a place.’ He pointed to Magnus. ‘You’re going with her. And one of you, too, I take it.’ He looked at her escorts. The Dutchman who hadn’t spoken until now was nudged by his companion. He sighed, went to his bed, and began packing his things.

Half an hour later, the three of them had been moved. The room was, indeed, a garret, but there was fresh straw on the floor and horse blankets spread out on top. A small window was open in the roof and Magnus could see the stars and the light of the moon. He put down his chest and crawled under his blanket. There he lay, his hands beneath his head, looking up at the night sky. Now and then the scent of lavender wafted in. He had trouble falling asleep, but after a while he drifted away. It was as if he rose up, grew lighter and lighter and …

When he opened his eyes Sarah was standing over him. She was as naked as Eve. He opened his mouth, but before he could say a word she sank to her knees. He felt her buttocks in his lap. She laid a hand over his mouth and began pulling off his blanket. He tried to push her away. He clutched at her breast. She moaned. Sounds came from his throat and she smothered them in the palm of her hand. It was as if time were changing. Time went faster than it should have done. Suddenly he felt her fingers, taking his sex, lifting and stroking it. In seconds, he was hard. Her hand closed, thumb on the shaft, fingers around his scrotum. She turned round and lowered herself onto his face. He gasped for breath. ‘Your tongue,’ she whispered. ‘Your tongue.’ She pushed down her pelvis. He tasted her. She moved her hips forward and back, he turned his head from side to side. ‘Can’t you do anything! Lick!’ Magnus felt how quickly he was breathing. He thought of everything at the same time. Lick? But that was … Then he felt something soft and warm gliding over his glans. She was taking him in her mouth! No! A strange tingling ran down his spine. He opened his mouth and licked.

It was pitch-dark in the garret and before long Magnus didn’t know where he was or how they were entwined. He didn’t find his bearings again until he saw the open window above him, the sprinkling of stars, and a slowly rising phallus. For a brief moment he thought it was his, but as the hazy white rod came closer he realised that it was someone else. Sarah mounted him and, impaled, rode him like a horse. Her hands rested on either side of his chest. He saw her contorted face, the open mouth and closed eyes. He felt two knees drop down beside his shoulders. A hairy scrotum dangled just above his head. He panicked. Then the knees wriggled forward and he saw Sarah open her mouth wider and bite into the phallus that was presented to her. Magnus averted his head and touched the thigh of the man kneeling over him. Lord of the Universe, help me. Forgive me. Sarah rode and rode and rode and through the archway formed by the legs of the strange man Magnus saw how her mouth swallowed and released the other man’s rod. His belly was on fire. He moaned. Sarah whimpered, her mouth made a slurping sound. ‘No,’ she said. ‘Not like that.’ She pulled her hips off him and pushed him away with her knee. ‘From behind.’ Magnus rolled over and crawled round her. She spread her legs. Her head moved up and down on the other man’s sex. Magnus looked up. He saw only a black figure silhouetted against the faint light from the roof window. He kneeled behind Sarah and tried to enter her, but she moved her backside and he missed. Then he felt her hand around his rod. He glided through her slit, and then upward. She thrust back her hips. He couldn’t go any deeper. She breathed in and pushed harder. He eased into her, and slowly, on his knees, began to fuck her. His hands on her hips, head back. Now and then he looked down to see her bobbing head of hair in the lap of the dark figure. The three bodies moved as one, a machine, a timepiece whose cogs were tightly interlocked and, together, formed one rhythm. Then the other man drew back. He lay down next to Magnus on the horse blanket and wriggled himself under Sarah. ‘No,’ she said. The man pulled her down, Magnus fell half on top of her. Only then did Magnus understand what was happening. The other man had plunged into her and was fucking her from the front. Magnus was committing the Sin of Sodom.

Realizing this, Magnus was gripped with fear, but he couldn’t stop. The earth fell out from under him. He could do nothing but move. He felt her buttocks against his belly and the legs of the other man between his own. Then he exploded. He shot into her, thrust after thrust, and it was as if it would never end. When he finally dropped down and slid out of her, Sarah climbed off the man, turned around, sat on his face, and rocked her pelvis. She had him in her mouth again. Before long they were moaning, first she, then he. Magnus lay down on his back next to the pair and saw Sarah’s rolled-back eyes, her mouth gripped around the wet staff, opening now and again to let out a moan. Then the man gave one loud groan and Sarah put her hand around his sex and kneaded it hard, as if she were milking him. The man thrust his hips upward and Sarah began to swallow.

The news that he had a bride reached Shabbetai in Cairo, at the house of Raphael Joseph Halevi. He gave orders to have her brought to him. His disciples were not pleased. The girl was said to be a slut who gave her body to every passing stranger. There were rumours about orgies beside which the excesses of the Romans paled into insignificance. A young, disappointed rabbi who saw in Shabbetai the light of Judaism, mustered up his courage and asked him why he would wish to associate with a harlot who had let her body be used as if it were a marketplace. Shabbetai replied that if the prophet Hosea could marry a whore, why shouldn’t he do the same?

Magnus had travelled with Sarah and the Dutchmen to Rome. He had bid farewell to Anselm near Turin and the monk had thanked him for his company and cautioned him against his endless wandering. He knew nothing of the black night that Magnus had spent with Sarah and the Dutchman and so Magnus accepted his good advice with shame.

They hadn’t been in Rome long when Shabbetai’s orders came. The Dutchmen, who felt that they had travelled long enough and fulfilled their task, entrusted the girl to Magnus’s care. He would accompany her to Egypt. They gave him a bag of gold pieces and a letter for the Messiah. This was the first that Magnus had ever heard of Shabbetai.

We sat around my kitchen table, Magnus, Great-Great-Grand-Uncle Chaim and I, all three staring down at the wood. Uncle Chaim shook his head, as he had done repeatedly in the past hour; Magnus barely moved.

‘I thought I was on the path to enlightenment,’ he said. ‘I never touched her again after that night and I thought that this would be my victory over the sins of the flesh. If I were to stand before the Messiah, he would understand.’

‘A victory,’ I said. I filled my glass. ‘In one night you had a taste of virtually every sexual possibility known to mankind. If you think that’s the depths, you’re right: things can only get better. Anyway, what’s the problem? You made love to a woman who offered herself to you. There’s no harm in that.’

Magnus waved aside my words. ‘Nowadays,’ he said. ‘Nowadays, that would be true. But there was no love involved, and it was then. In your time, you’d have no problem with such things, but I …’

Uncle Chaim sighed.

I’d have no problem with such things, said Magnus. But that wasn’t the case. I had received Nina’s … gift … yes, gift, as if a hot potato had been thrust into my hands. My entire life, sixty years, had been shaken because of it.

‘Magnus, I would have a problem, too. I did have a problem. Somehow or other we seem to find it easier to accept money, or goods, than love. If it was love.’

What Nina had offered – that was love. But why had she left?

‘Lilith,’ said Uncle Chaim.

Magnus and I stared at him.

‘Lilith.’

Long, long ago, when the Lord of the Universe created the first human, He created a woman for him, because, He said: ‘It is not good for man to be alone.’ He created her from the earth, as He had created Adam himself, and called her Lilith, the Woman of the Night. But the woman would not yield to Adam’s will. When he wanted to lie with her, she said: ‘I will not lie beneath you.’ Adam was shocked: ‘I am your master. I belong on top.’ Lilith was furious. ‘We are equal,’ she said, ‘we were both created from the earth.’ But Adam would not listen. This so enraged Lilith that she pronounced the Ineffable Name and flew off into the air. Adam called on his Creator. ‘Lord of the Universe!’ he said. ‘The woman You have made for me has run away.’ God sent three angels to bring her back. To Adam, He said, ‘If she agrees to return, fine. If not, she must allow one hundred of her children to die every day.’

The angels overtook Lilith in the middle of the sea, in whose mighty waters the Egyptians were destined to drown. They told her what God had said, but she refused to turn back. The angels said, ‘We shall drown you in the sea.’ ‘Leave me!’ cried Lilith. And at the command of the Lord of the Universe, the angels left her.

According to Zeno’s Zohar, the book that Shabbetai had loved so dearly, Lilith had six pendants dangling from her ears and all the jewels of the east around her neck. She wore robes of purple. Her mouth was said to be a temptation in itself, her tongue as sharp as a sword, her voice as smooth as the finest oil, her lips, rose-red and sweet with all the sweetness of the world.

And it was not only Adam who wanted her. One day the Lord of the Universe sent away His own wife and took Lilith in her place. According to Rabbi Shim’on bar Yohai, this was the real reason that God, the King, should be worshipped, so that He would remember His kingship and acknowledge His true wife, and she would return to Him.

Lilith, Uncle Chaim had said.

‘Nuncle,’ I said. ‘Lilith is a story. Sarah is real. Perhaps she was disturbed, or perhaps she was perfectly sane, but she certainly wasn’t some Biblical femme fatale who turned into a demon.’

I poured the last few drops out of the bottle. It was nearly midnight, but I had lost all sense of time. The day that lay behind me had run into the night and the way things looked now, that night was never going to happen. I’d probably be sitting here until the break of dawn, at this table, with Great-Great-Grand-Uncle Chaim and Cousin Magnus, trying to tie up the loose ends of the fabric that was our family history.

I tossed down my glass and got up. The stove was still burning, but I threw in a few more pieces of wood. Then I disappeared into the cellar for a new bottle of wine and a box of crackers.

When I came back upstairs, Magnus and Chaim were sitting in their chairs, frozen in motion. They didn’t start moving again until I had put the bottle down on the table.

‘Hey.’

Magnus looked sideways.

‘I can’t find the knife.’

‘Knife?’

‘The knife I always use to slice the cheese. It’s supposed to be in the block.’

‘Maybe it’s under that cloth?’

‘Magnus, it’s a big knife.’ I held my hands about twelve inches apart. ‘It belongs in the block. Last time I saw it … I can’t remember.’ I’m old, cold, and tired, I thought. I’m forgetting things, I’m losing things, I can’t even remember things that have just happened. I got out a plate, another knife from the block, and sat down at the table.

‘Hunger,’ said Chaim.

‘You, Nuncle?’

He shook his head.

‘Me? Yes. Always at night. A few crackers or a sandwich before bed. You know that.’

He nodded. They had often caught me sitting up in bed at night with my knees raised, a book on my lap and, under the book, wedged between my stomach and thighs, a plate. I opened the bottle. The Haut Brion had been better than I’d expected. Any other French wine would have had a hard time in this weather. That was why I had chosen an old Rioja, a Marques de Caceras, Gran Reserva, 1984.

‘You’re not going to bed yet,’ said Magnus. ‘Would you like me to …’

‘Please. I can’t bear to think about that cold empty bed and I’m dying to hear more about your adventures.’

He smiled wrily.

The wedding in Cairo was beyond compare. There was gold from Africa and silver from Iraq, silk from China and damask from Syria. There were fresh figs in fresh cream. There were olives as big as goat’s eyes and millstones of bread that gleamed like polished wood. There were almonds from Persia, there was dark red wine from Turkey. Magnus walked around like a child at a fair. He had never seen such riches. There were men in garments of pure silk. There were women with kohl around their eyes. He felt like a country bumpkin in a palace. He hadn’t seen Sarah once since his arrival at Raphael Joseph’s house. Her groom had sent his thanks and the master of the house received him at his table, but the Messiah himself had withdrawn. It wasn’t until the wedding began that he caught his first glimpse of him. He had a sharp nose and heavy eyelids. A downy moustache graced his upper lip. An attractive fellow, without a doubt, this Shabbetai Zevi. Still, Magnus couldn’t understand why everyone was so impressed with the vainglorious young man. They ate and drank, the certificate of marriage was read aloud and Shabbetai broke the glass under his foot. Then he addressed the guests. That was the moment when Magnus understood why men saw him as the Redeemer.

‘It was a sweet voice,’ he said. ‘Not a cajoling voice, not the voice of a serpent. No, a sweet voice. It came to you and wrapped itself around you and rocked you in its arms. Shabbetai spoke, he spoke like a book. You could close your eyes and it was as if someone were reading to you.’

And Magnus had let himself be rocked on Shabbetai’s words. He listened to his prophecy about the time that was to come and the time that had been and he was borne along, slowly, but inexorably.

Before the wedding it was as if life had come to a standstill, but less than a week later, time resumed its course and went storming ahead. Shabbetai asked his doctor’s son to sleep with Sarah. He sent for three virgins, disappeared with them for three days and then returned them, untouched, to their homes. He took a second wife, one who had already been promised to someone else. Time, Magnus knew, hadn’t really changed, the sun didn’t rise any faster or set any more slowly. The days were as long and the nights as short. Yet it felt as if the whole world was flowing, as if life was a river that had begun as a meandering stream and now plunged down, churning, from a mountaintop, shearing away banks, uprooting trees.

In Cairo, Smyrna, Constantinople and Gaza, men, women and children were preaching about their visions. Seers and prophets had risen up in Amsterdam, Paris, Frankfurt, Warsaw and Rome. People walked the streets like rabid dogs, foaming at the mouth and screaming Shabbetai’s holiness. The marketplaces were empty, the land lay fallow, and huge houses were sold off as if they were worth no more than tumbledown shacks. Some people exhumed their dead and had them brought to the Holy Land, so that their souls wouldn’t have to travel underground to the Mount of Olives to witness the Day of the Lord. Some Christians converted to Judaism, others were infuriated by the sudden self-awareness of the otherwise so diffident Jews. Ships with silk sails and Hebrew flags were sighted off the coast of Scotland. The Ten Lost Tribes, people said, were preparing to cross the mythical River Sambatyon.

Shabbetai proclaimed the Ninth of Av a festival and abolished the fast. He allowed women to read the Torah. He threatened his opponents with death and placated his disciples with positions in the rabbinate.

The year 1666 was approaching, the year of redemption, and Shabbetai set sail for Constantinople. Magnus sailed with him, his chest full of clocks and parts always at hand. He had become the Messiah’s clockmaker. He looked after the time. And the time wasn’t far off when there would no longer be any time, when hours, days, months, and years would have lost all meaning.

But even before they had set foot on land, Shabbetai was arrested and, three days later, brought before the Great Vizier. The man gave the travelling Messiah a few careless blows and then threw him in prison. After several months he was transferred to Abydos, where Sarah joined him, along with the rest of his entourage. The streets of Constantinople were soon teeming with followers and pilgrims. Magnus wandered through the city and lived off the goodwill of the Jews who took him into their homes and fed him. Clocks weren’t popular here and he had no other means of support.

Meanwhile, in Poland, a man had appeared who proclaimed the coming of a Messiah, but never mentioned Shabbetai. The captive redeemer sent for him, Nehemiah Kohen, and they spoke and argued for three days and three nights. When Kohen came out again, he still wasn’t convinced of Shabbetai’s calling. This angered the Messiah from Smyrna, and suddenly Kohen’s life was of little worth. He fled Abydos, converted to Islam, and informed the Turkish authorities of Shabbetai’s false messiahship. The sultan sent for the prisoner and made him an offer: either he prove himself to be the Messiah, by submitting to torture, or embrace Islam. Nathan Levi begged his master to choose the first, but Shabbetai didn’t have a moment’s hesitation. He converted to Islam, was given a white turban and a green robe as a sign of his conversion and, under the name Mehmed Efendi, was appointed Royal Gatekeeper. Sarah converted, too, and the couple lived on the generous allowance provided by the sultan.

A period of great confusion ensued. For many, the world collapsed. They had neglected or sold everything they owned, shunned friends and disinherited relatives. But a small circle of followers still believed in Shabbetai. The false messiah visited them – to convert them, he had told the sultan – but was caught delivering a Kabbalistic discourse. The Turkish government banished him to Albania where, on Yom Kippur, nine years after his journey to Constantinople, he died alone.

Magnus didn’t hear of these events until long after his redeemer had embraced that other religion. He happened to be in the synagogue one morning and as he bobbed through the service like a cork in the gutter, he heard someone cursing Shabbetai’s name. He was about to address the man who had spoken, when he heard about the conversion.

Suddenly there was no more time. All the clocks stood still. The hum of voices around him, the screaming children running round the bimah, the women whispering behind the lattice, they all disappeared into the background and were replaced by a great silence. It was the silence of nothingness. He could feel it. He could see it. He opened his eyes as wide as he could and stared into the depths of that silence. Then he keeled over.

‘And?’

‘And then I came back,’ said Magnus. ‘Some people I’d met took me with them. They listened to my story, gave me food and drink, and when I was feeling stronger, they gave me money for the crossing. The rest of the way, I walked.’

I dug my cigarettes out of my jacket pocket and lit one. Now that Nina was gone, I no longer had to keep to the rations. As it was, I had already smoked my way through most of them. Any longer and I’d have to go hunting for mouldy old cigars that Herman might have left behind.

‘So it was just his voice, Magnus? That’s what made you follow him?’

He nodded.

That was hard for me to imagine. There must have been something in his words.

‘But why did you go with Sarah to Rome and from there to Cairo?’

He shrugged. ‘What difference does it make where you go?’

I forced the cork back into the wine bottle and stood up.

‘Going to bed?’

I shook my head. ‘I’m going to make coffee. I need something to keep me awake.’

‘Nuncle,’ Magnus said. I rinsed out the coffee pot and went to the back door to fill it with snow. ‘Chaim?’

As I was shaking the coffee grounds out of the filter, I looked round. Magnus was lying nearly halfway across the table, his hand stretched out towards Uncle Chaim.

‘What’s the matter?’

‘He’s not answering.’

‘Perhaps he’s thinking about your journey, Magnus.’

Four scoops of coffee. Two strong cups.

‘Nathan?’

‘Hmm?’

‘He’s. Uncle Chaim …’

I spun round. Magnus was standing next to Uncle Chaim, his right hand on the old man’s scrawny left shoulder. ‘What?’

‘He’s dead.’

‘He’s been dead for centuries. What’s wrong?’

‘No, he’s gone. Look.’

Uncle Chaim was hazy. He was somewhere between here and not here. A pencil drawing being rubbed out.

‘Nuncle.’ I heard the fear in my voice.

The old man looked up, and from out of the haze came a smile, the likes of which I hadn’t seen on his face in years.

‘Stay with us, Uncle Chaim. Not now.’

He shook his head. ‘Late, now. Very late. Time up.’ His voice came from far away. ‘Too much happened. Too much …’ He looked at Magnus. ‘Too much time gone. Peace. Sleep.’

‘Nuncle …’

He straightened up and looked at us drowsily. He was almost translucent, like glass. ‘Last time, I think. Now. No more. Told everything. Doesn’t matter …’ The faint streak of his eyebrows seemed to dance up and down in amazement. ‘… at all.’ He melted away like a puff of cigarette smoke in the wind.

Magnus’s hand rested a few moments longer on the non-existent shoulder of his uncle. Then he lowered it and looked at me sadly. I shook my head but didn’t know what to say.

We stood there for a long time staring at the empty space that had once contained Great-Great-Grand-Uncle Chaim and was now nothing more than air and absence. I motioned to Magnus to sit down. I put the coffee on, waited for the pot to start bubbling, then filled my mug. On top of the sparkling black liquid I sprinkled a bit of cinnamon. It reminded me of Nina’s hair.

‘What now?’ said Magnus.

I had no idea. I felt as if I was here and not here. All those times jumbled together, people who couldn’t be here, but were, people who should have been here, but weren’t.

‘Do you know the story of Rip van Winkle, Magnus?’

He thought for a moment and then shook his head.

I told it to him, that American fairy tale about the Dutchman who fell asleep and woke up twenty years later in a world he no longer knew and which no longer knew him. ‘That,’ I said, ‘is how I feel.’

‘Do you think that’ll happen to me … I mean … like Uncle Chaim?’

‘Perhaps. It’s only human.’

He looked at me in surprise. Then his face cleared. He smiled. ‘Are you going to stay up all night?’

‘I’m not tired yet.’

‘You really don’t know where Nina is?’

‘Gone home, I imagine. The question is, Magnus, why?’

He was silent. ‘Why?’ he asked after a while.

I took a sip of the hot coffee. The smell of the cinnamon made my head spin. ‘I don’t know. If I did, I’d have the key to her secret.’

‘I didn’t know why Sarah … But that was different.’

‘Maybe not. The simplest answer, of course, would be Uncle Chaim’s. Lilith. But I don’t believe in that. To be honest, I think that we, you, Uncle Herman, Manny, Zeno, and I, the Hollander men, don’t know the first thing about women.’

Magnus shook his head.

‘No, I don’t really believe that either. Besides: Nina just said that Herman had a way with the ladies. Could it be that you and I have both experienced a moment when it was clearer than ever how much of a stranger a person, a person you know, can be?’

Magnus’s head swayed slightly.

I emptied my mug, got up, and put it on the draining board. ‘I’m going upstairs.’

‘Upstairs? I thought you slept in the hunting room.’

‘I do. I’m going to the attic.’

Magnus’s expression was as empty as a bottle after a drinking session. ‘To do what?’ he asked after a while. ‘What are you looking for?’

‘I have no idea.’ I found a new candle and lit it, then slid two more in my trouser pocket. ‘I think it’s time.’

Magnus sighed.

‘Listen,’ I said. ‘Three, almost four days ago, we began downstairs. We chopped our way up. Now we can get to the attic stairs, through a hole in the wall of the room we were in this afternoon.’

‘A hole in the wall?’

‘They’re wooden walls. He had to chop a hole so he could set his trap and then leave the room. But he couldn’t go back down the stairs. Which means …’

‘He’s upstairs.’

I nodded.

‘He might have escaped by way of the roof.’

‘Escaped?’

‘Left.’

‘Magnus, anything’s possible in this house, but one thing’s certain: if I ever want to find out what really happened, I’ll have to go upstairs.’

‘Has Zeno been here?’

‘The first day. Just the first day.’

Magnus nodded thoughtfully. Then he said, ‘I’m going with you.’