In the evening he stayed motionless on the mess hall balcony. Krantz was about to put a record on the PA.
“Hey, Anne, you want Mozart, the Forty-ninth?” he shouted. She ran towards him.
Breavman saw clover in the grass, a discovery, and mist drifting across the tops of the low mountains, like the fade in a photo. Ripples on the water moving in the same direction as the mist, from black into silver into black.
He didn’t move a muscle, didn’t know whether he was at peace or paralysed.
Steve, the Hungarian tractor driver, passed below the balcony, picking a white flower from a bush. They were levelling out some land for another playing field, filling in a marsh.
The flute-bird had a needle in its whistle. A broken door down the hill beside the thick-bottomed pines.
sang a file of children.
Down the pine-needled path stood Martin, motionless as Breavman, his arm stretched out in a Fascist salute, his sleeve rolled up.
He was waiting for mosquitoes to land.
Martin had a new obsession. He elected himself to be the Scourge of Mosquitoes, counting them as he killed them. There was nothing frantic about his technique. He extended his arm and invited them. When one landed, wham! up came the other hand. “I hate you,” he told each one individually, and noted the statistic.
Martin saw his counsellor standing on the balcony.
“A hundred and eighty,” he called up as greeting.
Mozart came loud over the pa, sewing together everything that Breavman observed. It wove, it married the two figures bending over the records, whatever the music touched, child trapped in London Bridge, mountain-top dissolving in mist, empty swing rocking like a pendulum, the row of glistening red canoes, the players clustered underneath the basket, leaping for the ball like a stroboscopic photo of a splashing drop of water – whatever it touched was frozen in an immense tapestry. He was in it, a figure by a railing.