Clara’s keynote was scheduled for the following evening at the city science museum, to be followed by a reception, at which the mayor and other town functionaries would be present. I went out into the street. A boy sat on a bench, and I watched as he consumed, one after the other, three unmarked bottles of blue liquid. In the market square, I obtained a coffee and pastry from a taciturn young man and sat by the water. There were flower vendors and a long line of stalls selling fish, wool and tourist apparel. I proceeded down a number of tree-lined boulevards and soon found myself sitting on a bench in a leafy esplanade beside an unkempt woman, who appeared to be asleep. Somewhere in the park, I could hear competing radios playing American pop music and klezmer. I took the opportunity to inspect more closely the woman sitting next to me. Her clothes appeared new, though dirty, while her hair was sparse but clean. A moustache curled over her upper lip. She awoke with a cough. Ah, she said, blinking up at me. She brushed the remains of her breakfast from her suit jacket and sat up. Did I speak English, she wanted to know. I had, she said, a slightly austere expression that suggested it might be the case. Of course, she had learned English at school, the school systems in the country were the best in the world, outperforming countries in subjects they themselves had devised. Shakespeare, for instance. She smiled, and I could see a row of sharp and even teeth. Her husband, she said, had thrown her out the night before. It was the latest battle in an abiding war between the two. They had married too late in life, she said, to be able to tolerate each other. And so in order to keep themselves amused down the years, they engaged in provocations of various kinds. Last night, she said, she had effected the final part of a plan that had been months, if not years, in the making. In retaliation her husband had thrown her into the street. Given the circumstances, it was unclear who currently held the upper hand, she or her husband, since although she had executed a master stroke, her husband had taken possession of their home in a neighbourhood nearby. She was resting on the bench while she planned her next move. Did I like the city, she asked. A place where North met East in all sorts of unexpected ways. On the one hand one was presented with the facades of buildings, a distinctly Nordic architectural style; on the other hand, the enormous, red stone Orthodox Church loomed over the city. For her part, ever since she was a girl, she had loved riding the streetcar. It was the one thing she and her husband had in common, she said, their shared passion for the city’s trams. On any given Sunday, although they might have been bellowing at each other since daybreak, perhaps even using the breakfast things as projectiles to hurl at each other, they could always be found riding happily in the streetcar by ten o’clock in the morning. She sighed. She had lived in the city her whole life. She loved the place still, in part because no matter how much seemed to change, the city in effect stayed the same, corruption in city hall, corruption in the district court, but they had their baby boxes, it was true. The world smiled upon them for their baby boxes. As to their institutions, she said, gesturing around with her left hand, there was no doubt they liked a park. On every street corner, the city authorities insisted, a park. It was a kind of mania. There were times in her life when the sight of a park bench nearly drove her to derangement. But, said the woman, tapping the bench, needs must. She had retired years ago from the Natural History Museum, her speciality was insects. She was relatively well known within entomological circles in Finland, having produced two books on local caterpillars. People thought of the butterfly, she said, the more charitable ones perhaps even the moth, but when the lepidopterists had finished pinning their specimens to the wall, did anyone think of the lowly caterpillar? As with so many things, we ignored the caterpillar at our own peril. What was the butterfly without the caterpillar? We would do well to remember where we came from, she said, the factors that went into our development, how one thing led to another. Since I claimed to be a specialist in literature, I would no doubt be aware of a certain writer’s love of butterflies, perhaps I had seen photographs of him in plus fours, clutching a net. As to his writing, she could not judge, she had read one of his novels, a family saga, the title was a girl’s name, she could make neither heads nor tails of it, all the same, there was undoubtedly beauty there. His forays into lepidoptery, however, left something to be desired. She understood, she said, that the process of transformation was decidedly attractive to the layperson, who viewed it as the caterpillar’s long-awaited realisation of itself. At the same time, she said, it was erroneous to view the caterpillar’s translation into a butterfly as a single occurrence, or even as a change at all. In a sense, she said, pulling a nail file from her breast pocket and beginning to file her nails, the caterpillar was always a butterfly. Interested parties had long wondered whether and at what point the caterpillar knew it would become a butterfly, which she supposed was a thought-provoking question, after all one did sometimes find oneself wondering, when faced with a recalcitrant child, at what age it would know it would become an adult. But for her, a far more interesting problem was, she remarked, replacing the file into her pocket, whether the caterpillar recognised itself in the butterfly and, if so, what the substance of that recognition was. Rising from the bench she turned to thank me. It had been a productive afternoon, and now it was time for her to face her husband. A little while later I too rose from the bench. All was still.