One day at lunchtime I wandered into a café by the university. The water levels had receded and, for the time being, the mayor’s office had lifted the curfew. People went out in the evenings, smelling the fragrant air. It was April, and the wind blew up the leaves in the nearby park. The person working the till seemed to me familiar, though I could not place him with any certainty. Had he been one of my students? The conjugal partner of one of my colleagues? Someone I encountered regularly at the municipal swimming pool? Was he perhaps a man I had met on an online dating website? Had I had drinks with this man who stood now behind the counter, wearing a kind of smock, on the front of which was stitched the name of the café? Was it possible I had been inside this man’s apartment, perhaps even in his bed? Had I in fact had sex with this man? I had come into the café to buy a portion of soup, usually served with two slices of bread, one brown and one rye, since my will to plan lunches had faltered, and I rarely had any food in the cottage except porridge and, at last reckoning, a bag of sesame seeds, which I could not remember purchasing, nor could I work out what kind of meal I might at one point have been planning that would have required their addition. But the bag was open and no longer full, so I must have at least once in my culinary attempts found the sesame seeds necessary to the completion of a recipe. I looked in the display case at the sandwiches sweating on their plates and felt disgusted. Although these sandwiches were considered to be gourmet, insofar as one could apply the word to any eating establishment in the city, and although some seemed even to contain fresh figs and blue cheese, still I felt disgusted. I ordered a pea soup and dropped the quantity of change I was holding in my fist onto the floor, which action made not only a loud noise but also a protracted one, as the coins, finding nothing to stop them, rolled and rolled in any and all directions through the café. I felt dejected and ashamed and wanted nothing more than to run outside, since I could not at all envision myself chasing the coins to the furthest reaches of the café, where they had come to rest against walls, or feet, or bags, or prams, but I felt at the same time a sense of responsibility towards the man working the till, out of whose pay cheque the money for the soup, if I ran off, might come, and whose pay was, what was more, minimum wage at most, whereas my wages were higher since the union, whose power was daily attenuated by the point-blank refusal of the university to engage with its demands, a refusal supported by local and state governments, had nonetheless managed somehow to secure a few negligible pay rises in the previous ten years. I was in a situation which felt insoluble, and I froze. At that moment, I found Clara was standing next to me. She explained that she had watched my progress through the park from the bench she had been sitting on. I thought it likely, she said, that you would end up here, being unable in the main to plan meals ahead of time, still less to execute them. Clara had a way of telling one the truths about oneself, as though not to do so would be to encourage in oneself a terrible sense of well-being. She paid for my soup and ushered me to a seat by the window. She made no mention of her months-long absence, neither where she had been, or with whom, or indeed why she had gone away. She was wearing clothing I had never seen on her before, a bright red turtleneck and patterned harem trousers. She had cut her hair short. I would not have recognised her were it not for that brusqueness that was so characteristic of her. We sat gazing in silence through the window. I was keenly aware of the negative space between our bodies, seated on separate stools, a foot or so apart. It hummed. Again I found myself at a loss. Did I ever feel, said Clara suddenly, as though one’s life was characterised by a general paralysis of will? It was true, she continued, that the abiding feeling in the city at the time was one of paranoia, true that we built each other up only to lay one another low again at the earliest opportunity. It was true, moreover, that one might be better off committing suicide. And yet instead of committing suicide, one went to work. And why did I think that was, asked Clara. Why was it, she said, lifting her mug of tea to her lips, that we went on and on, when it was precisely this going on and on that should fill us with terror. We carried on as normal until one day, well into our lives, we woke up with a worm in the heart. What followed was a succession of moments when we found we’d had enough of our relationship to the world. We found we’d had enough. We found, in fact, said Clara, that we felt more or less the same as usual, which was to say, terror-stricken. Terror all along. Clara looked at me directly now: But how various the ways of looking away. I found it difficult to respond to this gnomic utterance, whose meaning I would not have been able to paraphrase even though I understood it completely. It was an opening and also an invitation from someone who was unaccustomed to receiving. It was a way of telling me, I think now, that I had meant something to her, even perhaps that she needed me. I could not say a thing. I wanted her to lean into me, but as ever I struggled to soften my body’s angularity. I wanted to be open but I held myself still. I wanted to reach out. Like so many things it was impossible. We went on sitting in silence. There had been much silence, I thought, looking at Clara’s reflection in the window. What was it that I wanted to say to her? It had to do with life, the great gashes in the world. It was not that one wanted to guard it jealously, to cleave it together and to oneself. Rather, one simply did not want it to be torn apart. One loved it all, and with so much pain. She caught my eye in the reflection of the window, and I felt somehow that she too understood.