BLACK AS INK

The château, dove-grey, nested among dark green trees. Lawns like marzipan sloped to a huge lake like a silver spoon, the farther end of which held up an anchored fleet of islands. Pines and willows framed the watery vistas. There were swans. It was hopelessly idyllic and very quickly bored him.

“Paris,” he occasionally said, a kind of comma to everything. And now and then, in desperation, “Oslo. Stockholm.”

His mother and his uncle glanced up from their interminable games of chess or cards, under the brims of their summer-walking hats, through the china and the crystal-ware, astonished.

“He is scarcely here,” Ilena said, “and he wishes to depart.”

“I was the same at his age,” said Janov. “Nineteen. Oh my God, I was just the same.”

“Twenty,” said Viktor.

“What would you do in the city, except idle?” said Ilena.

“Exactly as I do here.”

“And get drunk,” said Janov. “And gamble.”

“I told you about the business venture I—”

“And lose money. My God, I was just the same.”

“Hush, Viktor,” said Ilena. “You should be sketching. This is what you’re good at, and what you should do.”

“Or take one of the horses. Ride it somewhere, for God’s sake.”

“Where?”

“Or the boat. Exercise.”

Fat Janov beamed upon his slender nephew, flexing the bolster muscles of his arms, his coat-seams creaking.

Viktor remembered the long white car left behind in the town, cafés, theater, discourse far into the night. The summer was being wasted, ten days of it were already gone forever.

He thought he understood their delight in the château, the home of childhood lost, suddenly returned into their possession. Seeing his elegant mother, a fragile fashion-plate with a hidden framework of steel, drift through these rooms exclaiming, recapturing, he had been indulgent—“Do you recall, Jani, when we were here, and here, and did this, and did that?” And the gales of laughter, and the teasing, somewhat embarrassing to watch. Yes, indulgent, but already nervous at intimations of ennui, Viktor had planned a wild escape. Then all at once the plan had failed. And as the short sweet summer clasped the land, here he found himself, after all, trapped like a fly in honey.

“Just the place,” Janov said, “for you to decide what you mean to do with yourself. Six months out of the university. Time to look about, get your bearings.”

He had, dutifully, sketched the lake. He had ridden the beautiful horses, annoyed at his own clumsiness in the saddle, for he was graceful in other things. The boat he ignored. No doubt it let water. He observed Janov, snoring gently under a cherry tree, his straw hat tilted to his nose.

“I could, of course,” said Viktor, “drown myself in the damn lake.”

“Such language before your mother,” said Ilena, ruffling his hair in a way that pleased or irritated him, depending on the weather of his mood, and which now maddened so that he grit his teeth. “Ah, so like me,” she murmured with a callous, selfish pride. “Such impatience.” And then she told him again how, as a girl, she had danced by the shore of the lake, the colored lamps bright in the trees above, trembling in the water below. They had owned the land in those days. Even the islands had belonged to her father. And now, there were alien houses built there. She could see the roofs of them and pointed them out to him with contempt. “Les Nouveaux,” she called them. In winter, when the trees lost their leaves, the houses of the Invader would be more apparent yet. Only the pines would shield her then from the uncivilized present.

Viktor imagined a great gun poised on the lawn, shells blasting the bold aliens into powder. He himself, with no comparative former image to guide him, could not even make them out.

Presently she reverted to her French novel, and he left her.

He walked down into a grove of dripping willows and began to make fresh plans to escape—a make-believe attack of appendicitis, possibly, was the only answer.…

When he awoke, the sun was down in the lake, a faded-golden upturned bowl. Through the willow curtains, the lawns were cool with shadows, and deserted.

Yes, he supposed it was truly beautiful. Something in the strange light informed him, the long northern sunset that separated day from dark, beginning now slowly to envelop everything in the palest, thinnest amber ambience, occluding foliage, liquid and air. One broad arrow of jasper-colored water flared away from the sun, and four swans, black on the glow, embarked like ships from the shelter of the islands. The islands were black, too, banks and spurs of black, and even as he looked at them he heard, with disbelief, a cloud of music rise from one of them and echo to him all the way across the lake. An orchestra was playing over there. Viktor heard rhythm and melody for the briefest second. Not the formal mosaic of Beethoven or Mozart, nor some ghost mazurka from Ilena’s memory—this was contemporary dance music, racy and strong, spice on the wind, then blown away.

Just as he had instantly imagined the gun shelling the island, so another vision occurred to him, in its own manner equally preposterous.

As he rose, loafed into the enormous house, found his way upstairs unmolested, and dressed sloppily for dinner, so the idea went with him, haunting him. Before the sonorous gong sounded, he leaned a long while at his window, watching the last of the afterglow, now the color of a dry sherry, still infinitesimally diminishing. A white moon had risen to make a crossbow with a picturesque branch: how typical. Yet the phantom movements of the swans far out on the sherry lake had begun to fascinate him. The music, clearly, had disturbed them. Or were they always nocturnally active? Viktor recalled one of Janov’s stories, which concerned a swan in savage flight landing with a tremendous thud on the roof of their father’s study. The swans were supposed to be eccentric. They fled with summer, always returning with the spring, like clockwork things. Ilena said they sang when they died and she had heard one do so. Viktor did not really believe her, though as a child, first learning the tale, he had conjured a swan, lying in the rushes, haranguing with a coloratura voice.

The gong resounded, and with sour contempt, he went downstairs to the china and crystal, the food half the time lukewarm from its long journey out of the kitchen, and the presiding undead of old suppers, banquets. “Do you remember, Jani, when—?”

“Do you recall, Yena, the night—?”

The idea of the boat stayed with him there. He took soup and wine and a tepid roast and some kind of preserve and a fruit pastry and coffee, and over the low cries of their voices he distinguished the lake water slapping the oars, felt the dark buoyancy of it, and all the while the music on the island came closer.

Of course, it was a stupid notion. Some inane provincial party or other, and he himself bursting in on it through the bushes. We owned this island once, he could say, erupting into the midst of Les Nouveaux. Yet, the boat rowed on in his thoughts, the swans drifting by, turning their snakelike necks away from him. The music had stopped in his fancy because he was no longer sure what he had heard at all. Maybe he had imagined everything.

“How silent Viktor is,” said Ilena.

“Sulking,” said Janov. “When I was eighteen, I was just the same.”

“Yes,” said Viktor, “I’m sulking. Pass the brandy.”

“Pass the brandy,” said Janov. “Eighteen and pass the brandy.”

“Twenty and I’m going upstairs to read. Good night, Maman. Uncle.”

Ilena kissed his cheek. Her exquisite perfume surrounded her, embraced him, and was gone.

“Do we play?” said Ilena.

“A couple of games,” said Janov.

As Viktor went out there came the click of cards.

* * * *

He waited in his room for an hour, reading the same paragraph carefully over and over. Once he got up and hurried toward the door. Then the absurdity swept him under again. He paced, found the window, stared out into the dark which had finally covered everything.

The moon had begun to touch the lake to a polished surface, like a waxed table. Nothing marred its sheen. There were no lights discernible, save the sparse lights of the château round about.

Viktor took his book downstairs and sat brooding on it in a corner of the salon, so he could feel superior as his mother and his uncle squabbled over their cards.

At midnight, he woke to find the salon empty. From an adjacent room the notes of the piano softly came for a while, then ceased. “Go to bed, mon fils,” she called to him, followed by invisible rustlings of her garments as she went away. Tied to the brandy decanter, with the velvet ribbon she had worn at her throat, was a scrap of paper which read: Un peu. Viktor grimaced and poured himself one very large glass.

Presently he went out with the brandy onto the lawn before the house, and scanned again across the lake for pinpricks of light in the darkness. Nothing was to be seen. He thought of the boat, and wandered down the incline, between the willows, to the water’s edge, thinking of it, knowing he would not use it.

“Paris,” he said to his mother in his head. “Next year,” she said. “Perhaps.” A wave of sorrow washed over him. Even if he should ever get there, the world, too, might prove a disappointment, a crashing bore.

The brandy made him dizzy, heavy and sad.

He turned to go in, defeated. And at that moment, he saw the white movement in the water, troubling and beautiful. About ten boat-lengths away, a girl was swimming, slowly on her back, toward him. With each swanlike stroke of her arms, there came a white flash of flesh. It seemed she was naked. Amazed, Viktor stepped up into the black recess of the hanging trees. It was an instinct, not a wish to spy so much as a wish not to be discovered and reckoned spying. She had not seen him, could not have seen him. As the water shallowed toward the shore, she swung aside like a fish. Amongst the fronded trailers of the willows, not ten yards from him now, she raised her arms and effortlessly rose upright.

Her hair was blond, darkened and separated by water, and streaked across her body so her slender whiteness was concealed in hair, in leaves, in shadows. The water itself ringed her hips. She was naked, as he had thought. She parted the willow fronds with her hands, gazing between them, up the lawn toward the château, or so it seemed. It was pure luck she had beached exactly where he stood.

He was afraid she would hear his breathing. But she seemed wrapped in her own silence, so sure she was alone, she had remained alone, even with his eyes upon her.

Another whiteness flashed, and Viktor jumped upsetting the brandy, certain now she had heard him, his heart in his mouth. But she gave no sign of it. A swan cruised by her and between the willows, vanishing. A second bird, like a lily, floated far off.

A white girl swimming among the swans.

The water broke in silver rings. She had dived beneath the shallows and he had not seen it. He stared, and beheld her head, like a drowned moon, bob to the surface some distance off, then the dagger-cast of her slim back.

Without sound, she swam away toward the islands of invasion.

“My God,” he whispered. But it was not until he was in his room again that he dared to laugh, congratulating himself, unnerved. Lying down, he slept uneasily.

He was already in the grip, as Ilena would have said, of one of his obsessions.

* * * *

A day like any other day spread over the lake and the château, plaiting the willow trees with gold. Before noon, Viktor had one of the horses out and was riding on it around the lake, trying to find if the islands—her island—was accessible from shore. But it was not.

From a stand of birch trees it was just possible, however, to see the roofs of a house, and a little pavilion like white matchsticks near the water.

Viktor sat looking at it, in a sort of mindless reverie.

When he was thirteen years old, he had fallen wildly in love with one of the actresses in a minor production of The Lady from the Sea. This infatuation, tinged by tremors of earliest sexuality, but no more than tinged by them, was more a languid desperate ecstasy of the emotional parts, drenching him in a sort of rain—through which he saw the people he knew, and over the murmur of which he heard their voices, yet everything remote, none of it as real as the pale rouged face, the cochineal gown and thunderous hair. Never since had he felt such a thing for anyone. Not even that hoard of young women he had gazed after, then forgotten. Certainly not in the few, merely physical, pleasures he had experienced with the carefully selected paid women his walk of life gave access to.

But preposterously this—this was like that first soaring love. It was the artist in him, he supposed helplessly. For however poor his work, his soul was still that of the artist. The dazzle of pure whiteness on the dark lake, accented by swans, the sinking moon. He had been put in mind of a rusalka, the spirit of a drowned girl haunting water in a greed for male victims. And in this way, to his seemingly asexual desire was added a bizarre twist of dread, not asexual in the least.

“Been riding?” said Uncle Janov on his return. “Good, good.”

“I thought I might try the boat this afternoon,” said Viktor, with a malicious sense of the joy of implicit and unspoken things.

But he did not take the boat. He lay on the grass of the lawn, now, staring through the willows, over the bright water, toward the islands, all afternoon. In his head he attempted to compose a poem. White as snow, she moves among the swans…the snow of her hands, falling.… Disgusted with it, he would not even commit it to paper. Nor did he dare to make a drawing. His mother’s parasoled shadow falling over him at intervals as she patrolled the lawns, made any enterprise save thought far too conspicuous. Even to take the boat could be a disaster. “Where is that boy going? He’s too far out—”

Sugaring her conversation, as ever, fashionably with French, Ilena somehow made constant references to love throughout dinner. By a sort of telepathic means, she had lit on something to make Viktor suddenly as excruciatingly uncomfortable as a boy of thirteen. Finally she sought the piano, and played there, with Chopinesque melancholy and Mozartian frills, the old ballads of romance: Desirée, Hélas, J’ai Perdu. She could, of course, in fact know nothing. He himself scarcely knew. What on earth had got hold of him?

It was inevitable. To be so bored, so entrapped. There must be something to be interested in. He sprawled in a chair as Ilena plunged into Lied, trying longingly to remember the features of the girl’s face.

* * * *

When the house was quiet, save for some unaccountable vague noise the servants were making below, Viktor came downstairs and went out. He dragged the boat from its shed, pushed through the reeds, and started to row with a fine defiance.

There was no moon, which was excellent, even though he could not see where he was going.

An extraordinary scent lay over the lake, a smell of sheer openness. At first it went to his head. He felt exhilarated and completely in command of everything, himself, the night. He rowed powerfully, and the château, a dark wash of trees against the star-tipped sky, drew away and away. Then, unused to this particular form of labor, his arms and his back began to ache and burn. He became suddenly physically strained to the point of nausea, and collapsed on the oars, only too aware he would have to return by this modus operandi, and already certain he could not make another stroke in any direction.

But the rim of the island was now much closer than the far shore. He could distinguish the matchstick pavilion. Something white in the water shot blood through him like a charge of electricity, but it was only one of the swans mysteriously feeding or drinking from the lake.

Cursing softly, his teeth clenched, Viktor resumed work with the oars and pulled his way through the water until the boat bumped softly into the side of the island.

There was a post there among the reeds, sodden and rotted, but he tied the boat to it. The swan drifted away, weightless as if hollow.

Viktor scrambled up the incline. He stood beside the little pavilion, back broken, and full of a sinister excitement, trespassing and foolish and amused, and dimly afraid.

There was no music now, only the sound the lake made, and a soft intermittent susurrous of the leaves. Viktor glanced into the summer house, which was romantically neglected, conceivably even dangerous. Then, without hesitation, he began to make a way between the stalks of pine trees, and over the mounds of the grass, passing into the utter blankness of moonless overgrowth which had somehow seemed to make this venture permissible.

Beyond the trees was a house, surrounded by a wild lawn and a clutter of outbuildings. Viktor took a sudden notion of dogs, and checked, appalled, but nothing barked or scrabbled to get out at him.

There was something reassuringly ramshackle about the place. Even the house, far younger than the château, had a weird air of desuetude and decline. Viktor walked nearer and nearer through the rogue grass, passed under a rose-vine unraveling on a shed. A few feet from the veranda, in a clump of bushes, he came on a small china animal of indistinct species lying on its side as if dead, beside a wooden pole stuck in the ground. The purpose of the pole was moot. For the running up of a flag, perhaps?

Viktor laughed aloud, unable to prevent himself. To his outraged horror there came an echo, a feminine laughter that pealed out instantly upon his own.

“Good God,” he said.

“Good God,” said the voice.

Viktor, struck dumb, pulled himself together with an effort at the moment the echo voice said clearly: “Why don’t you come here?”

“Where?” said Viktor.

“Wait,” said the voice.

It seemed it was above him, and throwing back his head in a gesture of unnecessary violence, he noted a pale thing like tissue-paper in the act of turning away from a window. A moment later, he saw a light spring up and go traveling across the house. The impulse to flee was very strong. A lack of social etiquette had brought him here, but now the trauma of good manners, of all things, restrained him from flight. He felt a perfect fool. What would he say when the door opened? I was shipwrecked on your island by this terrible storm that has been silently and invisibly happening for the past hour?

Then the door opened and the light of a small oil lamp opened likewise, a large pale yellow chrysanthemum across the wooden veranda. There was a hammock strung there, and a little table, and in the dark oblong of the doorway, the lamp in her hand, the girl he had seen swimming, naked as a swan, in the lake.

Of course, he had known the second he heard her voice that it was she, no other.

“My God,” he said again. He had an insane impulse to tell her how he had looked on her before, and choked it back with the utmost difficulty.

“Won’t you come in?” said the girl.

He stared.

She wore a white frock, white stockings and shoes, her blond hair pinned on her head in an old-fashioned rather charming way, and in the thick yellow light she glowed. Her face was not pretty, but had an exquisite otherworldliness.

“I was looking for—that is, I think I have the wrong house—” he blurted.

“Well, never mind. Since you’re here, why don’t you come in?” And when he still hesitated, she said with the most winning innocence, devoid of all its implications, “There’s no one here but myself. My uncle is in town on business.”

Viktor discovered himself walking toward her. She smiled encouragement. There was not a trace of artifice about her, not even a hint of the powder he had learned to recognize, on her eggshell face.

She led him inside, and he had the impression of one space tumbling over into another in a mélange of panellings and furnishings, and huge crazed shadows flung by the lamp. Then he was himself falling over a little card table, righting it, glimpsing the open window framed in the wings of opened shutters, the tassel of the blind swinging idly in the night air. He saw the lawn he had stood upon, the flagpole and the dead china animal. It was uncanny, surreal almost to him in that moment, to see from her viewpoint the spot he had only just vacated. She was saying something.

“—Russian tea,” she finished. He turned too quickly, and observed a samovar. “Will you take some?” And he thought of Circe. He would drink the tea and change into a pig.

“Thank you.”

And beyond the samovar, a beast with a monstrous horn. He noted the source of yesterday’s music with another small shock. Not an orchestra at all. Of course not.

She had set the oil lamp on the card table, and the light had steadied. Presently they sat down and drank the dark sweet tea, looking at each other neatly over the rims of the cups. There was nothing special about the room. He had seen many rooms like it. It was rather untidy, that was all, and the paper on the walls was distressfully peeling, due to damp he supposed. But the room smelled of water, not dampness, and of the tea, and of some elusive perfume which he wondered about, for it did not seem to be hers.

They did not speak again for a long while. It was so absurd, the whole thing. He did not know what to say. And was afraid besides of letting slip some reference to her nocturnal swim.

But he must say something—

“The château—” he said.

She smiled at him, polite and friendly, hanging graciously on his words.

“My mother,” he said. “She owns—we live at the château.”

“Yes?” she said. “How nice.”

“And you,” he fumbled.

“I live here,” she said.

This was quite inane.

“It’s very beautiful here,” he said, inanely.

“Oh, yes.”

“You must be wondering,” he said, oddly aware she was not, “why I came up here.”

“You said you thought it was another house. Someone you were looking for.”

“Did I say that?” Yes, he had said it. “I’m afraid it was a lie. I came here out of curiosity. We used to own this land.” Oh God, how pompous. “I say ‘we.’ I mean my mother’s family. And I was…curious.”

She smiled enigmatically. He finished the scalding tea at a gulp that seared his throat and stomach. Oink?

“Well,” she said, standing up as if at a signal. “It was kind of you to call.” She held out her hand and, disbelievingly, he rose and took it. Was she dismissing him?

“Well…” he repeated. Unsure, he felt in that instant another very strong urge to escape. “I suppose I should go back. Thank you for being so hospitable to a lawless trespasser.” The words, gallant, buccaneering, pleased him. Cheered, he allowed her to lead him out to the veranda. “I heard your gramophone,” he said, “the other night. Sound carries sometimes over the lake.”

“Good-bye,” she said.

He was on the lawn, and she stood above him on the veranda steps, white against the dark. He wanted to say: Do you often swim? And a vague wave of desire curled through him, making him tingle, and with it a strange aversion, drawing him away. But he said, without thinking, suddenly, “May I come back tomorrow?”

“Oh, no,” she said. Nothing else. He stood waiting for almost a minute, waiting for there to be something else, some explanation, excuse, equivocation, or some softening reversal: Well, perhaps… But there was nothing. She stood there kindly smiling upon him, and presently he said, like a fool, “Good night, then.” And walked off across the lawn.

When he came to the trees, he looked back. She had gone in, and the door was shut on the lamp, the peeling paper. It occurred to him for the first time that, before he had been seen, she had sat there in that large decaying house in the darkness. As if his arrival alone had awakened her, brought her to life along with the bubbling samovar.

He was disgusted with it all, himself, her. She was that vile and typically bourgeois combination of the nondescript and the obscure. He climbed in the boat, loosed it, and pushed away from shore.

As he rowed, inflamed muscles complaining, he cursed over and over. What on earth had happened? What had it been for? She bored him.

By the time he reached the willow banks of the château he was exhausted. He dragged the boat into its shed with an embarrassed need to hide his escapade, and went in through one of the unlocked little side entrances of his mother’s ancestral house. He threw himself on his bed fully clothed and began in sheer bewilderment to read a novel.

He fell asleep with his cheek on the open book, dissatisfied and disappointed.

* * * *

The dawn woke him, stiff and cramped from the night’s exercise. The long resinous light filled him with a terrible religious hunger for unspecified things. He thought of the nameless girl and how she had bored him, and her peculiar demeanor, and her slender pallor, and the moment of stupid desire. And realized in astonishment that it was the depression of jail he was feeling. He was certainly in love with her.

Halfway through the afternoon, as Viktor was lying encushioned on the lawn in an anguish of stiffness, dreading movement of any kind, a strange man appeared, walking around the château from the pine trees with a determined air.

Viktor sensed imminence at once. He hauled himself painfully into a sitting position. Ilena and her parasol, an odd creature from another planet, its second stalk-necked head twirling so far above the first, was parading gracefully up and down a long way off. Janov was indoors, engaged in billiards.

The stranger approached.

“Young man,” he said.

He towered over Viktor on the grass, an awful figure incongruously done up, even in the summer heat, in a black greatcoat caped like wings, and a tall black hat. A red beard streaked with darker red frothed between the two blacknesses, and a set of beautiless features, beaklike nose, small cold eyes of a yellowish, weaselish tinge.

“What do you want?” Viktor inquired haughtily.

The stranger considered.

“You, I think. I think I want you.”

“What do you mean?”

“Get up, if you please. We must have words, you and I.”

Viktor flushed with nerves.

“I don’t think so.”

“I think so.”

“And who the hell are you,” Viktor cried, “to think anything?”

The man’s gelid face did not alter. Only the mouth moved, as if the rest of the countenance were a mask. But he pointed inexorably out across the lake.

“Over there,” he said. “The house on the island. You know it?”

“Do I?”

“Yes, you know it. In the night, a visitor. You.”

Viktor sneered. He was still sitting, helpless from the stiffness of that illicit row which now loomed above him, it seemed, in the retributive person of the red-bearded man.

“I will say this,” said the man, “I do not like my niece disturbed when I am away. I do not like it. You hear me?”

Viktor stared arrogantly into the distance, blind. He could not bring himself to any more fruitless denials, or to argue.

“No further visits,” said the man. “You will leave my niece alone. You hear me?”

Viktor stared. He was appalled but not entirely astonished when the ghastly black thing swooped on him like a bird of prey, close to his ear, hissing, “You hear me?”

“I hear,” said Viktor, coldly, feeling an inner trembling start.

“Otherwise,” said the man, “I shall not be responsible for anything I may do.”

Miles off, in some other country, Ilena had turned, her parasol tilting like a fainting flower. “Viktor!” she called.

“You hear me?” the man said again.

“Yes.”

“Good,” said the man. He rose up and his shadow withdrew. He moved in short powerful strides, across the lawn, away into the pine trees.

Viktor, crouched in an agony of muscles and inarticulate fury, watched him go. The mystery of the whole momentary episode added to its horror. That the man was uncle to the white girl in the house—very well, one could accept that. That he had reached the shore, rowing an unseen boat himself in his heavy unsuitable garments—this seemed unlikely. But how else had he come here, save by flight? And the threats, out of all proportion to anything—Viktor became aware he should have stood up, threatened in turn, gone for one of the servants. That the very activity for which he was accused—yes, accused—had kept him riveted to the earth, seemed damning.

And the girl. She must have reported his coming to the island. Said she did not care for it, was afraid. Ridiculous horrid little bourgeoise. Since dawn, he had been thinking of her, wondering if he could bear to woo her, and how it might be done, tactfully and pleasantly. Wondering too with romantic dread if she were a ghost, brought to quickness only by his arrival, swirling into a tomb at his retreat. A vampire who would drink his blood, a rusalka who would drown him.… And then, hammered flat across these sexually charged, yearning images, this beastly ordinary evil thing, the uncle like an indelible black stamp.

“Who was that man?” Ilena said, manifesting abruptly at his side.

“I don’t know, Maman.” Not quite a lie. No name had been given.

“Viktor, you are white as death. What did he say? Is it something you’ve done? Tell me. Some gambling debt—Viktor!”

“No, Maman. He was looking for another house, and asked the way.”

“Then why,” she said, “are you so pale?”

“I feel rather sick.” That was sure enough.

“You drank too much at dinner,” she said.

“Yes, Maman. Probably.”

“What am I to do with you?” she asked.

“Send me back to the city?” he cried imploringly, the perpetual pleading shooting out of him when he least expected it to do so, had not even been thinking of it at all.

“Don’t be foolish,” she said. “In the city you would drink twice as much, gamble, do all manner of profligate idiotic things.” She was smiling, teasing, yet in earnest. It was all true. Under her fragile cynicism her fear for him lurked like a wolf. She was afraid he would destroy himself as his father had done. And he caught her fear suddenly, fear of some lightless vortex; he did not even know its name.

“All right,” he said, “all right, Maman. I’ll stay here. I’ll be good.”

“There’s my sensible darling.”

When she had gone, he flopped on his face. Images of his father, a drunken man who died in Viktor’s childhood, rose and faded. He recalled the lamps burning low on a winter’s afternoon, and being told to play very quietly. And later, men in black at the door, and a white wax face in a long box that did not look remotely like anyone Viktor had ever seen before in his life.

But he was not his father. And abruptly there came an awful suspicion. That he had been brought here for no other reason than to be protected from the city, from all cities, to be protected from the long, animated discussions and card games that ran into the early hours, from the theaters, the cafés, the pure excitement that a city symbolized. A prisoner. In that moment he thought of the girl again, and a strange revelation swept over him with a maddening sense of relief.

Could it be she too was kept as a prisoner? That the loathsome man had brought her there and shut her up there, keeping all company away from her. Perhaps she had mentioned Viktor innocently, hoping for a repetition, and the devilish uncle had flown at her, battering her with the vulture’s wings of his cape—No, no, you must go nowhere, see no one. I shall make sure he never comes here again.

But Viktor was powerless to alleviate her destiny. Powerless to alleviate his own.

He wondered which wine would be served with luncheon.

* * * *

By the time the sun set on the lake he was very drunk. Somehow, he had contrived to be drinking all day. He did not know why this had seemed necessary, had not even thought about it. His mother’s fear for him had begun it, and his fear for himself. As if by dipping into the vortex now and then, he could accustom himself to it, make it natural and mundane.

When the gong sounded for dinner he did not go down. He was afraid of Ilena seeing him as he was. But of course she came up, touched his forehead to see if he had a fever, gazed at him with her deep remorseless eyes. If she smelled the wine on his breath he was not certain, he tried not to let her, muffling himself in the counterpane from the bed, protesting he had a slight cold, wanted only to sleep—finally she left him. He lay and giggled, curled on his side, laughed at her a long while, then found himself crying.

He was surprised and shocked. He knew he was going to do something stupid, then, and such was his mental confusion that it was only two glasses of wine later that he realized what.

* * * *

Rowing this drunk was much easier. He scarcely felt it at all, the grisly laboring drags and thrustings. Nor did he feel any anticipatory unease.

It was quite late, overcast, and a wind rising and falling. This would account perhaps for his only suddenly hearing the music that came from the island, when he was about a hundred yards from the reeds and the summer house. The gramophone. So near, it was obviously no orchestra, tinny and hesitant, cognisant of the little box that held it, and the big horn that let it out. Did the fact that the gramophone was playing mean the man was away? The man in the hat and greatcoat, the man like a black vulture? Or home?

What would Viktor do if he met the man?

Call his hand, of course. Just what he should have done before.

But really there was no need, if Viktor were careful, if he used the qualities of cunning and omnipotence he now felt stirring within himself, no need to meet the man.

Gently now. The reeds moved about him in a wave and the boat jumped jarringly against the rotted post. With the drunkard’s lack of coordination and contrastingly acute assessment, he had seen landfall and planned for it and messed it up, all in a space of seconds. With an oath and some mirth, he tethered the boat and got ashore on the island.

No swans. Just the music. And, as he passed the pavilion, the music ran down and went out. He had reached the edge of the lawn before it started up again, a cheerful frivolous syncopation that sounded macabre, suddenly, in the dark.

But there were lights in the house, two windows a thick deep amber behind drawn blinds. They were on the other side of the veranda from the window she had called him from, the window of the room into which she had subsequently led him for a few minutes of reasonless dialogue, and a burning mouthful of tea.

The outbuildings loomed. He ducked under the rose vine, stepped over the china animal still lying there, and beneath the flagpole. He went toward the lighted windows, and paused, pressed against the veranda rail. Through the music he could hear the murmur of voices, or of a single voice. And now he could see that one of the blinds was not quite level with the sill. A trio of inches gaped, a deeper gold, showing slyly into the nakedness of the house.

Viktor advanced onto the veranda, crossed to the window and kneeled down, putting his face close to the pane. It was as simple as that. He saw directly into the room.

It was an amazing sight, a scene from a farce. He had no urge to laugh.

To the jolting beat of a dance melody, a couple moved about between the furniture. A huge oil lamp threw light upon them, leaving the corners of the room in a magenta vignette. The girl was white, white hair, white dress; the man a black creature, clutching her close. The tall hat was gone from his head, which was covered with a snarled bush of reddish hair similar to that which sprang from the face. This face, that was for one instant in view on a turn, vanished on another, came in view again, was steeled in concentration, looking blindly away with its weasel eyes. Now and then the mouth spoke. Viktor found himself able to lip-read, with the slight aid of muffled sounds through the glass, and realized his adversary was counting out the beats. The girl’s face was blank. Neither danced with pleasure or interest and yet, oddly, they danced quite well, the man surprisingly fluid, the girl following like a doll.

Like a doll, yes, that was exactly what she was like.

Abruptly the dance ended. The man let go and stood back, and the gramophone ran down. In the silence, the voice spoke, quite audible now.

“Better. You are better. But you must smile while you dance.”

The girl was facing in Viktor’s direction. He saw her face at once break into a soulless grimace.

“No, no.” The man was displeased. “A smile. Soft, flexible. Like this.”

He was turned away, and any smile that face could conjure, how could it be at all appealing? And yet the girl presumably copied his expression. And now, agitated, Viktor saw her smile limpidly and beautifully. He was charmed by her smile, mimicked incredibly from the monster.

“Better,” the monster said again. There was a trace of accent, had been when he spoke to Viktor earlier in the day, unnoticed then in the alarm of the interview. What was it? Germanic, perhaps. “Now, sit down. Walk to that chair and sit on it. As I have shown you.”

The girl, still with a trace of the magical smile on her lips, went to the chair, and seated herself, ladylike and graceful.

“Good, that is good. Now we will talk.”

The girl waited obediently, her eggshell face uplifted.

“The gardens. A bench,” said the man. Viktor noted, all at once, that along with everything else incongruous, the foreigner still wore his greatcoat, securely fastened. “It is late in the morning. I have sat beside you. Good-day, m’mselle.”

“Good day,” she replied aloofly, turning her head a little away.

“I hope I do not disturb you?”

“No. Not at all.”

“Have I seen you here before, m’mselle?”

“It’s possible. Sometimes I walk my dog here.”

“Ah, yes. Your dog. A delightful little fellow.”

“I am training him to shake hands. He loves to show off to strangers. Perhaps you would be so kind—”

“But of course. Ah! How clever he is.”

“Thank you. I should be very lonely without him.”

“But are you alone, m’mselle? A lady like yourself…”

“Quite alone.” The girl sighed softly. Her eyes were lowered. The extraordinary playacting went on and on. “My uncle, you understand, has business affairs which take him often from home.”

“Then, you spend all day in an empty flat?”

“Just so. It is very tiresome, I’m afraid.”

“But then, m’mselle, might I ask you to take luncheon with me?”

“Why—” the girl hesitated. Her eyes fluttered upward, and stayed, their attention distracted. It took Viktor several moments, so objective had he become, to understand it was on him her gaze had faltered and then adhered. She had seen him peering in under the blind.

Stricken with dismay, he seemed changed to stone. But the man, with a flap of his black wings, paid no heed to the direction of her eyes.

“Continue,” he barked sharply. “Go on, go on!”

The white girl only gazed into Viktor’s horrified stare. Then suddenly she began to laugh, rocking herself, clasping her hands—delighted wild laughter.

“On! On!” She cried. She bubbled, almost enchanting, somehow not. “On!”

The man reached her in two strides, and shook her.

“Be quiet. Quiet!” The girl stopped laughing. She became composed, and so remained as he coldly and intently ranted at her. “Was it for this I bought you in that slum, sores and verminous bites all over you, for this? You will be still. You will attend. You will learn. You hear me?”

The effect of those repeated words upon Viktor was awful. They seemed to deprive him of all the strength of his inebriation. Stunned and totally unnerved, he came noiselessly to his feet. He crossed the veranda, praying she would say nothing of having seen him. But she would not, surely. She was not quite normal, not even quite sane—He reached the veranda step and misjudged it, saw his misjudgment in the moment he made it, could alter nothing, and fell heavily against the railing.

The clamor seemed to throb through every wooden board and timber of the house. Before he could regain enough balance to break into a run, something crashed over in the lighted room, and then the main door flew open and a black beast came out of it.

He had known this would happen. Somehow he had come here for this—this goal of self-destruction.

“What are you doing?” the thing demanded. It caught hold of him, and he was brought about to face it again. All the rich light was behind the man now, full on Viktor. There were no excuses to be made. He flinched from the man’s odorless cold breath. “You are here? You dared to come back?”

Viktor pulled some part of himself together.

“Of course I dared. Why shouldn’t I?”

“You trespass.”

“No. I came to see you.”

“Why? This island is private. You were told to keep away.”

“You have no right to—”

“Every right. It is mine. I warned you.”

“Go to hell,” said Viktor. He was afraid. Could not control his limbs, barely his voice and the slurred movements of his mouth.

“No,” said the man. “It is you who will go there. I will send you there.” And with no further preliminary, he punched Viktor in the arm and, as he stumbled away grunting with shocked pain, on the side of the jaw. Viktor fell backward in the grass, and saw through a sliding haze, the man coming on at him.

As he rolled bonelessly against the legs of the veranda, the man kicked him in the side. The impact was vicious, filling him now with terror more than pain. Somehow, Viktor came to his feet.

“No,” he said, and put up his arm. Like a big black bear the man lunged at him, bringing down both his fists together, sweeping away the protective arm as if it were a rag. The pain was awful this time, and the blow had been meant, clearly, for his head. Viktor had an impulse to curl up on the turf, allowing the man to beat him until he wearied himself and left his victim alone. Instead, Viktor’s own fist lashed out. He caught the man on the nose, which began at once to bleed dark runnels of blood. But the madman scarcely hesitated. He flung his whole body after Viktor and caught him round the waist.

For a moment then Viktor felt himself trapped, and envisaged dying. To be weary would not be enough for his enemy. Only death could turn him aside. The man was squeezing him, choking him; stars burst in Viktor’s brain.

“I warned you,” said the man.

Some remnant of self-preservation—actually a story told him once by a prostitute—caused Viktor spontaneously to knee the hugging bear in its groin.

There was a dreadful sound, a sort of implosion, and the paws let him go. Staggering, Viktor ran.

There followed a nightmare sequence during which the china animal in the bushes tried to trip him, the grass and tree roots likewise. Then he plunged into water, found a rope, tore it free, and collapsed into the boat, crying for mercy to the darkness.

Somehow he made the oars work, and somehow the man did not come after him. Yet it was with the utmost fear that Viktor thrashed his way toward the midst of the lake. There, sobbing for breath, he lay still on the oars, and the great night grew still about him.

It seemed to be a long while afterward that he began to row for the château. And by then he seemed, too, to be quite sober, but perhaps he was not, his feelings a slow chilled turmoil where nothing anymore made sense. My little dog does tricks—Ah what a clever fellow—better, m’mselle, better— And in the middle of it all, something came over the last stretch of water from the shore, from the lawns where the château stood, serene and dislocated from reality.

It was a white something, and for a demented moment he thought the girl had jumped into the lake and swum out ahead of him. But no, it was a swan.

Feeling ill, he leaned on the oars, drifting, watching the swan come toward him. He became aware he must have disturbed it. It did not move like a ship but ran at him standing up on the water, flapping its wings which suddenly seemed enormous, like two white sheets. And abruptly the swan was beside him, hissing like a snake, smiting the boat, the air, his flesh—

He tried frantically to beat it off, to make for shore. This second nightmare sequence had no logic and afterward he did not properly remember it. All at once the boat slewed and he was in the water. It was colder than before, and an agonizing something had happened to his arm. He no longer had any control at all.

The first time he sank into the lake he shouted in terror, but the water was so very cold he could not shout again. And then he was falling down through it, knowing he was about to die, in absolute horror and despair, unable to save himself.

* * * *

A month later he learned a servant, smoking a cigarette on the lawn near to the water, had seen the swan attack and the accident with the boat. The man had leapt heroically into the lake and saved Viktor, while the swan faded away into the dark.

The broken arm and the fever had debilitated Viktor, and as soon as he was well enough his mother returned them all to the city.

“A terrible thing,” Ilena said. “You might well have been drowned. I remember a story of a boy drowned in that lake. Whatever possessed you?”

“I don’t know,” Viktor said listlessly, propped up in bed, surrounded by the depressing medicines, the dreary novels.

Ilena said nothing at all, but weeks after, apropos another matter, Janov mentioned a man who had kept his mistress on one of the islands, a young girl reckoned to be simple. It seemed they had packed up suddenly and gone away, and the house was in a nasty state, full of damp and mice.

* * * *

It was half a year before any of them thought Viktor fully recovered. He had begun to play cards with Uncle Janov, and next, billiards. Viktor had stopped drinking beyond the merest glass at dinner; he had taken a dislike for light and noise, painting and discussion. And so Ilena sent him to Paris, when he no longer wanted to go.

* * * *

It was more than fifteen years later that he saw the girl again.

In the winter of the northern city, the ice lay in blue rifts upon the sea, and a copper sun bled seven degrees above the horizon. He had been to visit his mother, cranky and bemused, in the house on Stork Street. Such visits, as the years went by, had become increasingly bizarre. Something was happening to Ilena. Arthritis, for one thing, had crippled her, twisting her elegant figure like the stem of a slender blasted tree. Betrayed by her bones, her sensibilities gave way. She made demands on Viktor and on everyone, calling the servants constantly: Bring me that pomander, that box of cigarettes. I want tea. I want my book of cuttings. She drove them mad, and she drove Viktor mad, also. Uncle Janov was dead. He had died ten months before, sitting bolt upright at the card table, without a sound. No one realized he had absented himself until he refused to play his hand.

There had been a war, too, setting the whole world on its ear. Somehow, some had escaped the worst of that.

To Viktor himself, time had offered a few patronizing gifts. He had published four novels with reasonable success. More than anything, writing, which he performed indifferently now, and no longer with any pleasure, gave him an excuse for doing nothing else. He had become, he was afraid, the perfect archetype of what the masses reckoned an author to be: one too lazy to attempt anything more valuable. The family meanwhile remained wealthy; he really had no need to do anything at all, except, possibly, to marry, which he had idly been considering. A much-removed cousin had been presented as a candidate, a lushly attractive young woman, with indeed some look of Viktor himself. She was a nice girl, quite intelligent and entertaining, and maternally adequate, being ten years his junior. An ideal match. It would soothe Ilena, giving her the sense that the family continued, giving her, too, something fresh to criticize. For himself, the proposed liaison was rather like his “work.” Something to give him an excuse to attempt nothing else. His libido, having reached a peak in his early twenties, was already diminishing. Sex had already lost all its alluring novelty. He had ceased to fall in love, and beyond a very occasional evening with one of the city’s hetaeras, he had put all that away, as it were, in some cabinet of his physical emotions.

And then, he saw the girl again.

It would not have been true to say he had often thought of her. He had scarcely thought of her at all as the years went by. And despite a fleeting reference to the peculiar events on the island inserted into his first book, he had never really reexamined the case. It had seemed to him very quickly that nothing much had happened at all. It had been merely a series of coincidental occurrences, made dramatic only by his state of mind and the ultimate plunge into the lake. The fact that he had never returned to the château did not strike him as particularly ominous. He had been bored there. Just as he had mostly been bored in Paris and was now bored almost all the time and almost everywhere. The only difference was that his fear of boredom had gone away. He was accustomed to it now and expected nothing else. It had come to fit him, suit him quite comfortably, like a well-worn dressing gown.

He was walking through one of the sets of gardens that bordered the museum and art gallery, on his way to a luncheon engagement at the literary club. And suddenly he saw a small black shape, rather like an animated sausage, trotting across the whiteness of the snow. It was a little dog, seemingly impervious to the cold, a very black, very purposeful little dog, that he followed with his eyes intuitively. And then a woman came out between the white trees, against an oval of brown sky. She was fashionably dressed, at the height of fashion indeed, and maybe not warmly enough for the season. Yet like the dog, which was obviously hers, she seemed untroubled by the cold. Like the dog too, she wore black—jet black—save for the tall scarlet feather in her hat and a pair of blinding scarlet gloves, and the scarlet of her lips.

Perhaps it was the maquillage on her face that prevented his immediately knowing her, or maybe only the fifteen years that had separated those three brief glimpses he had formerly had of her from this. Then something, the turn of her head, her gesture to the dog as it bounced up to her, jogged his memory.

For a full minute he stared at her, unable to say a word. She did not seem to see him at all, and yet something in her manner told him she knew quite well a man stood watching her, as she picked up and petted the dog. And then, irresistibly, he found he had gone over.

And he heard himself saying, as if by rote, for all at once he remembered the words: “Good day, m’mselle.”

And aloofly she replied, “Good day,” just as on the island, through the window.

“Forgive me for disturbing you. But I was intrigued by your little dog.”

“Oh yes. I am training him to do tricks, to shake hands. He loves to show off to strangers. Look at him! He’s trying to attract your attention.”

And Viktor found himself pulling off one glove and extending his hand to take the icy little paw, shaking it.

“How clever he is,” said Viktor.

“Thank you.” The smiling face, pretty in its makeup, lowered mascaraed lids. No wonder she looked different. The dark lashes, the black eyebrows. “I should be very lonely without him.”

Viktor almost choked, but he managed the words: “I find it hard to believe you’re alone.”

“Quite alone,” she said. She sighed, petting the black little dog with scarlet fingers.

“Your uncle is often away from home,” said Viktor, between sneering and joking and embarrassment,

“Why yes,” she said. She looked at him wonderingly. “Do you know my uncle?”

“I met him, once,” said Viktor. “Perhaps that gives me the right to presume. Will you have lunch with me?”

“Why—” she said. She lifted her pale eyes and looked at him. “Why, of course.”

She put her red hand through his arm as they walked, holding the dog with the other. He felt hilarious, and had already dismissed the other lunch engagement from his mind.

In the restaurant he talked to her randomly, hypnotized by the perfection of her answers. She replied to all, elaborated sometimes, giving the impression of an utterly charming negative neutrality, restful and obliging. And the little dog was a model of decorum, even when she awarded it a spoonful of the hot chocolate sauce. He marveled at its training, and hers.

Framed in the black bell of her hat, her face fascinated him with its changes, but he longed for her to remove the hat, to show him if her hair, now obviously very short, was still blond. As blond as when she had swum in the lake among the swans.

After lunch, he escorted her, naturally, to her flat. It was on a quiet street, between the ordinary and the modish. Flowerpots stood on the windowsills, winter bald. There was a plush carpet when, just as naturally, she invited him to enter and he did so.

They went upstairs to the second floor. She opened a door. It was much unlike the wild house with its peeling walls and oil lamps. The paper on the wall was a subtle cream and beige brocade, quite dry. At the touch of a switch the warmth of electricity flooded the rosy chairs, the deep blue rugs.

At this point, supposedly, the true meaning of their adventure would drift to the surface. It did so. Putting down the dog, she returned to Viktor across the pleasant room. Her gloves were gone, and she laid the smooth skin of her hand on his lapel.

“You’ve been very kind,” she said. Her eyes were brimming with invitation. From now on her clients would, probably, become more businesslike. And he remembered how she had dismissed him the first time, on the island, trained also to that.

With a strange sensation, Viktor lowered his head toward her. Her mouth was cool and perfumed with lip paint, curiously uninvolved as it yielded first to the caress and then to the invasion. What did she feel? Nothing? And he, what did he feel? He was unsure. He had persuaded himself to love her, once, the love of the unknown thing. He remembered her white body in the water and a sudden pang of sexuality shot through him, startling him.

The girl drew gently away. “Come with me,” she said secretively. And led him into her bedroom.

It was an ordinary chamber, in good taste, nothing lewd or even merely garish, no pictures of frolics intended to arouse or amuse, none of the bric-a-brac of the whore, except a heap of silken cushions.

“Take off your hat,” he said to her. “Take off all your clothes. I want to watch you.”

The girl laughed, and flirted with her eyes. The correct response. No doubt, his request was not unusual.

She stood then at the center of a red and black autumn of falling garments, and mesmerized, he did watch her, his heart ludicrously in his mouth as once before so long ago, and still the bell-shaped hat was left in place, even now she stood in her slip—he gestured to the hat, unable to vocalize, and she smiled and drew it upward from her head.

Her hair was black. Black as ink. He had not expected such a thing, it stunned him, and he felt again the water of the lake filling his nostrils, his throat, and the old break in his arm, which for years had promised the ultimate penance of Ilena’s arthritis, burned and ached.

“Your hair,” he said, forcing out the words, his excitement quite dead.

It was smooth and short and black, so black, as if a cupful of paint had been poured over her skull. Fashionable, and horrible.

She did not seem disturbed by his reaction, but went on archly smiling at him, trained as she was—this outcry of his was too far removed from her training to facilitate one of her closet-full of suitable responses.

It was only then, glaring at her, the cameo of black silk and blonde flesh, that he saw she had not changed at all, was just as he recalled, the ink blackness only an overlay. There was not a line that he could see in her smooth face, on her neck, her breast—these fifteen years, which had touched everything, had not touched her at all.

He went forward, and she, thinking equilibrium restored, invited with eyes and lips. But he did not take her to him, only stared at her. It was true. She was unmarked. He put one finger to her cheek, running it across her flesh that was as smooth as wax—And the bedroom door opened behind him.

Her hand flew to her scarlet mouth. It was another learned response, not real. Viktor could see that quite clearly. And he himself turned without any surprise and saw a man in a black greatcoat filling the doorway, his small eyes widened with outrage.

“What is this? I must ask you, sir—”

The voice was less foreign, the accent polished and succinct. The coat was of more recent cut, the face shaven, only a little red moustache and red hairs glinting in the flared nostrils. Nothing had faded, there was no grey. But the lines had deepened, quite normally.

Viktor felt a surge of relief. Yes, relief, that he would not have to go on with this absurd play, that he did not have to have her, the unobtainable, now ruined, thing.

He walked toward the man, who barked at her: “Get dressed!” And retreated out into the sitting room of the flat.

The bedroom door clipped shut. The black figure loomed before the mantelpiece.

“What am I to think?” the man said. “I come home unexpectedly, and I find my niece, and I find you, sir—and she is in her underwear—”

“What indeed,” said Viktor. He knew the game, who would not? Once in Paris, he had almost been caught in such a way, if a chance acquaintance had not warned him: the flighty young woman, her husband bursting in—

“And she is a little—how shall I say this?—a little naïve in her wits, sir.”

“An idiot,” said Viktor.

“And you, taking advantage of such a thing, her plight—I see you are a man of substance, sir. What would your associates think, should they learn what you did this afternoon, how you tried to abuse a young girl of less than average mental capacity. Making her drunk, bringing her to her own home, with the purpose of satisfying your desires.”

The voice went on. Now and then, almost smothered, Viktor noted the hint of the foreignness, still extant. He had known, probably, at some level of consciousness, from the moment he saw her in the garden. On an armchair, the little black dog slept, unperturbed by this rehearsal of fierce anger it had no doubt heard a hundred times.

Viktor sighed. He felt nothing anymore, not even satisfaction. Where was the island, the darkness? Where was twenty, now?

“Shut up,” he broke in, loudly, but without emphasis.

The monstrous beaked thing did indeed fall silent.

“I do know your intention,” said Viktor, calmly. “And I have a piece of news for you. I intend to pay you nothing. Nothing. Do you hear?” But not even this parody of the man’s speech pleased him. Viktor went on, replacing his gloves as he did so. “If you wish, you may tell the world at large that you found me in the bedroom with your undressed niece, who is not your niece, but who you—let me get it right—bought in a slum, covered with sores and bites. And whom you taught to behave as she does, in gardens, ballrooms, and God knows where else, on an island, fifteen years ago.”

The man’s face had set, drawing in about itself, becoming unreadable, and most attentive.

“All of which,” Viktor said, “I too am willing to reveal in my turn. Rather a blight on a profitable trade, I would think. And now,” he found himself at the door, “good afternoon.”

No move was made to stop him. He passed into the lobby and down the stairs, and on to the street.

Standing before the apartment house, Viktor paused and lit a cigarette, as if permitting pursuit to catch him up. But no one came, no window was flung wide, not even a flowerpot hurled. He wondered if the man even remembered him.

With a little shrug, Viktor turned to walk away. He felt a sullen disappointment which soon faded, slipping back into the worn dressing gown of boredom.

* * * *

It was three nights later, strolling home alone from a dinner party, that someone came behind him on a deserted street, and brutally beat him, leaving him unconscious in the snow. It might only have been a coincidence.

He was presently found and taken home, but the episode resulted in a bout of pneumonia.

* * * *

“My dear, you are so young, so young,” said Ilena, holding his hand. She seemed quite her old self, dressed in inspiring pastel colors, somehow here and seated by the bed, not demanding, not complaining at all, only coaxing him. He smiled at her, to show her he was pleased she had come. He felt a remote tenderness, but somehow could not summon the strength to say one word to her. She spoke of his cousin, the one he was to marry. “She will be here directly. But the trains are so slow. The weather—”

Across from the bed, the wall went on slowly dissolving, as it had been doing now for almost an hour, a soft sweet dissolution, like melting snow.

The doctor shook his head at Ilena, gently. She stopped speaking and only held the hand of her son, who, at thirty-six, it seemed, was about to die. Some fundamental weakness in his constitution had finished him. His lungs were filled by fluid, he was drowning, there was no hope at all. Ilena, who had railed and wept in the corridor, was now calm and tactful in the face of another’s agony. Her own, like the pain of her crippling disease, she would ignore for the present. Janov had spared her this. Even now, she did not quite believe that Janov had died, or that Viktor was dying. The whole world had paid with death for its dreams, its youthful mistakes, and was not done paying yet. But not her son, her son.

Somewhere a clock ticked. One of Viktor’s clocks. A miracle would happen soon, and he would get better.

Viktor watched the melting of the wall, and saw the long lawns of the château appear. Three years ago, the château had been sold again, lost again, but that did not matter now. The house was dim beyond the wall, vanishing. A thick mist lay everywhere, swathing the great stretch of water that must be the lake, a surface of dark silver, with one blank tear of soft white light across it. Beautiful, serene and melancholy, the light, the lake, and then a dark movement far away, something a mile out on the glacial water.

“Your last book,” Ilena said, unable to restrain her words despite herself. “I was reading it again, just yesterday. What a curious, clever book it is. High time you wrote another, my dear. Perhaps, in the spring—”

Yes, Maman, he said. But he said nothing. He stared away beyond the wall and saw the shape of the darkness on the water drifting nearer. He could see what it was, now. A swan, a black swan, floating like a ship toward him over the utter silence of the winter lake.

“Do you remember,” Ilena said, “when we were at the château and that silly thing happened with the boat?” It was the way she had been used to speak to Janov: Do you recall, Jani, when we were here, and did this and did that? Viktor smiled at her, but he did not smile.

The black swan came nearer and nearer, black as night, black as ink, and it seemed to him he heard it sing.

“You mustn’t leave me,” Ilena whispered, knowing he no longer heard her. “What shall I do, alone?”

But the shadow of the black swan had filled the room. She was alone already.