I went on reading to you: They didn’t generally dine at the hotel, where the electric bulbs sent floods of light across the great dining room, making it like a vast, marvelous aquarium beyond whose glass precincts the working population of Balbec, the fishermen and petit bourgeois families, invisible in the darkness outside, would press against the windows to watch the luxurious life of the people inside, gently rocked on swells of gold—as extraordinary to the poor as the life of fish and strange mollusks …
But you interrupted me, Petya. You asked: “What is it about? What’s the subject? The subject of the whole Book?”
“I’ve never thought about that …” I had to confess.
I had never thought about that. I stopped looking out the window, turned around. What is the Book about? I had never thought about that, can you believe me? I’ve read it thousands of times, I’ve entered its pages at random, at any point, like a child who learns to go into the house through the windows, familiarly. But once within I’d never asked myself the question you had just posed. You forced me to pause, having no clear idea of what he found a need to write about, a thing that could be enunciated thus: The subject of the Book is. But now that you ask, I can tell you. I know! It’s money. The Book deals entirely and exclusively with money. Because when the Writer takes a job as the tutor of the sons of Romanianus and the weeks go by and he is not paid, he stands at the window and asks himself a singular question: Shouldn’t they be fabulously rich? Shouldn’t they have money in little leather cases, hidden away in vaults, shelves full of glittering gold, all that money emitting a sense of calm and security?
The Writer was able to address this with complete frankness, a whole chapter dedicated to the subject. For doesn’t money figure at the center of all experience? Don’t we need money for almost everything?
The way he pauses and speaks with exquisite delicacy of the beneficent influence of money, the detailed description of the ruby ring the narrator’s grandmother leaves him at her death. A constellated ring: when the stone was turned downward, the flow of money dwindled; when turned upward, wealth came gushing in. Golden doubloons, antique florins with which he buys Albertine an airplane, a nice little one-seater with tarred wings that he, the Writer, uses as an introduction to the sections of the Book about flight.
Albertine—whom he never held prisoner nor kept with him against her will as so many commentators and myopic biographers have claimed—loved to fly. Obviously, if those claims were true he’d never have given her the airplane, for she would have been able to escape, to fly, literally, from the room, where she always returned, nevertheless, and where the Writer waited for her, avid for her stories, the herds of animals she saw grazing from the air, stampeding at the roar of the plane overhead. Dry lake beds imprinted with the cuneiform script of gnus. And sometimes she felt, he says, in pages brimming with a unique lyricism, like a friendly Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin sailing upon the ocean of air, or a Baroness Blixen, raised to the heights, transported by a genie from the Thousand and One Nights to the distant wildernesses of Africa and then back that same afternoon to the airport in Buc, on the outskirts of Paris. Though in that same plane she would crash into the sea and meet her death: Albertine, drowned.
The Writer never stops weeping for her or remembering the times he drove with her to the airport’s green meadow, she in her ski helmet and driving gloves, attentive to the silvery circle of the propeller and the lamps of the stars she would fly toward, leaning out over the edge of the plane, letting her honey-colored eyes, like unfathomable quartzes, fill up with the green of the forests, the blue of the sea, the red of the sun on the horizon. The beauty of that passage filling my heart, certain that when the time had elapsed I would leave that house with all the money I’d been promised. Or was I deceiving myself?
Or was I deceiving myself, and had I not fetched up in the house I imagined?
Now, how to think of Nelly as a great lady? To see her through the Writer’s eyes when, in the third volume, he gazes at his neighbor. A great lady like the Princesse de Laumes? Yes, I was sometimes inclined to believe that. Despite the vulgarity of the house, the shady business I imagined going on there, which the unbearable furniture hinted at. A woman on whom I could confer all the natural elegance of the Guermantes. Where the Writer says: beneath a mauve hood one day, a navy blue toque the next morning. And throughout this passage: One morning during Lent … I met her wearing a dress of pale red velvet, cut quite low at the neckline.
Alone, her husband away again.
The way she would focus her gaze fixedly on the tablecloth, her eyes inclined or falling at an angle like a shaft of light. And in the interior of that shaft the tiny figures of the false rich ancestors she never had. Obsessed with the idea that they’d been aristocrats at some point, that Vasily Guennadovich (your father) had grown up in a family of nobles, dispossessed, stripped of everything and excoriated around the year ’17 and through the years ’18, ’19, and ’20. The factories they’d owned in Finland—she was lying—all stolen. To the point that I told her, that first time in the kitchen: You should write a letter, go to Tampere, find those papers.
And she smiled to herself and gave me two quick glances.
Having sought out and hired me, I finally understood, as one more element of that deception, which would permit them to say: “A tutor for Petya, just like the one Guennadi Nicolaevich, Vasily’s grandfather, had. A certain level of instruction—you know?—a knowledge the boy would never have had access to in one of those schools, those prisons or warehouses for children, really. Although the one we hired is crazy or has had his brains scrambled by a writer he never stops talking about”—and she looked at me smiling when she thought that—“but he is good and generous and we have trusted him from the first moment.”
With that facility for the third person so natural in intelligent women, which she used to downplay her obsession with the subject of nobility, speaking of herself as a more ironic, more observant person would, acting like a girl on a visit to someone else’s house.
“She is, I confess, obsessed with the matter of nobility. And sometimes she’d like to fly away, escape from here. She’d love to pay you handsomely, to thank you for all that you do for her son … You don’t wear rings?”
“I’d like to, you know?” I lowered my head toward her hand. Admirable, that blue gem, set high over the finger like a hard flower of stone.
I said nothing about her necklace, pretended she wasn’t wearing the most fabulous necklace I’d seen in my life. Without taking my eyes off it, powerfully attracted by that necklace, fascinated and held by it, leaning toward her throat, with my feet firmly on the floor, imbibing the light her necklace radiated. Incredibly beautiful there on her breast. Obsessed with that necklace to the point that I’d searched through the fashion magazines they had lying around the house as instruction manuals for life in the West, scrutinizing the jeweled breast of every fashion model, Spanish or Greek, burnished skin glistening over the clavicle, neck tendons taut, for a gem like that one, the same size as that one. And finding not one, ever. Most of them, the best of them—it was easy to see from the design and the very bright colors—were just cut crystals.
I could think of nothing to say to her. I said:
“And yes, Nelly, it is something I have thought of. To surpass the objectives of a princely education, or rather, ignore them entirely. What sense in learning a foreign language if, once within that other world or universe, you’d only be fatally drawn in again by the magnet of the Book? Better to focus on it, for it’s the same in all languages, impervious—as the Commentator perversely affirms, though of course without referring directly to the Book—to the fire of translations. Constructed on the solid foundation of a universal language, a primordial speech. All nuances, all distinctions, all subtleties within it. A Theory of Everything, Nelly, a Book for all days. I don’t wish for, could never have wished for a better education for myself …”
“Solntse,” she interrupted me. She went over to the window and set her hands on the frame like a bird alighting there to await her husband, who was not coming, scanning the horizon from there. “Wouldn’t you like to go out for a stroll?”
And she turned toward me.
Her face.
Having stood back, the maker of that face, at twenty weeks’ gestation, to study the precise placement of the cheekbones’ brief elevation, the almond frame of the eyes. Rotated one second of arc downward at the inner corner and one second of arc upward at the outer, like wings. I was afraid to look her full in the face: the dangerous fascination voltaic arcs exerted on me when I was a child. But I couldn’t help throwing a look at the white-hot point, the acetylene flare hurtling toward me, the nucleus of a star expanding outward in a sphere. And in the center of that sphere, birds and bands of angels.
Her throat.
The stones around her throat.
“A walk? With all my heart!”
I imagined, Petya, that we were off to withdraw some money, that our little jaunt had to do, finally, with matters related to my paycheck. Progressing happily down the Paseo Marítimo. Without a monocle, it’s true, to bounce along on my chest. A monocle that would speak as clearly as the Writer of the happiness that suffused me, the soft purity of the morning. The hotels along the beach, the yachts with their colorful banners, the blue and white striped awnings of the beach clubs, the money we drew in with every breath, that perfumed the air of that city by the sea.
But picture this, Petya: a gentleman with a lady by his side and, with them, a dwarf. A rather different image from the one I’d had in mind, an image that can be read or glossed with no other significance but this: the dwarf was Batyk, who’d insisted on coming with us and whom I call a dwarf in the literal sense of a physical dwarf, not a moral dwarf. And not at all, never, in the allegorical sense to which the Commentator alludes with deepest hypocrisy in order to justify his own imposture: the sense of newcomers who, however small or dwarflike they may be, can see farther because they’re perched on the shoulders of the giants of the past.
The same went for Batyk, on my shoulders, though it would be more correct to say on the Writer’s shoulders, feeling him walk along behind me, paying attention to what he was seeing from that height, without understanding a thing. As when, to my disconcertion, your mother stepped into a jewelry store, with me all unaware of what prompted her to stop in front of the display window (the jeweler’s name etched in a semicircle on the glass), study some of the gems there, and then go inside for a closer look … Sensing that we’d be standing there for some time, I positioned myself next to the doorway in a patch of sunlight which was exactly that yellow color the Writer devotes such beautiful words to in the Book, but which now, in the aim of bothering and confounding Batyk, I used as the pretext for an odious discourse on Ferragamo: how that color, mingled with a lovely blue, would be perfect for a pair of Ferragamos, which is what we should have been looking at, not jewelry, Nelly. (I felt Batyk leaning over my shoulder, stretching out his neck—what shoes? which shoes?—stooping lower myself to make him stumble and fall on the slope of my false interest in fashion, inexplicable in a man like me, as if a matter of such little importance as a pair of shoes could occupy my mind, turn my thoughts aside for one second from what we had gone into that store to do.)
The adorable dress of layered red muslin your mother wore that day, her hand palm down on her thigh, the better to scrutinize a pink gem in the display case. She raised her eyes, shooting me a meaningful glance beneath another client’s elbow: a diamond, innumerable tiny facets that light could go into and then not find its way out again for one beat or two, until it flashed once more against my eyes, my astonished eyes. I looked up into her eyes without knowing what I was supposed to be seeing there, as if she were a botany teacher who goes on ahead and waits for you beneath a tree on an excursion through a garden. You reach her out of breath, you want to tell her something about the day, the view, but she puts her finger to your lips and asks you with her eyes: “Understand?”
Yes, Nelly: stones, diamonds, gothic diamonds, marquise diamonds, star diamonds. I don’t want them, have no money for them. Or else (I suddenly stood up straight, looked back into her eyes), or else: “Hand over the stone, motherfucker, hand over the stone before my husband gets back and makes you talk. I know you’ve got it. No use pretending …” And I saw in the red of that stone, its blood-filled interior, how easily Batyk could smash my head against the counter, the iron grip of his fingers around my neck, or send me crashing against the reinforced glass. How the shopkeeper would shout, and not because of the glass (bulletproof), which would never break. Giving vent, in that moment of danger, to his anger and indignation, in Korean or Tamil. Meaning: Get out of here you Russian pigs, go kill each other outside.
I’d give it back. I’d run back to the house, fly up the stairs, take it out from under the mattress. Here you go, Nelly, I never wanted it, you know that, don’t you? Never the slightest intention of keeping it, always meaning to give it back. And I had thought about doing that …
Easily comprehending, at that moment, my mistake: the mistake of having wanted to steal from the mafia.
“That’s not true. My mama is not in the mafia.”
“No, it is true. Just wait.”
I regretted everything in that fearful moment, entering cold regions full of fear and leaving them for warm regions full of fear. Having taken a position as the tutor of a child as wayward as you, Petya, having focused my thoughts on the wife of a mafioso and spoken of warps in space with your father. All that as I stood at the counter without daring to open my eyes and look at her, without seeing that she’d moved to the back of the store without any of this in her mind, that she hadn’t even noticed the stone was missing. So many stolen diamonds—if a single one fell down and was lost, what did it matter?
Were there, I wondered immediately—horrors! Petya, horrors!—were there many more of those diamonds lodged along the edges of the staircase, hidden between the sofa cushions and under the living room rug?
I must amplify the previous commentary. I had just returned to my room to flop down, not bothering to pull back the bedspread, lying diagonally across the bed, still trembling, when I heard music that someone had put on, and lowered the Book to listen.
The stereo’s silvery columns filling the air with a melody that made me think of the Writer, of a breeze and the shimmering surface of water that is exactly what the Book is about: the days you discover from your window without there being the slightest gap between the vision of the sea lapping at the coast, the cypresses in the distance, and your mother, her soul, the way she had of gazing gratefully up at me, the way she squeezed my hand when we’d returned to the house, happy to have gone out. As if I, as if my chest were armored with metal plaques that bullets would rebound from. Or as if the Book, placed between my heart and the gun barrel, could miraculously stop the bullet that was tearing through its pages with a single line, this line: one is a count or one is not a count, it’s not of the slightest importance, as Mme. de Villeparisis notes, and with good reason.
For she didn’t stop talking, all the way there and as we went from store to store, nervously talking about the mafia, the many Russian mafiosi who’d taken refuge there, the whole coast crawling with them. And I stared at her in amazement, thinking: But you people are the mafia, maja! What are you talking about? You yourselves are mafia! And as we went past, I signaled her with a pointed glance at a Guardia Civil’s lacquered bicorn. Look there, I meant to tell her. Why is it that you wouldn’t go outside unless I was with you?
Bent over the pages of the Book without reading, or reading blankly, pages going past without the Book’s allowing anything inside—a rare thing in the Writer who always grabs you, his pages like Velcro, your eyes like felt. Trying to decipher, suddenly lowering my eyes to focus on the explanation, first found in the Book, for their great fear. But then she appeared in my room, your mother: knocking, tock tock, on my doorframe.
“I have a gift for you,” she said. “Though it’s not a gift, it’s your salary.”
She came closer.
“Don’t you love dancing? You should dance for joy. It’s more than we owe you, but I wanted to reward you for your goodness to the boy. That’s why we went to see the diamonds. I wanted to find out how much it’s worth.”
She left the center of the room and walked toward me without taking her hand out of her pocket. Certain of the effect it would (and, indeed, did) have to drop into my hand, rolling bumpily down from hers, a stone, a diamond in the rough, an uncut gem. The size of a pea or bigger still. The size of a rather large pea.
I didn’t manage to say a thing, or rather I said, stupidly, pointlessly, “Ah, yes!” and thought: How does she know I love to dance? So much?
And then immediately: My salary! Finally! But in the form of a small diamond (one karat, three karats, not small). A capsule or sphere of crystal in which I saw myself diving off a dock into water, younger and thinner than I was then (than I am now), wearing Hawaiian shorts … The yellow silk of her kimono, the birds and vegetation embroidered on it. The perfectly unrumpled boughs exquisitely situated on the sleeve which lengthened, following her arm. Without managing to raise my eyes and tell her (which is what I should have told her): But Nelly! It’s a fortune! It’s a lot of money! Which is what I thought and was about to say, but then, already incapable of thinking straight, I imagined kissing her hand while my eyes remained on the stone, seeking there the words and explanation for such generosity and munificence.
There also entered my mind the idea, which I had not sought within myself, that this was the perfect twin of the stone I’d found in the grass. It kept me from lifting my eyes, that diamond, I gave it one more astonished glance and was about to raise my head, but Nelly had gone. Whether amused or annoyed by my surprise or apparent ingratitude, I don’t know.
Has anyone ever given you a blue diamond, Petya? Extracted from a woman’s kimono, the smooth glide of its silk across her skin? No longer thinking of her as the abandoned wife of a mafioso (she herself a member of the mafia: psst, quiet!), but as a woman I could seduce, my hands on her wrists, bringing her one, two faltering steps toward where I sat on the bed, the folds of silk coming toward my eyes in a rush. Surrounding her with my arms, letting them rest on her waist, breathing in the sweet fragrance of her body. What if she were a thief, what did it matter? What if she were a murderess? How many women do we watch in bedazzlement as they walk down the street, gazing at their legs, bedazzled, and those may well be the legs of a murderess, a thief—impossible to tell from the line of an ankle, the curve of an instep.
Have you ever found a blue diamond in the grass, Petya? I fingered the earlier stone in my pocket and pulled it out, the two more alike on the palm of my hand than my preliminary mental comparison had registered. Fearful now of being spied on by fiber-optic cables: anything was possible in a house like that. Batyk stabbing at my face on the screen with his finger and shouting for Nelly. “Look, aren’t there two stones there? Isn’t that one identical to the one you just gave him for a paycheck? Where did he …” Etcetera. Then, breaking off his reflections, he would leap up the stairs, his chest full of hatred, to hit me.
In one movement, supple as a thief in a hotel room, I switched off the lamp. Then, Petya, as the light slowly withdrew from the halogen bulb and went out, the stones began shining crazily, phosphorescing as if they were the last two points of solder a gigantic man were applying to my chest, sealing up the vacuum in that ampoule. Then, certain I was closed up inside, seeing me raise my bewildered eyes in there, he rubbed his hands in satisfaction, took a step, and was gone.
Those stones phosphorescing, glowing on the palm of my hand, trying to tell me something, foggily. That I’d been spied on! Suddenly I understood: I’d been spied on! The memory hadn’t come to me until the moment I switched the light off and remembered those eyes, gleaming like carbuncles in the cave of a face. In the discotheque, at the back of the discotheque, as day was dawning or almost dawning outside but the corridors within were still dark. And in the darkness inside, someone, over by the wall, had been spying on me, watching me dance, given over to the foul—and for me insane—diversion of dancing. From the moment I stepped onto the dance floor until I went out along the corridor to the parking lot and the sun hit me in the face.
And those eyes, which I didn’t remember having seen until now, which I’d buried among other impressions, bloomed before me at that moment or were dragged out into the light by the maddening glow of the stones on my hand.
The anguish, now, of having been watched, the anxiety of having seen, as I twirled and spun, a pair of eyes gleaming from the back of the disco and, I had only just understood: fixed on me. Like the terrible eyes the Writer sees flashing in a hallway in Saint Petersburg; he realizes he’s being watched because he sees a gleam, and when he turns his head he sees it blink out. Hidden there, that man, knife in hand, to kill me. And, in the Writer, I had to stand there like an idiot, or with the magnanimity of a prince, seeking him out in the darkness, making my eyes, brimming with goodness, illuminate the other man’s, which were cold and inhuman. I should have called out to him, told him, Don’t spy on me, Batyk (for it was Batyk): Don’t spy on me. There’s nothing here for you to take back to Nelly or Vasily, nothing I would be ashamed of. Even if I did go home with great fear in my heart, the tremendous anguish of having danced like that, unstoppably, thinking: Dancing for what? With what end in mind? Dancing continually like a man possessed until the last song, whether commented upon or without commentary. God! When I had a house, a job, my pupil awaiting me. What if they could take advantage of my late homecoming, those who were spying on me (if it wasn’t Batyk), the ones inside the house were so afraid of; what if they were waiting for me to open the door so as to erupt violently into the garden. Not Batyk, I repeat: the Russian mafiosi they were all so fearful of, the ones they never stopped talking about. Waiting outside until dawn in order to get into the house.
But no: it had been him, Batyk.
If not, then where did that comment come from, the one that stopped me in my tracks, asking myself … How does she know that I dance? Frenetically? (That was what she meant, your mother.) How does she know?
And then, two days later, back down to the city again. Your mother and I, arm in arm, strolling farther and farther from the little bay in search, I hoped, of a place where we wouldn’t be seen. Then, at the end of that long walk, we sat down on a bench at the tip of a jetty and she kicked off her red moccasins and lifted her feet so that, after an instant of weightlessness, her calves rippled with a dense movement that touched me to the core. And I realized I loved her desperately and was full of tenderness for her.
On that dock, far out over the water, she was continually looking back at the path—in case Batyk were coming, in case he’d followed us, I imagined then, but now I understand: she was debating whether to let me in on the secret. The water pounding beneath us like the motor of a boat about to speed away, the first spin of the propeller. Gazing at me while the dock behaved as if it were about to move, all the force of that water, and Nelly calculating whether or not to get me involved in it. If only she herself had weighed anchor, told me, putting her hand on her heart, gazing into my eyes, “Stay here. I’ll be back in two weeks, I’ll call you.” Or, rather: “Go ahead, what are you going to do all alone here? You’ll get bored.” Separated by the blades of water down there between the boards, the sun in the sky. Stripes of water between the jetty’s planks and on her breast. And she was debating.
I saw that and was afraid for a moment that she’d actually say something. I said something, spoke to her about what I’d been paid. “You don’t know how grateful I am. I will need, would have preferred cash, but no! Nelly, I’m lying: How can I tell you? It’s more than I was owed, much more …”
“Let’s go,” she interrupted.
We’d be seeing more jewelry, I thought. She’d give me a few lessons on how to spend that money, the fortune it no doubt represented—a diamond! Then the rest of it seemed to happen under water, as if it was us flowing between the boards. The blur of beach-goers pretending to smoke in the sidewalk cafés, lighting a cigarette in an alley between two stores, the two of us sheltered from the wind, the narrow passageway with its service entrances and a man with a gun, visible for a second, before diving into the mist to fire at us from there, under cover. Leaving the shore at top speed, racing to a high point along the coast.
Like a pair of assistant directors scouting along the edge of a steep cliff for the right location to film a scene of love and complicity against the wide-open sky. The way she gave me her hand without looking at me, placing or lodging her moccasins in the grass, her calves flexing at every step. Without turning toward me when we reached the top, both looking out, both of us educated in the same antique (or primary) painters, our eyes seeing, and my legs feeling from the air that blew in through the bottoms of my trousers and swept at her skirt, that we had arrived.
I’d imagined for a moment that I would still be telling her about the hatred I harbored against the Spaniard, that painter (“the greatest of the moderns”—in other words, a commentator), and that she would listen to me without saying a word, only to suddenly turn and present me with her lips, rapidly revolving, pivoting on the axis of her neck, her eyes shooting out sparks, transformed by the sun into diamonds.
But this was what she did: she lifted her arm and stretched out her hand so that a ray of light reached my eyes, sweeping the meadow to its right, directing that light with dizzying skill or invisible diligence: the blue, the gold of the tardy sun, the green of the plants, the violet of flowers that seemed to grow larger as the beam of light swept over them.
And, revealed and concealed by the turning blades of the sun, which was simplified like a sun in a poster, its rays slicing the air into circles, her lips drew near and revolved before me, appearing and disappearing behind the beams. Pale pink outside the ray of light, shiny red within it.
Because the gesture of extending her finger had warped the surrounding atmosphere and as this magnifying glass developed in the air around it, the blue stone on her finger began shining brighter and brighter. I had only to lean forward a bit more to analyze its chemical composition (carbon, rings of carbon) and to marvel for the umpteenth time, now very close, at its unusual size: the disproportion between the size of that gem, the size of her necklace’s cabochons, and the cheesy little stones worn by Silvia of Sweden and Margriet of the Netherlands.
And along the edge of that airy magnifying glass entered the words of a long explanation that I read as if in a trance, without being able to take my eyes off its surface for a second, the words distending as they reached the edges, then disappearing—but I had no need to reread them because their meaning was not escaping me. This was not a passage to comment upon, delve deeply into, and explore in order to extract some hidden message. All was expressed and stated with utmost clarity, golden words against a blue background. Without my ever having been able, without my ever having imagined anything like that, not the slightest inkling in all that time.
And when the words about the amazing size of the diamonds, their unusual coloration and, consequently, the money and Asiatic luxury of the whole house stopped emerging, the magnifying glass vanished, and I lifted my eyes and gazed deep into hers for a long second, throwing her a gaze of astonishment. Still more air entering my chest when she nodded her head several times, trying not to lose my gaze in order to transmit in that gesture the weight and gravity of her message. Which had the contrary effect of pumping even more air into me and making me continue on my upward trajectory with irresistible momentum.
To journey back into the past, set myself down at that point on the walls of time, walk through the garden, introducing myself into that moment as a wiser man, someone with the experience and exact knowledge of having already lived through that day, the late afternoon light in which we came back from the walk, went into the sun porch, and I was about to exclaim: “Synthetic diamonds!” To go over to myself and put my index finger on my own mouth, introducing a partition into the flow of that day. So that my words would flow down the opposite slope, at a wider angle, in order to extract them from my life.
And yet, no. I did none of that, none of it happened: we stopped for a second in front of the pool like two blank silhouettes, her hair rippling, my linen shirt loose. There was a moment when we reached the house and she finally turned to me and broke her silence, resolving to let me into the secret, moving me or roughly ejecting me from the safe and peaceful time where I was moving (or floating) into nights criss-crossed by white gunfire beneath a red rain. With blinding clarity. Only there, her eyes told me, only beneath that rain could I kiss her, only if I came to meet her there, leaving the island of dry air within which I walked.
Stopped there, having come full circle: on one side, my scant monthly salary as a tutor, my commentaries on the Book, the arid landscape of Spain glimpsed through a door in a wall. And on the other side, Petya, without words, without any need to use all the words I’m expending on you, a golden woman beneath a red rain. And even more diamonds among the garden grass. Diamonds revolving octahedrally in the air. Which one would you have opened, which door? Even if you knew a tiger was lurking beyond the frame, waiting to pounce?