Paris Review

WINNER—ASME AWARD FOR FICTION

The ASME Award for Fiction was established in 2018 to honor the historic link between literary fiction and magazine journalism. “Winter Term,” by Michelle de Kretser, was one of three short stories that won the Paris Review the award this year. The other stories were “Trial Run,” by Zach Williams, and “A Good Samaritan,” by Addie E. Citchens. The Fiction judges praised these stories as “arresting, electric with tension, and unfailingly alive” and said they “remind us that short fiction should leave readers discomfited and alert to new possibilities.” De Kretser is an Australian writer born in Sri Lanka. Her most recent novel is Scary Monsters, published in 2021. Founded in 1953, the Paris Review also won the ASME Award for Fiction in 2020 and was nominated this year for the National Magazine Award for General Excellence.

Michelle de Kretser

Winter Term

She walked to school along streets named for English poets, but the one thing everyone in Melbourne knew about her suburb was its nameless canal. It was held to be behind headaches, sore throats, and babies who wouldn’t settle, and was considered little better than an open drain. The reek of it sprawled in summer. Halfway along, the towpath relaxed into an open, grassy patch where, all year round, fights took place after school.

She’d been called Anny since arriving in Australia two years earlier. Her best friend was Lou. Lou lived minutes from school, but the morning bell often found her racing, and she would burst into classrooms with hair that looked as if it contained twigs. Mr. Cullen (history) didn’t mind, nor did Mrs. Dobek (maths), but on Wednesdays (English), Anny waited tensely at her desk beside Lou’s empty place. The third time Lou was late, Miss Kelso sent her to the deputy principal. Heaps of boys had crushes on Miss Kelso, who had cleavage and ringlets. The girls noticed that she had lipstick on her teeth.

Miss Kelso left no bruises that showed, but calculated the bestowing and withholding of smiles. She was the year-ten co-ordinator, and Anny had a form that required her signature. She rehearsed saying, Sorry, miss, I know you’re very busy. At the end of English she went up to Miss Kelso and blurted, Sorry, miss, I know you’re very boring.

Lou’s brother had dropped out of school to go traveling in Asia, but his friend Sandor lived at her place. Her mother, Maeve, had got together with Sandor the previous year, when she was the school receptionist. When Sandor’s parents found out, his mother paused on her way into the principal’s office to call Maeve a filthy Jew. Maeve was confused—who was this beehived woman shouting at? Later that day, Anny was at Lou’s place when Sandor explained that “Jew” was merely the worst insult his mother knew. The girls were eating ice cream, drinking Irish coffee, and listening to Nilsson Schmilsson, celebrating with Maeve and Sandor because he’d moved in. The school was powerless to prevent it, and so were the cops— he was almost seventeen.

On winter evenings, Anny added to a list in her notebook. Monday: green-flowered corduroy midi skirt, navy polo jumper, maroon boots, long camel-colored coat. Tuesday: brown corduroy midi skirt, beige polo jumper, boots, coat. Wednesday: denim midi skirt, black polo jumper, boots, blue velvet blazer … The notebook also contained poems on the theme of lasting love, poems like “When You Are Old” and “John Anderson my jo, John.” In autumn, a season that now seemed as remote as a different century, she’d copied out those poems and learned them by heart.

The list recorded the clothes worn by Rahel, whose family had immigrated from Israel in February, at the start of the school year. Around that time, Anny had started lying to her parents. Every Saturday, having said that she was going to Lou’s place to have dinner and study, she would put on her best top, blue with long, puffed sleeves, and meet Dave at the tram stop. They’d go to the city, where they would see a film or eat hamburgers in a diner. Dave always put five cents into the jukebox for “Smoke on the Water.” Afterward, they’d lie kissing in parks where the grass was covered in fallen leaves.

One recess just before the May holidays, Anny and Dave were sitting at the top of the rear stairs in the science block. He’d taken her there to tell her that his grandmother, lifting a slat in a blind, had seen them kiss at his gate the previous day. When Dave went in, a scene had begun that continued all evening, accruing intensity as each of his parents came home to be informed in turn that their son was carrying on with a Black shiksa. Anny began twisting her love beads, and Dave said she was not to worry about him. He’d explained that the kiss was nothing serious, just a bit of fooling around, because he was actually seeing an Israeli girl. He’d called Rahel straightaway, and she’d agreed to have lunch with his family on Sunday and go to the cinema afterward. Dave had started off speaking in a rush, but by the time he got to Rahel he sounded calm and expectant. Days later, it dawned on Anny that he’d been waiting for applause. He was the school star at maths and had once again demonstrated smart problem-solving. Reliving their conversation, she started fiddling with her necklace. It snapped, shooting tiny blue beads across her lap.

The winter term began before she could bring herself to tell Lou what had happened, omitting the word Black. Anny knew two things about Dave’s grandmother. The old woman had a tremor in her hand that caused her to grasp her table knife tightly and saw at the meat on her plate; the screech that resulted caused Dave’s teeth to tingle unpleasantly. His grandmother also had a line of numbers on her arm. Anny told Lou that a concentration camp survivor had moral authority—no one could defy that, which was why Dave had to break up with her. Lou replied that the old bitch held the purse strings for sure. When Anny objected, Lou asked why anyone would pay attention to an old woman who wasn’t rich.

The girls were heading for the gate after school when Miss Kelso’s louse-colored Holden went past. Lou gave it the finger at the moment when Miss Kelso looked in her rearview mirror. The next day Lou was no longer class president. Lou couldn’t care less, she said, because she was no longer comfortable with privileges designed to elevate her above the masses. Then she said that Kelso was a stupid bitch. She closed her lips around her forefinger and withdrew the finger smartly and said that was all you had to do.

Mr. Cullen, their favorite teacher, was American. At the thought of America, Anny felt weary in advance. America was modern life, the no-nonsense future, a glass cliff she’d have to clamber up one day. At the top of the cliff lay a broad expanse, like the grassy widening of the towpath: a place of wonder and punishment.

But Mr. Cullen pointed out that still today, in 1974, the People’s Republic of China, established twenty-five years earlier, was a featureless space on American maps. His class also learned that the notorious Christmas bombing of Hanoi, just one year before Kissinger got the Peace Prize, had been America’s largest air strike since World War II. By contrast, Australia had declared an end to its war in Vietnam and set up an embassy in Peking. The country’s progressive politics were the reason Mr. Cullen had chosen to live there. He explained that under communism China had done away with poverty, famine, and flies, while the Cultural Revolution was currently sweeping away the last traces of bourgeois thinking. His copy of Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book was passed from desk to desk. Anny read, “Recently there has been a falling off in ideological and political work among students and intellectuals, and some unhealthy tendencies have appeared.”

When Mr. Cullen’s glasses slipped down, he would wrinkle his nose to raise them. While Anny’s eyes remained on him, she was far away on a long march through mountains, a red banner triumphant overhead. Not that everyone in the class was marching in step. Ivan raised his hand and his croaky-squeaky voice to ask what happened to homosexuals in China. Mr. Cullen said there were no homosexuals in China.

Ivan’s sleepy gray eyes and lanky body had caused volcanic disturbances in Anny in her first term at the school. Then some boys bashed him and chucked him into the canal, and in the fallout she finally understood the meaning of the word she’d imagined was spelled p-o-u-f-f-e. Lou hadn’t been her best friend then. That happened the following year, when they discovered that they both liked to scratch out the faces in their class photo.

The school library yielded Away with All Pests, an English surgeon’s account of living in China in the fifties and the pioneering medical work done there. Among other feats, the Chinese had synthesized insulin for the first time. The book moved and sickened Anny—the descriptions of reattaching severed limbs! She was guilty of unhealthy tendencies, preferring The Good Earth and Man’s Estate, weeping over each in turn. It was becoming clear to her that it was Lou who was cut out for ideological and political work.

Boys used to fight one another over Lou, an indiscriminate kisser. Then her gas-blue eyes and thrilling breasts drew the attention of Joe, who was in year twelve and the editor of the school magazine. For some time now, she’d been accompanying him to the weekly meetings of Hashomer Hatzair, a Jewish youth group with socialist-Zionist aims. Hashy was secular, Lou reported, so no one objected to the presence of a gentile. Anny associated gentile and Jew with the Bible. Before Australia she’d thought of them as dusty designations, like Hittite or Assyrian.

Lou was writing an essay for the magazine called “Socialism Is the Grammar of Justice,” and reading QB VII, Lord of the Rings, and Manifesto of the Communist Party. She advertised her contempt for democracy by wearing jeans and desert boots. Her khaki canvas shoulder bag, sourced from Aussie Disposals, signaled total opposition to war. Revolution, on the other hand, was necessary and inevitable, according to Lou.

Anny was keen on justice and also on grammar, and it was the parsing of justice that alarmed her. Events in the country of her birth had caused her to dread violence, despite Lou’s lucid account of why Trotsky had to die. She wrote an anti-war poem that contained birds, soldiers, and the line “Strange green jungles in a harsh green land.” She slipped it into the manila envelope taped to the door of the room where Joe’s editorial committee met once a week.

Dave and Rahel were in year twelve and therefore easily avoided, but Rahel always ate her lunch in the art room, where the year twelves were allowed to smoke. As she headed there from the science block, her creamy oval face, wavy hair, and fabulous clothes could be observed from a distance. Every evening, when Anny wrote down what Rahel had been wearing, she was transferring a fraction of the power and beauty of those clothes to herself. A long coat and tall, shining boots would rescue even a Black shiksa from humiliation and lovelessness. Anny believed and didn’t believe this. It was an analgesic, an intermittently effective one.

The school had abandoned uniforms at the start of the year, so there went the money invested in tunics, school jumpers, motto-and-crest blazers. For winter Anny had jeans, a good jumper, a pilled one, a parka, and sneakers. She couldn’t ask her parents for new clothes. For a long time now her mother had spent the greater part of her days in bed. At night she might cook, or walk about the house taking things out of certain drawers and putting them in others. She no longer showered every day. Anny knew when her mother had visited her room from the trailing smell.

Her father worked alongside clerks half his age in the public service. He bought one giant sliced loaf a week, and took ham paste sandwiches to work and to the evening classes that would bring him the Australian qualifications he needed to practice law. He was saving for a deposit on a house. Rent was money out of the window, but a stronger motivation was his belief, confided in Anny, that a new house on an estate would mean a fresh start for her mother. Now and then, when Anny remembered, she still prayed. She prayed that the move wouldn’t happen until she was safe at uni, when Lou and she intended to share a Victorian terrace house with seagrass matting on the floor. It was vital to think “before” and “when” and “after,” to arrange herself along a taut line where one thing led logically to the next. In the absence of that line, her life might go straggly and directionless like her mother’s.

Lou spent the night of her sixteenth birthday with Joe. She described how Maeve had prepared her bedroom with incense, candles, and marigold petals scattered on sheets that showed crease lines from the packaging. Three months earlier, Maeve had got Lou on the pill, saying that she’d been pregnant at seventeen and no way was Lou going the same route. Lou made Anny swear never to tell Maeve that she’d been fucking Joe in his car for weeks. Anny had already sworn never to tell Maeve that back when Lou was in year eight, she used to fantasize about Sandor while masturbating.

An ankle-length velvet coat hung in the window of a secondhand clothing shop on Carlisle Street. It was dusky pink, lined in silver satin that had darkened at the armholes and was ripped near the hem. The shopkeeper said it had belonged to a white Russian who fled to Australia from Harbin when China turned to shit. He stroked the coat, smiling at Anny, and introduced himself as Travis. When she told him her name, he said he’d been hoping for something exotic but Anny would have to do. He encouraged her to try on the coat. In his cheval glass she beheld herself transformed, charged with the glamour of famous events.

The coat cost eighteen dollars fifty. She returned to the shop with the seven dollars she’d saved from babysitting as a down payment. After that there was only the dollar she received once a week to buy lunch. A cheese-and-tomato roll from the canteen cost nineteen cents, so by Friday she had enough for a five-cent packet of chips as well. But now she started shoveling in cornflakes at breakfast and skipping lunch. In the girls’ locker room, deserted at recess, she peered under the rows of lockers, where sometimes she found a coin. She always held a pen, and was scrabbling under a locker to retrieve it if anyone came in.

Every Saturday she handed Travis another dollar note. He would urge her to slip into the coat, coming up close and lifting her hair free of the collar. Sometimes she gave him five or ten cents less, which meant she’d caved in and bought chips.

Once a week the girls patted their faces with cotton wool soaked in egg white that they left on for ten minutes. Maeve said if there was only one thing you did for your complexion, that should be it.

Anny’s mother joined the family for dinner one evening. She used funny old expressions like yeoman service, trying to make her daughter laugh. Halfway through the meal, she laid down her cutlery and told her plate, very softly, Help me help me help me. Then she went on chatting in an upbeat tone.

Phys ed switched from hockey to ice skating at St. Moritz. When the girls left the rink, the afternoon was already fainting along the horizon. They called in to see Maeve and be fed hot chocolate and kugelhupf in the cake shop where she now worked.

Lou described Anny’s hair as “anarchic.” She envied it, Lou said. She was trying to radicalize her own fine, pale hair by sleeping in damp plaits and never brushing the result.

Miss Kelso, wearing jeans tucked into boots, required her class to write an essay on The Permissive Society. Anny would have preferred to write about poetry, but Miss Kelso always set boring subjects picked over by journalists and advised everyone to read Time— that mouthpiece for the capitalist-imperial machine.

Anny researched the overthrowing of the Chatterley ban, but she was really thinking about Maeve: her flares, her dolly haircut, the way she held her cigarette with her palm up, the lounge room she had furnished with cushions, large speakers, and hanging plants.

A roadie friend slipped Maeve a couple of freebies for Sherbet at St. Kilda Town Hall. When Maeve’s horn sounded, Anny’s father left his textbooks open on the kitchen table and came downstairs with his daughter. He greeted Lou and was introduced to Sandor, and Maeve told him no worries, Anny would be quite safe. It was plain to Anny that her father thought Sandor was Lou’s brother and that Maeve was going to the concert, too. She could remember him, when she was small, demonstrating how to strike a match safely, angling it down against the side of the box. She felt a scornful sort of pity for him now, so readily trusting and duped.

Sandor and Maeve dropped the girls off and headed to a club, because he was teaching her about jazz. When the concert ended, Anny and Lou set out to walk home with ringing ears. It was misty and very cold, and cars slurred past, men hanging out of them and yelling stuff that always meant, Fuck us, yer fucken molls! Lou shouted back, Hear me roar! All evening there’d been a loud, false vividness to Lou. She’d botted smokes off boys and laughed flirtily with them between the support band and Sherbet. Anny could tell that this was because Joe had refused to go to the concert, saying Sherbet sucked. Marching along Brighton Road in her oversize ex-army jacket, Lou said that years ago, Joe’s father, who was a dentist and had just cleaned Lou’s teeth, waited until the nurse left the room and told Lou she had a nice bum. She linked arms with Anny, who pictured their two tiny figures on the long march to knowledge, Lou’s far in advance.

At Broadway, where they hugged goodnight, she warned Lou to stay off the towpath, and Lou said she planned to. But she was giving off those flaky vibes, so Anny stayed watching until Lou was safely past the shortcut beside the canal.

Anny’s essay was suspiciously good, said Miss Kelso, and asked whether it was all her own work. Lou got top marks for writing about women’s lib and the pill.

Anny lay in bed, thinking that what she missed was not so much Dave as putting on her pale blue blouse and going out to meet her boyfriend on Saturday evening. It was a relief not to have to like Deep Purple, but she wished she were lying on leaves with Dave’s hand inside her knickers, the moon round and white as a Valium overhead. Beneath her longing was an awareness that having a boyfriend was an experience that would come again, maybe even before she left school. Perhaps her mother, too, would reappear one day, just as she used to be, funny and fierce.

Joe had decided to work on a kibbutz in Israel after finishing school. Lou was considering doing the same, she said. What about us, Anny asked, and Lou’s face went vague. Just an idea, she said, closing a door with three words.

Thursday: green velvet midi skirt, black jumper, boots, coat. The green skirt was a dream possession, one to set beside the entrancing, unavailable objects yearned for in childhood. The weighty swing of it, the color, plunged long spikes of pure, cold wanting into Anny’s heart.

With only two weeks of the winter term left, she still owed Travis five dollars. On Saturday she went to the shop just before it closed. She took the coat into the corner rigged up as a fitting room, and Travis continued carrying in racks of shoes from the street. When all her clothes were lying on the floor, Anny put her head around the curtain and called. Travis came over, and she told him that he could look for as long as he wanted, but he wasn’t to touch. Travis went away and locked the shop door, and ten minutes later he unlocked it. Anny left, wearing the coat.

On Monday morning, as they queued up outside their classroom, Ivan looked Anny over and said, Nice. As well as the coat, she was wearing golden leather shoes, creased across the instep, with a chunky heel. Travis had given them to her, warning her that they were character shoes, not intended for outdoor use. He also told her not to come back again.

Rahel wasn’t to be seen at lunchtime, nor when school ended, nor the following day. Word got around that she had glandular fever and wouldn’t be back before the spring.

Everyone had tickets to a university production of The Crucible, which year ten was doing in English. Joe wanted to see the play, too, so Lou, Anny, and Ivan gathered at his place after school for a lift to the campus. Ivan had changed into his best outfit: wide blue-and-brown tartan trousers with cuffs, a caramel body shirt, and platform shoes.

Joe had the benign yet impersonal manner of a medical professional, borrowed, Anny imagined, from his father, the dentist. Sitting behind him as he drove, she pictured his red-gold Afro bent over her poem and considered jumping out of the car.

Miss Kelso and Mr. Cullen were among the teachers in the packed auditorium. The atmosphere was rowdy and joyful, as if the holidays had already begun. It lingered after the performance, with a bunch of people from their school hanging about outside the theater, loudly discussing the play. Joe and Mr. Cullen got on to McCarthyism, and ignored Ivan when he said that Chinese Red Guards denouncing their parents was witch hunting.

Abigail and Tituba emerged from the theater. It took a minute to identify Tituba, now wrapped in a sheepskin jacket and no longer Black. Miss Kelso called, Bravo! as the actors went past. She waggled her car keys and told Mr. Cullen that if he wanted a lift home, she was pushing off. Mr. Cullen and Joe were on to Watergate, and Joe said he could easily fit one more in his bomb. Mr. Cullen thanked Miss Kelso, and said he didn’t want to take her out of her way twice in an evening. She went in one direction, and the five of them set off in another across the campus, Mr. Cullen still deep in conversation with Joe.

Lou offered Mr. Cullen her seat, but he said he was just fine in the back. Joe’s demister didn’t work, so everyone had to keep their coats and scarves on, and their windows open at the top. Mr. Cullen, sitting next to Anny with his knees wide, draped his arm along the back of the seat. Ivan, half turned away on her other side, was looking out at the sky. He sang “Starry, starry night,” just that line over and over, a croaky counterpoint to Mr. Cullen’s account of revolutionary praxis as enacted by Chinese peasants. After a while Joe stopped replying and picked up Ivan’s tune, whistling between his teeth. When he took a corner too fast, Anny clutched the seat with both hands, and Mr. Cullen slid up against her. He stayed that way, pressed warm and close, as excitement tinged with unease bristled inside Anny. Then his hand burrowed through her hair. One finger set about tracing tiny circles at the base of her skull, and she turned shimmery with lust. Eager to convey expertise, she slipped her hand under Mr. Cullen’s jacket and began stroking him through his jeans. He continued to caress her, now and then lightly twisting her hair to adjust her pace.

By the time they got to St. Kilda Junction, the racket of the engine was the only sound in the car. Ivan’s head had slumped forward, but jerked upright when Joe hit the brakes. Work to widen the intersection was being carried out at night, and the car had to creep past barriers, jackhammering men in hard hats, and flashing orange lights. The Victorian buildings that lined the road lacked roofs and facades, or were already rubble. Lou remarked that Hanoi must look like that. Hanoi on a good day, said Anny, dreamily taking in the devastation and the din, and was surprised when the others laughed.

Having ascertained addresses, Joe stopped at Mr. Cullen’s place first. Mr. Cullen said it had been a fun night and he hoped they could get together again soon. He gave Anny’s hand a quick, firm squeeze as he spoke, and she understood that he was talking to her.

She left the canteen with her roll, saliva starting up in anticipation of salty tomato and cheese. Dave appeared and began to walk with her. Recalling Dave, middle-aged Anny would think, His bones looked older than he was. He usually went home for lunch, but was saying that he’d waited to see her. He felt bad, he went on, about the way things had turned out. Dave’s eyes were small, slanted, and very blue. He had a face Anny had seen in old films. It showed up whenever men were herded together and given orders in black-and-white Europe. She looked away at the steep sky and bit into her roll.

The last day of winter, a Saturday, was the first day of the holidays. That evening Anny was minding a baby she’d minded before. He was a tremendous sleeper, but she left the door to his room open and didn’t watch TV in case he cried. The lounge was snug from the kerosene heater, there were snacks on the coffee table, and she knew to help herself to hot drinks. For a while she ate Cheezels and went on with The Mayor of Casterbridge, pausing now and then to blow cheesy orange dust off a page. She hadn’t had a class with Mr. Cullen in the two days of term left after The Crucible, but she’d observed him down corridors and across the yard. She saw a starman, fallen from the sky. It wasn’t only America he’d shed but every other country.

The cabinet in the lounge had stained-glass lozenges in the doors and a delicate brass key in the lock. The baby’s parents kept the flat bottle there, hidden inside a china tureen. When they went out for an evening they always carried a bottle of wine; there was beer in their fridge and a cask of red on a kitchen shelf. It seemed obvious to Anny that the gin was an unwanted present. The bottle had been opened; she’d done that, risking a few swigs when she was last here. She had another gulp now, twisted on the cap, and tucked the bottle into her bag. The candle she’d used the previous time was still in its candlestick. She lifted it out, lay on the carpet, and wriggled her jeans and knickers below her knees.

When the baby’s parents returned, the man offered to walk her home. She declined as usual, saying she lived only five minutes away. Fifteen minutes later she was across the street from Mr. Cullen’s place: a blond-brick block, two flats downstairs and two up, with an external stair. A light showed in one window, TV was leaking through the venetians in another, and the parking lot was lit up like a stage. The only empty car space had a big white number 4 painted on the concrete. It told Anny which flat belonged to Mr. Cullen, who didn’t drive. She loitered for a while, summoning authority from her coat, readying herself to knock on his door.

A car arrived from nowhere and swung into the vacant parking spot. The street was dark, and in any case the people who got out of the Holden were involved only with each other. Crossing that concrete stage, Mr. Cullen delivered a lesson in what it meant to be a starman: someone with no memories and no past. He put his arm around Miss Kelso, and she leaned into him as her boots went tok-tok-tok up the stairs.

Anny moved through the night, drinking gin. When she turned south, the wind was a wolf. There was something hard under her right foot, and she realized it was the pavement; her shoe had worn through.

The lights along Broadway had been placed there solely to expose stupidity and shame. But she had to go that way, past the plane trees that would give her hay fever in November, to get to Lou’s. The first time she went to Lou’s house, they’d dabbed scotch behind their ears like perfume. Through the bare vaults of the trees a toothy fragment of moon could be seen. A solid, awkward shape like that started working its way up through Anny’s thoughts. Eventually it informed her that it was Joe’s father’s fiftieth and that Lou had gone to the party.

She wavered for an instant. But there was still Maeve—Maeve, who’d looked at her in the pink coat and said, Your face should be on money. Maeve would be warm and uninquisitive, she’d offer Irish coffee in a tall white mug with a shamrock and invite her to curl up on the cushions on her floor—at the thought of those big, soft cushions, Anny couldn’t wait to lie down. A car slowed, its headlights assessing, before accelerating away. She saw the shortcut by the canal, its protective dark.

Stones poked up through her shoe and hurt her foot as she made her way past backyards with overhanging trees. When the path finally opened out, she stepped gratefully onto the grass. She sat down, removed her shoes, and rubbed her sore foot. It was another starry, starry night. Learning of the American bombs that fell over Hanoi for twelve days and nights, she’d pictured death-dealing Christmas stars. Was poetry a kind of ideological work, or just an unhealthy tendency? She was mostly aware of a subdued, greeny-brown smell, not altogether unpleasant, rising from the water. When the gin was gone, she unbuttoned her coat and spread it beneath her legs. Before lying down, she hurled the empty bottle into the canal, following it with her shoes, one by one.

Perhaps they heard the splashes and anticipated trouble, because they approached without a sound. She was still there, the cold just starting to enter her, when they arrived. They found her with her feet bare and her eyes closed, arranged on shining satin as if set out for their delight.

Time passed. Anny was strolling beside the river in Shanghai. In 1949, as Mao’s army advanced, the Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek made off with all the gold in China. Laborers transferred the bullion from a bank on the Bund to a freighter waiting to take it to Taiwan. There was also the end of Man’s Estate, when the revolutionary Katow sacrificed his cyanide to two young comrades in a Shanghai prison and went to his death by fire. These scenes flickered through her mind, illuminated fish, before sinking back into the weedy dark.

The drive home after The Crucible was present as well. She remembered shadowy companions, and a road that skirted a grassy field and ran between trees. The moon was out, there was a blaze of stars, and she saw everything distinctly, the leaning trees, the field. But there was nowhere like that on the way back after the play. It was like her poem about a harsh green place, something made from memories and dreams. But Hanoi on a good day was real, she knew that because she could hear them laughing. She couldn’t understand why they laughed.