Standing over the rusty oil drum, I ripped out two blank pages and set fire to them. Then I ripped out the little girl and burned her up, too. When I came back into the kitchen, I heard the toilet flush upstairs. I listened to Steven’s footsteps going back to his workroom, then went out and brought the new bottle in. I brought the level in the old bottle up to something like what I guessed it had been—apparently I’d hit it much harder last night than I remembered—took a slug of what was left for old times’ sake and poured the rest into the sink, running hot water to chase it down. I put the empty bottle back in the paper bag, stuffed it into a milk carton and tucked it away in the bottom of the garbage. Okay: crisis averted. I lit the oven, unwrapped the chicken, sawed the top off the bread loaf with the good knife from Broadway Panhandler, and began clawing out the soft inside.

“Now you’re talkin’,” he said. He took down a brandy snifter.

“What are you doing?” I said. “I’ll get that for you. Go and sit down.”

“I can get it.” He opened the cupboard door, took out the bottle of Rémy, looked at it and said, “What the hell?”

“In the interest of even fuller disclosure,” he said, “I must further confess to you that I nipped a bit at the cognac while you were out this afternoon. I don’t actually know why. Except that it was like, I really wasn’t craving a cigarette and that freaked me out. It was like nothing was wrong, you know? And that made me suspicious that something was really wrong that I didn’t even dare bring to consciousness, so I thought I’d better drink to sort of preempt it. Does that make any sense at all?”

“Absolutely,” I said. I wasn’t paying attention. How could he not have noticed that so much was gone out of that goddamn bottle? And now what? Try to keep him out of the kitchen and pour out some of what you just poured in?

[...] he found himself recalling a line of verse, ‘To him Apollo gave the gift of song, and music sweet to hear’, and for the first time he realised that it really was a gift. How inarticulate Tonka was! She could neither talk nor weep. But how is one to define something that neither can speak nor is spoken of, something that dumbly merges with the anonymous mass of mankind, something that is like a little line scratched on the tablets of history? What is one to make of such a life, such a being, which is like a snowflake falling all alone in the midst of a summer’s day? Is it real or imaginary? Is it good, or evil, or indifferent? One senses the fact that here the categories have reached a frontier beyond which they cease to be valid.

This brilliant and versatile young man was studying chemistry and turned a deaf ear to all questions that had no clear-cut answer. He was, indeed, an embittered opponent of all such considerations and was a fanatical disciple of the cool, soberly fantastical, world-encompassing spirit of modern technology. He was in favour of doing away with the emotions. He was the antagonist of poetry, kindness, virtue, simplicity. Song-birds need a branch to perch on, and the branch a tree, and the tree the dumb brown earth to grow in; but he flew, he was between the ages, he was somewhere in mid-air. After this age, one that destroys just as much as it constructs, there will come one that will inherit the new premises we are so ascetically creating, and only then will it be possible to say what we ought to have felt about things. Such was more or less his train of thought. For the time being the thing was to be as tough and austere as on an expedition.

Tonka lay there, with her eyes shut and her face turned to the wall, for an endless age, in terrible lonely fear. When at last she felt him beside her, her eyes were wet with warm tears. Then came a new wave of fear, dismay at her ingratitude, a senseless word uttered as though in search of help, as though stumbling out of some infinitely long, lonely corridor, to transform itself into his name—and then she was his. He hardly grasped how magically, and with how much childlike courage, she stole into his being, what simple-minded strategy she had worked out in order to take possession of all she admired in him: it was only necessary to belong to him entirely and then she would be part of it all.

Later, he could not in the least remember how it had all happened.

‘Either I must make Tonka my wife,’ he told himself, ‘or I must give her up and give up these thoughts.’

But no one will blame him for doing neither one nor the other, despite these reasonings of his. For although all such thoughts and feelings may well be justified, nobody nowadays doubts that they are very largely figments of the imagination. And so he went on reasoning, without taking his reasoning seriously. Sometimes it seemed to him that he was being sorely tried, but when he came to himself again and spoke to himself again, as it were, man to man, he had to tell himself that this ordeal consisted, after all, only of the question whether he would force himself to believe in Tonka against the ninety-nine per cent probability that she had been unfaithful to him and that he was simply a fool. Admittedly this humiliating possibility had by now lost much of its importance.

Then she told him of a dream she had had a few nights earlier. For Tonka also had dreams.

“In my dream I knew I was going to die soon,” she said. “And it ’s a funny thing, you know, but I was very glad. I had a bag of cherries, and I said to myself: ‘Never mind, you just gobble them up quick before you go.’ ”

The next day they would not let him in to see her.

From that time on much came to his mind that made him a little better than other people, because there was a small warm shadow that had fallen across his brilliant life.

That was no help to Tonka now. But it was a help to him. And this even though human life flows too fast for anyone to hear each of its voices clearly and find the answer to each of them.

Dubao came, and Zhenbao casually brought the conversation round to Jiaorui. Dubao tapped his cigarette like a man of experience: “She ’s gotten old, really old.” Which apparently meant, for a woman, that she was finished.

Zhenbao reviewed the scene that morning: yes, she had grown old. But even this he envied. He looked at his wife. Eight years of marriage and still no trace of experience. She was hollow and spotless. She always would be.