Back at home he sat down at the kitchen table with the manuscript of the song, but with the weaker version before his eyes and no piano at hand he lost even the mood of the accompaniment he wanted; it was all out of reach. He knew he was too tired to work but nonetheless tried, doggedly, angrily, to hear and to write down. He sat half an hour motionless, never moving his hand. At the other end of the table his wife was mending Tonia's dress, listening to some program of talk on the grandmother's radio. He put his hands over his ears. She said something about music, but he did not listen. The total impossibility of writing was a choking weight in him, like a big chunk of rock in his chest. Nothing would ever change, he thought, and in the next moment he felt a relaxation within him, lightness, openness, and certainty, utter certainty. He thought it was his own song, then, raising his head, understood that he was actually hearing this tune. He did not have to write it. It had been written long ago, no one need suffer for it any more. Lehmann was singing it,

Du hold Kunst, ich danke dir.

He sat still a long time. Music will not save us, Otto Egorin had said. Not you, or me, or her, the big golden-voiced woman who had no children and wanted none; not Lehmann who sang the song; not Schubert who had written it and was a hundred years dead. What good is music? None, Gaye thought, and that is the point. To the world and its states and armies and factories and Leaders, music says, "You are irrelevant"; and, arrogant and gentle as a god, to the suffering man it says only, "Listen." For being saved is not the point. Music saves nothing. Merciful, uncaring, it denies and breaks down all the shelters, the houses men build for themselves, that they may see the sky.

Gaye put away the scribbled, ruled sheets of paper the little volume of poetry, the pen and ink. He stretched and yawned. "Good night," he said in his soft voice, and went off to bed.

1938

THE sunlight of any October lay yellow across her way, and hundreds of dry, golden afternoons rustled under her steps. Only their great age kept the sycamores from being importunate. For blocks she was pursued by the familiarity of shadows, bricks, and balconies. Fountains spoke to her as if she had not been away at all. Eight years she had been gone, and this stupid city had never noticed her absence; its sunlight and the sound of its many waters hung about her like the walls of her own house, her home. Confused and offended, she passed the house at 18 Reyn Street without a glance at its door or garden wall, though something, not her eyes, saw that door and gate were locked. After that, the city began to let her be. Within a block or two it did not know her. The fountains talked to someone else. Now she was differently confused, recognising none of these crossings, not one doorstep or window of the shops and houses. She had to ask her way ignominiously of street-signs and house-numbers, and when she found the place she sought, a tenement with several entrances, she had to enter and inquire at open doors. Rumpled beds, family quarrels and partly buttoned dressing-gowns sent her up to a fourth-floor room, where her knock was answered only by a pencilled card tacked on the door. f.l. panin, it said. She looked in. A dormer room, jammed with the hefty sofas and tables of a dismantled house; a stranger's room, sunny, stuffy, defenseless.

Across from her was a curtained doorway. She said, "Anybody here?" and was answered from behind the curtain by someone half awake, "Hold on a moment."

She held on.

He came across the room, himself, as wholly himself as the stones and sunlight of the city after these eight years: the reality of her wretched dreams in which he and she stopped at inns on roads leading up into grey mountains and could not find, down cold corridors, each other's room: the original of all the facsimiles who, in Krasnoy on winter evenings, crossed a street with his walk or looked round with his turn of the head: himself.

"Sorry, I was asleep."

"I'm Mariya."

He stood still, and his coat hung on him as on a coatrack. Seeing that, she saw that his hair had gone a kind of dull grey – that his hair was grey. He was thin, grey, changed. She would not have known him if she passed him on the street. They shook hands.

"Sit down, Mariya," he said, and they both sat, in large shabby chairs. Across the bare floor between them lay a bar of Aisnar's unalloyed, inimitable autumn sunlight. "I have the alcove, but the Panins let me use this room while they're out. They both work the day shift at the GPR."

"That's where you work too – evening shift? I was going to leave a note."

"Usually I'd be on the way to work by this time. I've had some days off. Flu."

She should have expected him not to ask any questions. He disliked answering them, and seldom asked them. It was his self-respect that prevented him, a self-respect so entire that it included all other men and women, accepted them as responsible, exempted them from question. How had he survived so long in this world of the public confessional?

"I have a two-week holiday," she said. "I work in Krasnoy, teaching. In the primary schools."

It confused her to see his smile on the face of a man she did not know.

"I'm divorced from Givan."

He looked down at the sunlight on the floor. She answered the next question he did not ask – "Four years ago." Then she took out her cigarettes in self-defense. But she summoned up courage, before laying the smokescreen, to offer him one, reaching out to him across the sunlight: "Smoke?"

"Yes, thanks." He looked at the cigarette, smelled it, and leaned forward happily to the flame of her match. He inhaled the smoke and burst into a cough, a hacking, whacking cough, a series of explosions like heavy artillery, the most noise she had ever heard him make in his life. All through it he held on to the cigarette, and when he had got his breath back he took another draw, not inhaling.

"You shouldn't smoke," she said helplessly.

"Haven't been," he said. Sweat stood out on his forehead, even in his hair, which she now saw was only partly grey. Soon he put the cigarette out with care and stowed the unsmoked end in his shirt pocket. This he did with grace and ease, but then he looked at her with apology. She had not been with him during the years when he learned to save cigarette butts, and so might be embarrassed; and she tried to look impassive, knowing how he disliked causing embarrassment.

The strangers' room, the furniture of some other house, stood silently around them.

"Mariya, what did you come here for?" The question, which would have been any other man's, was not his, nor the voice; only the eyes, clear, frank, and obdurate.

"To see you. To talk to you, I mean, Pier. It got so that I had to. I'm lonely. I mean, more than that, I'm alone. By myself. Outside. There's nobody in Krasnoy that I can say anything to, they don't need me. I used to think, while we were married, you know, that if I were by myself, on my own, I'd find a lot of interesting people, friends, and be on the inside, do you know what I mean? But that was all wrong. You had friends then and I expect you do now. You have a place to stand on when you meet people. I never did, I never made friends. I never have reached another person, except you. I suppose I didn't really want to reach anybody. But now I do." She stopped, and with the same horror with which she had heard him cough, heard herself sob loudly. "I can't stand it very much longer. Everything is falling apart. I've lost my nerve." She went on as fast as she could. "Are people here buying salt? You can't get salt any more in Krasnoy, people buy it all and save it, they say if you wrap yourself in a sheet soaked in salt water it will cure radiation burns. Is that true? I don't know. Is everyone here scared? But it's not just the bombs, there are the other things they talk about, germ warfare, and how there are too many people and more all the time, so soon we'll all be like rats in a box. And nobody seems to really hope for anything good any more. And then you get older, and you think about dying, and in a time like this it seems so mean and pointless. Living and dying both. It's like being alone at night in the wind, it just blows right through me. I try to hold myself up and have some dignity, you know, but I can't believe in it anymore, I feel like an ant in a swarm, I can't do it alone!"