I squeezed her palm reassuringly, and saw her flinch.

I jumped.

The car salesman staggered, groaning in confusion, but I was already sweeping up the steps in a wave of taffeta and rose-hip perfume, my hair pinned too tight to my head, my heart racing so fast in my chest I felt briefly dizzy and knew it was not my presence which made it beat, merely the thought that I might be present, which a moment ago had been all that filled Maria Anna’s mind.

And yet she had taken my hand.

I handed over my invitation with barely a glance at the boy who took it, and the boy who took it waved me through with more than a glance at the body I wore. Maria Anna, tall and graceful, her long neck accentuated by the single pearl she wore in the hollow of her throat, hands sticky–physiological reaction to stress a little over-contained. As I swept into the main gallery of the museum, the guests in tuxedos and gowns swirled and swept around black-iron cannon, monuments to the dead, glass cases containing the pistol of a general, the uniform of a colonel fallen in a charge, the banner of a regiment wiped out upon some gunpowder-blasted hill. Through all this, the crowd chatted and bantered, the past set out to be picked over like last night’s TV.

I caught a glass of champagne from a waiter as he passed, and drifted towards a display of regimental photos, grainy and beige, sipping my drink and waiting for the rushing in my blood to slow down, pass. The hypertension eased a little at a time, muscles so tight it seemed the nerves themselves couldn’t process their presence. I let my gaze sweep the crowd, seeking out Horst Gubler from among his adoring fans.

He didn’t take much seeking. The noise around him was a swell in the turning sea and, unlike his more meagre guests, he didn’t have to move to find the party, but rather the party twisted to come and find him. I eased my way through, smiling a dazzling smile at all I passed, until I stood close and a little to one side, listening as he regaled the gathered masses with the story of a time when he had caught a fish, and met a minister, and watched the sun set on a Saudi oil field. When the audience laughed, I did not, and my silence caused his gaze to turn and light on me.

His eyes swept me from bottom to top, top to bottom, sticking to my skin, before his face opened into a smile of recognition and delight.

And at his smile something twisted beneath my stomach and he said, “Why hello. I remember you very well,” and, though I was perfectly functional and my body liked to exercise two or three times a week and eat sensible food, I tasted bile. Quickly, I reached out towards his smiling, wobbling face, palm up and replied, “Yes you do.”

He shook me by the hand.

Later, when asked to recall Horst Gubler’s speech at the museum, kinder listeners would report that he seemed rather strange in the minutes leading up to it, hardly himself at all. Harsher listeners–and the press–would report that he was clearly drunk, there being no other explanation for his actions.

Everyone, regardless of personal bias or inclination, would remember the first thing he said upon taking the stand, immortalised in journals across the state.

“Hiya, all!” the body of Gubler cried, silencing the audience with the jingling of a silver spoon upon a crystal glass. “So glad you could all be here, so glad! There’s just one thing I’d like to say before we kick off with the evening’s festivities. President Obama–what a faggot.”

Three days later I was on a plane to Slovakia, Horst Gubler’s passport in my hand, credit cards in my pocket. Of his assets–which turned out to be a mere 1.8 million dollars and a great deal of bluff–twenty thousand dollars went into a Swiss bank account for an unnamed roaming traveller, eighty thousand went to an ex-wife, and the remainder was bequeathed, along with any outstanding assets, to a charity dedicated to the victims of rape, violent crime and domestic abuse. They were so grateful, they sent me a plaque, framed in brass, which I forwarded on to Maria Anna Celeste, with my compliments.

Chapter 21

Slovakian?

Not a word.

I speak French, German, Russian, Mandarin, Japanese, English, Swahili, Malay, Spanish, Arabic, Turkish, Farsi and Italian. Based on these I can roughly comprehend a wide range of locally similar languages, though comprehension is never the same as being able to reply.

Hungarian? Czech?

Not a clue.

Only a few borrowed words–toilet, TV, credit card, internet, email–that sprung up too fast and too late for the linguists of their nations to have any better idea.

I got off the train a few stops short of Bratislava.

When first I visited Slovakia it was a beautiful land of mighty rivers, great fields across fertile plains, pine tree hills rising on the horizon and the distant jingling of cattle bells from the blue-grey walls of the evening valleys. There may even have been some traditional dress–though at the time tradition was a concept yet to be romanticised into its knee-kicking glory.

Communism, as always, had not been kind to this idyll. With as much tenderness as a tank in a trench, villages of rustic stone and tiny cared-for chapels now boasted squat apartment blocks and concrete industrial zones, fallen into disrepair almost as soon as they had risen. Rivers, once running clear, now flowed sluggishly through the flatlands, their surfaces decked with thick green scum that grew back as quickly as it was cleared. The land still held much beauty, but it was spotted through with the remnants of an industrial ambition stretched too far.

I stopped in a bed and breakfast in a town with an unpronounceable name. A bus ran every three hours to Bratislava, twice a day on Sundays. One church, one school, one restaurant, and on the edge of town one supermarket, which sold, as well as cured meats and fish, garden furniture, bathroom parts and small electric cars.

The owners of the bed and breakfast were a husband and wife, and only one other room was occupied by a pair of Austrian cyclists come to pedal the gentle low roads of Europe. I waited for the building to go to bed, then let myself out into the night.

The one-church town was also a one-bar town.

The one bar was playing 1980s pop songs from one CD. On the dance floor teenagers desperate to get out, get away, writhed against each other, too horny to go home, too frightened of their companions to actually have sex.

I looked for the one person who might be interested, and found her, sitting back from the dance floor, watching in the dark. I sat down opposite her and said, you speak English?

A little, she said.

But for what she did, a little was more than enough.

I bought her a drink, which she barely touched.

Her English was better than she claimed, and her French, we eventually discovered, was superb. She said, where are you staying?

The boarding house.

That won’t do at all, she replied. If you’re interested, I know somewhere quiet.

Quiet was perfect.

Quiet was exactly what I needed.

She lived on the very edge of town. The front door locked heavy behind us, the walls were hung with photos of ancient grandmothers, their hands resting proudly on the shoulders of their sons.

Her room consisted of a bed, a desk, a couple of hand-me-down works of art put up by a tenant generations ago who hadn’t liked them enough to take them away and left hanging by a lazy landlord. Under the bed were books on economics, chemistry, mathematics. On the small crooked desk, old plates gathering mould, and pieces of foil, stained with powder. She kicked the books aside, took off her jacket and said, you ready?