La Bohème, for instance. But I have to confess I don’t really know what a tone poem is.” “I guess what Richard Strauss did in his Don Juan and Till Eulenspiegel and so on, and what Sibelius and Smetana did in theirs. A narrative in music, though I’d think it’d be a very difficult form to put across. But we’ll forget the music and read the story — I’ve already started it and I know how it turns out — and talk about it sometime today?” “You finish it and I’ll catch up,” she might say. “I’ll also read it in Russian, if I have the time, in case the translation misses some of it.” “See you later, then,” he says. He goes into their bedroom, plumps up and piles the four bed pillows, her two and his, on top of one another against the wall, and lies back on them and reads the story. After he finishes it he goes back to her study. She’s not there.