When Kristina Kovacs came to look for me I was standing in the book-lined passageway through which earlier we had entered, leaning against the shelves holding a big book up to the light and pretending to read in it. She stood before me quietly for a moment, her head bowed and hands clasped. She had taken on the distinct air of a nun, in her black dress with its white lace collar, and for a giddy moment I thought she was trying to think how to frame the news that Cass Cleave was dead. In the sallow light of the narrow passageway her skin had a sickly, moist pallor and the rims of her eyelids were inflamed. With a jolt, I was struck by the amazing fact that this woman who was here now would in a little while be here no more, would be, indeed, nowhere, that her flesh that I had intimately known would soon be falling off the bones, and in time the bones themselves would fall to dust, and then the dust itself would disappear. Always a shock, when one comes smack up against death like that, as if for the first time. I mean, one can be aware that a person is dying and yet not have acknowledged it, not have absorbed it, fully. Mortal illness, after all, is only a matter of acceleration. Who knows, I might be gone before she goes. It is a rum business. I stand amazed before the ungainsayable certainty that in a hundred years' time every creature now alive on this earth, with the exception of a few giant turtles and the odd hardy herder of yaks in the Ladakhs, will be dead. I do not necessarily deplore this arrangement – think of the crowding if it were to be otherwise. And indeed, I often feel it is not so much the passing of the present lot that should appal me as the prospect of our replacement by a fresh cast of fools and knaves, with their needs, loves, terrors, their little tragedies. Yes, the poor old world would be better rid of us entirely; leave it to the ants, I say. Meanwhile, however, here is the dying though still living Kristina Kovacs demanding my attention. "Axel," she said, "you must do something about this girl." Why, I wonder, do people always think the employment of one's first name will add irresistible weight to their pronouncements? Calmly I closed the book I had been inspecting, keeping an index finger between the pages to mark my place – it was, not that it matters, the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, the London 1888 facsimile of the 1499 original, in mint condition, as the old book thief in me could not help noting with nostalgic interest – and assumed an expression of polite, perplexed enquiry. Kristina sighed. She indulges me, does Kristina, and never more than mildly chides me for my reprehensible ways. "What are you doing with her?" she said. "You can see she is sick." Sick, I expostulated, sick? "Yes," she said, "sick. And she has shown me the bruises." Bruises, bruises, what bruises? What had the child been saying about me? "Are you by any chance jealous, Kristina?" I said. The possibility had just occurred to me at that moment, I had spoken the thought before I was aware of having it. These little instances of unpremeditated insight convince me that the machines will never take over from us. Goodness, how discursive I am being today, with all this talk of insects, and machinery – whatever next? But Kristina, now, jealous… She gazed at me for a long moment, then turned aside with a weary, a despairing, shrug. "She wants to see you," she said. The bedroom where they had put Cass Cleave was large and square and high-ceilinged; stepping into it was like stepping straight into the past. Occupying the centre of the room was an enormous, high, iron bed in the chilly wastes of which my girl looked like a lost Arctic explorer fast-frozen in an ice floe. An electric lamp with a brown shade was burning weakly on a low table beside her, while all around on every available surface there was set out an unnerving array of devotional prints, all of Jesus, or the Virgin Mary, or the two of them together, mother and son vying with each other in expressions of sorrow, and seeping wounds, and ever bigger and bloodier bleeding hearts. I sat down gingerly on the side of the bed; it swayed, the springs wearily protesting. Cass Cleave's eyes were closed, and her face was drawn and without colour, not unlike the many doleful faces of the Virgin and her virginal Son ranged round about, and just as unreally, as ethereally, beautiful. Only her head and hands were visible, which increased the impression of her having succumbed in the effort of trying to free herself from the frozen medium of pillowcase and sheets. I was still lugging the Hypnerotomachia; I laid it down now on the bed beside her and she moved a hand sideways and touched the cover, still with her eyes closed, tracing the texture of the binding with her fingertips, as if she were blind. She smiled. "Well," I said, not harshly, "what happened to you?" For a while she said nothing. I could feel her thinking. There was not a sound around us anywhere. Idly I entertained the thought that we might both have died, without noticing, and that this dim-lit chamber crowded with hearts and thorns and plaster tears was all that there would be of the next world. "The different air," Cass Cleave said, very softly. "The different smells. If you got used to that, a foreign country would not be foreign any more." I said, yes, that was true, I supposed. I looked about, and even whistled a little, softly, to myself; one can be bored no matter what the circumstances. On the wall above the bed there was a large, framed, faded photograph of a young man with longish hair, dressed in the fashion of a previous century, dark coat and high stiff collar and stock, whose slightly crossed but burning eyes stared down upon me with an expression of deep animosity and challenge. Despite the antiquity of the picture, the fellow in it bore a marked resemblance to old Signora Bartoli, whose bedroom, I surmised, this must be. Cass Cleave moved her fingers from the cover of the book and touched my hand. She was looking at me now. "I want to go to America," she said. I nodded, indulging her. "Of course you do," I said. I could have lied, I could have said I would take her to Arcady with me, but I did not. It is no matter; it was not my America she meant.
That night, what was left of it, I slept alone for the first time in months. Or did not sleep, but lay in a sort of conscious daze, rather, attended by my familiar demons. I have always been prey to night terrors – hardly surprising, I suppose – but lately they are mainly of the waking kind. When I was young my dreams were all chaos, lust and violence, now in my old age sleep is a room of quiet marvels into which I am nightly ushered. It is the ante-room of death; in it, my fears are stilled. Tonight, however, that door was locked against me, and I lay on my back under a humid sheet with my hands folded on my chest like the dead Christ in his shroud and listened to the restless world's carousings. The city seemed to be celebrating one of this festive country's many feast days, for the streets outside were loud with revellers until the early hours. Or it may have been an hallucination: at one particularly clamorous stage of the celebrations I crept to the window and looked down and saw a sort of heraldic cavalcade passing along the street, young men in doublets and striped hose carrying banners and gowned girls with elaborate headdresses mounted on prancing steeds, followed by a band of motleyed minstrels. Toward dawn the crowds, phantom or real, at last dispersed, and then the all too real garbage trucks and delivery men took over. The curtain edges were lightening when I thought I saw Cass Cleave come into the room. She sat by me in the shadows and did not speak. I tried to touch her, to feel her warmth, but my winding-sheet held me fast and I could not move a limb. What was I thinking of, to leave her in the care of others, at such a time? But then, I was not aware that it was such a time. All the same, of the many derelictions of which I have been guilty in my life, this one seems to me now the most reproachable.