I do not know what passed between Kristina Kovacs and Cass Cleave that night, while I cowered in my forsaken bed, what confidences were offered, what pledges given. Kristina has not volunteered to tell me, and I have not had the heart to ask. I harbour no resentment against her. She acted for what she thought was the best, as unwitting mischief-makers usually do. If she does know my poor secrets she likely does not care, so engrossed is she in the hard business of dying. I sit with her for hours, in the evenings especially, and often late into the night. I think that for most of the time she forgets I am there. I can sense her labouring over her pain: it is as if she is trying to hew something out of tbe most unmalleable material, to fashion something that is beyond her powers and her failing strength. The doctors insisted that she undergo radium treatment, the only result of which I can see is that now she is entirely bald. She refuses to wear a wig. In this shorn state she has acquired an austere, elemental beauty; her pharaonic head, held frailly aloft and faintly trembling on the delicate, fleshless column of her neck, is stark and absolute, all line and plane and angled shadow. Sometimes when I am sitting with her I stroke her head; it seems to comfort her, and she nudges against my hand, with an almost forceful insistence, like a cat. Her scalp is warm and always a little moist, and there is a vein that beats beneath it, very fast. I accused her lightly that night at Franco Bar-toli's of being jealous, but I am the one who is jealous now. Whatever I may call what I felt for Cass Cleave – the word love, in my mouth, has acquired a blasphemous overtone – I know that Kristina in some way came to share it. They had only that one night together, and I am no more willing to speculate on how they spent it than I am to ask Kristina to tell me. I am prevented by a sort of prudishness, or do I mean pudency; the blaze that burns the jealous lover feels so like the heat of lust.
When in the morning I went back to Franco Bartoli's apartment he was not there, or at least did not appear, and instead Kristina received me, still in her black dinner dress, more ashen and red-rimmed than ever. She said she had not slept, but had spent the night at Cass Cleave's bedside. This seemed perfectly natural to my ears, as natural as the fact that I had, without any intention that I can now discern, packed Cass Cleave's bag and brought it with me from the hotel. I do believe that at these times our thinking is thought for us. Kristina when I handed her the bag made no comment. She led me into the dining room where we had eaten dinner the night before and bade me sit down at the table. In the spiked sunlight of morning the place had a slightly sweaty, panting atmosphere, as if the night's revels in the streets had broken in here and had only lately been quelled. Cass Cleave was right, it is the different air, the different smells, that mark a place as foreign. This room, fusty and watchful, was meant to be lived in only after dark, and the sunlight coming in at the window was scandalously bright and brash. Odd to think that for others, for Franco and his mother, for the old cook, this place was as familiar as the palms of their own hands. I have never belonged anywhere… I cleared my throat and enquired after Cass Cleave, diffident as a hospital visitor. Kristina was pouring coffee for me and did not lift her eyes from the cup. I could see my face reflected in the polish of the dining table, foreshortened, indistinct, the upper part of it seeming sinisterly masked. I was trying, inconse-quently but with some irritation, to recall the exact distinction between the terms gemutskrank and geisteskrank. "She wishes to be alone," Kristina Kovacs said. "For a while. She has things to consider." I nodded, not seeing how else to respond. There seemed a nice point of etiquette in play here, an etiquette to which I was not party. I felt distantly a dull, dragging sense of sundering and release, as the ship must feel in the first moment of heaving away from the dockside; it was, I realise now, an initial, premonitory twinge of the coming pains of loss. "I love her, you know," I heard myself say, almost peevishly, and would have gone red all over if my ancient hide were less leathery. Now it was Kristina's turn to nod, pursing her lips. I could hear the old cook scratching about in the kitchen. "Nevertheless," I said, overly loud, sounding to my own ears like a Victorian paterfamilias reluctantly acceding to a fortune hunter's request for his homely daughter's hand, "nevertheless, I shall let her go, if that is what she wants." Kristina, still looking down, pondered my words for a moment, and then looked up at me and smiled. "Oh, Axel," she said softly, "only someone incapable of love could love so selflessly."
Later, when I saw Cass Cleave, she was in Bartoli's garden, a cramped, sunless box of stubby grass and wilting foliage wedged between two high, stuccoed walls and the blank-windowed rear of another, looming apartment house. She was sitting on a wrought-iron chair in a corner beside a blue-blossoming bush, very straight, her slender neck extended and her hands calmly folded in her lap. Her hair, I noticed, had grown appreciably longer in the months that she had been with me, and was gathered now and tied behind her head in what I believe is called a chignon. She was barefoot, and was wearing an old-fashioned white linen night-gown, lent to her by Bartoli's mother, no doubt. Placed there, all pale and russet, in front of the stained white wall, she might have been posing for a photograph, or awaiting, indeed, the arrival of the firing squad. As I approached, she looked up, her gaze not quite focused, and smiled vaguely, as if she were not sure whether I was real or only a comfortably familiar hallucination. I stood before her in the still and lifeless air, jabbing at the coarse grass with my stick. She waited, incurious, directing her blurred smile here and there. I said that I had heard that she wished to be left alone, and was unable to suppress the unexpected note of pique in my tone. I said she should know that Kristina Kovacs was ill, that she was, in fact, dying. I said that I had slept with her once, long ago, in Prague. "Yes," Cass Cleave said, "she told me." So. "And what," I asked, "did you tell her, in return?" She did not answer. I sighed. I had my little speech prepared. A livid cloud was creeping stealthily toward the sun. "You must understand," I said, "I shall have to go back to my life, and so must you go back to yours." I lightly laughed. "I have spent so much money here," I said, "my agent in Arcady, who handles my financial affairs, believes I am being blackmailed – which," with an archly frowning smile, "I am, in a way." I paced a step to right, to left, pivoting on my stick. I said that of course I loved her, but love is only an urge to isolate and be in total possession of another human being. "By loving you," I said, "I took you from the world, and now, I am giving you back. Do you see?" She listened to all this in silence, her head judiciously inclined, and now she nodded. I sighed again, impatiently. "Are you going to betray me?" I said. "Those newspaper things – will you reveal them, and betray me?" She sat quite still for a moment, then looked up with a little shiver, smiling, as if she were waking from a brief, refreshing sleep, and glanced about, in pleased surprise, it seemed, at the blue bush, and the white wall, and at me, standing before her, leaning on my stick. "We never saw the Shroud," she said. She rose from the iron chair and linked her arm in mine, and together we started back across the garden, toward the open garden window, where Kristina Kovacs stood, waiting for us, with her arms tightly folded under her bosom. "I have," Cass Cleave said softly, "something to tell you."