I dressed, impatiently, as always now. With the years I find these necessary morning rituals increasingly irksome. For whose benefit was I putting on this shirt, this linen suit, this tie that was too short and too broad at the end and made me look, as I could see from the mirror, as if my tongue were hanging out? The old should have a special garment, something like a monk's habit, simple and functional, and suitably presageful of the winding-sheet. I ran my fingers through the crackling strands of my unruly hair, without visible effect; I never wanted to let my hair grow wild like this, especially when it began to turn white, but I felt it would be expected of me, the famous Mijnheer de Professor from the doddery, woolly Old World. Suddenly, like a soft blow, the memory from childhood came to me of my mother wetting a fingertip and smoothing down the comma of wiry hair on the crown of my head that always a moment afterwards would spring up again. I recalled too the curiously voluptuous shiver of disgust I would experience when she was helping me into some new item of clothing, a blouse, or knee-breeches, or a crisp navy-and-white sailor suit with the pasteboard price-tag still dangling from a buttonhole. What was the cause of that inner recoil? An excess of intimacy with my mother, under the chrysanthemum-smell of whose face powder I could detect a medley of more intimate and more exciting odours? No, that is not it, I think; what made me flinch, surely, was an over-consciousness of self, the sudden, ghastly awareness of being trapped inside this armature of flesh and bone like a pupa wedged in the hardened-over mastic of its cocoon. Immediately, again, came the demand: What self? What sticky imago did I imagine was within me, do I imagine is within me, even still, aching to burst forth and spread its gorgeous, eyed wings?
The lift was an old-fashioned, rackety affair, the sight of which twanged another vaguely nostalgic string at the far back of my memory. I could hear it coming down from above, stopping at every floor and flinging open its gate with a noise of mashing metals, as if successive armfuls of wire clothes-hangers were being crushed between giant steel claws. When it reached me, though, there was no one in it. The lobby too was empty, the reception desk unattended. Through a partly open door behind the desk I spied the manager from last night, eating a sandwich, sitting hunched at the corner of a table on which there was a typewriter and untidy mounds of papers. He was tieless today, with the sleeves of his white shirt rolled and the collar open on a tufted triangle of bulging chest. Was he, out of costume like this and in slight dishevelment, was he, I wondered, more himself, or less? He was going at the sandwich with the concentrated ferocity of a dog that has not been fed for days. When he saw me looking he did not acknowledge me, only scowled, his jaw munching away, and leaned out sideways and pushed the door shut with his foot. I was about to walk on when there rose unbidden before my mind's eye the image of the coffee mug, the one I had left on the table in the lounge when the taxi arrived to take me to the airport. I saw it all that way away, on what was now the dark side of the world, the rim marked with a dried half moon of gum from my morning mouth, the coffee dregs turning to a ring of furry brown powder in the bottom, just standing there in the darkness and the silence, one among all the other mute, unmoving objects I had left behind me in the locked house, and it came to me, with inexplicable but absolute certainty, that I would never return there. Shaken, I faltered, and put a hand to the desk to steady myself. A clerk came out of the office and looked at me. To cover the moment's infirmity I asked for a map of the city, and the clerk opened one between us on the counter and with a show of laboured dutifulness – why do his kind always glance aside in that blank, bored way just before they speak? – began to show me on it the location of the hotel. Yes yes, I said, I knew where I was! I snatched up the map and without folding it I stuffed it into my pocket and went through the glass door and corkscrewed myself on my stick down the steps into the high, narrow street.
What did it mean, that I would not go back? Was I to die here, in this city? I am not superstitious, I do not believe in premonitions, yet there it was, the conviction – no, the knowledge – that I would not return home again, ever. But then I thought: Home? I walked along the street in wonderment and muddled alarm, in the unfamiliar air, smelling the city's unfamiliar smells. At the sunlit corner I came upon the flower seller. She was seated beside her stall on a folding canvas stool. She was a foreigner, another refugee, I surmised, not Russian, this time, but a native of one of those statelets wedged like boulders of basalt, though beginning rapidly to crumble now, between the straining continental plates of East and West. Her skin was a dull shade of khaki, and she was dressed in what looked to me like a gypsy costume, with bangles and many cheap rings, and a brightly coloured headscarf knotted tightly under her chin. She was young, no more than thirty, I thought, but her face was the face of an old woman, pinched and sharp. She was talking to herself, rapidly, in a low, rhythmic singsong, a sort of atrophied whine of entreaty and complaint. I felt a jolt, as in the experience of putting a foot on to the non-existent top step of a staircase in the dark, when I saw from the filmed-over emptiness of her eyes that she was blind. She sensed my hovering presence at once, though, and fumbled a spray of lily-of-the-valley from the stall and offered it to me, her whine intensifying into a pitiful but curiously unurgent, almost indifferent, beseeching. I produced a bank note, in an absurdly enormous denomination, and she put out a thin, leaf-brown hand unerringly and took it, and stored it swiftly in an inner recess of her beaded bodice. I waited for my change, but none was offered. She sat and softly keened complainingly as before, oblivious of me now, it appeared, rocking herself back and forth on her stool. Only then did I notice that she was in an advanced state of pregnancy. Behind me a yellow-and-black tram went past, spitting big, soft, flabby sparks from its overhead connection and causing the pavement to quake. Stooping in the lee of all that force and clangour I turned and hurried on.
I dodged into the first caffè that I came to and sat at a table far at the back, as if to hide from a pursuer. My upper lip was damp with sweat and my heart was joggling from side to side like a cartoon alarm clock. What was the matter, why had that encounter so disturbed me? I recalled the old man in Paris, a distant relative on my mother's side, in his dank apartment in the Marais, pressing fistfuls of francs into my hands and reciting for me the names of people who might help me, in Lisbon, London, New York, chanting them over and over in an urgent murmur, as if they were the verses of the Law. Even now, half a century later, I can recall a surprising number of them – their names, that is, for of course I never went near the people themselves. They would all be dead by now, most likely, and their children grown up, become lawyers or doctors or big shots in the insurance business, who would not care who I was, or what I had made of myself, or how, for no good reason, I had deceived that old man in the Marais, telling him I was someone other than who I was. I lifted my coffee cup with a hand that was trembling again and sought to quell the memories welling up out of the murk of the past. What is remarkable is not that we remember, but that we forget – who was it that said that? I looked about me at the caffè's ornate trappings, the chandeliers, the potbellied coffee machines, the gleaming copper spigot at the bar from which a constant purling cord of water flowed. There were few patrons: a panting old man and his panting dog, a woman in an elaborate hat eating pastries, and a clownish, carrot-haired fellow wearing an ill-fitting, loud, checked blazer and a bright yellow shirt with a soiled collar, the wide wings of which were spread flat over the lapels of his blazer, who kept glancing surreptitiously in my direction with a faint, elusive leer. By the door three black-tied waiters loitered, exchanging desultory remarks and eyeing the toecaps of their patent-leather shoes. For a second, strangely, and for no reason that I knew, everything seemed to stop, as if the world had missed a heartbeat. Is this how death will be, a chink in the flow of time through which I shall slip as lightly as a letter dropping with a rustle into the mysterious dark interior of a mailbox? I paid my bill and rose abruptly and made for the door, again as if I were fleeing someone, and had the sensation, as so often at such precipitate moments, of having left something of myself behind, and thought that if I were to look back now I would see a crude parody of myself sprawled on the chair where I had been sitting, a limp, life-sized marionette, hands hanging and jointed limbs all awry, grinning woodenly at the ceiling.