Am Abend, wenn die Glocken Frieden läuten,
Folg ich der Vögel wundervollen Flügen,
Die lang geschart, gleich frommen Pilgerzügen,
Entschwinden in den herbstlich klaren Weiten.

Hinwandelnd durch den dämmervollen Garten
Träum ich nach ihren helleren Geschicken
Und fühl der Stunden Weiser kaum mehr rücken
So folg ich über Wolken ihren Fahrten.

Da macht ein Hauch mich von Verfall erzittern.
Die Amsel klagt in den entlaubten Zweigen.
Es schwankt der rote Wein an rostigen Gittern,

Indes wie blasser Kinder Todesreigen
Um dunkle Brunnenränder, die verwittern,
Im Wind sich fröstelnd blaue Astern neigen.

- ‘Der Verfall,’ Georg Trakl

They met on a bus during a trip to an exhibition of drawings and sketches by the Austrian painter Egon Schiele. Martin was coming from Prague and Lenka had got on in a tiny village where she was staying for a while with her mother.
         There was hardly anyone else on the bus, she remembered. When he asked her for directions, she saw straightaway that she was capable of becoming involved with him. He had a lost, vulnerable look that she thought interesting, though at first she thought he was a little scared of her.
         When it became obvious that they were both going to the exhibition, his guardedness fell away and they decided to go together.
         They walked around the brightly-lit gallery, which had something of a castle’s illogical distribution of space, with one large hall deferring to the occasional alcove where one of them might spend some time considering a drawing. They were nearly all ink drawings, some coloured. He became lost in these lone, splayed figures, particularly the women. She too was fascinated by these works and tried to see what he saw, though some were impenetrable in their solitariness. Was it the obscenity of these descriptions of human existence or the profundity of the emotion that had locked onto him, as if that emotion had spilled out of the figures like the insides of fish being gutted? She suspected that he hadn’t seen too many of the artist’s works before this, except the most well-known, the ones that occasionally graced the cover of a novel. Surely, and this was confirmed later, these had hardly been seen outside Austria.
         She was in a quandary. She knew an attachment could start up with him, having reached a point in her attraction where a decision either way could just as easily be the result of a coin toss; it was only a question of whether she would let herself go along with it. She felt both in command and irresistibly pulled along by the situation.
         On the way out of the gallery, there was a simple, unlikely moment when they touched hands as they reached for a door handle.
         “I didn’t see where you got on the bus,” he said a little later.
         “It’s not far from here.”
         “I’m lucky you can speak English.”
         She smiled, revelling in the simplicity of their communication. She had lived in Prague and worked on foreign films made partly in the capital. She was used to Czech men showing the ribald, manly side of themselves, foreign men trying to outwit her with intellectually artistic mind games, a way of lulling her into a position of surrender she did not take to. She had learned to dress like many Westerners, in DM boots and heavy leather, which she combined with a business-like manner and compactness of purpose and comportment. Neither kind of man actually liked this show of independence.
         “You’re looking for something here?” she asked, as they started that first aimless walk together.
         “I’m an open book as far as Czechos … I mean the Czech Republic, is concerned. I’ve been in Hungary and Poland, though, and other parts of Europe.”
         “You’re running away from something?”
         He balked at the suggestion, so English.
         “No, I’m like anyone in my position, widening my horizons.”
         “You like to see the poverty of Eastern Europe? You think of yourself as a conqueror?”
         She wasn’t speaking to Martin. She was speaking to a series of faceless foreign men who had forced themselves on her, over her.
         But the comment had affected him, she could see.
         “I’m sorry. It’s got nothing to do with you. I …”
         “Are you staying here in Ceské Krumlov?” he said, getting over her sudden attack. “The place looks extraordinary. We could see some of it together.”
         “I think that would be lovely.”

“What is that building there?” he said pointing to a tower that looked like something out of a Grimm tale. It had several pastel-coloured sections in different styles, though the overall impression was one of Baroque helter-skelter, almost folly. He thought it even inclined a little. He had not seen the Pisa tower and wondered if this building didn’t hold some of the fascination of its more famous cousin.
         She should have known what it was, but she said she had never spoken to anyone who actually knew. Now that she was forced to think about it, she came to the conclusion that it was like a collective mirage in the town. Nobody spoke of it, nobody could say anything for certain about its origins or purpose, there were no postcards. And most probably, the authorities would go on letting it crumble away, as they had done most things for the last two decades.
         They tried to get in, but it was closed, with no explanation as to when or whether indeed it was ever open for a tour. They went on a long walk up to the castle on the hill, during which the town took on an even more picturesque, fairy-tale aspect than before, an effect heightened by the falling snow and the weir that crossed a section of river.
         As soon as it got dark, they went eating, a pursuit they found they had in common with a coinciding metabolism to match. He tasted Czech dumplings in a beery stew for the first time and fell in love with the dish, though the lean sliver of meat that finally surfaced he found insubstantial. He started talking about how right he found those images of Schiele’s women, that the human element came to the fore more than any other aspect. She said she found them debasing and erotic at the same time. She interpreted his attention to the subject as a kind of need to come to terms with an idea of women which lacked actual involvement with a woman herself.
         Then he began to flounder, casting out a net to make all kinds of connections, usually through Czech films, or some other art that they might share. She found this funny and endearing, though at times she knew he could have been talking to any attractive woman her age.
         Not long after dark they found themselves in a cavernous wine bar sitting as close to an open coal fire as they could get without setting themselves alight. They were drinking red wine, and the awkward stumblings of their first contact on the bus seemed like a distant country now, only five or six hours later.
         She found the hardened wall of pseudo-antagonism towards him softening. She was no longer speaking to a cross-section of foreigners but someone who was falling over himself to gain her attention, and beyond that someone so painfully earnest that many women must have found it off-putting.
         By the time they left the wine bar, they knew they wanted to spend more time together. In a picturesque street not far from the centre of town, they struck a deal with a small hotel owner and found themselves on a mini-tour of a turquoise-walled pension. There were no unpleasant smells; the rooms were neither overscented nor mildewy.
         The attitude of the landlady, despite a disconcerting stare occasioned by an eye impairment, seemed to bestow her blessing on this innocuous coming together of souls.
         Not long after the door was closed on them, they came together as if at impossible angles, though this might have been Lenka’s way of describing their mutual state of inebriation. His performance evidently did not match his outward excitement; it was rather his tenderness that captured her that first night. That night’s lovemaking was like the continuous layers of snow outside falling constantly to rearrange themselves in different patterns, sometimes left pure, then to be overlaid by newer ones, sometimes to have unpredictable tracks ridden through them. It was predominantly a moonlit scene she still saw in her mind’s eye. He, as he told her the next morning, had had a nightmare, and could not remember where the lovemaking had merged with sleep. At one point he thought he had awoken to find himself weighed down by massive thighs which had something of the shape of sea lions. These thighs gleamed in the dark, with silvery strips of light shining across transverse patterns of green and grey. He said the colour reminded him of the muddy brew of silt and effluent at the bottom of the docks in Deptford in London. He could not move this lumpen body on top of him, until he finally managed to jerk an arm and woke up into real darkness.
         She was not depressed by the juxtaposition of this vision, which he later called ‘the decay’ after it had appeared a few more times, with what in the course of the night became a beautiful experience. In fact they had drifted in and out of sleep all night, sometimes huddling together as if from a storm or in an access of revived passion.
         From that first night they often recalled little images, he a small patch like cellulite crossing the surface of her thigh and disappearing into shadow like the last visible craters of the moon before they turned into the dark behind. Or (she) an old pock mark on his arm which looked like some new stellar explosion. There weren’t many nights like that, especially with a stranger, and they were not about to let it go.
         The fresh morning snow seemed to confirm that night in every detail. The fact of the snow (he); the glint of the sun on the wall across the street from their pension (she).
         The tower was still closed the next day, so they went to the exhibition again, then they walked along the river until they had to turn back. Soon he would have to return to Prague, to his teaching job, which mocked him from afar.
         He told her about a line from a Nabokov novel a friend had passed onto him in Prague, as if it had been a coded message to him:

there he is, a special, rare and as yet undescribed and unnamed variant of man, and he is occupied with God knows what, rushing from lesson to lesson, wasting his youth on a boring and empty task, on the mediocre teaching of foreign languages, when he has his own language, out of which he can make anything he likes – a midge, a mammoth, a thousand different clouds

         Was he really so vain? He had not as yet had even one story published yet, as far as she knew.

During the next year they went from weekend visits to marrying. She would move back to Prague and find film work again, he would continue teaching with always that lingering threat that one day he would get a breakthrough with his writing, in which case they would move to somewhere he could reap the laurels due to him, as if as a writer of fiction he would be in demand. Film-making he shunned, whilst adoring films. Which is why he never even visited the sets or even knew exactly what it was she did on them.
         The question was where to live. He hankered after living in one of those smoky Czech villages that you passed on the bus as it hurtled down a hillside, a window of one cottage glowing orangey-red from the coal fire from within. She wanted to get away from it, from those memories of her step-father’s clawing paws and his attacks on her mother, those beatings he gave his wife in bed, transmitted through the walls by muffled thuds, which it had taken her all too long to translate. Why it had come as a shock when he moved his attentions to her, she did not quite know. It had happened one afternoon when she was fourteen. She had come back thinking no one was home. Having showered, she skipped naked along the corridor humming a ditty. She interpreted the report of the sound as if it were a car backfiring. Then she realized that the sound had been the slap of a hand on her backside. She turned round to see her step-father’s rotund grinning face, but for a while neither of them gave anything away. Then her tears came, like a dam bursting.
         In the end they struck a deal. Martin gave up his hankering, which after all had been based on a falsely nostalgic idea of rural Czechness, for the more urban comforts that he had not expected they would be able to enjoy in Prague. She had savings in dollars from her work on films, so they moved into a roomy flat not far from the Vltava with satellite TV from all over Europe and a short tram ride to the castle. It was better than Paris.
         Had he felt he had made a sacrifice? Perhaps, but he never said anything to her. While his green-eyed, blonde beauty was off on location, he would sometimes retreat into a world of self-indulgent sleepy self-decay, trying to imagine what her new world was like, perhaps imagining the rapacious eyes of the film crews on her slim, black-stockinged legs that tapered into narrow, tightly-tied black leather boots. He would sometimes masturbate to this image of her or to a photograph of her. She had not been shocked or worried; he brought her a strange kind of calm, even when he was at his most introverted.
         And this is where it all came tumbling down.
         “You’re toying with me,” he once said after she returned from a two-week shoot.
         “Toying?”
         “It’s a joke you’re being married to me, a teacher, and only a lowly discardable English teacher in the middle of Europe, married to someone of your beauty.”
         This shocked her. She didn’t know where it was coming from. She attempted to take hold of this different person confronting her and turn what was going on into a game. There was hardly any point in trying to explain what he really meant to her—someone who had always responded to her as a person, who hadn’t sought to conquer and possess her. Where she should have said, “I love you. Don’t be silly,” she said, “What is it, Martin? What is it you want me to do? I’ve failed you in something?” It was a game she was starting, wasn’t it? A gamble, really, uncertain if there were two players here. She felt herself being drawn into something dark, emanating from a place that had no exact location except that Martin was a kind of medium for it, a channel. She was subjecting herself to his morbid fantasy. Yet it was not Martin, the pale sallow Englishman with the self-deprecating manner. “You’re a fantasy,” he said suddenly. “Don’t leave me,” he implored. Then he cried. Then almost as suddenly he commanded her in a harsh voice, “Take off your clothes.” She stared at him in disbelief. It wasn’t so much the content as the tone, the form of this command coming from Martin. And something else.
         Her father was standing before her in his white string vest and cheap tracksuit bottoms, the hair of his arms backlit absurdly like the sun’s aurora during an eclipse, centred by the frame of the kitchen door. He gave her no chance, caught her wrist in a vice-like grip, and dragged her into the room. She was down on her bed in a few seconds. She was so thin and he was so big and she had no chance. Till this day she could still see what she couldn’t have seen, his meaty cock burrowing inside her and the drizzly white stream that ran down her as she was unstoppered like a beer bottle.
         “Martin, you don’t have to tell me to do that.”
         “You mean you won’t?”
         He was coming closer. He surely would not be rough. Nothing like that had ever happened before between them. She smiled nervously, in spite of herself, halfway between wanting to say, This is a joke, isn’t it?, and a fear she had thought she had been shielded from for so long, the last barrier having disappeared with this man’s emergence in her life. But it was too late.
         He got hold of her left hand, she still remembered it was her left hand, twisted it into a lock with which he easily made her go down (it was a technique, she remembered thinking, one that required knowledge and practice), dragged her to the foot of the bed, and tried to twist her hand even further behind her back, as if he were lost here, holding out for some revelation, some vision, and when this vision did not materialize, suddenly stopped.
         Oh, my God, Martin. What did you do? What did you do?
         She repeated it endlessly, while he slunk off to the kitchen, opened the fridge door, took out a carton of milk, a glass from the cupboard, sat down there and slowly drank.
         She drifted into sleep. Maybe she did manage to convince herself after a while that it had been a nightmare.
         Until he came to her later in the night and put his arms around her, and started to whisper ‘sorry’ and talk about certain desires that had been building up in him all this time. And what did he want, what did he want from her? He wanted her to be something even less obtainable, he had all kinds of possible scenarios in his head, the kind of things you could imagine taking place in the underworld of the European sex industry. He seemed already to be pushing her into a story where she was lost in the heart of Europe.
         She left him after that, with the help of her family and her film contacts. For him, the network of relations in Bohemia might as well have been the jungles of Vietnam, whereas the alternative, a tour of the cities of Europe, which were the stopping-off points of the continental movie scene, would have been like a parody of his desires, only in reverse.
         When she thought back to those moments of peace in their marriage, she was reminded repeatedly of a poem by the Austrian poet Georg Trakl that Martin had sometimes talked of. It was called Verfall, or Decay, like his nightmare, and she was forced to conclude that he was seeing himself increasingly as a writer who aspired to a decadent vision, willing himself to an idea which in no way reflected the person he really was.

They came two or three times a month and the films were brutal. She had not known any of the men who took part in them apart from her father and her silently colluding mother. She could still remember the setting: the blushing rag doll on the chair with legs mockingly splayed as if it too were about to take part in the ritualized events; the crockery made and decorated by local artisans proud of their honest work; the burnished wooden sideboard and cupboard. There were professional lights, a cameraman, a ‘director’, two more actors, one a sixty-year-old man who looked like a university professor or one of those men of authority you see giving their opinions on world events, the other a young blonde girl in pony tails, not very dissimilar in looks to her, and a make-up woman. Usually, they would be caned or spanked by this man after he found them in some illicit act. The scenarios were simple, but they were mined for all their visual potential, whether it was the sight of pale flesh, reddened flesh, tears, or the sheer helplessness of the girls’ situation.
         She had to invent all kinds of reasons not to play sport or shower at school, the real place, that is, where nothing like what had happened in the films ever actually happened.
         Martin knew nothing of this.

Her first client was too much like Martin in almost every respect except that he was Czech.
         He looked around her room with as much curiosity as he did at her; he seemed particularly interested in the lonely little alcove with the sink screened off only by a half-drawn, dingy red curtain. Of course, he could not see the second door at the back of this area that connected her flat to Ralf’s, where Ralf had his ‘office’ and where he would sometimes summon her to service him.
         That first client’s efforts were embarrassed and insubstantial; she almost wanted to comfort him, take him by the hand and seduce him out of whatever failed marriage he was in. But after that, they got rougher, less worried about their abilities and more concerned about their control of the situation. Some were overly concerned with symmetry, others sometimes asked for some colourful drape to be put across the bed. And though the majority showed a penchant for slapping her and she could at any time call out for Ralf, she forced herself to endure it in the hope of understanding it, maybe of understanding Martin, but she couldn’t.
         She became pregnant. She thought it would all end with this, but Ralf realized it actually raised her asking price. It could have been Ralf’s, but it could just as easily have been the child of a hundred men. She didn’t want it, but he kept such a strong watch over her she couldn’t even have aborted it herself.
         So there was a trade in pregnant women in a small Czech town where that first winter trucks drove through the rainy main street, invariably going straight by, but sometimes noticing the unsubtle red-lit windows.
         She had the child. The child was taken from her.
         Then came the final transition, one that Martin would have been curiously proud of. A client came in one day and offered to take her away. When János mentioned films, she was not fooled. It would mean moving to Hungary, though, maybe eventually Holland or Belgium. It was safer and better paid, he said.
         She was not in love with him, but he had a certain infectious entrepreneurial naïvety that masked well the reality of the business he was involved in. His English, their common language, made her laugh, with its phrases that did not sound quite right, but nevertheless came over as strangely original.
         János came back and smuggled her out. It confirmed her view that Ralf had been an amateur. He had had no ambition. He would use up the resources he had until they dried up, as her body would be, to end up like a mummy under its wrappings, skin tightened to torso, head and arms, drained of fluid.
         She had never been to Budapest before, and she was not prepared for the friendliness so available on the surface of things.
         János had a flat overlooking the Józséf körút, within view of Rákóczi Square where very miserable-looking, miserably-dressed women stood in the cold in gaudy anoraks with their arms wrapped tightly about them, as if they were holding onto all their worldly possessions right there in the street. As comfortable as the flat was, that view of the square seemed to serve the function of reminding her that she could at any moment be sent back to the harsher end of the market.
         Yet sometimes, when the sun was angled in a certain way, and the girl in the flat next door was practising, Lenka almost succeeded in convincing herself that this was a satisfying life.
         They actually provided a make-up artist for the porno sessions for which, invariably, the crew and most of the cast were German. Sometimes, she wondered which was the greater invasion, this or the ever-present pushing outwards that had not abated after the Second World War. And yet sometimes she had to feel sorry for the occasional stud of the week when he couldn’t come on cue.
         They would usually film in a proper studio not far from the centre of town, so she would sometimes comfort herself with the thought that she would at least be home soon after the shoot finished.
         She had worked like this for about half a year when János changed. He started to show interest in other women, mainly other ‘actresses’. To this he added hitting Lenka. He was losing his grip on her, despite the beatings, which she would not take for long. Yet she could not do anything drastic without her passport, and she had no idea where he had put it. It had been one of the conditions of helping her escape Ralf.
         She could not have said when she became aware of the tomato-red koda always parked in the same position at a junction of the Józséf körút and a nearby side street, but she became used to the pattern of it pulling away whenever she came out of the apartment block. The plume of exhaust, the gear change, the untypically careful indicating despite evident haste, all of these lent it significance. A friend of János’s keeping an eye on her? It was the most likely explanation. It went on so long she knew she had to find out who it was.
         But before she had a chance to go into the matter, János told her about the new project. True, more and more, there was an attempt at a ‘story’. She could even see the frustrated strainings of the director to convince the crew as well as himself that there might be some artistic value in the project. And the director, Gert, was taking an interest in her.
         In one scene her breasts were tied so tight that they looked like small red puffed-up balloons filled with water. The ropes were attached to pulleys suspended from beams in a barn-like room. These ropes went up through the pulleys on either side of her and their loose ends were in turn held by two blank-faced, bored-looking crewers on either side of the room. Pulled on simultaneously, the ropes would stretch her beyond endurance. She could not remember how in the ‘plot’ of the film such a situation was supposed to come about, but she found herself at one point wondering what exactly the intention was; János was curiously taciturn suddenly. It was something indefinable, something to do with the way everyone’s eyes refused to make contact with hers that made her realize what they were actually going to do. They were going to suspend her from the beam by her breasts. Her heart started pounding. She shouted at them, tried to get free. “You bastards,” she screamed at János and Gert. “You haven’t got the nerve to do it yourselves.” Which was where János stepped in and knocked her out.
         The next thing she saw she assumed was a dream. As she was helped into János’s car, she thought she saw Martin walking by her on the pavement. Could it have been him? He could not have known where she was. And she was in such pain that she was probably delirious. She passed out again as soon as they drove off.
         Left alone for the first time in months, rolling through waves of dreams and pain, she awoke to the plangent sounds of violin chords and the sight of some flowers whose blurred form she had interpreted as an albino praying mantis. As if she were being prayed for. Over this she heard the sound of a young boy crying for its mother. Her baby had been a boy; that much she knew. She got up with difficulty, drawn by that sound, wearing nothing but a dressing gown. The voice took her further down, until she was looking out into the street. Then a coat was around her and she was just thankful for it, giving no thought to the face that followed the arms, wrapping the coat around her: she just assumed it was another of János’s guards, and succumbed to the inevitable.
         She was in his koda, lying on the back seat, she could tell that much, but she was drifting off. As used as she was to being escorted around by strangers, she found herself wondering where they could be going now. It wasn’t far. He must have carried her up to the flat. She had no recollection of the journey up the stairs. Then she was out again, sleeping for longer than she could remember.
         In the dream she was overcome by an intense feeling of dread. Some people were downstairs in the living room. She didn’t recognize the flat, but the people who were gathered were familiar without her being able to identify them, with the exception of Martin. Something terrible was going on, but there was nothing to see once she entered the room, except their startled expressions.
         When she actually woke out of the nightmare, her room was bathed in a deathly grey tinged with an ugly blue. She was certain she was back in János’s flat.
         When the door to her room opened, she saw the figure of a man standing above a thin carpet of red light and wondered if the nightmare had really ended after all.
         It all changed when she saw his face. Martin. Her suspicions of the last few weeks fell into place. She did not really know if she was happy. There was a lot to talk about, suddenly. She knew she could not and would not ever go back to János. But how to justify such a life?
         “I thought I saw you,” she said finally. “But how could you—”
         And then he went into one of his monologues, which he had been getting a name for, she heard later. It would not have been so memorable, she said, had it not had such an atmosphere of finality about it.
         “I came to work in Hungary, to put you and what I had done behind me. I got a teaching job, I started going out with another teacher, a Hungarian woman. I was even beginning to write again, feeling almost settled. Suddenly, she broke it off. She had a long-term long-distance lover who decided to move to Hungary. I began feeling sorry for myself and frustrated, as usual. I started going to the porn cinemas that were sprouting up about that time along the Erzsébet and Teréz körúts. I lost myself in their worlds, where no action ever seemed to have any consequence beyond that of pleasure or pain, where the real world was suspended to such a degree that the inevitability of certain actions became either painfully senseless or beautifully seductive. I developed a taste for films that had a patina of a story, but not too much, where the director was striving to achieve some kind of artistic goal without ever compromising the main aim, the money shot, as it’s sometimes referred to.
         “I started to list the names of the production companies, ‘actors’, ‘actresses’, even making a note of the story lines, and locations. It became like a puzzle. To make some sense of it all. Why were these people brought together to provide such pleasure for the viewer? It seems crazy, but you forget the money aspect, really, even in real cinema. You think that these people are there to make you happy, they are doing it for you personally.
         “Then I saw you, in these films, of course.
         “I knew at that moment I’d lost you a second time, but I’d developed a habit of going to porn cinemas by then, and I couldn’t have ignored you completely even if I’d wanted to. I know that’s a weak excuse. I saw the way you were being treated. You might laugh at my naïvety, but how do you know, as a viewer, how much is acting and how much actual? I thought that your rôles were developing, that there was a suppressed ambition in the whole thing. I sometimes think I’d like to meet this János person, but I’d be too afraid.
         “You probably want to know how I found you. It wasn’t from ‘clues’ in the films’ minimal credits. I simply saw you one evening with this unlikely group. Just as in the films, though, I wasn’t one hundred percent certain it was you. I kept looking for that otherwise insignificant mole on your calf, and sometimes I saw it or thought I saw it, but, in the street, you were usually wearing jeans and in the films the lighting or your movement would always somehow interrupt it, even when I finally managed to get a copy of Delay at Budapest. I love the title, by the way.
         “I haunted the area around the körút where I first noticed you, until I came across you and your gang again. I saw you go into that building. So I kept a kind of watch, in between my lessons in the language school here, a bit like Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver, I know, but you were … are, my ex-wife, and it has given my life some purpose. I don’t expect you to take me back, I’m not asking for that. You may think it’s bizarre, but I can’t help thinking that, deep down, you were doing this for me, rather than against me. You remember those things I whispered to you that last night?
         “In the end, though, I just want you to be safe. I’m not going to stay in Hungary. It’s finished for me here now, but I still feel a nostalgia for your own country, and I want to live in Prague a while.”
         She didn’t tell him about the child. He gave her enough money to go into hiding near Ceské Krumlov. She heard that János had paid a visit there and looked around some nearby towns, but he’d soon given up.
         She could not help but worry about Martin, full of contradictions that would never be resolved unless there was a breakthrough of some kind. Her own thinking was that he was afraid of ending up a nobody, and in the process hurt others, if not himself.
         One day, as the last of the snow was melting, she shook herself out of her self-induced lethargy, shrugged off her fear of being seen by János, and took a bus back to Ceské Krumlov.
         Nothing had changed. She had expected details to be altered. Perhaps there would not be quite so much mist over the weir near the castle; perhaps even the inclination of that magical tower would seem different; the bridge over the river and the curious viaducts linking some of the older buildings would be differently located. But no. They were all frozen in place, as if the snow had never gone away, as if she had stumbled on a block of ice that had preserved her memory of the town and she were wiping away the snow.
         She went to as many of the places she could remember going to with Martin. She visited the very respectable Egon Schiele Art Center, she went up to the main castle, she located and checked into the hotel they had stayed in, managing to obtain the exact room where they had made love, and found the wine cellar, though it was too early to go in. She was not completely convinced this was what she wanted, to replay events like this, without the person, that hopeless Martin on whose very being the meaning of her experiences here were precedented. Yet were these not her own new experiences, a new chapter?
         Something was missing. Martin, of course, though that could never be—now. Then she remembered. The tower! The tower which they had not been allowed to enter. She could imagine how he would write or even direct the last scene of their story: her running up to that Baroque tower, to the soundtrack of Last Tango in Paris, most likely.
         She walked at a stately pace and was taken aback when she realized it was open for business. It had grated on her why it had been closed that time. She ascertained from the ticker seller the reason why. It had been closed for renovations for the last two years. Yes, a simple enough answer. Would that all mysteries could be answered so easily.
         She climbed the numerous steps, passed through the various stages, the little displays, all the time feeling as if she were a tiny glacé figurine being manoeuvred by a chef preparing a giant wedding cake. Would her groom be there waiting for her?
         She looked out over the town. She had not noticed before now how the river made a shape like an inverted octopus. And all those tiny pretty Czech villages, with their hardworking families, the fathers who would come home from the factories, or the pubs, the wives who would keep up all those good traditions. Somewhere, out there, was her son, and Martin. Perhaps she had let them both go too easily. She did not expect a fairy-tale ending, but Martin owed her a satisfying one, to put the final touch to this ridiculous sequence of events. Somewhere out there, yes.

Brian Howell lives and teaches in Japan. He has been publishing stories since 1990. Print publications include Critical Quarterly, Panurge, Stand, Neonlit: The Time Out Book of New Writing, Vol.1, and Leviathan Quarterly. Online, his stories have appeared in Linnaean Street, The Richmond Review (U.K.), and Painted Moon Review. He is currently working on his fourth novel and on a collection of stories dealing with a variety of aspects of modern-day Japanese life which is due to be published next year. His novel based on the life of Jan Vermeer, The Dance of Geometry, was published in March 2002 by The Toby Press and is available at Amazon and other online booksites. This story is adapted from an as yet unsold novella, The Study of Sleep.