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are open, Anna holding her hand out of the window into the air rushing by, and Alice calls out: Turn right! Here. Bear right, up there on the right towards that restaurant, keep to the right, go past it. Right, exactly. We’re almost there.Fifty metres from here, Conrad had written, there’s a spot where five roads come together. Take the one that leads through the forged-iron gate, the ‘fifth road’. It leads to the yellow house.
    The fifth road is a dirt road. To the left a little stream, an olive grove, and among the trees, goats raising their heads, indifferent. The car rocks from side to side. They pass Lotte and Conrad’s house, a large, old, converted barn in the bend of the road on the side of the mountain, tall windows facing the lake, shutters closed tight. Ahead, at the end of the road, the yellow house. An Italian palazzo. Shuttered up, ivy, two balconies, one facing the mountain, the other the lake. A terrace, fig trees, agaves, and bougainvillea. From the back seat Anna says, You can actually hear the cicadas. There is rapt amazement in her voice. They get out of the car, leaving the doors open and going off in different directions.
    Alice walked up the dirt road to Conrad and Lotte’s house. Pebbles in her sandals. She looked up at the black mountain behind the house and ducked. She climbed the broad steps between huge, tropical lavender bushes. Cardinal beetles, bright red, their little bodies chained to each other. In a hurry. And a rustling in the trees, a light breeze. Lotte was sitting on the terrace, which was empty except for a green hose on a drum, a grey stone sphere and the chair in which she sat. Three doors on the lower part of the house, two of them closed, the middle one slightly ajar. Lotte got up as Alice reached the terrace and came towards her; theygreeted each other with a tentative embrace, cautiously, as if, at a touch, the other might dissolve into thin air.
    There you are, Lotte said. She smiled and then stopped smiling. When she wasn’t smiling the creases around her eyes were white. Lotte was seventy years old. Conrad too. More than twenty-five years older than Alice. Did everything go all right. Lotte said. Did you have a good trip. She asked the questions so that they sounded like statements but still she expected an answer.
    Yes, Alice said. Everything went well. It was strenuous, but now we’re here, and we’re happy to be here. Lotte, I’m so very happy.
    Lotte said, Conrad is sick. Unfortunately he’s sick, nothing serious, only a little fever, but he’s in bed.
    She indicated the middle door; it was dark behind the door, not a sound to be heard.
    He doesn’t want you to see him lying in bed; he doesn’t want that. He’ll come to see you later, Lotte smiled again, a smile somewhere between irony and sadness. She was tanned from the Italian sun, wore a lightweight linen dress, unwrinkled, pale violet, falling in precise folds, and a necklace of silvery, smooth beads. She looked neat and rested; Alice thought of all the motorway rest stops of the past ten hours, of the radio music in the toilets, the smell of urine and disinfectant, the broken soap dispensers, of her own exhausted face reflected in a mirror of scratched tin. She was glad she didn’t have to say hello to Conrad just now; he would be able to retain his image of her arrival: a picture of an arrival.
    Come, said Lotte softly. I’ll unlock the yellow house for you.
    She held up two small keys that she had probably been holding in her hand all the while. She had been sitting on the terrace, holding the keys, waiting for them. And, Alice thought, it was really Conrad who had invited them. It had been his invitation; of course he must have discussed the invitation with Lotte, but it had been his idea. Come and visit us and bring along whomever you like. Alice decided to ask Anna, she didn’t want to go anywhere without Anna. And she picked the Romanian