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smell: we are a nation of smokers. Instead, allow the smell to remind you of Linas; it is good that you should consider Linas now.
    I have suggested this café not solely because it is one of those places which offers a 10 per cent reduction to all readers of this book. (Though this should of course be taken advantage of—and be sure to exhibit the book each time the waitress comes forward, and perhaps even to point at it indiscreetly.) But I recommend the café also for its excellent thick, bowel-moving coffee. In fact not even purely for the coffee, or the 10 per cent reduction, has this place been selected above all others; nor is it even for the scores of beautiful late-teenage waitresses that Louis has employed over the decades of his café’s existence to soften the hearts of hard old men and make them linger and care less for the thickness of their wallets. No, the principal reason for my recommendation is that sitting amongst you now as you drink the faultless coffee are various men and women from our city, regulars at Café Louis, who happen also to be characters (or the children of characters) from this book.
    Let us start with the couple in the darkest corner of the bar, two men, both sitting with coffee or beer in front of them, not talking but with anxious expressions on their faces, as if they dare not talk, as if they are waiting for something or someone. One is older, he is tall and podgy and nervous, he drums his fingers on the table’s surface; the other, shorter with greying hair, sighs noisily every now and then. But these two characters have yet to be introduced in this history (perhaps that is why they are so impatient), so let us leave them
alone for the time being with their secret anticipation. Let us turn instead to Louis himself, for he is invariably there, or at least his body is—his mind travels increasingly longer distances until one day, surely not far from now, it will never come back. Look at stationary Louis: what a wonderful wrinkled old fellow he is. Look how white his hair is, see how mildly he looks ahead—he had such a temper once that he smashed all the dozens of coffee cups and all the lines of beer glasses one evening, two decades back (out of love), as if all those glasses and cups were the containers of his happiness, and so had to be broken because he was miserable. Louis, even in his more active days, will never perform a major role in this history, though when his hair was black, his café was frequently visited by Alva Dapps, who liked to rest here from her walks around Entralla.
    Please note the wooden seat next to Louis. It is empty. It is always empty now. It was once filled with the ample behind of a man named Kurt Laudus. Here rests, if not a character from this book, then a ghost of a character from this book. The Kurt who once sat on this stool was the same Kurt who once worked in our Central Post Office, but who was never, despite a postmaster’s hopes, to fall in love with one Dallia Dapps, née Grett. Kurt loved only men, and his greatest love was Louis, a love which Louis’s customers never spoke openly about, for such a love was officially prohibited then. Kurt once squandered Louis’s ever-constant attentions on a student of archaeology from Entralla University, and it was because of this that Louis smashed all his cups and glasses and also, a short while later, Kurt’s face.
    But Kurt Laudus has left us now, embraced by a collapsing building one July 16th, during our earthquake adventure. The chair is occupied only by memory: histories from the brain of a vague and snow-white, gently dying, mourning lover.
    Here also should be, slouched over the bar, nonchalantly working through one of the day’s many tall, half-pint glasses of local blonde beer (highly recommended, incidentally), Lavinja Cetts, Ambras Cetts’s daughter. You will remember at what promise-filled moment we left Ambras’s career (and what results his over-eagerness
had on the progression