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love potions. Hate potions to sprinkle, deadly, round a rival’s house? That’s witch doctor magic, not healing. The patrons, beer in hand, talk to him, talk out the inner self. As hereluctantly continues to recount, he says that he observes their body language, he gathers what lies unconfessed between the words. No. He doesn’t tell them what to do, dictate a solution to confound, destroy the enemy, he directs them to deal with themselves.
    â€˜A psychotherapist! Oh of course, that’s it. Dear Anthony!’ He’s proved psychotherapy was first practised in ancient Africa, like so many Western ‘discoveries’ claimed by the rest of the world. Susan puts an arm round his shoulders to recognise him as an original.
    And aren’t they, all three. How shall we do without them? They’re drifting away, they’re leaving the table, I hear in the archive of my head broken lines from adolescent reading, an example that fits Edward’s definition of Western orientalism, some European’s version of the work of an ancient Persian poet. It’s not the bit about the jug of wine and thou. ‘. . . Some we loved, the loveliest and the best . . . Have drunk their cup a round or two before / And one by one crept silently to rest.’ Alone in the Chinese restaurant, it comes to me not as exotic romanticism but as the departure of the three guests.
    I sat at the table, you didn’t turn up, too late.
    You will not come. Never.

a frivolous woman

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    WHEN she died they found in an old cabin trunk elaborate as a pirate’s chest a variety of masquerade costumes, two sequinned masks, and folders protecting dinner menus flourished with witty drawings dedicated by the artists.
    She had brought the treasure trove from Berlin as a refugee from Nazi extermination of Jewish Germans. She left behind, dispossessed of, the fine house where the dinners were given, the guests famous opera singers, orchestra conductors, painters, art collectors and Weimar Republic politicians—Walter Rathenau, the Liberal last Minister of Foreign Affairs in that government, a regular at table, had been assassinated by Right Wing radicals.
    Her family in the country of emigration lifted this cache forty years later, laughing, shaking heads, grimacing incredulity. One of the adult grandsons, for whom she was history, thought but did not speak: she rescued this junk to bring along while others like her were transported in cattle trucks.
    Old Grete! Her son would tell how at party gatherings inthe adoptive country to which he had gained entry for himself, his wife and mother, he was as a young man embarrassed when she would disappear to another room briefly and reappear in the doorway, castanets and mantilla, singing and stamping as Carmen. But he must have been habituated
in utero
to her gregarious flair for performance, because the night of his birth is celebrated on a poster announcing the opening of an exhibition of paintings by the Impressionist Lovis Corinth at a fashionable Berlin gallery; confident that with a second pregnancy she could calculate the progression of birth-pains, his mother had said nothing about them and accompanied her husband to an occasion she would never allow herself to miss, a
vernissage
. On arrival back home, she delivered the boy. The story is verified by his birth certificate (among emigration papers) and the reproduction of the poster in an art book.
    What her son didn’t tell was the other story of her emigration. The Carmen act, which many people found part of their heightened party mood, was significant in that she had at the same time settled in a boardinghouse apparently without remarking comparison with the elegant rooms that now housed some Third Reich official. But in 1939 she insisted, against her son’s vociferous objections, on going back to Europe. How could she abandon Heinrich! She must visit her elder son, who had chosen