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improvement.
    She did not mention it. She asked about August, first it
was only about him. Whether he lay awake
at night, whether there were difficulties in
sharing a room with him, whether he talked about his parents, to all of which I could reply in the
negative.
    She was very aware. I tried to figure out what she was
getting at, but she
gave nothing away.
    Then she said, "You know Katarina from
Second Year Second ary?"
    The question was posed incorrectly. It was her
first inaccuracy ever.
    I had worked out the rule behind her questions long before. She began by inquiring about my
growing pains or my general state of health,
or whether there was anything that had happened since last time that I would like to tell her about. Questions the answers to which
were already known and which were posed simply to get me to say something, which I always did, although never
very much. After that
came the questions about my past and what I dreamed about at night.
    When she mentioned Katarina, it
was different. It was a trap, the first she had set for me.
    She must have known that Katarina
and I had been found to gether during a period. But she asked anyway. To see
whether I would reply in the negative.
    "We met in the
library," I said, "twice."
    She asked me what
we had talked about. Then I told an untruth.

There was no harm intended, but she had set a trap. One
was forced into it.
    "She said she
would tell you herself when she comes up here."
    There was a brief
pause before she answered.
    "She has not
done so."
    Thereby betraying the fact that Katarina had been up
there, that she, too, had been referred to
the psychologist. And that she had not told her anything special about us.
    Then she asked how the conversation had come about. I
knew I would have to answer.
    "It was me," I said,
"I wanted to find out what it was like to be alone with a girl."
    It was not untrue. And you could see that it satisfied her. This was a rule I had discovered about her. Confessing to
minor viola tions could lead to a reward of a
sort.

TWELVE

 
     
            A t the Lars Olsen Memorial Home they had a book—I borrowed it from the chief
physician—about great clocks through the ages.
    In China, before Christ, a clock
consisted of concentric circles of incense through which a glowing ember burned its way,
thus keep ing pace
with the day by way of constantly changing scents.
    At the same time, in Egypt, there was a grid—five hundred
feet long, etched into rock—over which the shadow of an obelisk trav eled with the sun.
    In Europe, in the Middle Ages, there was a brass disk marked with a hypothetical stereographic
projection of the heavens across which moved a mechanical model of the
celestial bodies in bronze and wood. It was called an astrolabe and called to mind another of the
clocks in the book—the Chinese Sung dynasty's celestial clock: a model of the solar system
mounted on a tower thirty feet high and powered by a water wheel as it presented the
positions of the planets;
the movements of the heavens; the months, days, hours, and quarter-hours.
    The book had
pictures.

It seemed so obvious then. That such precise clocks had always been regarded as technical
marvels, more than anything else. They had not
so much served another end—such as telling the time. They had been an
end in themselves.
    At the end of the fourteenth
century many major European cities acquired a town clock.
    In 1370, for example, the French
duke Jean de Berry paid 70 percent of the
building costs on a very grand clock tower for Poi tiers. Where Charles Martel had stopped the Moors.
    This may well have been the
first instance, anywhere in the world, of a timepiece that registered the passage of the hours
being acces sible to
the general public.
    But even then it was as though the time that the clock
measured was not put to any use. For by far the majority of Europe's popu lation, namely, those living outside of the
towns—and, strictly speaking, also
for those