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warmth and the window fogs over. On ceiling-high shelves books lose their titles and spines. The dark line of true reading. Take the yellow novels in their paper bag and go. It is time.
    She walks past shops that are closing one by one, the rain a mere veil now, but the greyness has won. There is the Europe of great literature, perhaps far away. But there is Ervant’s Europe, too, and it sometimes humiliates her, drives her away. Last week, for instance, a day that she hates to remember, when he arrived just after noon, agitated, but with a look of triumph. With a package all tied with string, something rendered shapeless by the mail. Under stamps with foreign faces, Ervant’s name was capped with accents. The package had been opened, then tied up again. “It’s for you, from my mother,” he said, excited. Did she remember that he had written his mother to tell about his life here and his future? Had he told her, or had she heard him? Until now, the mother had been just a shadow in a kerchief, left behind in Odensk, a setting of icons, embroideries, a circle of forests, once dark with murders, now with superstitions. He mentioned it only to mark the distance once more, to leave it again, break with it.
    Marie saw Odensk differently, inaccessible to her. It must resemble Montbrun, with its one road only slightly wider at the church, then arriving at once at the woods. Silent villagers, whose lives repeat themselves very early every day, with pauses only for fatigue. Its women are bent and always in skirts, and they make old things like wax or soap, they beat rugs. There were no young girls, and the reason for the men’s exile was in that absence, even though Ervant had never said such a thing.
    The package contained red slippers of imitation suede lined with plush, pointed like the footgear worn by ladies in hennins or by comic-book elves. The falseness of the fabric was obvious at once — the women there no longer wove, then, as they shivered by the fireplace — and these ridiculous slippers could be bought in the market.
    Ervant smiled. And Marie liked only thin sandals or bare feet on carpets. She carefully folded the paper, uncertain whether to lie but already trapped. Pretend. Diminish. Dissemble. She questioned him about what he had written to his mother, to apologize for having become a daughter-in-law because those people knew only women who are cold. She must show this present to her mother, tolerate the murmuring, get through the sarcasm, hear herself whisper to Ervant how much she appreciates the peasant woman’s kindness. And Marie was sure that he would smile again, shedding the discomfort of the man who had come here in ignorance.
    That evening, the last one before the week of night work, she had escaped with him to the movies so she wouldn’t be obliged to do anything more, to have a break before drawing out their time at the Paris Café, as usual. They had laughed, and she had let herself recover over brackish coffee because he knew a different way of talking. About the brass, the brown-gold Turkish coffee served there by every woman from the engraved pot she is given in the days of her beauty. They grow old in silence, in the presence of men, he says, and if he wants nothing of those women it is because they end up chattering among themselves, hating the daytime. He wants Marie with him in the light.
    She doesn’t know if she prefers this possessiveness, but it causes less pain than does affection in the guise of red imitation suede. She doesn’t want his child: she simply wants him to close the door on her, to leave her frozen there and then awaken her. In settings they will devise together: sheets of satiny raw silk perhaps, a bed of unvarnished wood, a diamond-shaped vase on a low table, lamps that only faintly illuminate walls painted grey, walls painted blue.
    Magazine images, which she confuses with intensity. She knows when it is five o’clock, as it