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cunning andfreedom from squeamishness.) Of course, in prison there were deprivations, and they were hard to bear, I will not deny it. I had thought it would be women I would want when I got out, women and silk suits and crowded city streets, all that rich world from which I had been isolated for so long, but here I was, pottering about in this rackety house on a crop of rock in the midst of a waste of waters. I had my books, my papers, my studies, playing the part of Professor Kreutznaer’s amanuensis, supposedly aiding him in the completion of his great work on the life and art of Jean Vaublin for which the world, or that part of it that cares about such things, has grown weary of waiting. The fiction that I was no more than his assistant was one that, for reasons not wholly clear to me, it suited us both to maintain; the truth is, before I knew it he had handed over the task entirely to me. I was flattered, of course, but I did not deceive myself as to his opinion of my abilities; it is true, I have a capacity to take pains, learned in a hard school, but I am no scholar. It was not regard for me but a growing indifference to the fate of his life’s work that led the Professor to abdicate in my favour. No, that’s not right. Rather it was, I think, an act of expiation on his part. He like me had sins to atone for, and this sacrifice was one of the ways he chose. Or was it, on the contrary, as the weasel of doubt sometimes suggests to me, was it his idea of a joke? Anyway, no matter, no matter. My name will not appear on the title page; I would not want that. A brief acknowledgment will do; I look forward to penning it myself, savouring in advance the reflexive thrill of writing down my own name and being, even if only for a moment, someone wholly other. If, that is, it is ever to be finished. I am happy at my labours, happier than I expected or indeed deserve to be; I feel I have achieved my apotheosis. My time is wonderfully balanced between the day’s rough chores and those scrupulosities and fine discriminations that art history demands, this saurian stillness before the shiningobjects it is my task to interrogate. In these soft, pale nights, while a grey-blue effulgence lingers in the window, I work at the kitchen table at the centre of a vast and somehow attentive silence, doing my impression of a scholar, sorting through sources, reading over the Professor’s material, in Licht’s exuberant typewriting, and writing up my own notes; collating, imbricating, advancing by a little and a little. It is a splendid part, the best it has ever been my privilege to play, and I have played many. I am in no hurry; the lamplight falls upon me steadily, my bent head and half a face, my hand inching its way down the pages. Now and then I pause and sit motionless for a moment, a watchman testing the night. I have a gratifying sense of myself as a sentinel, a guardian, a protector against that prowler, my dark other, whom I imagine stalking back and forth out there in the dark. Where can he be hiding, if he is still here? Could he have got back into the house, could he be skulking somewhere, in the attic, or in some unused room, nibbling scraps purloined from the kitchen and watching the day gradually decline towards darkness, biding his time? Is he in the woodpile, perhaps? If he is here it is the girl he is after. He shall not have her, I will see to that.
    So anyhow: I came here, and I settled down, if that is the way to put it. I was content. This was a place to be. I did not travel to the mainland. No one had said I might not do so, but I seemed to feel an unspoken interdiction. If there was such a rule it must have been of my own making, for I confess I had no desire to realight from Laputa into the land of giants and horses. Yes, I was happy to bide here, with my catalogues and my detailed reproductions, polishing my galant style in preparation for the great work that lay before me impatient for my attentions. Ah, the little