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world. And they will sit there again: the man erect, his single dreadful eye aimed straight at him, the hand which has poured the soda still on its return journey to a resting place closer to its owner. His aunt slouches, head leaning backward, eyes vacant, roving, legs stretching, opening, closing, on the too straight, too hard chair. A dolorosa. Himself he cannot see.
    "Well, how does it taste?" A definition was demanded from him, a protocol his senses were required to formulate before they could be distracted by any other sensation.
    "Of smoke, and of hazelnut."
    Thousands of whiskys he has drunk since. Malt, bourbon, rye, the best and the worst, straight, with water, with soda, with ginger ale. And sometimes, suddenly, that sensation would come to him again. Smoke — yes, and hazelnut.
    At each important moment in your life, he thought later, you ought to have an Arnold Taads, someone who asks you to describe exactly what you feel, smell, taste, and think when you experience your first fear, your first humiliation, your first woman. But the question must be asked always at the moment itself so that the protocol remains valid and the thought, the experience, can never be discoloured by later women, fears, humiliations. Precisely that definition of the first time — smoke and hazelnut — would set the tone for all future experiences, for they would be determined by the extent to which they either deviated from that first time, which had now become the yardstick for the future, or fell short of it, being no longer smoke or hazelnut. To see Amsterdam for the first time again, to enter the loved one with whom you have lived for years for the first time again, to hold a woman's breast in your hand for the first time again and to stroke it, and to keep the thoughts relating to this intact through the years, so that all those later times, all those other forms, cannot in due course betray, deny, cover up, that first sensation.
    Arnold Taads had at least set a standard for him on one sensuous experience. All the others would vanish irrevocably in later layers of his memory, interblended and corrupted in the way that his hand, which had caressed that first breast and closed those first dead eyes, had betrayed his memory, himself, and that first breast by having become older and misshapen. It was a hand showing the first brown freckles of old age, with thick veins, a corrupted, tainted, experienced forty-five-year-old hand, an early harbinger of death in which that former, slenderer, whiter hand had dissolved unrecognizably, unfindably, while he still called it "my hand", and would continue to do so until a later, living hand would lay it, dead, on his breast, crossed over the other that resembled it.
    "What do you do?" asked Arnold Taads.
    "I work in an office."
    "Why?" This belonged to the class of superfluous questions.
    "To earn money."
    "Why aren't you a student?"
    "I haven't got a high school diploma. I was expelled from school." He had been expelled from four schools, but it did not seem the right moment to divulge this. The eye, which had been fixed on him uninterruptedly, now moved without the head in which it was lodged turning with it, like a searchlight to his aunt, so that Inni was free to let his gaze wander about the room. On the mantelpiece lay twenty packets of cigarettes all of the same brand, Black Beauty. Beside them stood a number of silver and gold medals on a stand, each representing a skier.
    "What are those medals?" asked Inni.
    "We're talking about you now. Don't forget, I used to be a notary. I always finish things properly. What do you want to be in life?"
    "I don't know."
    He realized that this was not a good answer, but it was the only possible one, even to someone who liked to finish things properly. He had not the faintest idea. As a matter of fact, he was sure that not only did he never want to be anything but that he never would be anything either. The world was already chock-full of people who