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bed listening intently to this internal turmoil, to the tentative scrabbling and the cautious nibbling; then it all quieted down, she even got up, rummaged through her first husband’s letters, burned some of them, sorted certain exceedingly old small objects—a child’s thimble; a mesh change purse of her mother’s; something else, thin, golden, fluid as time itself. At Christmastime she again grew ill, and her daughter’s planned visit came to nought.
    He was unfailingly attentive. He made mooing sounds of consolation and accepted her awkward caresses with concealed hatred when, on occasion, she tried to explain, grimacing, that not she but it (a little finger indicated her belly) was responsible for their nocturnal separation, and it all sounded exactly as if she were pregnant (a false pregnancy, a pregnancy with her own death). Always even-tempered, always self-controlled, he sustained the smooth tone he had assumed from the start, and she was grateful for everything—for the old-fashioned gallantry with which he treated her, the polite form of address that in her estimation gave tenderness a dignified dimension,the way he satisfied her whims, the new radio phonograph, his docile acquiescence to twice changing the nurses who were hired to care for her around the clock.
    On trifling errands, she would let him out of her sight no farther than to the corner room, while, when he went out on business, they jointly established beforehand the precise duration of his absence and, since his work did not call for a fixed schedule, on each occasion he had to battle—gaily, but with clenched teeth—for every grain of time. Impotent rage writhed inside him, the ashes of crumbling combinations stifled him, but he was sick of trying to hasten her demise; the very hope of it had become so vulgarized that he preferred to court its antithesis: perhaps by summer she would recover to such a degree that she would let him take the girl to the seashore for a few days. But how could he lay the groundwork? Originally he had imagined that it would be easy, sometime, under the guise of a business trip, to whip over to that town with its black church and its gardens reflected in the river; but when he once mentioned that, by a stroke of luck, he might be able to visit her daughter if he had to travel to a certain destination (he named a nearby city), he had the sensation that some vague, tiny, almost subconscious ember of jealousy had suddenly enlivened her hitherto nonexistent eyes. He hastily changed the subject, and contented himself with the thought that she herself apparentlyhad promptly forgotten that idiotic flash of intuition, which there was of course no point in reigniting.
    The regularity of the fluctuations in her health seemed to him to embody the very mechanics of her existence; that regularity became the regularity of life itself; for his part, he noticed that his work, the precision of his eye, and the faceted transparency of his deductions had begun to suffer from the ceaseless vacillation of his soul between despair and hope, the perpetual ripple of unsatisfied desires, the painful burden of his rolled-up, tucked-away passion—the entire savage, stifling existence that he, and only he, had brought upon himself.
    Sometimes he would walk past young girls at play, and sometimes a pretty one would catch his eye; but what that eye perceived was the senselessly smooth movement of slow-motion film, and he himself marveled at how unresponsive and occupied he was, how specifically the sensations recruited from every side—melancholy, avidity, tenderness, madness—were now concentrated upon the image of that absolutely unique and irreplaceable being who used to rush past with sun and shade contending for her dress. And sometimes, at night, when everything had quieted down—the radio phonograph, the water in the bathroom, the nurse’s soft white footfalls, that endlessly protracted sound (worse than any bang) with which she closed