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theatre, but by this time his art had progressed and now he offered a trip in a time machine. Customers were invited to take off their clothes and don all manner of period costumes provided for them by the impresario. When they were suitably garbed, the lights dimmed and Mendoza projected upon a screen various old newsreels and an occasional early silent comedy. These films had, as it were, slots in them in which the members of the audience could insert themselves and so become part of the shadow show they witnessed. I spoke with a man who, as a child, had been in this fashion an eye-witness of the assassination at Sarajevo. He said it had been raining heavily at the time and everybody moved with the spasmodic jerkiness of clockwork figures. This showman, Mendoza, must have been one of Dr Hoffman’s first disciples or even perhaps an early missionary. Hoffman’s undergraduate class list included a fellow student named Mendoza, said to be psychologically unstable, who did not complete his course of study. But one day a drunken crowd burned down his booth and Mendoza was burned with it, so badly that he died a few days later in some anonymous charity ward, attended by Sisters of Mercy. What linked him unambiguously to Hoffman had been his repeated mutterings: ‘Beware the Hoffman effect!’ On his board-hard death bed, under a casque of lint, he muttered away, an elderly nun remembered. But now Mendoza was irretrievably dead and the Minister wondered if he were not a red herring.
    The Minister had built up a hypothetical model of the invisible Dr Hoffman much as Dr Drosselmeier had built up a model of the unreality atom. From the scientist’s academic record, we could see there was scarcely a branch of human knowledge with which he had not familiarized himself. We knew of his taste for the occult. We knew his height, his size in hats, shoes and gloves; his favourite brands of cigars, eau de cologne and tea. The Minister’s model was that of a crazed genius, a megalomaniac who wanted absolute power and would go to extreme lengths to grasp it. He thought Hoffman was satanic and yet I knew my master too well not to realize he was tainted with a little envy for the very power the Doctor abused with such insouciance, the power to subvert the world. This did not lessen my admiration for the Minister. On the contrary, I was so lacking in ambition myself that the spectacle of his, which ravaged him, impressed me enormously. He was like a Faust who cannot find a friendly devil. Or, if he had done so, he would not have been able to believe in him.
    The Minister had all the Faustian desires but, since he had rejected the transcendental, he had clipped his own wings. In my meditative days, I used to think that the Faust legend was a warped version of the myth of Prometheus, who defied the wrath of god to gain the prize of fire and was punished for it. I could not see what there might be wrong with knowledge in itself, no matter what the price. In spite of my post, I had taken no sides in the struggle between Dr Hoffman and the Minister. At times I even speculated that Hoffman was altogether Prometheus and no Faust at all, for Faust had been content with conjuring tricks while the manifestations around us sometimes looked as though they were formed of authentic flame. But I kept these thoughts to myself. Nevertheless, you must realize the adversaries were of equal stature. The Minister possessed supernatural strength of mind to have stood out so long and it was his phenomenal intransigence alone which upheld the city.
    Indeed, he had become the city. He had become the invisible walls of the city; in himself, he represented the grand totality of the city’s resistance. His movements began to take on a megalithic grandeur. He said continually: ‘No surrender!’ and I could not deny his dignity. I even revered it. But, for myself, I had no axe to grind.
    The siege went into its third year. Supplies of food were almost at an end. An