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take the child into the men’s side, because he was afraid to go in alone. They locked themselves into a stall; the woman closed her eyes and leaned her back against the door. Above the partition separating their stall from the next a man’s head appeared; he had jumped up from the floor. A second later it appeared again. Then the man’s grinning face appeared below the partition, at her feet. She took the child and fled, stumbling on her broken shoe. They passed a ground-floor apartment where the television was on. An enormous bird flew across the foreground of the screen. An old woman fell on her face in the middle of the street. Two men whose cars had collided sprang at each other; one tried to strike out, but the other held him motionless.
    It was almost night. The woman and the child were in the center of the city, at a snack bar between two big office buildings, and the child was eating a pretzel. The roar of the traffic was so loud that a long-lasting catastrophe seemed to be in progress. A man came into the snack bar; he was bent almost double and had his hand on his heart. He asked for a glass of water and gulped it down with a pill. Then he sat down, stooped and wretched. The evening church bells rang,
a fire truck passed, followed by a number of ambulances with blue lights and sirens. The light flashed over the woman’s face; her forehead was beaded with perspiration, her lips cracked and parched.
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    Late in the evening she stood by the long windowless side wall of the living room, in the half shadow of the desk lamp: deep quiet; dogs barking in the distance. Then the phone. She let it ring a few times, then answered in a soft voice. The publisher said in French that her voice sounded strange.
    The woman: “Maybe it’s because I’ve been working. That seems to affect my voice.”
    The publisher: “Are you alone?”
    The woman: “The child is with me, as usual. He’s asleep.”
    The publisher: “I’m alone, too. It’s a clear night. I can see the hills where you live.”
    The woman: “I’d love to see you in the daytime.”
    The publisher: “Are you working hard, Marianne? Or do you just sit around, out there in your wilderness?”
    The woman: “I was in town with Stefan today. He doesn’t understand me. He thinks the big buildings, the gas stations, the subway stations, and all that are wonderful.”
    The publisher: “Maybe there really is a new beauty
that we just haven’t learned to see. I love the city myself. From the roof of our office building I can see as far as the airport; I can see planes landing and taking off in the distance, without hearing them. There’s a delicate beauty about it that moves me deeply.” And after a pause, “And what are you going to do now?”
    The woman: “Put on my nicest dress.”
    The publisher: “You mean we can get together?”
    The woman: “I’m going to dress to go on working. All of a sudden I feel like it.”
    The publisher: “Do you take pills?”
    The woman: “Now and then—to keep awake.”
    The publisher: “I’d better not say anything, because I know you take every warning as a threat. Just try not to get that sad, resigned look that so many of my translators have.”
    She let him hang up first; then she took a long silk dress from the closet. At the mirror she tried on a string of pearls but took them right off again. She stood silent, looking at herself from one side.
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    The gray of dawn lay over the colony; the street lamps had just gone out. The woman sat motionless at the desk.
    She got up and, closing her eyes, zigzagged about the room; then she paced back and forth, turning on her heel every time she came to a wall. Then she walked backward
very quickly, turning aside and again turning aside. In the kitchen she stood at the sink, which was piled high with dirty