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understand the dishes need washing? Is that what this is about?”
    “No, the dishes are washed, thank you. You are to understand that if I weren’t here, they wouldn’t get washed. That’s what this is about.”
    “Sure they would. I couldn’t stand a dirty kitchen. But why do women always blame men for not doing what’s already done? You complain about the laundry, for example, yet you do it. Why should I then concern myself with it? Do you really want me to take my clean clothes out of the closet and wash them again, so I can say I did the laundry?”
    “Very well,” Sarah said, putting her mirror down. “What about dusting? The apartment has not yet been dusted.”
    “And it needn’t be. Dust is perfectly acceptable. Dust gives the place character. Besides, what if somebody looked in the window and saw me doing it?”
    “And vacuuming? Does dried mud on the carpet give the place character?”
    “No, but I have an answer to that. Vacuum cleaners are designed for women, not men. When they are made so men don’t have to bend over constantly to use them, maybe men will use them more often.”
    “It was men who designed them, you know.”
    “The same goes for washing dishes and all that other kitchen work: the countertops are too low.”
    “And the cobwebs on the lamps in your workshop? Are they too low for you?”
    “Cobwebs keep the place free from flies.”
    “It looks to me like you’re trying to grow new lampshades. By the way, when do you think you’ll get around to investing the ten seconds it will take to change the bulb on the bedroom ceiling?”
    “If it’s so easy, why don’t you do it, and save yourself the trouble of nagging me about it?”
    “You know, David, even in the Polak jokes the bulb gets changed. It may take three or four of them to do it, but at least the job gets done.”
    He raised his hand to silence her. There was a news report on the television about the seventeenth-century cartographer who had floated to the surface of a bog. As was true of many people, the story of Cellarius’s disappearance and rediscovery had captured David’s imagination. The media delighted in showing pictures of the corpse.
    The news camera panned the bog where the body had been found, but of course it was gone. All there was to see was a phalanx of detail-hungry reporters, some craggy birch trees, and a few anonymous spectators waving to the camera.
    The body was being stored in a low-temperature chamber at the University of Hamburg and was unavailable for view. A news team had nevertheless perched outside the room and focused its lens on the door. The sign merely read Privat . Viewers could only imagine what was on the other side.
    Coverage shifted to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D. C. Dr. Cornelius Bancroft, curator in charge of the institution’s mineral and gem collection, filled the screen. The news camera scanned the curator’s figure, from his tennis shoes to his ponytail, as though to point out an incongruity.
    “Hey,” Sarah said, “isn’t that—”
    “Shh!”
    Dr. Bancroft was explaining his theory: that the ruby found in Cellarius’s fist was one of the lost Tavernier stones of popular European folklore.
    David caught his breath, sank deeper into the beanbag chair, and stared at the screen. The lost Tavernier stones were almost as legendary as the Holy Grail. Prospectors, treasure hunters, and quacks had been searching for them for over three hundred years.
    Bancroft based his theory on a comparison of the ruby’s color and clarity with those of a similar stone described by Tavernier. But opponents of the theory, whom the TV news reporter also interviewed, were quick to point out that the cut did not match any of the drawings made during Tavernier’s seventh voyage—the entire account of which, at any rate, was commonly understood to be a hoax.
    Bancroft countered that the ruby must therefore be a recut . “Finally we have a direct link,” he said, “to the