“Plenty more than that was destroyed,” said the bartender. He was washing glasses. “You can still see the mermaids—right around that corner. But my wife and four little children died in your air raids.”

“I wasn’t in any bombers,” he said, tormented by guilt.

The bartender started drying the glasses. He did it in a peculiarly clumsy way, more like an inexperienced servant girl than an old barkeep. He screwed a corner of the dishtowel into the glass till it reached the bottom, stuffed the entire glass with the balled-up towel, held the protruding end with one hand and turned the glass with the other, and then pulled out the towel and held the glass up to the light to see if it was clean, closing one eye as though taking aim.

“I wasn’t in any bombers. I did play at soldiering once, but thank God not in the war.”

“Well weren’t you lucky,” said the bartender. “People like us didn’t have it so good.”

Now the silence of all those around him was thick enough to cut with a knife. He thought he could sense their contempt. “You didn’t have to start in about it,” he heard himself say, “about the war, I mean.” He listened intently for the silence to become malevolent. Ready to fight. It would have been a relief to throw a few punches. But that was just what they were waiting for.

Should I go over and put a few coins in the jukebox? he thought. Play just any old record—probably nothing but wild rock ’n’ roll in there. Set off a racket to accompany this unreal reality; unleash the hullabaloo they use nowadays to smother thoughts of the past; transport the senses into blazing intoxication to match the psychedelic, spectral light of this new world . . .