He offers to drive me back to the Left Bank. His car is parked in a garage a few steps away on the place des Ternes. I beg off. I’m at the end of my tether. I want to be alone. But I tell him, “If you’d like to come with me, I’m going back on foot.”

He cheerfully agrees. “I’d love to.” And gently takes my arm because I am about to run down a baby carriage. All along the avenue des Ternes, he chats away at me (with constant gentle grabs at my arm to steer me past hindrances). But eventually he lapses into silence. He only asks once (when I stumble), “Shouldn’t we really take a cab?” I retort that as a good German infantryman I marched from Ukraine to Mount Athos, but I get the words out only in fits and starts.

The redhead is still standing by the Madeleine. I shake him off. “Excuse me, but I think I’ll go off with this girl now.”

He says, “I’ll be waiting for you in the café over there.”

For a moment I feel like punching him in the nose. His eyes are as imperturbable as when he gazed along the Seine. But he gives the girl a small, encouraging smile. She makes a face at him: “Salaud!” Then she takes me by the arm.

Half an hour later I am standing on the street again, alone, a bit ransacked, humiliated. I am thirsty and, heedless of screeching brakes and invectives, I veer across the square to the café. He is sitting at one of the outside tables, waiting for me. I join him wordlessly. He doesn’t speak either. I order a cognac (saying, with venomous pride in my French, “Une fine de la maison”). He has a drink too. The jets droning in my ears are unendurable. I see his bright, imperturbable, alert eyes. “Ready?” he says in English. I stand up (not bumping the table this time, but the chair behind me topples over and he catches it). I say, “The perfect nurse.” He does not answer. He picks up the bank note I threw on the table and presses it into my hand. It is the last one the girl left me.

He heaves me into a cab. I say, “Leave me alone!” He tells the driver the address and gets in next to me. “You will sleep marvelously. Call me up whenever you like. After all, you know I’m waiting.”

I hear myself say, “But not for my call.”

He says, “For your call.”

I bow and kiss his hand.

6

Et vous vous en foutez, monsieur. Lei se ne frega. You couldn’t give a bloody fucking shit.

And of course you’re perfectly right. You’re in the business. It’s your century. It’s your world. And if I feel lost in it, that’s my problem.

Only I would like to trouble you a bit with this problem, dear Mr. Brodny. Look: As an outsider by calling, predestination, and vocation, I am accustomed to running through the world in one abstracted way or another. The pretty prelude to my unfortunately still uncompleted book may have suggested as much.