"I haven't either," said Jay, with mock contrition. "I've just come home, because of the war. They asked us to leave. Whoever couldn't be drafted was only one more mouth to feed for France. The consulate sent us a messenger: 'Let all the useless ones leave Paris.' In one day all the artists deserted, as if the plague had come. I never knew the artists occupied so much space! We, the international artists, were faced with either hunger or concentration camps. Do you remember Hans, Sabina? They wanted to send him back to Germany. A minor Paul Klee, that's true, but still deserving a better fate. And Suzanne was sent back to Spain; she had no papers. Her Hungarian husband with the polio was put in a camp. Remember the corner of Montparnasse and Raspail where we all stood for hours saying good night? Because of the blackouts you'd have no time to say good night, you'd be lost as soon as you were out of the café, you'd vanish in the black night. Innocence was gone from all our acts. Our habitual state of rebellion became a serious political crime. Djuna's house boat was drafted for the transportation of coal. Everything could undergo conversion except the artists. How can you convert disorganizers of past and present order, the chronic dissenters, those dispossessed of the present anyway, the atom bomb throwers of the mind, of the emotions, seeking to generate new forces and a new order of mind out of continuous upheavals?"

As he looked at Sabina his eyes seemed to say that she had not changed, that she was still, for him, the very symbol of this fever and restlessness and upheaval and anarchy in life which he had applauded in Paris seven years ago.

At this moment another personage sat down next to Jay. "Meet Cold Cuts, Sabina. Cold Cuts is our best friend here. When people get transplanted, it's exactly like plants; at first there's a wilting, a withering; some die of it. We're all at the critical stage, suffering from a change of soil. Cold Cuts works at the morgue. His constant familiarity with suicides and terrifying description of them keeps us from committing it. He speaks sixteen languages and thus he's the only one who can talk to all the artists, at least early in the evening. Later he'll be drunk in extremis and will only be able to speak the esperanto of alcoholics, which is a language full of stutterings from the geological layers of our animal ancestors."

Satisfied with this introduction, Cold Cuts left the table and busied himself with the microphone. But Jay was wrong. Although it was only nine o'clock, Cold Cuts was already in difficulties with the microphone. He was struggling to maintain an upright relationship, but the microphone would yield, bend, sway under his embrace like a flexible young reed. In his desperate embraces, it seemed as if the instrument and Cold Cuts would finally lie on the floor entangled like uncontrollable lovers.