It was so warm in Germany, you see. I hadn’t been used to the warmth, and it had taken me some time to get used to it again. A beautiful day for vengeance. But his neck, sweating. Sweating in the sun. I was unable, I had been unable . . . The wound had been warm, and there had been something comforting about that. No more ice. No more snow. Just a seeping warmth . . .

Sound.

It jolted through me.

What was it? A stream?

No, not that. Listen.

Animals! Geese, perhaps?

No, there was more to it, it was deeper. Listen again, closer this time.

Voices. That was it. Human voices. Criss-crossing. Now changing pitch, moving deeper. Singing. They lifted, somehow, and I felt myself carried away with them, on a tide . . . Not of water. Why was I thinking of snow? The voices seemed to be drifting down like snow, drawing me into their drift. And yet I was warm. Hot, even. Strange to have snow while I sat here sweating.

But there was a breeze. Hadn’t there been a breeze just now? Yes, there it was again. It felt so good. It was almost as if I could follow every atom of it wafting across my face. Now it had reached the bridge of my nose, now onto my cheek. And then it had gone again. Why? How can it have gone like that? Now I felt drier than I did before. Wait. Here it came again . . .

I opened my eyes. A man wearing a white mask was waving something at me.

A banana leaf. So that was the breeze. Yes, keep waving it, I wanted to say to him. Give it to me. Let me wave it! He didn’t. Instead he stopped waving. I could see the sides of some glasses frames through the peepholes of the mask, and behind the lenses lay dark watchful eyes. The man stood suddenly and moved away from me, out of my line of vision. The singing stopped abruptly, and as it did I placed the song. The snow falling outside on the black cars. The sky darkening. Cocktails at the consulate in Helsinki, all those years ago.

I was a long way from Helsinki. I tried to sit up, but all I caught was a glimpse of the man walking away, and the room I was in. It was very narrow and low-ceilinged. The walls were white and made of some kind of stucco or wattle, propped up with logs. The man was wearing a thin white coat, and there were shelves attached to the walls with small glass objects on them.