Perhaps it’s theater, but they seem no longer to be Allies… though the history they have invented for themselves conditions us to expect “postwar rivalries,” when in fact it may all be a giant cartel including winners and losers both, in an amiable agreement to share what is there to be shared… . Still, Enzian has played them off, the quarreling scavengers, one against the other… it looks genuine enough… . Marvy must be together with the Russians by now, and with General Electric too—throwing him off the train the other night bought us—what? a day or two, and how well have we used the time?

It comes down to this day-to-day knitting and unraveling, minor successes, minor defeats. Thousands of details, any one of which carries the chance of a fatal mistake. Enzian would like to be more out of the process than he is—to be able to see where it’s going, to know, in real time, at each splitting of the pathway of decision, which would have been right and which wrong. But it is their time, their space, and he still expects, naïvely, outcomes the white continuum grew past hoping for centuries ago. The details—valves, special tools that may or may not exist, Erdschweinhöhle jealousies and plots, lost operating manuals, technicians on the run from both East and West, food shortages, sick children—swirl like fog, each particle with its own array of forces and directions… he can’t handle them all at the same time, if he stays too much with any he’s in danger of losing others… . But it’s not only the details. He has the odd feeling, in moments of reverie or honest despair, that he is speaking lines prepared somewhere far away (not far away in space, but in levels of power), and that his decisions are not his own at all, but the flummeries of an actor impersonating a leader. He has dreamed of being held in the pitiless emprise of something from which he cannot wake… he is often aboard a ship on a broad river, leading a rebellion which must fail. For reasons of policy, the rebellion is being allowed to go on for a bit. He is being hunted, his days are full of narrow escapes which he finds exciting, physically graceful… and the Plot itself! it has a stern, an intense beauty, it is music, a symphony of the North, of an Arctic voyage, past headlands of very green ice, to the feet of icebergs, kneeling in the grip of this incredible music, washed in seas blue as blue dye, an endless North, vast country settled by people whose old culture and history are walled off by a great silence from the rest of the world… the names of their peninsulas and seas, their long and powerful rivers are unknown down in the temperate world… it is a return, this voyage: he has grown old inside his name, the sweeping music of the voyage is music he wrote himself, so long ago that he has forgotten it completely… but now it is finding him again… .