*

Although he never saw the lady doctor again, through the glass window of a closed antique store on Park Street, Harbart did see the fairy. And at once he realized that of the lady doctor—of the woman who’d climbed up the wooden stairs on the left of the mirror—this fairy was the younger version. Buki had been a little older than the fairy. But the Buki he’d gazed at from his top-terrace, that Buki had been different. He couldn’t match the two and come up with the one. But the fairy was the beginning. Golden hair, carved out of a yellowish stone. A stone body, draped in stone robes. The left hand gently folded behind her head. The right arm holding aloft a lamp. The light must come on at the touch of a switch, for a black electric wire trails away behind her. The sight of that wire upsets Harbart, makes him uncomfortable—and all those things, so many things, around her! Stone vases, stone chairs, wooden elephants whose faces were turned away, a stone table on which was placed an enormous lamp from some enormous ship.

“Cat, bat, water, dog, fish!”

As Harbart stared at the fairy, he thought he heard the dead women of the West singing their songs. Swelling into a cloud of lament, the songs drew closer and hurled themselves against the dusty glass. Alas, stone fairy. Like that young Russian woman facing the German machine guns—naked, her hands hiding her breasts, running across the dark black ground. Not stopping to listen to anyone. If the busy pedestrians stopped for a moment, they would hear the entranced Harbart’s stifled sobs. And see that fairy slowly floating upwards, her cheeks rubbing against a bulbous big balloon tied to a ladder with string.

On winter’s Park Street, a streak of refrigerator air sidled up and clasped Harbart in its arms. Harbart turned up the collar of his Ulster, and now it was impossible to look at him and think of anything but Hollywood. It was still evening, now. It had still been evening, then. Soon, as the darkness spreads, the fairy will seep away from view. Only to be sometimes startled by the lights of a passing car. Then, her lips will seem to move. Then, her blind eyes will seem to gleam with yellow light. “Staystill, staysafe,” whispered Harbart, “I’ll be back.”

On the way home, to the trees by the street, to the familiar lepers, to the balcony pillars, to the signboards and tea shop, to the duty-done homeward-bound ayahs and nurses, to the prostitutes, park railings, and the pictures of a lion and of a Mickey Mouse painted on the walls of the park pond, to the water spurting out of the depths of the city—to each and every one he had something special to say. Car lights splayed across the giant billboards, and Harbart felt he was at the movies again. Standing in the heart of a crowd, in the middle of some street, Harbart and Krishna-dada had watched The Fall of Berlin. And many other documentaries about World War II. A naked young Russian woman hides her breasts with her hands and runs across the dark black ground while the German soldiers slowly raise their machine guns. The woman runs, runs on and on. Not stopping to listen to anyone.