Year after year Elza will remember herself dressed as the Ice Queen with a chalk-white face, wandering away from the crowd to sit all night on the river bank. The ant-hill of thousands of lights, the splendid humps of bridges, stars that break out from the haze to be counted on your fingers. Each year anew she will dress up for the death joke parade and each year, having gone once again, she won’t know how to take part. Her soul will drag her away from the happy, colourful crowd. Her soul will sit her down in loneliness on a bench by the riverside under a golden maidenhair tree. She will feed the late pigeons with sweet bread and feel, how souls gather – right here in the reflected lights, right here in the fallen maidenhair leaves, right here under the wings of the pigeons. Elza will be Elza will be Elza. She will touch the hair of the mother she has never met – hair like the smooth, nearly, nearly live marble dove’s wings on her mother’s grave. Father’s warm hand will pat her comically tousled head. Her lover will dip his hands in the city’s river and will wash her chalkwhite face clean. Right here on this lonely bench he will kiss her. And above his lips a tiny white powder mark will remain.

Elza will sit almost frozen, afraid to make a move that would frighten the souls. Just the quiet, rhythmical beating of her pulse in her cramped hands, only the throaty gurgling of the pigeons and the rustling of their nails in the golden Maidenhair leaves.

“Yuga-a,” Nabuco calls out almost in victory, because she senses the lesson coming to an end.

“Jūgs,” Elza drags out the reins of words. Yoke.