ZELDA SAT by the window of her hotel room and gazed over the river at the dome of St. Paul’s Cathedral surrounded by cranes and half-built modern structures that would soon, along with the gherkins, cheese graters, shards and tulips, dominate the entire city skyline. She had had a difficult night, and she was still recovering, feeling tired and numb. It had started, as it usually did, with a nightmare at about three o’clock in the morning, the details of which scurried back into the dark recesses when she woke, leaving only vague impressions of unbearably slow journeys across darkening post-industrial landscapes, through crumbling ruins and over mud as sticky as treacle. There was always someone, or something, chasing her, or hiding in the shadows, and she could never get far enough ahead to feel safe. She also felt that there was nowhere she would feel safe, for the place she was seeking didn’t exist, and if it should suddenly be conjured into existence, she wouldn’t be able to find it, or she would have to swim so far underwater that she wouldn’t have enough breath to get there.

As usual, she woke gasping for air, her heart thudding, and that was when things got worse, when she started remembering the real terrors of her years as a sex slave: the pain of her first anal rape, a broken nose, a messy abortion in a cheap backstreet clinic in Belgrade, all in excruciating detail, faces included.

So she did what she always did: got up, took two of the tranquilizers her doctor had prescribed and made a cup of chamomile tea. Then she took out her Moleskine notebook and jotted down what she could remember of her dreams. The doctor had told her it would help her come to terms with her experiences, but she didn’t think it had done much good so far. Nevertheless, she persevered.

When she had written down as much as she could remember, she put on her headphones. Zelda had three favorite symphonies—Beethoven’s “Pastorale,” Tchaikovsky’s “Pathétique” and Dvořák’s “New World”—and she always turned to one of them at such times. She didn’t care how corny they were, or how many times she had listened to them. This morning she chose the Dvořák and settled by the window to watch the daylight gently nudge away the darkness as the city came to life in all its quotidian glory, from the first joggers on the embankment to the quickly multiplying hordes of pedestrians heading for work, the rumbling and clattering of commuter trains over Blackfriars Bridge, then the first tourist boats cutting their wakes along the Thames to Greenwich.

And by then the world was beginning to feel bearable again.

That day, the dawn had begun with an unusually rosy glow. Rust-stained tugboats and overloaded barges passed by below her window. The broad dark river fascinated her. It was like a living being, with its swirling oil slicks and currents like ropes of muscle twisting in the wake of the boats. Sweet Thames.