But of all her professors Fein was the one who most insisted upon a personal relationship. At their first meeting—when Marya sought him out to ask, to insist, that she be allowed into his seminar—he interrogated her for some minutes, keeping her standing awkwardly in a doorway; neglecting, or not wishing, to invite her inside to have a seat. He wanted to see how serious she was. How substantial her background was. Frankly (so he said, adjusting his blue-tinted glasses and regarding her critically)—frankly, he and her adviser didn’t get along very well; the man’s notions of the medieval period were asinine. His single published book in the field was a disaster of misguided energies. . . . Not knowing what she did, Marya found herself nodding, smiling vaguely, seeming to agree.

Fein stared at her. “But why are you agreeing?” he asked sharply. “Are you really in an intellectual position, Miss Knauer, to know enough to agree?”

So she was shamed, exposed. But she went away buoyant enough since Fein had—reluctantly, magnanimously—allowed her into his seminar.

SOME MONTHS AFTERWARD Marya was singled out for the awkward honor of looking after the Fein household for ten days while the Feins were in Europe. Maximilian was scheduled to speak at a medieval conference in Munich (his paper was on a newly discovered manuscript attributed to Agrippa von Nettesheim); following which the Feins were flying to Madrid to visit the Prado. (Every few years, Fein explained, the need came over him to see Bosch again, to stand in his extraordinary presence. It was more than need—it was hunger, sheer desire.)

Marya, embarrassed at being chosen, and more excited than she cared to know, consented at once. It would be no trouble to bicycle over from the graduate college a mile away . . . she would be delighted to tend to the Fein’s several cats. . . . She didn’t ask Fein if he trusted her alone in his house because of course he must have trusted her.

(Someone had broken into the house a few years ago, he told Marya, when he and Else were at a similar conference. But the poor man went away with little because of course the books meant nothing to him—not even the treasured Chymical Wedding, or the volumes of Picinelli. He might have intended to steal the Sung funerary urn but something about it—its weight, its smell, the little rattle of the bones inside—discouraged him. So he took only a few dollars’ worth of stamps, a portable typewriter, some of Else’s grandmother’s gold-plated spoons. . . . Fein hadn’t troubled to report the theft to the police, he said, because he didn’t want any more strangers in his house.)

When Marya let herself into the gloomy front hall she felt intimidated at once; even a little apprehensive, as if she might be stepping into a trap of some kind. She might be Maximilian Fein’s favored student at the moment but she didn’t really know him—she certainly wasn’t on intimate terms with him. “Hello,” she called out cautiously, though she knew no one would answer, “hello, it’s just Marya—Marya Knauer—” She reasoned that an intruder, hearing her, would flee.