Marya went boldly into the kitchen: she would celebrate by making herself a cup of tea.

This was her year, this was her time. Or so it seemed. For wasn’t she at this very moment in Maximilian Fein’s kitchen, moving unhesitatingly about as if she belonged here? . . . opening cupboard doors, peering into drawers, daring to examine the contents (very few, actually) of the old refrigerator. She was so close to euphoria that the teacup she’d chosen for herself nearly slipped through her fingers.

Marya, calm down. Marya, for Christ’s sake. He isn’t even on this continent at the present time; nothing you do matters.

She was too restless to sit at the cramped kitchen table so she prowled about, sipping tea, looking out the rear windows to the steep rocky lawn that dropped to the river some seventy feet below. Evidently neither of the Feins tended the yard, which was hardly more than a patch of weeds amid the remains of a rock garden. Marya noted an old swing, a child’s swing, painted red but now badly flecked with rust. Straggly climbing roses on a rotted trellis; a stone wall, perhaps twelve feet high, that had begun to crumble. The Feins’ house at 37 Azazel Drive belonged to the university but neither of them must have reported the condition of the wall; nor, Marya gathered, the somewhat shabby condition of the house generally, outside and in. There were water stains around the windows, the linoleum floor in the kitchen was badly warped, most of the kitchen and bathroom fixtures were old, even antiquated; the sink in particular was shocking, deeply stained, even rutted. It could never be scoured clean, Marya thought. Not even if she were to try her hand at it.

She half closed her eyes and saw Else Fein enter the kitchen. For it was her kitchen, after all—she couldn’t really have wished one of her husband’s young women students to have made herself so much at home. Else Fein with her stolid ungiving handsome face, the gray eyes watchful rather than animated, the features sharp as chiseled stone; Else Fein with her rather thin streaked hair pulled back into an old lady’s bun; Else Fein, his wife, of whom it was whispered that she was a disappointed scholar herself . . . a former student of classical languages who only did, now, occasional translations for the university press. Everyone in the circle had a theory about Mrs. Fein, who had never troubled to learn their names or sort them out from one another. (Perhaps because there were so many? because the composition of the circle was always changing as older students moved on and newer students joined?) It was thought that, like many transplanted Germans, she believed herself superior to her American environment; then again it was thought, even argued, that she was a desperately lonely and isolated woman who believed herself inferior . . . for, after all, she hadn’t many acquaintances, and virtually no friends, among the foreign-born faculty members and their wives. Ernest Slater, who could boast self-mockingly of being Fein’s “oldest” student at the present time, claimed that Fein had simply exercised an Old World prerogative in keeping his wife to himself, a true Hausfrau. She stayed away from the living room when the seminar met, except to serve coffee and tea; she was rarely heard speaking above a murmur, and then in German, with her husband, rather than English. Ernest joked of her famous coldness, her stubbornness in refusing (for so it seemed) to learn his name after four years. She hates us all, he said genially, her very gaze is thistles in the heart, an elbow in the ribs, surely you’ve noticed?