Marya, not knowing what she did, pressed her face against the sleeve of one of Fein’s tweed coats. She gripped it tight, the scratchy wool, the small leather-covered buttons.

She closed the door carefully; paused to take in her tall slender reflection in a bureau mirror; wondered how she would ever be able to sleep that night. In her cell of a room. In her narrow bed.

And now she could not resist the dresser, opening the first of the drawers, the second, the bulky third . . . her heart still swinging, her pulse beating hard. You little savage, someone chided, aren’t you a little savage! Don’t we know you through and through! The bottom drawer of the dresser was crammed with Fein’s things, somewhat haphazardly. Stray cuff links, single socks, linen handkerchiefs, tie clips and stickpins, loose papers, rubber bands, buttons. A worn leather portfolio which, naturally, Marya could not resist taking out and opening. . . .

The handwritten note seemed to leap out at her, to strike her between the eyes.

My dear brazen Marya—

She stared; blinked; felt a wave of faintness rise in her; a knowledge that yes, yes, she had halfway expected something like this. To be caught like a trespassing child, a thief, to be exposed as the low-minded criminal she was. . . .

At this point she might have closed Fein’s portfolio and slipped it carefully back into the drawer (had it been on the right side, or the left?); she might have retreated, fled; but of course she did not. She read the note. She even went to the window to hold it to the light.

My dear brazen Marya—

If you hold this in your hand, if you have ventured so far, I think it futile for us to keep up certain pretenses. I know you—I seem to have recognized you from the first—do not be frightened, my dear (do not be less brazen), if I shortly make my claim upon you.

—Maximilian Fein

Fein was forced to descend periodically, he later told Marya, into the Underworld, the Night World; but not by choice.

It was a species of hell contained within the perimeters of his skull—or, if you like, his soul.

Nor could it be shared. Even by a lover or a disciple.

Even by a wife.

What had happened was simply that, as a young man of twenty-two, traveling alone in Egypt, he had picked up an infection of the inner ear. Within forty-eight hours he experienced terrifying symptoms—dizziness, vertigo, nausea, a sense that the world was disintegrating, and he himself with it; he had never been, he said, so entirely alone before—nor had he been so convinced of the individual’s metaphysical isolation in the universe. (“Is this the ‘benign indifference’ of which the existentialists so blandly spoke? I wonder!” Fein said.) He had collapsed in his hotel room; was taken to a hospital in Cairo—a noisy, unsanitary, wretched place; too sick to be moved, he had had to stay there for weeks, with the consequences that his eyes were infected as well—he was actually blind for more than a month. It was simply hell; he had prayed to die. Consciousness was hell. As his vision returned by degrees he suffered terrifying hallucinations which he still saw, three decades later, in his dreams; he was convinced he’d experienced the “hell” of the Tibetan “twilight following death”—which he later recognized when he studied the tradition of the Bardo Thödol—The Tibetan Book of the Dead.