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.

The Feins had taken possession, twenty years before, of one of the splendid eighteenth-century houses on the river, owned and to some extent serviced by the university. Though they had one child—a daughter, Marya gathered—they had never cared to buy property, evidently; Maximilian was not the sort to wish to be encumbered by such things. (Didn’t he make contemptuous reference now and then, in his seminar, to the property-holding bourgeoisie; to the contamination of the human spirit by such things as the “burden of excessive ownership”?) A scholar in the classic European tradition, he owned books; his treasure was all in books, old manuscripts, objets d’art.