Still, when Else Fein did come one morning in early February, Marya wasn’t at all prepared for her. She wasn’t at all prepared.

THESE WEEKS AND months, Marya continued to perform beautifully, as she had always done. She thought of herself as a figure skater, executing extraordinary spins and leaps and patterns on the ice, in a very circumscribed space.

She went through the motions of a daylight life. She was still the good girl, the A-plus student, fired by competition and virtually inexhaustible. Or so it seemed. Attending all her seminars and lectures, acquitting herself admirably. Sometimes she observed herself from a little distance, quite impressed. The baroque figures—the ingenious tricks!—of the seasoned ice skater.

On her free evenings she began to go out, alone. To concerts mainly. Losing herself in . . . it scarcely mattered what: a Bach cantata performed by the university chorus, a Brahms string quartet, that powerful second piano sonata of Chopin’s.

Her skin grew chapped and rather sallow, her eyes watered frequently, went bloodshot. It was a familiar consequence of winter—she seemed to have no defenses. On her really bad days she learned to apply a little dime-store makeup to her face, smeared on a little lipstick, why not? She had to admit it was remarkable, the difference so commonplace a trick made.

FEIN HELD HIS seminar in his home on Thursday evenings, it was an old custom of his, it allowed people to say of him that, yes, he really was friendly and accessible, he wasn’t at all like his reputation. But now it began to be somewhat awkward, at times it was frankly embarrassing . . . because quite clearly there was something between him and Marya Knauer; and the more pointedly the two of them behaved otherwise, the more evident it became. (Fein ignored Marya for an entire evening. Or glanced frequently in her direction. Or spoke her name with just the wrong inflection—too harshly, too gently. As for Marya, earlier in the year you couldn’t shut her up, now she sat silent, mute, staring at the carpet; holding one of those enormous cats in her lap. She no longer questioned Fein’s enigmatic remarks and she only laughed at his jokes—breathlessly, a little hysterically—when she saw that the others were already laughing.)

Else Fein no longer made even a token appearance on those nights. It was thought that she’d left the country—perhaps she was visiting relatives in Germany—but one or another of Fein’s students would often remark after a meeting of the seminar that he was certain he’d heard footsteps upstairs. A faint, almost imperceptible creaking of the floorboards. . . .

MARYA REALLY DID go through the motions of another sort of life, though it struck her as improbable, afterward. She must have been improvising clumsily since she forgot the substance of most of these experiences almost as soon as they occurred.