Mrs. Fein began to speak as soon as they were in the car together, though she hadn’t looked Marya full in the face, and her manner was both distracted and oddly calm, methodical. She told Marya that Fein had collapsed in his study. Sometime during the previous evening. Sometime between the hours of six and ten o’clock. She told Marya in her quick, accented, slightly admonitory voice that Maximilian had deliberately locked himself away in his study; that he had gone into one of his states, his stubborn sick spells, and had not eaten for almost three days. When she knocked at the door he shouted for her to leave him alone, he couldn’t be interrupted, he would come out when it was time. Even though she pleaded with him, begged him. . . . (“Did he tell you he would be doing this?” Mrs. Fein asked Marya in an aside that took her by surprise, and Marya, numb, frightened, her head still aching from that terrible pressure, said at once, “No, no, he never told me such things.”)

Yesterday evening, Mrs. Fein said, she began to grow frantic. Maximilian had never behaved quite like this—to such an extreme. When she rapped at the door there was no response: nothing. She had halfway considered telephoning Marya then, to inform her of the situation, to ask would she come to the house and make her appeal. . . . Her reasoning was, she said with a glance at Marya, and a mirthless little laugh, her reasoning was, he would have opened the door to Marya if he would have opened it to anyone at all.

Marya, who did not believe this to be true, nonetheless sat in silence, her gloveless hands clasped tight together. She could not have said what seemed to her at that moment more frightening, unthinkable—the fact that her lover was gravely ill or the fact that her lover’s wife knew about her, seemed to know a great deal about her, had probably known all along.

She noted with what rough nervous skill the older woman drove the Mercedes along the narrow winding residential streets close by the university; how unhesitatingly she pushed into traffic on a larger street, even sounding her horn. She gripped the steering wheel hard; she was wearing smart black kidskin gloves. Marya’s own hands were chapped, her fingernails bitten and raw, but she made no effort to hide them. Her teeth were chattering from the cold.

Shortly before midnight, Else Fein continued, she had telephoned the hospital and the police. And an ambulance was sent at once, it arrived within minutes, and the door was forced open, and Maximilian was discovered lying on the floor . . . he’d had a cerebral hemorrhage, as it turned out.

Hearing these words, knowing now that all this would have a name, Marya began to cry.