Death from without & death from within, she discovered scrawled in the margin of one notebook page. On another, where her notes trailed off, Death from without vs. death from within: which? She remembered having written it only vaguely, dimly, the way she remembered having done equally almost-plausible things in dreams.

When they broke at one o’clock she would telephone Eric in New York to report to him the substance of the morning’s reports. To amuse him she would dwell (perhaps) on the predictable handwringing response of the chairman of the American delegation, an old Yale classmate and genial enemy of Eric’s; she would single out two or three atrocity stories, fresh statistics that were shocking, or improbable, unverifiable in any case; she would abbreviate the accusations of American intervention, with which Eric was already too familiar. (The Meridian had printed the first exposés of CIA-financed “anti-Communist” activity in Latin America years ago, in a series of articles on the Guatemalan White Hand; Eric Nichols had campaigned vigorously, and to little purpose, against Nixon and Kissinger’s “diplomacy” in Allende’s doomed Chile.)

She would not tell him about her interest in the translator from the United Nations, which he might misinterpret. She would tell him about the curious words, Death from without, death from within, which, she discovered, she had written out several times.

Then she remembered that Eric himself was dead. This was October, it was not last April, when she had telephoned him from a similar conference in Mexico City and they had talked for nearly two hours. Time pleats oddly, cruelly, Marya thought, times rush together, when you are wearing the same headphones, taking notes you’ve already taken in a hand you can’t always recognize. She thought it might be the headphones, mainly. The weight, the uncomfortable warmth, the close intimate stream of words in the ear, from a stranger in a glass booth.

Death from without, death from within. Marya admired the balance, the restraint. She did wonder what Eric would have made of it.

THESE DAYS, WHEN Marya’s mind drifted, she sometimes fancied that something was growing in her womb.

She had never been pregnant, nor had she so much as imagined herself pregnant. She had once observed with her customary irony that, by having failed to have an abortion, let alone several, she had cut herself off irrevocably from the common experience of many of her female contemporaries. (This was the sort of lightly self-deprecatory remark Marya Knauer often heard herself making to friends, or caught herself writing in letters. Eric disapproved in theory—if he loved her it hurt him to think she didn’t love herself—but he always laughed, in practice. With other people, women especially, Marya was often harder on herself, pitiless. She knew it was a form of vanity but she couldn’t resist: if she was hard on others, she was obliged to be harder on herself.)