She fancied that something was taking shape in her womb, in that innermost, most secret part of her body, in which nothing had ever lodged, let alone grown. At first it was the size of a melon seed. Then the size of a currant. Then the size of a grape, a plum. . . . But why the agreeable imagery of fruits? Why not the imagery of, say, marbles, golf balls, tennis balls? Marya forgot about it for days at a time (it was, after all, illusory), then remembered it at inexplicable times, walking along the street, settling back in a taxi, strapping herself into an airline seat and preparing (psychologically, physiologically) for takeoff: those few crucial seconds during which a plane might nose-dive and crash, but probably would not.

Dear Eric, Do you think you are responsible . . . ?

Dear Eric, Do you think your death is responsible . . . ?

Marya knew about hysterical pregnancies because she had read about them. She had read about most things by now, at least in a cursory manner. She even knew about the alleged pregnancies of women in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in England and Europe, who were charged with consorting with the Fiend, and hanged (in England) or burned alive (on the Continent) as witches. In fact she had once spent some weeks researching Henri Boguet’s Discours des sorciers, a document of the early seventeenth century whose pious author wished that all witches might be united in one single body that they be “consumed in one single blessed conflagration.” She knew of, had actually studied the floor plans of, the infamous Witch House at Bamberg, where the holy Bishop Johann George II tortured numberless witches, male and female, and put them to death. . . . Marya might have observed that the instinct for extreme cruelty in mankind was not appreciably different in late medieval Europe or in twentieth-century Europe, in uncivilized Latin America or in “civilized” Latin America. But it was the sort of clever observation Eric disliked in her, or had disliked. It suggested resignation, an unearned cynicism, despair. In Eric’s puritanical cosmology one had to earn such sad luxuries of the spirit.

Marya knew that the tight elasticity of her womb was inviolate but if she made the conscious effort—lying in a warm fragrant bath, for instance, or waking in the morning in a strange hotel room—she could sometimes summon forth the thing’s shape, envision (as she embodied?) its shadowy contours. It was a whim, a nervous fancy, an indulgence, one of those romantic obsessions she supposed she’d outgrown. If obliged to translate it into anecdotal and therefore amusing form she would have said that she was pregnant with her lover’s death. She would have said that it had begun on the very day of his death: the first intimation of something lodged in her that would suck her strength, her spirit, her famous vitality, the first intimation of pain to come.