Except that would have been a lie, strictly speaking. Because Marya’s obsession had not begun on the day of Eric Nichols’ death but on the day—no, the morning after the evening—of her discovery of his death, twelve days after the fact. She had been out of the country at the time. Inaccessible. Incognito. No telegram could reach her and indeed no telegram did: she hadn’t been his wife, after all.

(Perhaps, Marya thought, she would translate this quirky obsession into an anecdote. She was good at anecdotes. All her friends and acquaintances were. It was a meager art form they despised in print but quite reveled in, in life. I, Marya Knauer, the very embodiment of rationality and female enlightenment. . . . I, Marya Knauer, whose sanity is so tediously steadfast. . . . Over the years many of Marya’s acquaintances had slipped over the border into lunacy at various times and to various degrees, and they had invariably been humored, and sympathized with, even, upon occasion, nursed back to sanity; now it was Marya’s turn.)

DEATH WITHOUT, DEATH within. . . .

By the third morning of the conference Marya realized that she was not going to make it.

Though she had slept a full seven hours the night before, in a veritable stupor of unconsciousness (yes she had been mildly intoxicated, no it would not become a habit), her mind wasn’t tuned to its usual sharpness; she felt light-headed, even dizzy; she began to think she was recognizing not only stereotyped words and phrases but entire speeches. A lengthy embittered denunciation of American liberals (“that pampered self-righteous class”) by a fierce young Nigerian playwright who now lived in London; a passionate monologue on the ideals of freedom, world peace, and brotherhood, by an East German writer and translator now living in West Berlin; a bright, sardonic, fast-paced denunciation of Americans, liberals, and the “pieties of brotherhood” by an English literary journalist of some renown. (The journalist, gauged more or less as Marya’s opposite number, appeared to be addressing her in particular as he spoke. He quoted Orwell, Waugh, Jonathan Swift. Marya could not determine whether he saw in her a fellow skeptic or whether he was deftly attacking her and what, in his imagination, she represented. She would have liked to ask him. She would have liked to ask what Marya Knauer’s beliefs were, since he knew them well enough to be attacking them.)

This too would have made an anecdote of sorts to tell Eric. That she had begun to imagine she’d heard all the speeches—the denunciations—the spontaneous outbursts—beforehand.