The rims of Martha’s eyes were red, but still she said nothing. Anton stood up and crossed to the armchair, where he sat down, exhausted. He had nothing to say and the silence in the room grew thick.

Sullenly, Anton shook his head. He had spoken for half an hour. Why should he say more? The church bell struck. Martha raised her eyebrows, then looked down at the pad on her knee and tapped it with her pencil.

‘That sense,’ said Anton, reluctantly, ‘of having lived before. That thing I mentioned to you. Reading Jacques’s letters from America. The feeling that he himself described of in some way being reincarnated. Remembering that feeling I had in the jungle in Panama … My awe at human insignificance in the face of nature and of being connected somehow …’

He trailed off, but looked up to see Martha nodding encouragement.

‘Perhaps I would have married Sonia, Jacques’s wife. If I’d met her. And if I’d recognised who she was. These choices look fated only in retrospect. Perhaps it didn’t matter who married Sonia, as long as life got lived. And Lena, if she was a version of Delphine … Does it matter? Perhaps I really have lived before as different people. I’ve married both Lena and Sonia. And time has run in many parallel ways. Or perhaps I have lived in fact different versions of myself. With Friedrich, bleeding to death. With Delphine in Baden. With those girls in Vienna. Here in this place of refuge. I think perhaps the reincarnation is not of other men through me, but of myself at other times. I’ve been forced by circumstance into many separate lives. If I could reconcile those different selves into one man …’

‘Then?’

He looked away, reluctant to come to the conclusion that she wanted. Then he said, ‘I believe that we are lost, at the mercy of chance and that history laughs at our attempts to make a pattern or a plan. You end with your legs blown off. Dying of the influenza. Or in a dementia ward, dribbling and alone. That is what life is. But if I can believe that I carry the essence of others who have lived before and that it doesn’t threaten me, but in fact enriches me … And if I can understand that the mystery of these unexplained familiarities I see in other people is that they relate to aspects of my broken self … Then …’

‘Then?’

‘Then that would be at least enough to live with, enough to go on.’

‘And?’

‘And then I would be whole.’

Martha stood up and crossed to the window, standing with her back to him.

Anton felt too tired to move.

7

Rudolf’s letter was not what Lena had expected. He did say how much he missed her and how well he would behave towards her if given a second chance; but much more of it was about private armies and the Nazi threat. The two of them together: a mark in history, whatever might happen to them …