Then he remembered. When he had gone down to the docks the first time, and Abu was drunk—it had been a long night, and the white-eyed antinomial had played and sung and talked about his childhood up above Rang-river, when all the world was snow—it had been a boring night, and much of the music Thanakar had neither heard nor understood. But one thing had touched him. There was a girl in the story, and when the antinomial had spoken about her, every time she had come into the story, a little music had come in with her and mixed with the other music. It was his way of naming her, and he had sung it sometimes with a kind of hunger and sometimes hesitantly and unsure, and then especially, listening, Thanakar had caught a glimpse of how she must have been, half delicate, half wild, running and stumbling through the crusty snow, her golden hair wild around her face, or later in the last days of the thaw, dancing under risen Paradise, or riding through that high red valley where the sun barely rose, in red velvet and a bracelet on her wrist. Just a few sweet notes, a song of hunger still unsatisfied, but later Thanakar could hear how all the other notes and music took their tone from those few notes, and he had thought that when that man had said he loved her, that was what the world meant to him, that her music had entered into his, and there was nothing he could ever do to separate them.

In the hot cell, Thanakar sat forward and tried to explain it to her, but without the notes it was useless, and the notes eluded him. She just sat there, her eyes as empty as windows, stroking her sister’s hair.

With music, he felt that he could break her heart; without it, it was just barbarian drivel—he could hear the clattering as he tried to talk. “ ‘The night the soldiers came . . .’ ” and then he stopped, because she was staring at him patiently, vacantly, stroking, stroking.

The music came to him late that night. He sat up in bed, and when he lay back down, he thought he had it imprisoned in his heart. But by morning it was gone, and he ate breakfast with the rain coating the windows, trying to remember. A dozen notes, that was all, what was it? Gone. But he had kept the bracelet. And afterward he went to show Abu. He met the commissar in the hall.

“He’s still in there,” complained the old man. “Damned inconvenient. Just because I didn’t . . . well. I don’t know what I could have done. Pure chance that I found him at all. He was in one of those caves.

Safe and sound, not a scratch. He’s been in bed ever since. Only opens up for meals. You don’t think,”

he continued anxiously, “that he’d try anything stupid. I haven’t seen him this bad for months, damn him.