They were surrounded by hundreds of rotting carp.

“The fish too had been shot. Right through the gills,” said Silkleigh in a shocked voice, placing a finger to his ear.

Genia would not know the details until the eve of her departure from Tromso. She spent most of the next six years in an unhealthy daze. She attended the gymnasium, she helped out in the house and she passed the evenings alone in her room, looking at the northern lights misting the night sky.

According to the trader this phenomenon was caused by thousands of swans. They had slept on the ice, their wings had frozen in the night and they were beating their way free. His daughter said it was the hair of women who had died as virgins floating on the night winds. She wished no such fate for Genia. When an orchestra from Bergen visited Tromso she gave a dinner party for its Spanish conductor. Genia was instructed to lead him home after a programme which included music from Bartók’s ballet “The Wooden Prince” and Sibelius’ “Valse Triste”.

“Come here, Genia. You make the arrangements. He speaks only French.”

She accepted the telephone.

“How will I know you?” came a young man’s voice.

She thought, I don’t know. She had a small nondescript face and long brown hair which everyone said was beautiful once she had brushed it a hundred times.

“Why don’t you wait for me by. the ticket box looking helpless?”

He said two people who have never seen each other before, but who are looking, always find each other.

She arrived late and sat at the rear of the hall until Ernesto finished conducting. Afterwards she made her way to the ticket office. Suddenly she felt a stroking movement on the back of her legs. Something hard was touching her skin, causing her to shiver. It lifted the hem of her skirt and rose ticklishly up her calf. She twirled about.

“My magic wand!” said Ernesto, spinning his baton into the air and nearly dropping it.

He shook her hands while Klebst, owner of the concert hall told him how wonderful she was, how pretty. The more Klebst told him, the harder the conductor squeezed.

Ernesto Ortiz was a tall, thick-set man, with a large chin and a perpetually moist upper lip. His darkish blond hair was unkempt and wiry, as if the strings had snapped on a thousand violins. He was twenty-five and conductor of the orchestra he had founded two years before. Nineteen twenty-four, while a remarkable year for claret, was no annus mirabilis in the short history of the Abyla Philharmonic. When offered the position for six months as guest conductor of a Norwegian orchestra, Ernesto had accepted, as he had profited from his term at Manaus’s Teatro Amazonas. He might also meet some musicians whom he could attract to Abyla.

One of the few persons whom Ernesto would ever attract to Abyla was the seventeen-year old Evgenia Nikolaevna. Paraphrasing Goethe, he told her she was the eternal feminine who had transported him to higher spheres. She was the halfness he had always been seeking. The eagerness with which he pressed his suit melted something inside her. He was an apostle from a happier world, a world echoing to the slurred cadences of Sibelius. On the day following his proposal, after consulting with the captain’s daughter who told her it was a brilliant match, Genia consented.