THE STAIRWELL IS all shadows. He follows the light down and then sees her from the turn of the stairs. As arranged, she’s waiting by the door. He watches her for a moment before she realizes he’s there. She is silhouetted in profile against the window and staring down at her hand on a chair back. The pose reminds him of the woman that he’d seen topping a war memorial four days earlier. Edie’s circling ankle is the only thing that gives away that she isn’t an allegory cast from concrete. Like the memorial figure, her eyes aren’t focused; her face gives the impression that her thoughts aren’t in this room. But then a moth starts to flicker at the window, the insistent throb of wings seemingly bringing her back into the here and now. She puts her fingers to the glass.

“‘And when white moths were on the wing, and moth-like stars were flickering out, I dropped the berry in a stream and caught a little silver trout.’”

“Harry! It’s you. I didn’t see you,” she says as she turns. “Yeats?” Her whole face changes when she smiles.

“The trout became ‘a glimmering girl with apple blossom in her hair who called me by my name and ran and faded through the brightening air.’”

They step out into the evening. Swallows are plunging through the overhead blue. They swoop, as one wing, between the tattered rooftops.

The hotel is just off the square. It is a wide square and must once have been prosperous, only now it is all brought down. It surprises him again, when they walk into it, how little remains. There’s much less of it than he remembers there being in 1917. The leveling of the buildings, the flattening of it all, makes the sky seem very wide and rather heavy.

“It’s like a half-excavated Roman town,” Edie remarks. “Don’t you think? Where’s the bathhouse? Which way to the barracks? Where’s the ditch to keep the barbarians out? Doesn’t it strike you how quickly we can roll back to that?”

“Yes,” he answers.

“It’s like something left by an ancient civilization,” she says, “like all the clues that remain at the end of a civilization. I know that I’m staring, and yet I feel as if I ought not to look, as if it’s impolite to let my eyes linger on it. Irreverent, almost. I don’t know whether to whisper. Should I whisper?”

He shakes his head. “Is this the square in that photograph, do you think?”

“It is.”