He walks around the arcades and looks out at the bright square beyond and the war memorial at its center. It is like the pivot at the center of this village now. Everything must revolve around it. He wonders if it repulses or draws. Today it does not seem to draw. Noise clatters from the top of the bell tower and vibrates around the square, summoning no one. He walks on until he hears the sound of voices.

Harry stands at the bar to drink a beer. A woman is polishing glasses with a white cloth, holding them up to the light and nodding as she places them back on the shelf. An old man is whistling as he sweeps the floor in the back room. Otherwise the bar is empty.

“Do you know if there is an Englishman living in this village?” he asks, faltering as he sees her incomprehension. “Il y a un anglais qui habite ici?”

“Un anglais?” The woman looks up and pauses her polishing. “Il n’y a que l’homme qui prend des photographies.”

“A man who takes photographs?” The glass won’t seem to stay still in his hand.

HE HAD FELT his heart racing as he had watched the woman drawing the map. All the rhythms of his body seemed to be accelerating as her pencil made a chain of arrows that finally terminated with a cross. As he follows those arrows now, and looks down the long perspective of the narrowing road ahead, he feels something like vertigo and has to put a hand out to the wall to steady himself. What exists where those vanishing points meet?

The woman has taken care to mark all the shops along the street, but her sense of scale is askew, Harry realizes. The drawing diverts him from the road and into washing-strung alleys that twist around and then widen again, past the back door of a baker’s, where a youth crosses white arms in the doorway, and a butcher’s, where a man in a red-stained apron touches his hat to Harry. He walks quickly, but as he looks at the cross on the map, he is not altogether sure whether he ought to be running to it, or running away; he is caught between urgency, the need to know now, and fear. He steps out beyond the walls that enclose the village, over a bridge, and across a field, and sees the building. It is a symmetrical-faced house, two windows on either side of a canopied door, squarely planted in a garden. Here the order stops, though. The garden, he can see, is overgrown, and paint is peeling from the metal railings that surround the property. The shutters are closed. It looks forgotten.