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Five
ACCIDENT
Finally, I was able to get to work on the more lucrative and more immediately-marketable novel of 'The Great Circassian Lay', without having to lay aside entirely my fictional history of popular literature. At first, even after the final contractual details were settled, I had hesitated to begin it. Then, one morning, a series of chance circumstances led me to share breakfast with Kassandra and her dismally accurate predictions.
"There's no problem," she said, without looking up from the surgery she was performing on the boiled egg before her. "You make the 'Lay' novel the last section of your book. It's the post-modernist bit, at the end, like a party after some life-giving or life-taking event."
"That's good," I said, "but I don't think the contract would allow it."
She glanced up without lifting her head. "That's too bad, since the book's not going to sell well anyway."
I didn't dare ask her which one she meant. Instead, after considering her remark, I resolved to think of the two projects as one. In a sense, they were indeed similar -- if not, in the final analysis, utterly indistinguishable -- at least in content, if not in intention.
Not many weeks later, as a result of that resolution, I was bicycling along the Rheinweg, more absorbed in trying to sort out the plot impasse of the London section than in where I was going. I pedalled mechanically, as if I might go on this way forever. The film's visually enigmatic events at Waterloo Station, I was finding, were essentially impossible to represent in words. Somehow, I would have to invent for them a corresponding verbal equivocation.
"Vorsicht!" I shouted. She did not hear my warning. There was neither world nor time enough for me to avoid her. The pale angelic form was floating along on a tall, black bicycle on the wrong side of the crowded path -- her impossibly long, white-blonde hair levitated behind on a cushion of zealous air, held back by inertial forces loathe to leave where she had just been. For the sake of her sky-blue eyes the Rheinweg at once flattened out and smoothed itself and broadened, but not enough to save us from each other. I rapidly extrapolated her youthful beauty from the streaming hair and impossibly upright posture, particularly her pale immaculate skin -- for the sake of which the first midges of Spring frantically made way, to avoid impious contact with her nose, mouth or rounded brow, features graced with the strength and fragility of chiselled marble. That this quintessence of fleeting beauty might not have understood my warning never occurred to me.
There was just time to entertain the profane thought that it was not for the sake of the Lamed-Vov Tsadikkim, the hidden Thirty-Six Pious Men, that the God of the Jews saved the world from destruction, but because it was inconceivable, even to Him, that such a creature as this should be lost with it. And I was about to hit her with my bicycle.
I rang my bell frantically, a ridiculous measure against an oncoming rider. It was too late besides. The accident was, it seemed, inevitable. Fated. So was it an accident at all?
The actual moment of encounter involved a crash of respectable volume and dimensions, that stopped all but the most abstracted cyclists and pedestrians in both directions for some minutes. The merits of spectatorial diversion versus Schadenfreude battled in each German soul for pre-eminence, as they had done for their ancestors at gladiatorial combats in nearby outposts of the Roman Empire -- and more recently when these very people, their parents and grandparents, had paused to watch the columns of Jews assembling at the Gueterbahnhoefe and Sammelplaetze of the Lower Rhine.
We both fell. An elderly lady who had been bicycling behind me narrowly avoided piling on top of me. Shaken though she was, she carefully waited until the squealing of her brakes had ceased before commencing to heap maledictions upon me.
I was unhurt, or if I was hurt, I didn't know it. The moment I succeeded in extricating myself from beneath my twisted handlebars, I was beside my seraphic victim. Others were already lifting the heavy machine from where it had fallen upon her, thus freeing me for the blissful penitence of ever so meekly and compassionately manipulating and manoeuvring various parts of her body until, at the triumphant climax, I helped her to her feet, one arm around her shoulders, the other hand in the warm place beneath her shoulder, just beside -- but I dared not think of that. Her pure, white blouse was slightly torn, a centimetre or two only, but at that spot my finger tips immediately fused to her skin -- where we were conjoined, I hoped, forever.
Immediately the fear arose that it was to be only an ephemeral eternity. As soon as she was sufficiently recovered from the shock of our collision, the accusations would begin. In the unlikely event that she herself was too reticent, older members of the crowd would joyfully initiate the proceedings. The number still surrounding us was considerable, though some had melted away with a disappointment -- thinly masked as relief or indifference -- once it became clear that neither of us was visibly injured nor given to verbal or physical displays of indignation.
What could I have said? 'You were cycling along the wrong side of the path; there was neither world nor time enough for me to avoid you.' The idea that a situation could exist in which such a figure could possibly be at fault struck me as even more ludicrous than it would strike the others. All would come to her support at once. And they would be entirely right to do so. Not only her appearance, but also my foreignness, would be held against me. As it was essential that guilt be assigned somewhere, it would be assigned to me. There was no question of my attempting to defend myself by explaining what had happened either to the crowd, or to her.
"Danke schoen," she said with a quiet solicitude for the vowels, as I reluctantly released my hold upon her.
This was not what I expected. Was it the accent, or the sentiment itself, that first told me she must come from elsewhere? My apology -- in the German language, the perpetrator requests from the victim absolution for his guilt -- froze on my lips.
When no reply was forthcoming, she turned to face me directly, lifting her head slightly and pushing her hair gently from her face with a movement that stirred an old memory. The gesture had none of the brusqueness with which people so often shove their hair back. Instead, it suggested the patient disquiet of a good friend who would prefer you gave up some silly habit, but would never dream of revealing that preference to you.
I had not properly seen her face since first imagining it as we careened into each other's lives -- not even as I helped her up, for as she bent her head, the hair had cascaded over her face like a flaxen shroud. Now, before they were revealed to my eye, the features came into sharp focus in my mind, so that the actual moment of seeing them proved more a recognition than a discovery.
"Marion," I whispered.
Marion was my first, my only real love. I disbelieved in her re-appearance even as I spoke her name. Yet the figure before me appeared to be her. I wanted so much to believe that my unalterable memory of her could engender equally unaltered its object incarnate -- and I was sufficiently rattled by the accident -- that I said aloud, "I never thought I'd run into you again."
"You didn't. I ran into you." She smiled shyly. "What do you mean, again?"
It was absurd, after all, to think that this could be Marion. Twenty-five years had passed. "I meant figuratively. I mean, after all these years since we last saw each other."
"But I've never seen you before. I only just ran into you."
Her appearance, like her words, was utterly unadorned. Her face would not have been improved, but only rendered less perfect, by modification. Anything applied to her skin might have dimmed its luminosity, obscured her soul as it shone through to the outside world. "No," I said, "it wasn't your fault. Anyway, there's no harm done." I hardly knew what I was saying. "Not this time."
"What do you mean?" she said.
Marion could not be coy. It wasn't like her. But how could this be Marion, anyway? Bruised by the absurdity of my own conviction, I stood there and foolishly tried to back-pedal. "I mean, it's no accident."
"No," she said. Her eyes seemed not so much to reflect the colour of the spring sky, as to have projected their own pale blueness onto it. "I suppose not. If no one is hurt."
"I meant, it wasn't accidental," I said, more pointedly.
"Do you think I ran into you on purpose?" she asked.
"Not this time."
The crowd had by now completely disappeared, driven away by our English words and, still more, by our dull civility. Someone had drawn our bicycles onto the grassy verge, but we ourselves were still standing partly in the path. I pulled her over just before two racers sped by together. She caught her breath as the wind from the bicycles blew her hair. She touched my arm and said, "Thank you. Again."
I watched the words emerging from between her finely-wrought lips. I could actually see the words taking shape and emerging before their sounds reached my ears. From this separation of words and images, it suddenly dawned on me how the Waterloo scene could be resolved. I'd replace the cinematic image by the words themselves. A satisfactory device was easy enough to find. The headline of a newspaper held up to the reader's view would suffice: something about the disaster, the bomb, the killer. Though what, exactly, I didn't know. Still, I was cheered by this partial solution, which had come to me, in the end, effortlessly -- the result of a charming, chance disruption of my earlier, fruitless efforts.
I thought I felt her fingers lingering on my arm. But when I glanced down, I saw that I was wrong.
"I can't believe that you and I are standing together, Marion, on a path along the Rhine, twenty-five years after we last saw each other, and that you are utterly unchanged. It's impossible."
"It is impossible," she said. It was the first time we had agreed. "I'm Ellen. Marion is my mother."
I tried to take this in, disguising my effort by a careful examination of her face. She gestured in that tender way with her hair again, her mother's gesture exactly, as if to please me with the likeness. So I had found the daughter. It seemed too good to be true: a naturalistic explanation which allowed a kind of literal truth to linger in the fantasy world outside time, where I had been dwelling since our collision.
We examined our bicycles. My wheel was bent; her handlebars, or rather her mother's, were badly askew. We chained our machines together around a tree and set off on foot for Brands Jupp, the cafe-restaurant just above the Rheinweg in Wittlaer -- once an affluent village, now the most northerly suburb of Duesseldorf, farthest from the Uni. It was shady and cool. We sat alone amidst the empty outside tables. Her pale blonde hair, I noticed, was so long that she was partly sitting on it.
I learned that Ellen was twenty, precisely Marion's age when I had known her, and that she had just arrived in Duesseldorf a week earlier for a Spring holiday visit to her mother, who had actually been at the Uni throughout the past academic year, researching something to do with comparative Slavic and Germanic linguistic morphology. Why Duesseldorf, rather than Dresden, or Bratislava, or any other university on the relevant linguistic border -- from which Duesseldorf itself was separated by hundreds of kilometres? Ellen had no idea. Nor could I explain how it was that I had neither seen her nor heard of her presence, in a university where Americans were few in number and drearily insular. "I've been very busy this year," I ventured. She began to laugh. Soon I was laughing too.
To my surprise, she accepted a second glass of wine when I offered it. Leaning a bit closer, she said, "Tell me about you and my mother."
"She never has?"
Ellen looked up and shook her head, smiling expectantly.
"We met at an anti-war workshop," I began, smiling now at the idea of a student workshop as a weapon against war. "It was at the height of the Vietnam war, and these gatherings were fairly common on college campuses. The more enterprising radical groups at the universities sometimes held these vast regional meetings. I suppose they saw them as the affluent American version of going into the hills and organising the peasants. Only, in this case, we came to them -- to one of those beautiful little campuses north of New York City, along the Hudson River. Spring was just beginning. Your mother and I had each come alone, without the protection of a group of friends, which everyone else seemed to have. In the morning there were seminars on American Imperialism in the Third World and on Tactical Non-Violent Responses to Tear Gas Attacks and Mounted Police Charges. There was a carnival atmosphere at lunch. I felt remote from it, almost offended, even though I probably took the seminars less seriously than most of the others who were there. I went outside with the sandwich I'd brought along, and I climbed to the top of a hill. I thought I might be able to see the Hudson from there."
"And could you?"
"I could, yes, but I hardly looked at it. Because when I got to the top, I saw Marion sitting on the grass. No one else, just her. She looked at me and smiled as I came up. Then she turned back to the river. But I couldn't take my eyes off her."
"You thought she looked like an angel," Ellen said, as if she were repeating my own words.
"Yes. How did you know?"
"I've heard other people say that about her."
"But you look exactly as she did that day."
Ellen bent her head and shook it rapidly, so that her hair soon covered her face. I drank what remained of my wine and lapsed into silence. Ellen looked up again, suddenly surprised. "Aren't you going to tell me the rest?"
"If you'd like."
"I would."
I tried to think how I could explain to Ellen, so they'd sound purely historical, the feelings I was experiencing at that very moment I sat beside her now. "I'm normally not a terribly outgoing person," I finally began. "I often think it might be interesting to talk to someone, but then I don't, because I can't manage to climb over the wall that surrounds me, let alone the one surrounding the person I've just met."
"Really?" Ellen interrupted. "I've never felt that way."
"That's exactly what Marion said when I told her what I've just told you."
"So you spoke to her first?"
"As I said, I normally can't do that. But there I was, sitting in this beautiful landscape, all alone with an angel. I was afraid that any minute some other alienated soul might climb up our hill -- and he wouldn't hesitate to claim the attention of the angel who was sitting there, as if she were waiting for his arrival. Even if that didn't happen, sooner or later she'd walk down the hill and back inside, or simply float back in, and I'd never see her again. I was terrified at the thought that I might lose forever the chance to make her aware of my existence. That's what drove me to say something. But then, facing her, I didn't know what to say. So I told her how hard it was for me to speak to her."
"And she said she never had trouble speaking to people when she wanted to."
"Exactly. And it was clear enough why she didn't." It was clear enough why Ellen didn't, either. But I couldn't quite bring myself to say that, yet. "But I couldn't quite bring myself to say that, yet," I continued. "So instead I said, 'Just now, the difficulty doesn't feel quite so overwhelming.'"
"And does it feel overwhelming now?" Ellen asked.
I looked at her, but she was intently fingering the little cardboard mat under her wine glass. "No more than then," I said. "Perhaps even a tiny bit less."
Ellen looked at me with what seemed a certain eager anticipation and asked, "What did you talk about?"
I shook my head. "I don't know. I couldn't have told you then, either. I suppose we kept talking together about talking together. Marion asked questions mostly, I think. Or at least, what I remember is that, having begun, I kept babbling on stupidly, and she kept smiling at me, which I must have taken for encouragement. How could I help it, with a smile like that as a reward -- yes, exactly like that."
For at that moment Ellen had bestowed upon me a smile of such radiant condescension, faintly tinged by appreciative amusement -- this mortal pleases me, it seemed to say -- that I felt it was precisely the response one would hope for from a celestial being. And precisely the response that, coming from Marion twenty-five years earlier, on another continent, beside another river, had me completely enthralled by the time she suggested -- oh, so delicately, as if nothing else in the universe could have driven her to propose the relocating of our tete-a-tete -- that possibly we should go back for the first of the afternoon workshops.
As I descended the mountain and entered the building beside Marion, how unutterably insect-like seemed the throngs of the self-important, and the congregations of their hangers-on milling around them. Had I had stone tablets in my hands, rather than my spiral notebook, how easily I might have dashed them to the ground. Yet, at the same time, a peculiar aura, a kind of soft focus surrounded these very same objects of my gentle scorn, a diffuseness of line that I was not to experience again until I swallowed my first tablet of mescaline some months afterward -- or when, still later, I saw an old film with a close-up of Greta Garbo.
"Could she read your mind?" Ellen asked cryptically. "Because you've stopped giving words to your story -- and I can't."
So I had. It seemed strange that such creatures, if creatures they were, could not also read minds. "I was thinking how to tell the rest of the story," I said.
"If you say one word, then another, and then each one that comes after, in the order they come out -- won't that work?"
I could have sworn she'd said that to me before, on the hill above the Hudson. I began to stroke her hand, and only stopped, abruptly, when I recalled that it wasn't she whose hand I could claim any authorisation to stroke. Still, she didn't remove her hand, or make any effort to stop me. So I let my hand remain where it was. Probably, I reflected, it's always this easy for men who act as if they already know a woman and are only pretending to be making her acquaintance for the first time.
"Eventually, in the workshop, people started moving to the various rooms to which they'd been assigned. I didn't look at the schedule in my pocket, but for me there was no question of our going off in different directions. We were walking down a long, windowless corridor. I still felt like I was floating, and she looked as if she was. Then we saw some people running towards us. Further down, in the direction we were going, we heard shouting, and more people running. One of the women rushing by us screamed, 'A bomb!' and right behind her, a man shouted, 'Fucking CIA plot, man!' After that, there was complete chaos. People were running, shoving, yelling, falling. I wouldn't have been worried for myself -- it helps somehow in such situations if you're one of those people who is never noticed -- but I was terrified something might happen to you -- to her, I mean. I took her hand and led the way with my other hand stuck out in front of me, as if I were an icebreaker and she was my fragile cargo."
"That's nice."
"Eventually we got out of the building again, of course. It took us ages, but in a way I was happy about the whole business. I felt we belonged outside."
"And was it a bomb?"
"Nothing ever went off. But I don't know if it was a bomb that didn't go off, or just a bomb scare, or the rumour of a plot, or something else. Whatever else it was, it was a disaster for the workshop. Only the hardliners hung around. The rest of us drifted off. At the station, people were arguing about whether this was going to be in the newspapers. One fellow said things like this were going on every day, but the government didn't let the papers report it. Somehow that made sense to me at the time. I was feeling secretive myself."
Suddenly an image loomed up in my mind, ready formed, not from the 'Lay', but replacing its impossible scene: a newspaper headline, held up to eye-level by a man standing on the platform of a railway station:
CIRCASSIAN ASSASSIN BOMB PLOT DISASTER
What was being reported? Was something 'supposed to' happen that had happened? Or something that had not? The words -- and still more, the arrangement of the words -- left everything possible. Nothing was revealed; everything was suggested. I came back to our story, but the figure with the newspaper lingered at the edge of the platform, serviceably reading a different, still-unwritten story on the inside pages.
"We got on a train to New York together. What a strange ride that was. I spent all of it terrified that any moment it would end -- so in one way it seemed to go on forever, but really it was just ending forever. I remember deciding it was Marion who was making the train crawl all of the way, and that she thought she was helping me, because it was what I wanted, and I did, but it only prolonged the agony. Five minutes before Grand Central Station, I tried to convince her to let me take her home. That would have meant a crosstown bus ride at least, and maybe a few minutes lingering in front of her building, but she smiled and shook her head and said, 'Won't your parents be wondering about you?' Of course she was right, but I was so desperate that I said I could phone from the station. She smiled and shook her head again. The train was slowing. Now my terror at the prospect of the end of our day together gave way to a far worse terror: that I'd never see her again. The train had nearly stopped. She was writing something on a scrap of paper even as she stood up and pulled her backpack from the overhead rack. The beauty of that unconscious movement, the image of that instinctive upwards sweep -- her body stretched effortlessly -- completely overwhelmed me. I barely reacted as she thrust the paper into my hand, bent over, kissed me, called out 'Bye!' and was gone before I could connect that image to her departing figure. The manner of her departure was for my benefit, too. I didn't suffer so much that way."
"And all that, you felt for my mother?"
I wondered for a moment if I should have the newspaper in the hands of some ethereal creature. But no, then something terrible would have to happen to her. Besides, ethereal creatures don't read newspapers, at least not on station platforms.
"For your mother. For you. Who can say?"
"But you saw her again."
"Oh, yes. The paper she handed me had seven numbers written on it. Nothing else. I figured it must be her phone number. I hoped it was. I forced myself to wait an entire week before dialling the numbers. Probably I was helped in this by my terror of telephones. She must have known that about me -- she seemed to know everything else -- so she'd given me this to help me, rather than her address. If I'd known that, I'd have hung around her building every day. It was only as I was about to dial the number, standing in the hallway of our apartment by our wall telephone, trying to fit my shaking finger into the holes of the dial, that I realised I didn't know her name. Not just her family name. I didn't even know her given name."
"Really?"
"It hadn't ever occurred to me to ask. I mean, I knew 'who' she was the moment I saw her. Just as I knew 'who' you were. What was her name? Just someone else's idea, years earlier, of what she might become. Only it now seemed a real problem: how to ask to speak to someone on the phone whose name I didn't know. You can imagine how it made me even more terrified."
"What happened?" Ellen asked with such eagerness that it might have been an answer she knew perfectly well, but one she liked and wanted to hear again.
"The person who answered could have been her, or her mother, or a sister, or you. All I heard was 'Hello?' in a voice of sweet expectation. But the words that came out of me were, 'Do you remember this guy at the workshop last week? The fool on the hill?' The laugh like tiny bells told me I had the right person. I said, 'The real reason I'm calling is to find out your name. I'm sure the CIA knows it, but I don't, and they won't tell me.' We spoke on the phone two or three times after that. Somehow it was never possible to meet. I was afraid to push things. At least this way I got to hear her voice sometimes. I didn't want that to end as well. It allowed me to retain the appearance of sanity for weeks on end around all the other people who thought they knew me. That's why I never mentioned her to anyone. Just in case I had only imagined her and everything that had happened -- I didn't want anybody helpfully pointing that out to me."
"You're funny," Ellen said. In her voice, it was like an expression of gratitude. Her mother had said it that way too. But I didn't tell her so.
The figure on the platform seemed to be glancing darkly at me from over the headlines. I thought I'd better get on with it. The disaster.
"Then, I don't know, months later, it must have been, maybe near the end of the summer, she called me for the first time. She said, 'I was just wondering. Do you want to come over?' I thought: do I 'want' to? You were just 'wondering'? You have the possibility of bestowing bliss, and for you it's just an idle thought? I did my best to control myself, to say something conventional like, 'yes, I think I'm free', or 'that would be nice, when is convenient for you?' Whatever I said, I couldn't have sounded more idiotic to her than I did to myself. Then she said, as if it were a kind of afterthought, 'You can spend the night, if you'd like.' How can I describe to you the feelings that rushed through me, as if they were all battling to get out before I exploded?"
Ellen giggled. "You were just like the radical workshop."
"I was. And I don't know what I actually said. In fact, that was part of what worried me, all the way there."
But only a very small part, compared to everything else I worried about. At this point, I wondered if I should explain, as we sat at the cafe table -- I was shivering slightly from the cold, whereas Ellen seemed unaffected -- that I'd already slept with a girl once, some time in the previous winter. I considered this detail highly relevant to the events of that memorable night at Marion's. But then I thought better of it. I was more than twice Ellen's age. How would she construe a statement like that from an old man like me? From any man?
The fellow on the platform was watching me still from behind his headlines.
I cleared my throat. "It was an hour by subway from my house to hers. I don't remember anything about the trip. Probably I was shaking the whole way. The address she gave me was of one of those grand, old New York apartment houses that look more like French chateaux that have been divided up. Like the Dakota. The doorman was taller than me. He stood over me in his long, blue coat, with two rows of shining gold buttons and called me 'Sir' in the most contemptuous way. I remember thinking: if this is the Golden Gate to which he holds the key, why do I keep expecting to see his three-headed dog?
He let me through. Inside, there was a security guard at a desk with three little TV monitors. Of course, when he asked who I wanted, I couldn't remember the family name. So I said, 'I'm here to see Marion.' He folded his arms across his chest and curled his lip. He said, 'That's what everyone says. How do I know she wants to see you?' I suggested he call up and ask, but he didn't even look at me again. He kept getting calls from people in their apartments, and a number of other people came in or went out -- either residents he was careful to greet cordially, or people visiting or making deliveries. All of them seemed to know what to say in order to get through without a problem. But I stood there, completely ignored, like a character in a moral allegory. I would have made a dash for the stairs, but he had a gun, and nothing I'd seen made me hope for one moment that he wouldn't use it. Finally, after half-an-hour or so, his phone buzzed again. The guard finally looked at me again. The sneer reappeared on his face. 'What's he look like?' he said into the phone, and then, 'Right you are. Thank you ma'am.' He hung up the phone, and, still looking at me, jerked his thumb toward the elevator. 'One one seven,' he said. How beautiful those three numbers sounded, even coming from him."
She laughed again, her hand around her wine glass. I saw that she was happy for me, as I described how it felt to emerge from the elevator, ring the doorbell, and see her at the open door. I looked at her now and felt again, undiminished, all the unimaginable desire I had felt a quarter-century earlier -- with no greater assurance than before that I could do anything about it, except to try to explain once again.
"Do you understand? I was seeing her again, finally, after all those months, after having forgotten everything about her except her unbearable beauty. Then, as I stood there, I realised what it was, even more than her beauty, that had made her so unapproachable -- until that moment when she asked me in."
The intensity of Ellen's gaze forced me to lower my own eyes. Why had I brought her here? Why was I drinking wine with her -- not one, but several glasses? Our accident, if it was one, the 'Lay' book, the Uni, the people I knew there -- everything seemed to fade into a distant, indistinct greyness. There was only her radiant, unadorned, inconceivable face before me.
"You'll laugh," I said, "but do you know what I imagined I was seeing as I looked at her? A kind of feminised, perfected, etherealised, idealised, even sanctified version of myself."
"There's nothing strange about that. It's love you're describing. Why would I laugh at that, John?"
I was quite sure I had not told her my name.
As I continued my story, she listened with the compassion of one who has heard the events described before, or who at some time was herself witness to those events. I could feel her familiarity. I told her of my shock at learning that Marion's parents were away and would not be returning for three days -- followed, understandably, by my pleasure at this news -- followed, incomprehensibly, by my growing fear. I described our long walk up Fifth Avenue and then back down the Avenue of the Americas, as daylight faded into greyness and rows of taxi headlights. I recounted our making dinner together, an endless chopping of vegetables with two knives, by four hands, on one cutting board. We were like an old married couple then -- but also nothing like an old married couple, for every detail of our preparations and our conversation came back to me as I described them with a vividness I could attach to no other events in the decades that have followed. There were moments -- as we recalled the aborted workshop and the panicked flight from it, or some New York character we had just seen on the street together -- when talking to her was like talking to anyone else whose company I simply enjoyed. But there were other moments -- which came to dominate as dinner ended, and there were only the last drops from the wine bottle left to hang onto -- when the intensity of her gaze in the candlelight was too much for me to bear, when I could only silently echo the words of some character in an old novel: 'What have I done to deserve all this happiness?' |
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