He sits down across from me, taking off the cellophane and paper ring of a cigar. He has a box of extra-long matches. He uses one to bore a hole in the conical, curved end of the rounded, rolled tobacco leaf. Then he lights it, carefully and meticulously. When it's burning evenly, he fixes his gaze on me.

"It wasn't you, by chance, who killed him, was it?" he says.

"No."

While he talks, he continues to stare at me, as if trying to examine my conscience.

"If a person drowns, the first thing to happen is that he tries to hold his breath. When he can't hold it any longer, he takes a couple of deep, desperate breaths. That pumps water into the lungs. This motion creates whitish protein material in the nose and throat, based on the same principle as when you beat egg whites. It's called froth. This person-whom I ought not, to discuss, and particularly with someone who might be involved in the crime-this person has no trace of it. So he didn't drown, at any rate."

He carefully taps the ash from his cigar.

"He was already dead when I went on board."

He hardly hears me. His thoughts are still on that morning and the autopsy.

"First they tied him up. With pieces of copper wire. He put up a hell of a fight, but they finally got him tied up. There must have been a couple of them. He was a strong man. An elderly gentleman, but strong. Then they bent his head to one side. You're familiar with sodium hydroxide-lye. An extremely caustic base. One person held him by his hair. Several clumps were torn out. And then they dripped lye into his right ear. Nice and easy, just like that, damn it all."

He regards his cigar thoughtfully. "You can't be in my business without running into torture now and then. It's a complicated subject. A hell of a subject. The legal definition, by the way, says that it has to be carried out by an organization. The important thing for the torturer is to find the victim's weak point. And this man was blind. That's not something I discovered. I didn't know that until we got his medical records. But they knew it. So they concentrated on his hearing. Damned inventive, you have to give them that. It's psychopathic. But it has a creative streak. What you can't help wondering is what they were after."

I think about the curator's voice on the telephone, about what I had thought was a muffled laugh. They had already broken him by then.

"He had cotton in his ears."

"Glad to hear it. It was gone when he was fished out. But I guessed about the cotton. When I found the little burns. At some point they reached the end of the line with him. Whenever that might have been. And so they did something quite clever. They moistened some cotton, maybe with lye, since it was handy. They then split an electrical cord and put one pole in each ear. And plugged it in. And then calmly turned on the switch. Dead on the spot. Quick, cheap, clean."

He shakes his head. He's a doctor, not a psychologist. He finds the world in which we live beyond comprehension.

"A couple of fucking professionals. But if I believed in New Year's resolutions, mine would be to make them pay."

I wake up around 1:00 a.m. One second I'm sleeping, the next I'm awake.

He's lying next to me. On his stomach with his hands down at his side. Asleep, one side of his face is pressed flat against the sheet. His mouth and nose vibrate gently, as if he were sniffing at a flower. Or were about to kiss a child.

I lie quietly and look at him in a way I haven't been able to before. His hair is brown, with a few gray streaks. It's thick, like the bristles of a broom. Burying your fingers in it is like grabbing a horse's mane.

There in bed, happiness comes over me. Not like something that belongs to me, but like a wheel of fire rolling through the room and the world.

For a moment I think I'll manage to let it pass and be able to lie there, aware of what I have, and not wish for anything more.

The next moment I want to hang on. I want it to continue. He has to lie beside me tomorrow, too. This is my chance. My only, my last chance.

I swing my legs onto the floor. Now I'm panic-stricken. This is what I've been working to avoid for thirty-seven years. I've systematically practiced the only thing in the world that is worth learning. How to renounce. I've stopped hoping for anything. When experienced humility becomes an Olympic discipline, I'll be on the national team.

I've never had any patience for other people's unhappy love affairs. I hate their weakness. I watch them find a man at the end of the rainbow. I watch them have children and buy a Silver Cross royal blue baby buggy and walk along the embankment in the spring sunshine and laugh condescendingly at me and think, Poor Smilla, she doesn't know what she's missing, she doesn't know what life is like for those of us who have babies and a marriage certificate.

Four months later there's a reunion for their old prenatal care group, and her dear Ferdinand has a little relapse and lines up a few hits on a mirror, and she finds him in the bathroom where he's rolling around with one of the other happy mothers, and in a nanosecond she's reduced from the great, proud, sovereign, invulnerable mama to a spiritual gnome. At one stroke she falls to my level and below, and becomes an insect, a worm, a centipede.

And then they take me out and dust me off. Then I'm supposed to listen to how hard it is to be a single mother after the divorce, how they had a fight over splitting up the stereo, how her youth is being sucked out by the child, who is now a machine that uses her and gives nothing in return.

I've never wanted to listen to that. "What the hell do you want?" I've said to them. "Do you think I edit some kind of lovelorn column? Do you think I'm your diary? An answering machine?"

There's one thing that is forbidden on journeys by sled, and that is whimpering. Whining is a virus, a lethal, infectious, epidemic disease. I refuse to listen to it. I refuse to be saddled with these orgies of emotional pettiness.

That's why I'm scared now. Standing there on his floor, next to his bed, I can hear something. It's coming from inside me, and it's a whimper. It's the fear that what has been given to me won't last. It's the sound of all the unhappy love stories I've never wanted to listen to. Now it sounds as if they're all contained within me.

But I can still be saved. I can gather up my clothes and put them under my arm. I don't even have to take time to get dressed. I can just walk out and run up the stairs. In my apartment I'll pack the essentials, or not even that much. I'll call a moving company and arrange to have my furnishings moved out and put in storage, and then I'll put my money box in one pocket and Isaiah's tape in the other, and I'll move into a hotel, so that I'm gone when he wakes up and I'll never have to look him in the eye again. He opens his eyes and looks at me. He lies there quite still, trying to figure out where he is. Then he smiles at me.

I remember that I'm naked. I turn my back to him and walk sideways over to my clothes. He folded them for me; they haven't been folded that way since I bought them. I put on my underwear. Modesty is part of the fundamental nature of human beings. It makes me sick to think of the European idea that they can solve all their own self-induced sexual neuroses by laying the meat on the table and putting it under a microscope.

I go into the living room. I have no idea what to do with myself.

He comes in a moment later. He's wearing boxer shorts. They're white and reach down to his knees and they're big enough to be made out of a comforter cover. He looks like a half-naked cricket player.

I notice them now, and remember that I saw them yesterday, too. He has narrow black lines around his wrists and ankles. They are scars. I don't want to ask him about it.