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ask her, ‘ “What is wrong?” and she would lower her eyes and murmur wretchedly, “Nothing. No, nothing at all.”
    “Don’t be late,” she admonished him blithely.
    “I won’t.”
     
    V lora hung up with grateful relief, dimly heard Leda answering a call, and was suddenly assailed by a vivid recollection of a lucid dream of the night before, a chronic nightmareof a terrified infant abandoned in a corner of endless night. Then came a new and more dreadful visitation of which he remembered only disparate images: Russians. Ho Chi Minh. A banquet in Tirana. A death.
    What did it mean?
    He didn’t know.
    He turned his gaze to reports in a wire basket and lifted them out. They made an ambiguous rustling sound, the kind in which sometimes in the quiet of dawn one imagines one’s name has just been whispered. Carefully, he placed them before him on the desk. The answer was here, he felt, in these papers, though he’d pondered their contents so often before. Staring at the redness of a thing hid its greenness, he knew; he must look from the right point of view. On top of the stack lay a white identity card that was soiled and battered from handling. The emblem of the eagle and the cornstalk on the cover had faded to a bloodless apparition of itself. The Interrogator picked it up gently and unfolded it, then scanned its twin columns of data: . . . father’s name . . . mother’s name . . . residence . . . profession . . . eyes . . . mouth . . . distinguishing marks. His pensive stare slipped down to the photo glued at the bottom of the left-hand column where the Prisoner’s eyes stared back with the trust of a simple heart.
     
    T russed up in a jacket, shirt, and tie, his head and shoulders were drawn up affectedly in that pleased and prideful bearing so typical of peasants when posing for this photo, and the too-tight jacket, buttoned and tugging, had the look of something borrowed or rented for this day. Was he smiling?Yes, a little bit, decided the Interrogator. The effect was of a childlike innocence that he found to be oddly touching. How could the Prisoner have feigned such a look? He found himself thinking of
The Brothers Karamazov
and the deathbed speech of little Rusha: “Father, don’t cry, and when I die get a good boy, another one. Choose one of my friends, a good one, call him Ilusha and love him instead of me.” There were times when reading it caused him to weep. Why had he thought of it now? he wondered. What could be the triggering association? He put the identity card aside and then labored at the papers for hours in silence, polishing and burnishing each fact, every riddle, and then turning them end over end and around before holding them up to the light of sense; but still no insight gleamed, no hidden fact cried out its secret name, and at the end was the taunting fog of the beginning.
    And that certain touch of fear.
    Vlora put away the papers and listened to the reassurring patter of the rain. Was there nothing amiss after all? he wondered. Were his worries imagined? Danger’s dream? From behind him he heard thunder rumbling faintly high in the mountains of Selca Decani, and abruptly a keening wind leaped up, slamming rain against the windows in bursts. Mysterious flashes danced on his spectacles, far lightning, memory of suns; then suddenly the wind trailed away to a hush that once again softly bedded a steady light rain. Vlora listened and for moments he did not move, his gaze fixed upon a deep bottom drawer of his desk. Then he slid the drawer open, reached in, and lifted out a yellowing cardboard shoebox that he carefully placed atop the desk as if it contained some priceless relic. Thick rubber bands stretched a guard around the box. For amoment Vlora pensively rubbed a thumb back and forth atop a knot where one of the bands had snapped and been retied. Then he slipped off the bands, removed the shoebox lid, and peered down at the items in the whiteness of the box: the