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“mystery,” that which is beyond explanation. I’d love to be able to reverence mystery and give it its due, let something go, but perhaps for the same reason a Bob Dylan song in Italian sounds strange to an American in Italy, I wouldn’t be able to think for long in a really different language, assuming that that language mirrors its ideas. In one African language the word for money and rain is the same. If there isn’t a word for guilt, movies or sex in some culture, could I really exist there?
    On the other hand I might get swept up, embraced by events of history that would bestow upon me the dubious privilege of a certain destiny. At least where the public event meets some personal need. I’m reading
Code Name Mary
, the autobiography of Muriel Gardiner, a wealthy American who lived in Vienna in the thirties and early forties and became a Resistance fighter, having already become a medical doctor and a psychoanalyst, and saved Communists and Jews. Later Gardiner’s fate is to be reinvented as the friend of Lillian Hellman, as the Julia of Hellman’s
Pentimento
. Gardiner writes to Hellman: I understand you’ve based a book on me, then never hears from her. She was the only American woman in Vienna working in the underground. She never knew Hellman.
    I walk to the Leidseplein. Older women riding bicycles have firm calves and thighs. Men and women carry infants on their backs with no worry of falling. Dutch people have bright large teeth. An Englishwoman explained to me in London that Englishmen, not Englishwomen, think going to the dentist is merely cosmetic. What do the Dutch think?
    I choose a café with a view onto the square. And to shake flat wallpaperlike feelings, adaptable to any public or private space, to bars or cafés, I order a
genever
with a coffee, black and strong. Ordering this combination doesn’t make me feel like the Dutchman at the bar who has also just ordered it but a version of, an imitation of him. He doesn’t see m€ as an homage, but maybe he ought to consider it. Staring purposelessly at a lively group of Dutchmen who order another round of
pils
, with a lot of gusto, much the way I’ve done coke, staring past them, I spy American Sal, an older man I met in Lindos. He’s in front of one of the more disreputable nightspots, talking to several men, all of whom are shorter and seedier-looking than he. Sal’s turned up like a bad penny.
    I move somewhat automatically out of the café into the square so that he’ll discover me. Sal shouts: “Babe, remember me from Lindos? What are you doing here?” He shakes loose from his group of smaller men and runs over, his arms outstretched. “Let me buy you a drink.” It’s about 4  P.M. , and I sense I’m about to lose the night. He picks up on this instantly and says, “What’s time? Only these farmers should care about it.” He points to the men he was standing with who don’t look anything like farmers, the ones in storybooks. Then Sal waves his hand at a couple of large blond men eating
leverwurst
or
kaas
on small buns or
broodjes
. He points to Broodje van Kootje, the sandwich shop, and says, “l love that place. This is a great country.” He throws out his arms as if to embrace it, then sighs and grabs my arm. “Lindos,” he says, “you should have stayed. It got crazy. Bad shit went down. Basil got done for smuggling rugs into Turkey.” “Basil the rug merchant?” “Yeah, him, that guy you didn’t want to sleep with. And after all that I found Sylvie. I want you to meet her. She lives here. That’s why I’m here.” He throws his arm around me, one strange comrade to another. “Don’t you miss that moussaka?”

Chapter 8
     
Passing
     
“I realized that modesty helped me to shine, humility to conquer and virtue to oppress.”
    —Albert Camus
     
    This could be a fairy tale. Each day is something of an invention. If it were a fairy tale there could be a reversal of fortune even for me. Literal fortunes are