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us smile with pleasure, like a shy and grateful child given a candy it wanted so much, it could taste the taste of not being given it, but here it is, after all, not just any old gift, but exactly what one wanted.
    Something is missing of course. We feel scooped out and we can see the stitches. But we are not missing. We are back again. We do not know the prognosis. But we are there. That’s marvelous.
    Lotte was waking up. It took her a while, these days. Birds were singing outside and there was plenty of light in the room, in fact, too much. She had nothing against songbirds, but these sounded like a bedspring, left to rust in a vacant lot, being jounced by guttersnipes. She’d had a bad night. That pishtush about what a marvelous mechanism the human body is is a lot of pishtush. There’s nothing in it. That look of immortal youth takes hours. The only marvelous thingabout the machine is that it runs at all, and the better the car, the more time it needs in the garage. So Lotte stayed in bed. Under thirty your body runs you. Over thirty, if you’ve any sense and know how, you’re old enough to fight back, and woe betide you if you don’t know how.
    She knew how. So she was still in bed when the phone rang. The Festival had caught up with her.
    That she still had a career, she owed to being a good scout, easy to get on with, obliging, polite, generous, and you never hear a word against her, which as a matter of fact she was, and much preferred to her public image, which was of a Ninon de l’Enclos traveling in foreign parts, the beautiful lady who never says thank you. So she agreed, besides it would be one in the eye for the management at Cannes, broke the connection, and then dialed Charlie’s room. He wasn’t there. She had forgotten. He was an early riser. But usually he stayed in his room, Paul or no Paul, and worked until noon. These little toddles out into the daylight weren’t like him. She wondered where he could be.

V
    HE was at the theatre. Theatres had fascinated him ever since somebody had given him a purple Russian puppet as a child.
    Mondorf didn’t have a movie palace large enough to house the Festival (it would award the Prix Luxembourgeois, which should embarrass the Russians a bit, should they by any chance win it), so it had been necessary to use this bijou piece of nonsense instead. The theatre had been built by a nineteenth-centuryduke, at the caprice of someone like Cléo de Merode, in between kings at the time, down on her luck, but well up on the Almanach de Gotha. Charlie felt quite happy there.
    When he was a young tourist he had once gone to Vicenza during the winter, that being the fiscally convenient season for young tourists. The snow had turned Palladio into a pastry cook. The theatre there, being ducal also, but from a private period, had had no foyer to the street. So he had entered that wonderland along a board fence and through a service door.
    The guide had left him alone in a Monteverdi Rome built by jewelers for the use of dwarfs. He had been fascinated, in particular, by that little town in diminished perspective that could be seen through the arches of the screen, exactly as some provincial Bibiena had left it, so he climbed up on the stage and stared through the arches. “Open identical doors on identical death,” he remembered. Literacy has its uses. It is at any rate a great consolation, it provides the pleasure of consanguinity, although an arch leads not to death, but to the past. It was unexpectedly cold on the stage and all the seats behind him were haunted full. A little hesitant about not what he would, but what he would not, find back there, Charlie ducked his head and entered the past, trudging uphill over creaky, splintered boards, with painted loggias at eye level, and doorways up to his knees. As one went to the rear, the past got smaller, and going round in back, he couldn’t help noticing the past was also lath and batten work behind, in short, a Potemkin