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these days; cultivate the indigenous only. It's a rule I never fail to practise, except in the case of noble families."
    It almost seemed she no longer believed in a classless society.
    Three weeks after this conversation my passport came in the mail, without incident.
    "They gave it to you!" My mother was incredulous. "And without settling things! Not a soul came to question me," she continued to marvel. "But it isn't logical. After all, I
was
a member of the Society for Revolutionary Ideals! I belonged to the Marxist Book Club! And besides," she wailed, "I'm the author of
Marianna Harlow!
" She blew through her nose in astonishment or vexation: "Do you suppose that Enoch—"
    But Enoch was still in Geneva.

4
    The summer wheeled on sluggishly, until in the brilliant heart of July it teetered, hung poised, and suddenly stopped dead. On the terrace the aspidistra in their ceramic pots withered. Night never came. It did not rain. The days were as pointless as childhood afternoons.
    In the mornings my mother took me shopping with her. We moved slowly down the long row of air-conditioned department stores, through endless revolving doors; there were high flags on lances over the street, and not a pucker in them. Through the perfume mist that meandered in the cooled currents inside the stores we could smell the cars in the street, glistening, yet quiescent, trapped like beaten doves in front of traffic lights, their exhausts rising and mingling with the odors of gasoline, molten tar, the fiery circles of breathing manhole-covers. The city burned. We went from counter to counter, touching everything—kerchiefs, gloves, buckles, moth-bags, jewel-boxes, nooses of pearls, the rigid wrists of manikins, bits of leather, candlesticks, tea sets and trays from Japan, Denmark, Italy. In one place, murmuring saws about the English weather, we bought a khaki raincoat for me, but the rest of the time we eschewed escalators and silently circled the lower floors, fanned into a kind of trance by the confusion of scents, the flash of glass cases, the idle shudder of the feet of little dogs.
    After lunch my mother would leave me and go to her room and sleep until dinner.
    I began to read newspapers feverishly and irrepressibly. I read every edition of every paper. I read the funnies, the beauty columns, the editorials, the lovelorn advice, the political analysts, the women's pages, the advertisements down to the dreariest minim of color, price, and branch-store location, the lost-and-found boxes, the captions of pictures, the classified sections, the letters to the editor.
    I also read the news.
    It was a brutal and curious time. Old ladies were dying of heat prostration; in Montana cows swooned. A New England farmer became heir to a dukedom. Everywhere children were falling down wells, down drains, down ten-inch pipes. In the cities the young girls were already jumping. They jumped from bridges; from penthouse windows; from the railings of national monuments. They left behind passionate notes pinned to their dresser-scarves. In Indonesia an American philologist was arrested for paddling a rubber boat from isle to isle at three o'clock in the morning.
    Toward the end of July the heat broke with a roar of rain and roots of lightning. My mother came out of her room into the sudden night of the terrace, and stood under the awning amid the dead plants.
    "Seriously," my mother said in her somnolent summer voice, "that dress I brought. You ought to wear it. You ought to have a going-away party."
    I tore off the theatre page and made a boat out of it and sent it on to capsize in the torrent that poured off the awning; dried white sleep-particles cracked in the comers of my mother's eyes as she watched.
    "Is there anything in the papers about a disturbance?" she inquired after a moment.
    "No. Everything is very quiet and ordinary."
    "I mean in Bulgaria. In Sofia perhaps. That sort of disturbance."
    "Nothing has happened anywhere."
    "Poor Enoch. He must