Oh, Let This Night Never End

This is the third, and perhaps the last, stage of life. What do I see? It looks like a rain shower of bright curtains. The sunlight suffuses them with colors, and they pour down endlessly, leaving no trace. What do I hear? It sounds as if someone's quietly climbing down the stairs. But that's not true. There's no one home but me. How can you kill memory? We're its prisoners. Through the slats of the window grate I pick out a single star.

Maybe it's our star? You can't turn back the clock. Otherwise the stars turn to ash.

Every morning the sickly December light seeps through the blinds. My heart beats in my throat. Now I know there's something more terrifying than the northern sky. It's when you look a person in the eye and realize she'll never be the way she was. Time and illness have eroded her life force. The soul is riven apart. As if a skier skated up over a virgin mountainside.

Many years ago, I went into the Cathedral of the Antwerp Mother of God—an incredible structure—and I made a wish, dripping a little blood onto the pages of the book of wishes. I pricked my finger with a safety pin to ensure it would come true. The candle of life is guttering out, and everything I intuited is turning to ash. I've turned backward too many times.

A fog bores through my forehead. At around four o'clock the light fades into a dark void. And things get a bit easier. You can tell that life continues from the quacking of the ducks over the island outside.

We take Viktor's (accent on the second syllable) suitcase from his hotel and head to my place. I live right next to the river.

"What a dense fog," he says.

"It's this way pretty much all year long."

Viktor is just visiting the city. I haven't seen him since my photography show in the US. He called me the day after the opening and asked to meet. I hardly knew anything about him except that he was a pretty famous journalist and spoke good Russian. He was a spy, rumor had it.

Viktor invited me to a birthday party for his ex-wife. A pretty strange gesture given we'd known each other for only two days.

He drove up to my hotel in an old car. His overcoat was in keeping with the vehicle—heavily worn. I got in, carefully tucking in the edges of my coat. He noticed how I looked everything over.

"I don't need a new car," he said.

We drove along a road, darkened by massive trees. The houses here were single-story affairs and gave the false impression of being too small for this respectable part of town. In fact, we were seeing only the tip of the iceberg: the main sections of the villas were hidden behind the facades. You could guess their true size only from the inside. I looked at my companion out of the corner of my eye. Unquestionably, when he was younger, women hadn't owned him. They'd belonged to him. His eyes—blue, almost transparent, framed by short, upturned eyelashes. Jewish men are handsome in a particularly elegant way. We parked the car on the street and went in. The party was going full blast.

"Oh, Viktor! With a young date, what a surprise! But why isn't she Asian? Asians are very chic these days, Viktor! If, of course, you're not concerned about an empty bank account and an accidentally overturned wheelchair" (saying this, his ex-wife patted him on the shoulder).

"Natasha, you could be a bit more gracious."

Natasha looked me in the eyes.

"You're an actress?"

"In a way."

"Perform something touching for us in honor of my birthday."

"I wouldn't want to ruin the festivities," I said. "The monologues of my motherland are filled with sadness."

"Then have something to drink."

The...