The cell was not a literary cell. It was neither Nabokovian nor Kafkaesque. It was just a cell six feet wide, eight feet long and ten feet high. It contained (1) a steel cot, (2) a ventilating window five inches square, (3) no light, (4) a porcelain urinal and (5) Geoffrey Wolgamot, murderer of college students, whose execution was nigh.

The village is celebrating I don’t know how many years of destruction. The band goes blaring by below my apartment. Among the crowd of youngsters following it I recognize someone who was tried about three weeks ago; he has a patch over his right eye and his cheek is pocked with barely healed scabs. 

Oleo’s is hopping. Fat Carlo is sweating away behind the bar, dipping and dripping in the ice-cream bins. He looks up for an instant as Stefan comes in - grins - and then re-applies himself. The Moped Gestapo, installed on the left, is demanding Der Stürmerfrom Emile, spastic fifty-year-old alumnus of Theresienstadt.

 “We never really liked that pond in the garden. At times it was choked with a sort of weed, which, if you pulled one thread, gleefully unravelled until you had an empty basin before you and the whole of the pond in a soaking heap at your side. 

A man leaves a dockside tavern in the early morning, the smell of the sea in his nostrils, and a whiskey bottle in his pocket, gliding over the cobbles lightly as a ship leaving harbour.

He examined the chessboard. There was no doubt he had the other fellow’s king in check. The guy must be nuts or something to say “check” right after him. Nobody, absolutely nobody, was near his king.

The Services of Security of “Santa Isabella,” that parched and brutalized island satrapy, are notoriously efficient. But Manuel Andrada, who came to me in Boston, was the exception to this cold, deathly rule. He had known only failure and frustration since leaving home on a mission for which he was the least qualified, the most unsecretive “special agent” conceivable. 

I remember him (I have no right to utter this sacred verb, only one man on earth had that right and he is dead) with a dark passion flower in his hand, seeing it as no one has ever seen it, though he might look at it from the twilight of dawn till that of evening, a whole lifetime.

here then I quote on part three how it was after Pim how it is part three and last at last towards which, lighter than air an instant flop fallen so many vows sighs prayers without words ever since the first word I can hear it the word how

Whenever, like two people turned to stone, we sit down to a meal together or meet at the door at night because each of us has just remembered about locking up, I feel our sadness is an arch, a great bow extending from, one end of the world to the other—which is: from Hanna to me—and in the drawn bow an arrow aimed straight at the heart of the unmoving sky.