Available for download now. Only 1 left in stock - order soon. Provide feedback about this page. There's a problem loading this menu right now. Get fast, free shipping with Amazon Prime. Get to Know Us. English Choose a language for shopping. Amazon Music Stream millions of songs. Amazon Advertising Find, attract, and engage customers. Amazon Drive Cloud storage from Amazon. Hazzard's investigation will take him from Paris to a mysterious clinic in Geneva, and finally to a remote chateau in the Bernese Alps where he will discover the truth that nearly costs him his life.
Private Investigator Rich Hazzard receives an unusual invitation to tea, accompanied by a photo of a woman whose throat has been cut. The address turns out to be an estate on Sunset Boulevard. A mute bodyguard ushers him into a dimly-lit suite where portraits of a stunningly beautiful girl cover a gallery wall. The girl is Cara Shears, a silent film actress who abandoned Hollywood for Berlin and German expressionist films in He never sees her face on the other side of the silk portiere and comes to wonder if the person talking to him really is the one time film actress.
While it keeps the noir voice, it has the architecture of a literary novel with a powerful theme as opposed to the formula driven mystery. Investigating the homicide of a Medal of Honor recipient from Vietnam, Rich Hazzard uncovers a disturbing clue - a photograph of slaughtered Vietnamese women and children in a Montagnard hamlet. Is the murder of a war hero part of a high level cover-up?
Secretly backed by Berlin, a cadre of Turkish officers has planned a military coup to topple the neutralist government and enter the war on the side of the Axis. Documents linking the insurgents to German Intelligence fall into the hands of an elusive Turkish criminal who plans to sell them back to the highest bidder.
The hunt pits two men against each other, Wolf Koeller, a resourceful Abwehr operative, and Wilson Chance, an American. Street smart and wry, Chance has a cynical allegiance to nothing. When the British blackmail him into working for them, he finds himself swept into the heart of the Cinder Red conspiracy, and a relationship with two women, one of whom is a double agent.
From the cabarets and teeming brothel quarter of Adana, to the ruins of a crusader castle above the Mediterranean, Chance follows a trail of murder and intrigue to its ultimate conclusion. After a mountain climbing accident on the border of Tibet, Cord Salter is picked up by a Chinese ski patrol. Held and interrogated inside an old lamasery, now a penal camp for Chinese dissidents, he discovers an aging American POW from Vietnam. Rich Larkin is the sole survivor from a missing platoon of Americans never accounted for at the end of the war.
Larkin has no idea what happened to the other men who have disappeared, one by one, while in captivity. Nor can he give a reason why he, alone, is still alive. Salter escapes, and after a harrowing pursuit by his Chinese captors, reaches safety. Back in the U. Deep trouble was having its way with Dora, as the girls were the first to know. She might still take them into her arms —but vehemently, as if few such embraces might be left to them, and without providing sanctuary. Dora's state was coming on them like nightfall, while they still affected to discern the shapes and colours of normal day.
Keeping up emotional appearances, they were learning to appease and watch out for her. Dora's flaring responses to error might now be feared, or any kindling of her enchafed spirit. The bruises of a fall must be concealed from Dora's shrill ado, and so with other falls and bruises. They were losing their mother a second time. Caro was coming round to the fact of unhappiness: No one would now appear offering rescue, it was too late for that.
In growing, Caro was beginning rather than outstripping her long task. At least for the present, Caro was stronger than Grace, and was assuming Dora as moral obligation. Dora herself was strongest of all, in her power to accuse, to judge, to cause pain: Dora's skilled suspicion would reach unerringly into your soul, bring out your worst thoughts and flourish them for all to see; but never brought to light the simple good. It was as if Dora knew of your inner, rational, protesting truth, and tried to provoke you into displaying it, like treason.
On the one hand, it was Dora seeking havoc, and, on the other, the sisters continually attempting to thwart or divert. The girls heard it said that Dora was raising them. Yet it was more like sinking, and always trying to rise. In these children a vein of instinct sanity opened and flowed: An aversion to emotion was engendered, and the belief—which in Caro was to last her lifetime—that those who do not see themselves as victims accept the greater stress.
In their esteem for dispassion they began to yearn, perverse and unknowing, towards some strength that would, in turn, disturb that equilibrium and sweep them to higher ground. Like other children, they stopped on the way home from school The Transit of Venus 39 to pull at socks or pick at scabs or stare up a garden path at some opalescent entry.
Grace with a satchel and pale jiggling ringlets, Caro tilted to a loaded briefcase. At school both were clever, which was attributed to the maturing effects of their tragedy—just as, had they lagged, obtuseness would have been ascribed to the arresting trauma. They sought each other in the playground and were known to be aberrant, a pair. The classrooms had rough sallow walls. The classrooms were windows on the bay. Tendrils of morning glory crawled on wooden sills. It was always summer—and was afternoon more often than not, hot with smells of chalk and gym shoes and perhaps the banana uneaten in someone's satchel.
Fatigued as businessmen, the girls carved names into desktops in expectation of the bell. Caro and Grace walked home uphill in raging heat. Brick houses were symmetric with red, yellow, or purple respectability: Never a sign of washing or even of people: Caro was beginning to wonder about the inside and the back, and whether every house concealed a Dora. Whether in every life there was a Benbow that heeled over and sank. You felt that the walls of such houses might topple inwards, that they would crush but not reveal.
Refinement was maintained on the razor's edge of an abyss. To appear without gloves, or in other ways suggest the flesh, to so much as show unguarded love, was to be pitchforked into brutish, bottomless Australia, all the way back to primitive man. Refinement was a frail construction continually dashed by waves of a raw, reminding humanity: There were raucous families who bought on the lay-by, if at all, and whose children were bruised from blows or misshapen by rickets—this subtler threat contained in terrace houses whose sombre grime was a conta- 40 Shirley Hazzard gion from the British Isles, a Midlands darkness.
Britain had shared its squalor readily enough with far Australia, though withholding the Abbey and the Swan of Avon. Concussed by these realities and worse, refinement shuddered and turned away. The two girls walked home hand in hand, not so much like lovers as like an elderly couple, grave with information and responsibility. Coming home was to a Dora of outraged quiet, of which some cause must, sooner rather than later, be explosively made known.
Or to Dora disfigured by tears from the affront of some neighbour, now marked down for life. Meaning was acoustical, ringing out, shaping inflections, filling silences. Dora could always die, so she said. She told them that death was not the worst, as if she had had the opportunity of testing. She said she could do away with herself. Or she could disappear.
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Who would care, what would it matter. They flung themselves on her in terror, Dora don't die, Dora don't disappear. No, she was adamant: It was the only way. How often, often, she drew upon this inexhaustible reserve of her own death, regenerated over and over by the horror she inspired by showing others the very brink. It was from their ashen fear that she rose, every time, a phoenix. Each such borrowing from death gave her a new lease on life.
Not that Dora was tolerant of the afflicted or of those who had gone under. The maimed or blinded were a resented incursion on pity that was Dora's by right: Dora's cry for help must drown out all others. She was quite taken up with her own disappearance, which loomed the largest presence in their lives. The girls' early legends were all of the time that Dora. The time that Dora stood up to the tax man, the time Dora took no nonsense from the minister. Dora lashing out, Dora pitching into, Dora breaking down.
Dora giving the dreaded news: Dora was, furthermore, convinced that if she pressed on kind intentions hard enough they would disclose their limitations; and in this, time after time, had proved herself right. Dora had a vermilion dress with black buttons that she wore for housework. The child Grace was asking, "Why are you always angry in that dress? I certainly am not angry. I am never done. Well let me tell you.
Dora was twenty-two and had dark sloping eyes and, despite dn addiction to boiled sweets, perfect little teeth. Caro wondered when Dora would be old enough for tranquillity. Old people were serene. You simply had to be serene, for instance, at seventy. Even Dora must be, if they could only wait. Yet Dora was daily life. Dora shopped, and paid bills out of their small inheritance; and spoke with trustees about debentures.
Dora went to tea, and wrote thank-you notes on her blue deckle-edged. She wore a smart silk frock of the colour known as teal, and had her long dark hair waved and rolled. On prizegiving night Dora exulted over the girls' bound anthologies and the silver cup Grace won for Piano; and shed true tears for Caro's gold medal in French. It was this that set Caro to wondering about the backs of houses, and whether Dora was in some form inevitable to every household. Supremely confusing was the Dora, all loving normality, who followed the release of the good row.
At those intervals the girls 42 Shirley Hazzard became, for an evening or a day, young again. It was of course a confounding of all they knew for sure, through the certainty of suffering. But, like others in the clutch of absolute authority, they settled for the brief respite. It seemed easier to lie—to Dora, to oneself, to God—than willfully to precipitate the other Dora. Into these hostilities came war.
One year it was statesmen shrieking "Peace! A family from Vienna, Jews, took the house next door, and Dora reported, "He's an engineer, she's a children's doctor. The two boys, Ernst without the second e and Rudolf with f, mooned on the lawn. Their father, slim and grey, pondered a row of freesias that in October had forced itself through from the far side of the earth. The following June, the greengrocers' windows were smashed because of being Italian.
Manganelli's at the Junction put out a sign: Once again the men set sail for history, in darkness and without streamers. There was the blitz, the RAF, and Mr. Caro's class put aside the War of the Spanish Succession to read a book about London, the buildings standing out like heroes—the Guildhall, the Mansion House— which every night the flames consumed on the seven-o'clock news.
Dora seethed under rationing, but yearned to be where bombs were falling. She took the conflict personally, frenzied by Mr. It was Dora's war. The neap tide of history had, as usual, left them high and dry. Caro was becoming flesh. Her hands were assuming attitudes.
In shoes dull with playground dust her feet were long and shapely. The belt of her school uniform, which at the time of Dunkirk had banded a mere child, by the siege of Tobruk delineated a cotton waist. Her body showed a delicate apprehension of other change. Caro knew the sources of the Yangtze, and words like hypotenuse.
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Even Grace did homework now, sitting on the floor. Dora was knitting for the merchant marine, charging this calm activity with vociferous unrest. Greece fell, Crete fell. There was a toppling, even of history. One hot day Caro looked up Pearl Harbor in the atlas. Buses were soon painted in swamp colours. Air-raid shelters were con- The Transit of Venus 43 structed, and a boom, useless, across the harbour mouth.
You kept a bucket of sand in the kitchen with a view to incendiary bombs. Whittle was an air-raid warden, and the Kirkby boys were called up. The noble rhetoric of Downing Street scarcely applied to dark streets, austerity, and standing in the queue. Colonial families arrived from the East destitute, and Singapore fell, fell. Orphans were numerous now; and the girls, in their civilian loss, no longer commanded special attention. The school was moving to a country house, where the invading Japanese would hardly penetrate.
Grace was too little to be saved by such methods, Caro would go alone. Caro would try out the fugitive state; if it came up to snuff, Grace might later be included. Caro was installed one afternoon at the foot of the Blue Mountains. On the plain below, gum trees straggled back towards Sydney, bark was strewn like torn paper. The littlest children cried, but the parents would visit them in a fortnight if the petrol held up and the Japs did not arrive. There was also an ancient train as far as Penrith, but after that you were on your own.
They knew about Penrith, a weatherboard town with telegraph poles and the sort of picture-house where you could hear the rain. Grace waved out the car window: After sago pudding, they sang "Abide with Me," and Caro went out on the upstairs veranda. Fast falls the eventide. The darkness deepened in silence more desolate for the squawk of a bird they had been shown in illustrations.
Incredulous response cracked in Caroline Bell's own throat. Smells of dry ground, of eucalyptus and a small herd of cows gave the sense of time suspended, or slowed to a pace in which her own acceleration must absurdly spin to no purpose.
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The only tremor in dim foothills was the vapour of a train on its way up to Katoomba. It was insignificance that Dora had taught them to abhor, and if ever there was to be insignificance it was here. The measure of seclusion was that Penrith had become a goal. Caro took herself in her own tender embrace, enclosing all that was left of the known. She had crouched into the angle formed by the balustrade and one of the high supports of the veranda.
Bougainvillea was trained on the uprights; and a round plaque, cool as china, impressed her cheek. There were insects in the thorny vines, there was the scuttle of some animal in the garden below. Dora would have confirmed that death is not the worst. In the morning, Caro saw that the medallion on the balcony was blue and white, and Catholic.
One of the girls told her, "Miss Holster says it's a Dellarobbier. There was a lot to look at. It was owned by the Doctor, who was not a doctor at all but an architect; and Italian, even if on our side. He had withdrawn to a smaller building alongside—servants' quarters was a phrase that came readily enough to them from books, or from the old stone houses built by convicts. The Doctor wore a short white cotton jacket and a little white pointed beard and, although not lame, carried a stick.
According to Miss Holster, he had seen through Mussolini from the word Go. The house had in Roman numbers on the porch; or portico. For its construction, coloured marbles and blond travertine had spent months at sea, fireplaces and ceilings had been dismantled outside Parma, where the ham and violets came from.
And whole pavements of flowered tiles uprooted and rebedded. The diningroom was said to be elliptical. All the doors, even for bathrooms, were double, with panels of painted flowers, and paired handles pleasant to waggle until they dropped off. There were velvet bellpulls, intended for maids, that fell into disrepair from incessant tugging. There was also the day Joan Brinstead broke an inkpot on the white marble mantel in the music room and ammonia only made it worse. Miss Holster had a canopy over her bed; but could not say why lemon trees should be potted rather than in the ground.
These rooms enclosed loveliness—something memorable, true as literature. Events might take place, occasions, though not during the blight of their own occupancy. At evening the rooms shone, knowing and tender.
In a forbidden paddock below the house, a wire fence surrounded tents, tin buildings, and thirty or forty short men grotesquely military in uniforms dyed the colour of wine. The Doctor's countrymen had come to the ends of the earth to find him, for the men who dug his fields and gathered his fruit were Italian prisoners of war. At dusk they led in the cows before being themselves led behind the wire. The Doctor could be seen in the mornings moving among them, white beard, white jacket, white panama: They learned that, like a baby, he slept in the after- The Transit of Venus 45 noons.
They had seen, or caught, one of the prisoners kissing his hand. From the fields, or behind the wire, the prisoners waved to the schoolgirls, who never waved back. It was a point of honour. After two weeks of this, Dora came with Grace in the Marchmains' car, which had been converted to naphtha. Dora was at her best in the drama of reunion and had brought a magnificent hamper to supplement the dreadful meals. Caro showed off to Grace with the Marchmains' pale-pink Rosamund, her fellow exile. They had a picnic on the banks of the Nepean, Mr.
Marchmain explaining about nettles and dock leaves. Sausages were cooked on sticks over a fire the Marchmains made. The fat dripped, reeking; sausage meat obtruded from split casing. Fending for yourself on a desert island would not be like this: Dora sat on a corner of the spread rug, longing to be assigned some task so she could resent it. The girls swam in the river, repelled by the saltless water and the ooze. Across the river, the gorges began, melancholy, uninhabited. A friend of the Marchmains had once stayed up at Lapstone—for pleurisy, or so it was given out at the time.
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You could usually tell the real thing, though, by the hectic flush. Caro was thinking of Umbria, until yesterday a mere colour in the paintbox between Yellow Ochre and Burnt Sienna; and of flat Parma where the violets came from. Caro would have liked to reveal the house, but feared Dora's reaction. Dora was not one to lie down under the news that a veranda was called a loggia, or a mural a fresco.
Let alone villa for house. Any such divulging would somehow bring word of Caro's secession from Dora's rule. They walked about the corridors and looked in the oval dining-room without perceiving. Marchmain, who was coarse, "appears to be a raving ratbag. Caro and Grace disappeared into the makeshift dormitory, where they sat side by side on a bed.
They made 46 Shirley Hazzard little wracked gasps of an adult weeping that must presently be concealed. The huge heavy mechanism of their hearts dragged at their slight bodies. Grace said, " write. The basin was shaped like one of those shells. Even the lav had a blue pattern inside, possibly Chinese. Dora had found the matron and was reading the Riot Act about blankets. Marchmains were coming up the gravel. Now, authorized public tears, let grief be unconfined. Grace climbed in the car, abashed by escaping yet again. At that moment, Japs were the last thing in anyone's mind: Caro came home in winter, with the others.
The villa dissolved into gum trees even as they twisted to see it for the last time, breath steaming the cold windows of a bus that took them to the Penrith train. No one, even so, would take a chance on waving to their fellow-prisoners. Soon their flight to the mountains was part of the fabled past, a form of war service. Not before the Doctor had brought suit, however, for irreparable damage to his house.
After all that palaver about Danty and the sunset, the old ratbag was asking a thousand quid, Mr. Marchmain reported, to fix up his caricature of a home. Caro returned, as if from abroad, to a city populated by American soldiers. Dora confirmed that these were boastful, and self-indulgent in ways unspecified.
Girls who went with them were common. Caro and Grace, in school uniform, were photographed by a lanky sergeant while crossing at the Junction; and put up their hands, like the famous, to ward off intrusion. It was a pity one could not have a better class of saviour: Americans could not provide history, of which they were almost as destitute as Australians. The sisters had never seen black men before, apart from the Lascars at the Quay.
At school, Grace was studying the Stuart kings. From newspapers they learned about Stalingrad and Rostov-on-the-Don. Dora was part of a camouflage-netting group that met on Thursdays in Delecta Avenue and was rancorous in the extreme. In the relief of home, Caro was lenient. Once in a while she pictured to herself the The Transit of Venus 47 Doctor's house, and the high rooms that created expectation. If you could have had the rooms, without the misery. These picturings might be memories—unless it was too soon for memories. The moments would not say which of them might be remembered.
When you measured five feet tall you were eligible for extra clothing coupons. She would have undone her plaits into a pony-tail had it not been for Dora. One morning a girl whose father had been in America for Munitions came to school with nibless pens that wrote both red and blue, pencils with lights attached, a machine that would emboss a name —one's own for preference—and pencil sharpeners in clear celluloid. And much else of a similar cast. Set out on a classroom table, these silenced even Miss Holster. The girls leaned over, picking up this and that: Can I turn it on, how do you work it, I can't get it to go back again.
No one could say these objects were ugly, even the crayon with the shiny red flower, for they were spread on the varnished table like flints from an age unborn, or evidence of life on Mars. A judgment on their attractiveness did not arise: It was the first encounter with calculated uselessness. No one had ever wasted anything. Even the Lalique on Aunt Edie's sideboard, or Mum's Balibuntl, were utterly functional by contrast, serving an evident cause of adornment, performing the necessary, recognized role of an extravagance.
The natural accoutrements of their lives were now seen to have been essentials—serviceable, workaday— in contrast to these hard, high-coloured, unblinking objects that announced, though brittle enough, the indestructibility of infinite repetition. Having felt no lack, the girls could experience no envy. They would have to be conditioned to a new acquisitiveness. Even Dora would have to adjust her methods to contend with such imperviousness.
Never did they dream, fingering those toys and even being, in a rather grown-up way, amused by them, that they were handling fateful signals of the future. The trinkets were assembled with collective meaning, like exhibits in a crime, or like explosives no expert could defuse. Invention was the mother of necessity. It was 48 Shirley Hazzard not long after this that the girls began to wave their unformed hips and to chant about Chattanooga and the San Fernando Valley. Sang, from the antipodes, about being down in Havana and down Mexico way. Down was no longer down to Kew. The power of Kew was passing like an empire.
Now Caro and Grace Bell did not go home at once after lessons but walked along the beach below the school, getting sand in their shoes and stockings, picking up chipped shells and flinging them away. Seaweed sworled in dark, beady tangles, scalloped up by the tides, bleared by an occasional medusa. A boy or pair of boys would speak to them, boys in grey knickerbockers and striped ties. The uniforms were a guarantee: Grace was a flower.
Caro's hair hung heavy on her shoulders, as no child's will do. The sounds and smell of ocean made speech unworthy, or required a language greater than they knew. Because Dora's intrusions had made privacy sacrosanct, they exchanged no word on the dangerous preparations their bodies were making for an unimaginable life.
And, in this respect, lingered in unusual ignorance. Dora was too sore and disturbing a subject for their circumspect afternoons. Besides, they were supposed to love her; and, more to the point, did so. They would have given anything to see her happy. However, the threesome was beginning to irk them. People had to step aside as Dora marched the girls, on arms inertly linked, along streets or pushed them singly through turnstiles. They lived under supervision, a life without men. Dora knew no men. You could scarcely see how she might meet one, let alone come to know.
All women evidently longed to marry, and on leaving school held their breath, while accumulating linen and silver. There was a lot of waiting in it, and an endangering suggestion of emotion. Of those who were not taken, some quietly carried it off—like old Miss Fife, who came to tea with parasol and high collar, fondant silk to her calves, pointed shoes each clasped with single button: There were others, unhinged, timid, or with whiskers—crushed by father, crushed by mother, or unthinkingly set aside.
The Transit of Venus 49 In this, Dora was hard to place. Caro was allowed into town on her own, on the ferry. There was the gangplank, creak of hawsers, casting off, smell of throttling engines, and the sea slapping at green encrustations on wooden piles. She heard the hooting approach of the city, tram-bells, the jarring of a great ignition.
In the cabin, office girls held up little mirrors and patted powder off their curving fronts and concave laps with small reverberations at thorax or thighs. They dabbed behind the ears, then sharply closed their handbags to signal preparedness. This was not the groundwork for a march, three abreast, through the town; but a prelude to encounters.
Alone in the city, Caro was lifting a frayed book in a shop. The table was massed like an arsenal. Let's say, ten bob. We too," said Ted Tice. The tuff was close as stitching: The astounding trees were Weymouth pines, through which the sun came down in hallowed strokes like light into a cathedral. Matters must soon come to life for her that had only been known, like colouring, from books. Ted said, "Like heat, for instance. Or, according to rank, "You would not half believe. Hearing her called "the old Lancashire, " they had expected something of the kind. Aden was a line of molten crags awaver with fumes of petroleum and colonial dejection.
They passed into the Indian Ocean with no sense of release. Sunburn cream and soda water had long since run out. They sang war songs —stale, in , with superseded poignancy—and marching songs that taunted immobility. In the evenings there was housie-housie or another sing-song; which met few requirements. Airless episodes of England continued to be performed, at Colombo, at Singapore. The club was on a side street within walking distance of the naval dockyard, and in the evening the officers came there in pure white and gold, as if in court dress. Under slow revolutions of a ceiling fan, the aftermath of war was coming to a halt.
There was a smell The Transit of Venus 17 of starch, of lime juice and gin, mildew from canvas cushions, and, faintly from the street, the reek of China. Three fair floral women on a sofa were clearly nurses off duty, awkward as plainclothes police. Hearing him laugh, one of the women innocently turned and laughed too, from good nature.
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She was about nineteen, a broad, guileless face with long nose and irregular teeth. The sleeves and bosom of her civilian dress were outgrown as a schoolgirl's tunic. Like Ted Tice's mother, who kept a newsagent's shop, she had a Manchester voice. When Ted Tice first left home for the university, his mother had said to him, "Tha dustn't have to say owt about shop.
If tha dustn' want. Unbearable, her understanding; her lack of understanding. The naval lieutenant, who was not all bad, had been in Japan. You can do nothing without a permit from MacArthur. They're in the driver's seat now, and we're on the skids. Even a king might be regretted now he was on the skids.
Chinese servants were carrying trays, not yet apprised of change. The girl on the sofa said in her Mancunian voice, "And I say he couldn't run a pie-stall. The lieutenant told Ted Tice, "Unless you have a girl. The islands were irruptions, each fringed with the single file of lean trees leaning. At home, even the wildest coast had established itself with slow insistence, but these islands were fragments of a cataclysm. Ted had never seen so red a dawn, or villages of straws.
Little boats like wrapping paper flapped on alluvial waves, and a young Englishman looked down over a railing into faces stigmatized with the cartoon image of enemy. At the port, hulks lay about like rotting whales. There were 52 Shirley Hazzard blitzed docks and, in the harbour basin, the upturned keel of a ship capsized at launching.
On the pier, the erstwhile enemy, dressed in the colour called fatigue, pulled on ropes and uttered the cries by which a ship is docked. One of the ship's officers said, "You'll be going over the hill. It was early in June. There were the bombed docks and ruined avenues of the port, and then the hillside grotto of a destroyed railway tunnel. The officer beside the driver was pointing out, "Here there was, apparently there used to be, you wouldn't credit it now. His name was Captain Girling. They were descending to a vast ground without horizon, and at first there were small unfinished houses everywhere.
Unweathered timbers were being ribbed into rooms, roofs were being woven slat on smarting slat. Men and women were bearing loads, were walking planks, were strung up against a hot tin sky. The jeep slowed beside a new-laid tramline. Where rails and road diverged, a youth leaned from the tram door to spit on them, and withdrew. He had a scar, just a line, as if a pillow had creased his sleeping cheek.
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This Captain Girling saw the flaw on Ted Tice's eyeball without looking into his eyes. In the back seat of the jeep they were showing, like children, what they had got—the cameras and watches and little radios with which the enemy had nearly won. In the past, the demolition of a city exposed contours of the earth. Modern cities do not allow this. The land has been levelled earlier, to make the city; then the city goes, leaving a blank. In this case, a river amazed with irrelevant naturalness. A single monument, defabricated girders of an abolished dome, presided like a vacant cranium or a hollowing out of the great globe itself: Saint Peter's, in some eternal city of nightmare.
It was now that Ted Tice's life began to alter aspect and direction. He was used to thinking of his life—I have done this, how could I have done that—like everybody. Barely twenty, he would have imagined he had overcome a fair amount.