Hanne had held on to the job only because she was stout and blond. A smaller brunette from the south had stayed for a time but was finally let go because she didn't look German enough. A Bavarian peasant but not German enough! The whims of Boeblich the owner got only amusement from Hanne. Bred to patience - a barmaid since age thirteen - she had cultivated and perfected a vast cowlike calm which served her now in good stead among the drunkenness, sex for sale and general fatuousness of the bierhalle.

To the bovine of this world - this tourist world, at least - love comes, is undergone, and goes away unobtrusive as possible. So with Hanne and the itinerant Lepsius; a salesman - said he - of ladies' jewelry. Who was she to question? Having been through it (her phrase), Hanne, schooled in the ways of an unsentimental world, knew well enough that men were obsessed with politics almost as much as women with marriage. Knew the bierhalle to be more than a place to get drunk or fixed up with a woman, just as its list of frequent customers did comprise individuals strange to Karl Baedeker's way of life.

How upset Boeblich would be could he see her lover. Hanne mooned about the kitchen now, in the slack period between dinner and serious drinking, up to her elbows in soapy water. Lepsius was certainly "not German enough." Half a head shorter than Hanne, eyes so delicate that he must wear tinted glasses even in the murk of Boeblich's, and such poor thin arms and legs.

"There is a competitor in town," he confided to her, "pushing an inferior line, underselling us - it's unethical, don't you see?" She'd nodded.

Well if he came in . . . anything she happened to overhear . . . a rotten business, nothing he'd ever want to subject a woman to . . . but . . .

For his poor weak eyes, his loud snoring, his boylike way of mounting her, taking too long to come to rest in the embrace of her fat legs . . . of course, she would go on watch for any "competitor." English he was, and somewhere had got a bad touch of the sun.

All day, through the slower morning hours, her hearing seemed to grow sharper. So that at noon when the kitchen erupted gently into disorder - nothing outright: a few delayed orders, a dropped plate which shattered like her tender eardrums - she'd heard perhaps more than she was intended to. Fashoda, Fashoda . . . the word washed about Boeblich's like a pestilent rain. Even the faces changed: Grune the chef, Wernher the bartender, Musa the boy who swept floors, Lotte and Eva and the other girls, all seemed to've turned shifty, to've been hiding secrets all this time. There was even something sinister about the usual slap on the buttocks Boeblich gave Hanne as she passed by.

Imagination, she told herself. She'd always been a practical girl, not given to fancy. Could this be one of love's side-effects? To bring on visions, encourage voices which did not exist, to make the chewing and second digestion of any cud only mare difficult? It worried Hanne, who thought she knew everything about love. How was Lepsius different: a little slower, a little weaker; certainly no high priest at the business, no more mysterious or remarkable than any other of a dozen strangers.

Damn men and their politics. Perhaps it was a kind of sex for them. Didn't they even use the same word for what man does to a woman and what a successful politician does to his unlucky opponent? What was Fashoda to her, or Marchand or Kitchener, or whatever their names were, the two who had "met" - met for what? Hanne laughed, shaking her head. She could imagine, for what.

She pushed back a straggle of yellow hair with one soap-bleached hand. Odd how the skin died and grew soggy-white. It looked like leprosy. Since midday a certain leitmotif of disease had come jittering in, had half-revealed self, latent in the music of Cairo's afternoon; Fashoda, Fashoda, a word to give pale, unspecific headaches, a word suggestive of jungle, and outlandish micro-organisms, and fevers which were not love's (the only she'd known, after all, being a healthy girl) or anything human's. Was it a change in the light, or were the skins of the others actually beginning to show the blotches of disease?

She rinsed and stacked the last plate. No. A stain. Back went the plate into the dishwater. Hanne scrubbed, then examined the plate again tilting it toward the light. The stain was still there. Hardly visible. Roughly triangular, it extended from an apex near the center to a base an inch or so from the edge. A sort of brown color, outlines indistinct against the faded white of the plate's surface. She tilted the plate another few degrees toward the light and the stain disappeared. Puzzled, she moved her head to look at it from another angle. The stain flickered twice in and out of existence. Hanne found that if she focused her eyes a little behind and off the edge of the plate the stain would remain fairly constant, though its shape had begun to change outline; now crescent, now trapezoid. Annoyed, she plunged the plate back into the water and searched among the kitchen gear under the sink for a stiffer brush.

Was the stain real? She didn't like its color. The color of her headache: pallid brown. It is a stain she told herself. That's all it is. She scrubbed fiercely. Outside, the beer-drinkers were coming in from the street. "Hanne," called Boeblich.

O God, would it never go away? She gave it up at last and stacked the plate with the other dishes. But now it seemed the stain had fissioned, and transferred like an overlay to each of her retinae.

A quick look at her hair in the mirror-fragment over the sink; then on went a smile and out went Hanne to wait on her countrymen.

Of course the first face she saw was that of the "competitor." It sickened her. Mottled red and white, and loose wisps of skin hanging . . . He was conferring anxiously with Varkumian the pimp, whom she knew. She began to make passes.

". . . Lord Cromer could keep it from avalanching . . ."

". . . Sir, every whore and assassin in Cairo . . ."

In the corner someone vomited. Hanne rushed to clean it up.

". . . if they should assassinate Cromer . . ."

". . . bad show, to have no Consul-General . . ."

". . . it will degenerate . . ."

Amorous embrace from a customer. Boeblich approached with a friendly scowl.

". . . keep him safe at all costs . . ."

". . . capable men in this sick world are at a . . ."

". . . Bongo-Shaftsbury will try . . ."

". . . the Opera . . ."

". . . where? Not the Opera . . ."

". . . Ezbekiyeh Garden . . ."

". . . the Opera . . . Manon Lescaut . . ."

". . . who did say? I know her . . . Zenobia the Copt . . ."

". . . Kenneth Slime at the Embassy's girl . . ."

Love. She paid attention.

". . . has it from Slime that Cromer is taking no precautions. My God: Goodfellow and I barged in this morning as Irish tourists: he in a moldly morning hat with a shamrock, I in a red beard. They threw us bodily into the street . . ."

". . . no precautions . . . O God . . ."

". . . God, with a shamrock . . . Goodfellow wanted to lob a bomb . . ."

". . . as if nothing could wake him up . . . doesn't he read the . . ."

A long wait by the bar while Wernher and Musa tapped a new keg. The triangular stain swam somewhere over the crowd, like a tongue on Pentecost.

". . . now that they have met . . ."

". . . they will stay, I imagine, round . . ."

". . . the jungles round . . ."

". . . will there be, do you think . . ."

". . . if it begins it will be round . . ."

Where?

"Fashoda."

"Fashoda."

Hanne continued on her way, through the establishment's ors and into the street. Grune the waiter found her ten minutes later leaning back against a shop front, gazing on night-garden with mild eyes.

"Come."

"What is Fashoda, Grune?"

Shrug. "A place. Like Munich, Weimar, Kiel. A town, but in the jungle."

"What does it have to do with women's jewelry?"

"Come in. The girls and I can't handle that herd."

"I see something. Do you? Floating over the park." From across the canal came the whistle of the night express for Alexandria.

"Bitte . . ." Some common nostalgia - for the cities of home; for the train or only its whistle? - may have held them for a moment. Then the girl shrugged and they returned to the bierhalle.

Varkumian had been replaced by a young girl in a flowered dress. The leprous Englishman seemed upset. With ruminant resourcefulness Hanne rolled eyes, thrust bosoms at a middle-aged bank clerk seated with cronies at the table next to the couple. Received and accepted an invitation to join them.

"I followed you," the girl said. "Papa would die if he found out." Hanne could see her face, half in shadow. "About Mr. Goodfellow."

Pause. Then: "Your father was in a German church this afternoon. As we are now in a German beer hall. Sir Alastair was listening to someone play Bach. As if Bach were all that were left." Another pause. "So that he may know."

She hung her head, a mustache of beer foam on her upper lip. There came one of those queer lulls in the noise level of any room; in its center another whistle from the Alexandria express.

"You love Goodfellow," he said.

"Yes." Nearly a whisper.

"Whatever I may think," she said "I have guessed. You can't believe me, but I must say it. It's true."

"What would you have me do, then?"

Twisting ringlets round her fingers: "Nothing. Only understand."

"How can you -" exasperated - "men can get killed, don't you see, for 'understanding' someone. The way you want it. Is your whole family daft? Will they be content with nothing less than the heart, lights and liver?"

It was not love. Hanne excused herself and left. It was not man/woman. The stain was still with her. What could she tell Lepsius tonight. She had only the desire to remove his spectacles, snap and crush them, and watch him suffer. How delightful it would be.

This from gentle Hanne Echerze. Had the world gone mad with Fashoda?

VIII.

The corridor runs by the curtained entrances to four boxes, located to audience right at the top level of the summer theatre in the Ezbekiyeh Garden.

A man wearing blue spectacles hurries into the second box from the stage end of the corridor. The red curtains, heavy velvet swing to and fro, unsynchronized, after his passage. The oscillation soon damps out because of the weight. They hang still. Ten minutes pass.

Two men turn the corner by the allegorical statue of Tragedy. Their feet crush unicorns and peacocks that repeat diamond-fashion the entire length of the carpet. The face of one is hardly to be distinguished beneath masses of white tissue which have obscured the features, and changed slightly the outlines of the face. The other is fat. They enter the box next to the one the man with the blue spectacles is in. Light from outside, late summer light now falls through a single window, turning the statue and the figured carpet to a monochrome orange. Shadows become more opaque. The air between seems to thicken with an indeterminate color, though it is probably orange. Then a girl in a flowered dress comes down the hall and enters the box occupied by the two men. Minutes later she emerges, tears in her eyes and on her face. The fat man follows. They pass out of the field of vision.

The silence is total. So there's no warning when the red-and-white-faced man comes through his curtains holding a drawn pistol. The pistol smokes. He enters the next box. Soon he and the man with the blue spectacles, struggling, pitch through the curtains and fall to the carpet. Their lower halves are still hidden by the curtains. The man with the white-blotched face removes the blue spectacles snaps them two and drops them to the floor. The other shuts his eyes tightly, tries to turn his head away from the light.

Another has been standing at the end of the corridor. From this vantage he appears only as a shadow; the window is behind him. The man who removed the spectacles now crouches, forcing the prostrate one's head toward the light. The man at the end of the corridor makes a small gesture with his right hand. The crouching man looks that way and half rises. A flame appears in the area of the other's right hand; another flame; another. The flames are colored a brighter orange than the sun.

Vision must be the last to go. There must also be a nearly imperceptible line between an eye that reflects and an eye that receives.

The half-crouched body collapses. The face and its masses of white skin loom ever closer. At rest the body is assumed exactly into the space of this vantage.

chapter four.

In which Esther gets a nose job I.

Next evening, prim and nervous-thighed in a rear seat of the crosstown bus, Esther divided her attention between the delinquent wilderness outside and a paperback copy of The Search for Bridey Murphy. This book had been written by a Colorado businessman to tell people there was life after death. In its course he touched upon metempsychosis, faith healing, extrasensory perception and the rest of a weird canon of twentieth-century metaphysics we've come now to associate with the city of Los Angeles and similar regions.

The bus driver was of the normal or placid crosstown type; having fewer traffic lights and stops to cope with than the up-and-downtown drivers, he could afford to be genial. A portable radio hung by his steering wheel, tuned to WQXR. Tchaikovsky's Romeo and Juliet Overture flowed syrupy around him and his passengers. As the bus crossed Columbus Avenue, a faceless delinquent heaved a rock at it. Cries in Spanish ascended to it out of the darkness. A report which could have been either a backfire or a gunshot sounded a few blocks downtown. Captured in the score's black symbols, given life by vibrating air columns and strings, having taken passage through transducers, coils, capacitors and tubes to a shuddering paper cone, the eternal drama of love and death continued to unfold entirely disconnected from this evening and place.

The bus entered the sudden waste country of Central Park. Out there, Esther knew, up and downtown, they would be going at it under bushes; mugging, raping, killing. She, her world knew nothing of the square confines of the Park after sundown. It was reserved as if by covenant for cops, delinquents and all manner of deviates.

Suppose she were telepathic, and could tune in on what was going on out there. She preferred not to think about it. There would be power in telepathy, she thought, but much pain. And someone else might tap your own mind without your knowing. (Had Rachel been listening on the phone extension?) She touched the tip of her new nose delicately, in secret: a mannerism she'd developed just recently. Not so much to point it out to whoever might be watching as to make sure it was still there. The bus came out of the park onto the safe, bright East Side, into the lights of Fifth Avenue. They reminded her to go shopping tomorrow for a dress she'd seen, $39.95 at Lord and Taylor, which he would like.

What a brave girl I am, she trilled to herself, coming through so much night and lawlessness to visit My Lover.

She got off at First Avenue and tap-tapped along the sidewalk, facing uptown and perhaps some dream. Soon she turned right began to fish in her purse for a key. Found the door, opened, stepped inside. The front rooms were all deserted. Beneath the mirror, two golden imps in a clock danced the same unsyncopated tango they'd always danced. Esther felt home. Behind the operating room (a sentimental glance sideways through the open door toward the table on which her face had been altered) was a small chamber, in it a bed. He lay, head and shoulders circled by the intense halo of a paraboloid reading light. His eyes opened to her, her arms to him.

"You are early," he said.

"I am late," she answered. Already stepping out of her skirt.

I.

Schoenmaker, being conservative, referred to his profession as the art of Tagliacozzi. His own methods, while not as primitive as those of the sixteenth-century Italian, were marked by a certain sentimental inertia, so that Schoenmaker was never quite up to date. He went out of his way to cultivate the Tagliacozzi look: showing his eyebrows thin and semicircular; wearing a bushy mustache, pointed beard, sometimes even a skullcap, his old schoolboy yarmulke.

He'd received his impetus - like the racket itself - from the World War. At seventeen, coeval with the century, he raised a mustache (which he never shaved off), falsified his age and name and wallowed off in a fetid troopship to fly, so he thought, high over the ruined chateaux and scarred fields of France, got up like an earless raccoon to scrimmage with the Hun; a brave Icarus.

Well, the kid never did get up in the air, but they made him a greasemonkey which was more than he'd expected anyway. It was enough. He got to know the guts not only of Breguets, Bristol Fighters and JN's, but also of the birdmen who did go up, and whom, of course, he adored. There was always a certain feudal-homosexual element in this division of labor. Schoenmaker felt like a page boy. Since those days as we know democracy has made its inroads and those crude flying-machines have evolved into "weapon systems" of a then undreamed-of complexity; so that the maintenance man today has to be as professional-noble as the flight crew he supports.

But then: it was a pure and abstract passion, directed for Schoenmaker, at least, toward the face. His own mustache may have been partly responsible; he was often mistaken for a pilot. On off hours, infrequently, he would sport a silk kerchief (obtained in Paris) at his throat, by way of imitation.

The war being what it was, certain of the faces - craggy or smooth, with slicked-down hair or bald - never came back. To this the young Schoenmaker responded with all adolescent love's flexibility: his free-floating affection sad and thwarted for a time till it managed to attach itself to a new face. But in each case, loss was as unspecified as the proposition "love dies." They flew off and were swallowed in the sky.

Until Evan Godolphin. A liaison officer in his middle thirties, TDY with the Americans for reconnaissance missions over the Argonne plateau, Godolphin carried the natural foppishness of the early aviators to extremes which in the time's hysterical context seemed perfectly normal. Here were no trenches, after all: the air up there was free of any taint of gas or comrades' decay. Combatants on both sides could afford to break champagne glasses in the majestic fireplaces of commandeered country seats; treat their captives with utmost courtesy, adhere to every point of the duello when it came to a dogfight; in short, practice with finicking care the entire rigmarole of nineteenth-century gentlemen of war. Evan Godolphin wore a Bond Street-tailored flying suit; would often, dashing clumsily across the scars of their makeshift airfield toward his French Spad, stop to pluck a lone poppy, survivor of strafing by autumn and the Germans (naturally aware of the Flanders Fields poem in Punch, three years ago when there'd still been an idealistic tinge to trench warfare), and insert it into one faultless lapel.

Godolphin became Schoenmaker's hero. Tokens tossed his way - an occasional salute, a "well done" for the preflights which came to be the boy-mechanic's responsibility, a tense smile - were hoarded fervently. Perhaps he saw an end also to this unrequited love; doesn't a latent sense of death always heighten the pleasure of such an "involvement"?

The end came soon enough. One rainy afternoon toward to end of the battle of Meuse-Argonne, Godolphin's crippled plane materialized suddenly out of all that gray, looped feebly, dipped on a wing toward the ground and slid like a kite in an air current toward the runway. It missed the runway by a hundred yards: by the time it impacted corpsmen and stretcher-bearers were already running out toward :t. Schoenmaker happened to be nearby and tagged along, having no idea what had happened till he saw the heap of rags and splinters, already soggy in the rain, and from it, limping toward the medics, the worst possible travesty of a human face lolling atop an animate corpse. The top of the nose had been shot away; shrapnel had torn out part of one cheek and shattered half the chin. The eyes, intact, showed nothing.

Schoenmaker must have lost himself. The next he could remember he was back at an aid station, trying to convince the doctors there to take his own cartilage. Godolphin would live, they'd decided. But his face would have to be rebuilt. Life for the young officer would be, otherwise, unthinkable.

Now luckily for some a law of supply and demand had been at work in the field of plastic surgery. Godolphin's case, in 1918, was hardly unique. Methods had been in existence since the fifth century B.C. for rebuilding noses, Thiersch grafts had been around for forty or so years. During the war techniques were developed by necessity and were practiced by GP's, eye-ear-nose-and-throat men, even a hastily recruited gynecologist or two. The techniques that worked were adopted and passed on quickly to the younger medics. Those that failed produced a generation of freaks and pariahs who along with those who'd received no restorative surgery at all became a secret and horrible postwar fraternity. No good at all in any of the usual rungs of society, where did they go?

(Profane would see some of them under the street. Others you could meet at any rural crossroads in America. As Profane had: come to a new road, right-angles to his progress, smelled the Diesel exhaust of a truck long gone-like walking through a ghost - and seen there like a milestone one of them. Whose limp might mean a brocade or bas-relief of scar tissue down one leg - how many women had looked and shied?; whose cicatrix on the throat would be hidden modestly like a gaudy war decoration; whose tongue, protruding through a hole in the cheek, would never speak secret words with any extra mouth.) Evan Godolphin proved to be one of them. The doctor was young, he had ideas of his own, which the AEF was no place for. His name was Halidom and he favored allografts: the introduction of inert substances into the living face. It was suspected at the time that the only safe transplants to use were cartilage or skin from the patient's own body. Schoenmaker, knowing nothing about medicine, offered his cartilage but the gift was rejected; allografting was plausible and Halidom saw no reason for two men being hospitalized when only one had to be.

Thus Godolphin received a nose bridge of ivory, a cheekbone of silver and a paraffin and celluloid chin. A month later Schoenmaker went to visit him in the hospital - the last time he ever saw Godolphin. The reconstruction had been perfect. He was being sent back to London, in some obscure staff position, and spoke with a grim flippancy.

"Take a long look. It won't be good for more than six months." Schoenmaker stammered: Godolphin continued: "See him, down the way?" Two cots over lay what would have been a similar casualty except that the skin of the face was whole, shiny. But the skull beneath was misshapen. "Foreign-body reaction, they call it. Sometimes infection, inflammation, sometimes only pain. The paraffin, for instance, doesn't hold shape. Before you know it, you're back where you started." He talked like a man under death sentence. "Perhaps I can pawn my cheekbone. It's worth a fortune. Before they melted it down it was one of a set of pastoral figurines, eighteenth century - nymphs, shepherdesses - looted from a chateau the Hun was using for a CP; Lord knows where they're originally from -"