She is cornered, she knows. But what does it matter, being cornered, if it brings what feels more and more like a contest of rhetoric closer to its end! 'Do you think the guilty do not suffer too?' she says.'Do you think they do not call out from their flames?
'And these voices that summon you,' says the pudgy man: 'you do not ask where they come from?'
'No. Not as long as they speak the truth.'
'And you – you, consulting only your heart, are judge of that truth?'
She nods impatiently. Like the interrogation of Joan of Arc, she thinks.
A silence has fallen. 'Go on,' the man says encouragingly.
'That is all,' she says. 'You asked, I answered.'
'Do you believe the voices come from God? Do you believe in God?'
Does she believe in God? A question she prefers to keep a wary distance from. Why, even assuming that God exists – whatever
'That is too intimate,' she says. 'I have nothing to say.'
'There are only ourselves here. You are free to speak your heart.'
You misunderstand. I mean, I suspect that God would not look kindly on such presumption – presumption to intimacy. I prefer to let God be. As I hope He will let me be.'
There is silence. She has a headache. Too many heady abstractions, she thinks to herself: a warning from nature.
The chairman glances around. 'Further questions?' he asks.
There are none.
He turns to her. You will hear from us. In due course. Through established channels.'
She is back in the dormitory, lying on her bunk. She would prefer to be sitting, but the bunks are built with raised edges like trays, one cannot sit.
She hates this hot, airless room that has been allotted as her home. She hates the smell, revolts at the touch of the greasy mattress. And the hours here seem to be longer than the hours she is used to, particularly in the middle of the day. How long since she arrived in this place? She has lost track of time. It feels like weeks, even months.
There is a band that emerges on to the square in the afternoons once the worst of the heat has passed. From the ornate bandstand the musicians, in starched white uniforms with peaked caps and lots of gold braid, play Souza marches, Strauss waltzes, popular songs:'Il pipistrello',' Sorrento '. The conductor wears the neat pencil moustache of a small-town Lothario; after each piece he smiles and bows to the applause, while the fat tuba player doffs his cap and wipes his forehead with a scarlet handkerchief.
Exactly, she thinks to herself, what one would expect in an obscure Italian or Austro-Italian border town in the year 1912. Out of a book, just as the bunkhouse with its straw mattresses and forty-watt bulb is out of a book, and the whole courtroom business too, down to the dozy bailiff. Is it all being mounted for her sake, because she is a writer? Is it someone's idea of what hell will be like for a writer, or at least purgatory: a purgatory of clichés? Whatever the case, she ought to be out on the square, not here in the bunkhouse. She could be sitting at one of the tables in the shade amid the murmurings of lovers, with a cold drink before her, waiting for the first touch of the breeze on her cheek. A commonplace among commonplaces, no doubt, but what does that matter any longer? What does it matter if the happiness of the young couples on the square is a feigned happiness, the boredom of the sentry a feigned boredom, the false notes that the cornet player hits in the upper register feigned false notes? That is what life has been since she arrived in this place: an elaborate set of dovetailing commonplaces, including the rattletrap bus with the labouring engine and the suitcases strapped on the roof, including the gate itself with its huge bossed nails. Why not go out and play her part, the part of the traveller cast up in a town she is doomed never to leave?
