She stopped smiling.
It was her husband.
His silver mask glowed dully.
He entered the room and looked at her for only a moment.
Then he snapped the weapon bellows open, cracked out two dead bees, heard them spat on the floor as they fell, stepped on them, and placed the empty bellows gun in the corner of the room as Ylla bent down and tried, over and over, with no success, to pick up the pieces of the shattered glass.
“What were you doing?” she asked.
“Nothing,” he said with his back turned.
He removed the mask.
“But the gun — I heard you fire it.
Twice.”
“Just hunting.
Once in a while you like to hunt. Did Dr. Nile arrive?”
“No.”
“Wait a minute.”
He snapped his fingers disgustedly.
“Why, I remember now.
He was supposed to visit us tomorrow afternoon.
How stupid of me.”
They sat down to eat.
She looked at her food and did not move her hands.
“What’s wrong?” he asked, not looking up from dipping his meat in the bubbling lava.
“I don’t know.
I’m not hungry,” she said.
“Why not?”
“I don’t know; I’m just not.”
The wind was rising across the sky; the sun was going down.
The room was small and suddenly cold.
“I’ve been trying to remember,” she said in the silent room, across from her cold, erect, golden-eyed husband.
“Remember what?”
He sipped his wine.
“That song.
That fine and beautiful song.”
She closed her eyes and hummed, but it was not the song.
“I’ve forgotten it.
And, somehow, I don’t want to forget it.
It’s something I want always to remember.”
She moved her hands as if the rhythm might help her to remember all of it.
Then she lay back in her chair.
“I can’t remember.”
She began to cry.
“Why are you crying?” he asked.
“I don’t know, I don’t know, but I can’t help it.
I’m sad and I don’t know why, I cry and I don’t know why, but I’m crying.”
Her head was in her hands; her shoulders moved again and again.
“You’ll be all right tomorrow,” he said.
She did not look up at him; she looked only at the empty desert and the very bright stars coming out now on the black sky, and far away there was a sound of wind rising and canal waters stirring cold in the long canals.
She shut her eyes, trembling.
“Yes,” she said. “I’ll be all right tomorrow.”
August 1999: THE SUMMER NIGHT
In the stone galleries the people were gathered in clusters and groups filtering up into shadows among the blue hills.