great expectation and opportunity, and my Sybelle, a curvaceous and full regal-bodied 
woman by then, and an even greater concert pianist than she could be now, her golden hair 
framing a woman's oval face and fuller womanish lips and eyes full of entsagang and 
secret radiance.
  
  Could I dictate the story in this room and give them the book? This book dictated to 
David Talbot? Could I, as I set them free from my alchemical world, give them this book? 
Go forth my children, with all the wealth and guidance I could bestow, and now this book 
I wrote so long ago for you with David.
  
  Yes, said my soul. Yet I turned, and ripped the black scalp of hair from my victim and 
stomped on it with a Rumpelstiltskin foot.
  
  David didn't flinch. Englishmen are so polite.
  
  "Very well," I said. "I'll tell you my story."
  
  His rooms were on the second floor, not far from where I'd paused at the top of the 
staircase. What a change from the barren and unheated hallways! He'd made a library for 
himself and with tables and chairs. A brass bed was there, dry and clean.
  
  "These are her rooms," he said. "Don't you remember?"
  
  "Dora," I said. I breathed her scent suddenly. Why, it was all around me. But all her 
personal things were gone.
  
  These were his books, they had to be. They were new spiritual explorers-Dannion 
Brinkley, Hilarion, Melvin Morse, Brian Weiss, Matthew Fox, the Urantia book. Add to this 
old texts-Cassiodorus, St. Teresa of Avila, Gregory of Tours, the Veda, Talmud, Torah, 
Kama Sutra-all in original tongues. He had a few obscure novels, plays, poetry.
  
  "Yes." He sat down at the table. "I don't need the light. Do you want it?"
  
  "I don't know what to tell you."
  
  "Ah," he said. He took out his mechanical pen. He opened a notebook with startlingly 
white paper scored with fine green lines. "You will know what to tell me." He looked up 
at me.
  
  I stood hugging myself, as it were, letting my head fall as if it could drop right off 
me and I would die. My hair fell long about me.
  
  I thought of Sybelle and Benjamin, my quiet girl and exuberant boy.
  
  "Did you like them, David, my children?" I asked.
  
  "Yes, the first moment I saw them, when you brought them in. Everyone did. Everyone 
looked lovingly and respectfully at them. Such poise, such charm. I think we all dream of 
such confidants, faithful mortal companions of compelling grace, who aren't screaming 
mad. They love you, yet they are neither terrified nor entranced."
  
  I didn't move. I didn't speak. I shut my eyes. I heard in my heart the swift, bold 
march of the Appassionata, those rumbling, incandescent waves of music, full of throbbing 
and brittle metal, Appassionata. Only it was in my head. No golden long-limbed Sybelle.
  
  "Light the candles that you have," I said timidly. "Will you do that for me? It would 
be sweet to have many candles, and look, Dora's lace is hanging still on the windows, 
fresh and clean. I am a lover of lace, that is Brussels point de gaze, or very like it, 
yes, I'm rather mad for it."
  
  "Of course, I'll light the candles," he said.
  
  I had my back to him. I heard the sharp delicious crack of a small wooden match. I 
smelt it burn, and then came the liquid fragrance of the nodding wick, the curling wick, 
and the light rose upwards, finding the cypress boards of the stripped wooden ceiling 
above us. Another crack, another series of tiny sweet soft crackling sounds, and the 
light swelled and came down over me and fell just short of brightness along the shadowy 
wall.
  
  "Why did you do it, Armand?" he said. "Oh, the Veil has Christ on it, in some form, no 
doubt of it, it did seem to be the Holy Veil of Veronica, and God knows, thousands of 
others believed it, yes, but why in your case, why? It was blazingly beautiful, yes, I 
grant you that, Christ with His thorns and His blood, and His eyes gazing right at us, 
both of us, but why did you believe it so completely, Armand, after so long? Why did you 
go to Him? That's what you tried to do, didn't you?"
  
  I shook my head. I made my words soft and pleading.
  
  "Back up, scholar," I said, turning around slowly. "Mind your page. This is for you, 
and for Sybelle. Oh, it's for my little Benji too. But in a way, it's my symphony for 
Sybelle. The story begins a long time ago. Maybe I've never truly realized how long ago, 
until this very moment. You listen and write. Let me be the one to cry and to rant and to 
rail."
  
  2
  
  I LOOK AT MY HANDS. I think of the phrase "not made by human hands." I know what this 
means, even though every time I ever heard the phrase said with emotion it had to do with 
what had come from my hands.
  
  I'd like to paint now, to pick up a brush and try it the way I did it then, in a 
trance, furiously, once and for only, every line and mass of color, each blending, each 
decision final.
  
  Ah, I'm so disorganized, so browbeaten by what I remember.
  
  Let me choose a place to begin.
  
  Constantinople-newly under the Turks, by that I mean a Moslem City for less than a 
century when I was brought there, a slave boy, captured in the wild lands of his country