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to the familiar doubt as to whether love really exists, or is merely a sick, over-the-rainbow fantasy, a new phantasm that has appeared on our planet only in the last five or six thousand years. Perhaps we still can’t tell if our planet will accept it, or reject it as foreign tissue.
    Whistle-blowers had sounded the alarm about the hole in the ozone layer, about the encroaching deserts, and terrorism, but nobody had yet drawn attention to the fragile state of love. Perhaps a few sects had been created to investigate the truth or falseness of love, and maybe this couple, Besfort Y. and Rovena St., had been members of one of these.
    One starry summer night, he felt that he was closer than ever to the forbidden zone, but on its very brink he had collapsed, as if struck by an epileptic fit.
    He spent the entire summer in a lethargic depression of the kind that can land you in hospital.
    Determined to keep going in spite of every danger, he thought he would try a new approach, using his research data to reconstruct, day by day and month by month, the story of what might have passed on earth between Rovena St. and Besfort Y. during the last forty weeks of their lives. Like Plato, he knew that this story could only be a pale reflection of its eternal form, yet he clung to the hope of finding the essence by starting from the appearance, however misleading this might be.
    It would not be an easy task to tell the story of their last forty weeks, and maybe it would turn out to be impossible. The torrent of events surged ahead, and could not be controlled.
    Perhaps he could tame it if he divided it into days and months, or acts or cantos, like an ancient epic.
    He had heard that The Iliad took four days to tell. Would this be enough for his story too? Like every story, it would have three phases: the first purely imagined, the second clothed in words and the third finally told to others.
    He had a presentiment that he would only be able to manage the first.
    And so, one night in late summer, he started to imagine their story. But this effort of imagination was so strenuous, and consumed so much passion and empathy, that it drained his entire life-blood away.

Chapter One
    Forty weeks before. A hotel. Morning.
    As so often in hotels, wakefulness crept up on him from the window. He stared at the curtains for a moment, trying to work out from them which hotel he was in. They told him nothing, not even the city. But he could still recall precisely his dream of a few moments before.
    He turned his head. Rovena’s hair, spilt over the pillow, made her face and bare shoulder look even more fragile than usual.
    Besfort Y. had always thought that women’s smooth necks and graceful arms were the sort of things that could be used as tactical weapons in war, as decoys by opposing armies.
    Fragile, as if he could break her in his arms and master her easily: that is how Rovena had looked twelve years ago, when, for the first time, she had come out of the bath to lie beside him and conquer him. Her breasts were small, like a teenager’s, and strategically important in the battle. After them came her belly, the next snare. Below this, dark, threatening, marked by the dark triangle, lurked the final hurdle. And here he was defeated.
    Carefully, so as not to wake her, he lifted the quilt and, as he had done dozens of times before, looked at her belly and the site of his surrender. It was surely the only place in the world where happiness could be found only in defeat.
    He covered her up again with the same gentleness and looked at his watch. It was nearly time for her to wake up. Perhaps he still had time to tell her his dream before it faded irretrievably.
    How many times, he said to himself, had they repeated all this in one hotel or another, without being entirely sure what “all this” was.
    In his dream he had been eating lunch with Stalin. This seemed entirely normal, and it even made no particular impression on him when Stalin’s face