He drank the whisky, though: more beautiful and encouraging in the glass than in his mouth or heart. Oh well.

The telephone rang.

"Old friend,” Boney Rasmussen said, sounding almost as far away as he really was, in his big house a couple of miles and more from Kraft's. “I wondered if you were up for a game of chess tonight."

"Ah well."

"I'd be glad to come to your place.” Kraft had nearly ceased to drive. His vanishing competence or what he believed to be its vanishing had begun striking fear into his heart at odd moments, causing him to brake suddenly on the road, nearly causing thereby the awful collisions he envisioned.

"Mon empereur,” Kraft said. “I have a question."

"Anything."

"A question. Not a request."

"All right,” Boney said. “Shoot."

"Suppose I were very suddenly to make an exit. I mean drop dead. I'm afraid I haven't prepared very well for this eventuality."

"No need to hasten things,” Boney said after a funny pause. “Of course we must get all your ducks in a row."

"Ah yes. Ah yes. The very largest duck of course comes first, and that we have really firmly in place."

"You mean the books, the copyrights."

"Yes. They'll be yours. I mean the foundation's. And this house."

"Maybe I should come over,” Boney said. “It's actually a beautiful evening."

"There are masses of things. I have kept diaries. I have covered paper with writing, more with typing. I wouldn't want just any-old-body going through it. Though boredom would no doubt keep person or persons from going far."

Boney was silent for a long moment. The thoughts of age are long, long thoughts.

"You could,” he said at last, “destroy it yourself. Whatever of it you thought was too—too..."

"Somehow I can't do that,” Kraft said. “It would be a little like putting an end to my own messy and overstuffed consciousness. I have profound horror of suicide."

More silence.

"Of course they're valueless. They're just mine. I'm like a bum on a park bench, his clothes stuffed with newspapers to keep him warm."

"Is any of it,” Boney asked, “recent?"

"Oh, some.” He raised his eyes to the ceiling, just as though Boney could see him do so. “Some. And there are things, too."

"Things, yes."

"A loathsome rummage sale. What to do. Is it a comfort to think we will carry our secrets to the grave, simply because others can't find them in the litter?"

"Old friend,” Boney said. “Your house is not as large as mine. Or as full of this and that. I have a few years’ collecting on you."

"Let me ask this. If I were to make over this house and its contents to you, to the foundation, of course I mean. Then would it be all right if I just left everything here as it is? I'd trust you to find all that was worth finding, and discard the rest."

"I don't know that you need to make this determination now,” Boney said. “Though of course."

"Yes."

"If you needed to feel it was all."

"Yes."

"In case."

"Yes.” He let all that was unsaid flow back and forth over the wire, a ghost conversation he (and Boney too no doubt) could almost hear. Then he said: “I will take a rain check on the game, dear friend. I have a date with a hot-water bottle. I feel better already, though."

"I'm very glad."

"Will you call again tomorrow?"

"I will. Don't worry about any of it."

* * * *

After a time Kraft arose—it had begun to seem a small surprise each time nowadays, that he had another getting up still in him. He gathered together the letters he had been reading, and inserted them again into the envelopes from which they had come. Then the pile of yellow typing paper, its top sheet already growing pale from the sun through his study window. No one knew of its existence yet but he.

Dr. Pons had once, among his other tales, told him the story of the Shekhinah.

The rabbis say that the Shekhinah is the earthly dwelling place of the Glory of God. It is a fragment or sliver of godhood, left over from that primal disaster when God somehow contracted or removed himself from a space in his own heart, a hollow, which eventually became the universe. Though terminally cold and dark (before God's separated and self-conscious Aeons or Sephiroth began to work within it) it contained, as it had to, having once been God, something of divinity. That something is the Shekhinah, which the alchemists call the Stone that transforms matter to spirit. And it's still here. It could be, Dr. Pons thought, very small; small and big mean nothing when we talk about divinity. It could maybe be held in the hand. And it might be anywhere, not enthroned most likely, not honored; for it is the lapis exulis, the gem of lost home, and gutters and ash heaps are as likely a place for it as any. When he was a boy walking those streets Kraft used to keep an eye out for it, going up the town and back again; looking for its telltale gleam in vacant lots, kicking cans that might conceal it. Once he kicked a can that contained a nest of yellow jackets, and was badly stung.

It was very wrong of him to have teased Boney Rasmussen as he had, and sent him enigmatic telegrams from Abroad. He had never found anything on his travels that could extend Boney's protracted life, or warm his heart. But he had, one night in Czechoslovakia in the spring of 1968, found the stone of transformation, its powers intact, not superannuated or even asleep, not a story or a fable, lying in plain sight in the vacant lot of the present.

March 1968. Somewhere the journal for that year still lay, stuffed with the postcards he liked to collect on his travels, not new garishly colored ones but old-fashioned sepia-toned ones, which had always made him feel superannuated himself: as though he could not only see the colored present before him full of busy young people and shiny cars and advertising, but remember this old brown past too, the cars few and black, the trees ungrown or uncut. Like the one he got from a stand outside Franz Josef Bahnhof in Vienna, a picture of the very station he stood before, taken at the end of the empire, the horse cabs and taxis outside, the wide street clean and cobbled. From there the Vindobona Express departed at the difficult hour of eight in the morning, reaching the Czech border at Gmund two hours later.

It was a fast new train, the coaches smelly and low, where they had been smelly and high roofed before, thirty years and a year before, when he had last looked out at these scenes. He had entered a land in dissolution then, and everyone knew it: the Nazi gangs flush with German pay and German successes were starting fights in the streets, beating Jews, assassinating ministers; they had colored with their menace his book about Prague, the Emperor Rudolf, werewolves and golems. Everyone wondered if the nation could survive. So much worse was waiting for them too, so much worse than he could have thought of, than anyone could.

Most of the trains they passed were still steam driven, even in 1968, puffing their pipes as they went by on the parallel track. A former world still present. In fertile south Bohemia, all black mud and greening trees, sun-glitter danced over the broad pools built long ago by monks to breed carp to eat on Fridays, fish long-lived enough to be still there to remember, maybe. They went by Tabor, fortress town of the Hussite wars, the first religious wars in Europe since the Christians beat the pagans, but with many more to follow quickly after. All that the Hussites had wanted was a Bible in their own language, communion in both kinds, bread and wine, and the church's admission that though scripture could never be wrong, the church leadership could be. Their bravery raised wild hopes; people came to Bohemia from all over Europe—Wyclifites, Waldensians, proto-Quakers. And Adamites too, living naked in the woods and dancing around their fires and coupling indiscriminately: they believed, outrageously, that God entire was within each of them. Let out your prisoner, the women cried to the men as they tore their last rag of garment away, give me your soul, and take mine! They had to be killed like the beasts they were, even the Hussite preachers agreed with that; but they would not be forgotten.