There is an episode in the Odyssey that always sends a shiver down her back. Odysseus has descended into the kingdom of the dead to consult the seer Tiresias. Following instructions, he digs a furrow, cuts the throat of his favourite ram, lets its blood flow into the furrow. As the blood pours, the pallid dead crowd around, slavering for a taste, until to hold them off Odysseus has to draw his sword.

The pool of dark blood, the expiring ram, the man, at a crouch, ready to thrust and stab if need be, the pale souls hard to distinguish from cadavers: why does the scene haunt her? What, coming from the invisible, does it say? She believes, most unquestionably, in the ram, the ram dragged by its master down to this terrible place. The ram is not just an idea, the ram is alive though right now it is dying. If she believes in the ram, then does she believe in its blood too, this sacred liquid, sticky, dark, almost black, pumped out in gouts on to soil where nothing will grow? The favourite ram of the king of Ithaca, so runs the story, yet treated in the end as a mere bag of blood, to be cut open and poured from. She could do the same, here and now: turn herself into a bag, cut her veins and let herself pour on to the pavement, into the gutter. For that, finally, is all it means to be alive: to be able to die. Is this vision the sum of her faith: the vision of the ram and what happens to the ram? Will it be a good enough story for them, her hungry judges?

Someone sits down opposite her. Preoccupied, she does not look up.

'Are you working on your confession?'

It is the woman from the dormitory, the one with the Polish accent, the one she thinks of as the Kapo. This morning she is wearing a cotton dress, flowery, lemon-green, somewhat old-fashioned, with a white belt. It suits her, suits her strong blonde hair and sunburnt skin and broad frame. She looks like a peasant at harvest time, sturdy, capable.

'No, not a confession, a statement of belief. That is what I have been asked for.'

'We call them confessions here.'

'Really. I would not call it that. Not in English. Perhaps in Latin, perhaps in Italian.'

Not for the first time, she wonders how it is that everyone she meets speaks English. Or is she mistaken? Are these folk in fact speaking other languages, languages unfamiliar to her – Polish, Magyar, Wendish – and are their utterances being translated into English, instantaneously and by miraculous means, for her benefit? Or on the other hand is it a condition of existence in this place that all speak a common tongue, Esperanto for example, and are the sounds that issue from her own lips not, as she deludedly believes, English words but Esperanto words, just as the words the Kapo woman speaks are Esperanto, though the woman may believe they are Polish? She herself, Elizabeth Costello, has no recollection of ever having studied Esperanto, but she could be mistaken, as she has been mistaken about so many things. But why then are the waiters Italian? Or is what she thinks of as their Italian simply Esperanto with an Italian accent and Italian hand gestures?

The couple sitting at the next table have their little fingers hooked together. Laughingly they tug at each other; they bump foreheads, whisper. They do not seem to have confessions to write. But perhaps they are not actors, full actors like this Polish woman or this woman playing a Polish woman; perhaps they are just extras, instructed to do what they do every day of their lives in order to fill out the bustle of the square, to give it verisimilitude, the reality effect. It must be a nice life, the life of an extra. Yet after a certain age anxiety must begin to creep in. After a certain age, the life of an extra must begin to seem like a waste of precious time.

'What are you saying in your confession?'

'What I said before: that I cannot afford to believe. That in my line of work one has to suspend belief. That belief is an indulgence, a luxury. That it gets in the way.'

'Really. Some of us would say the luxury we cannot afford is unbelief.'

She waits for more.

'Unbelief- entertaining all possibilities, floating between oppo-sites – is the mark of a leisurely existence, a leisured existence,' the woman goes on. 'Most of us have to choose. Only the light soul hangs in the air.' She leans closer. 'For the light soul, let me offer a word of advice. They may say they demand belief, but in practice they will be satisfied with passion. Show them passion and they will let you through.'

'Passion?' she replies. 'Passion the dark horse? I would have thought that passion leads one away from the light, not towards it. Yet in this place, you say, passion is good enough. Thank you for informing me.'

Her tone is mocking, but her companion is not rebuffed. On the contrary, she settles more comfortably into her chair and gives a little nod, a little smile, as if inviting the question that has now to come.

'Tell me, how many of us get through, pass the test, pass through the gate?'

The woman laughs, a low laugh, strangely attractive. Where has she seen her before? Why is it such an effort to remember, like feeling one's way through a fog? 'Through which gate?' says the woman. 'You believe there is only one gate?' A new laugh passes through her, a long, luxurious shudder of the body that makes her heavy breasts quake. 'Do you smoke?' she says. 'No? Do you mind?'

From a gold cigarette case she takes a cigarette, strikes a match, puffs. Her hand is stubby, broad, a peasant's hand. Yet the fingernails are clean and neatly buffed. Who is she? Only the light soul hangs in the air. It sounds like a quotation.

'Who knows what we truly believe,' says the woman. 'It is here, buried in our heart.' Lightly she smites her bosom. 'Buried even from ourselves. It is not belief that the boards are after. The effect is enough, the effect of belief. Show them you feel and they will be satisfied.'

'What do you mean, the boards?'

'The boards of examiners. We call them the boards. And we call ourselves the singing-birds. We sing for the boards, for their delight.'

'I do not give shows,' she says.'I'm not an entertainer.' The cigarette smoke drifts into her face; she waves it away. 'I cannot drum up what you call passion when it is not there. Cannot turn it on and off. If your boards will not understand that -' She shrugs. She had been about to say something about her ticket, about handing back her ticket. But that would be too grand, too literary, for so petty an occasion.

The woman stubs out her cigarette. 'I must go,' she says. 'I have purchases to make.'

Of what nature these purchases might be she does not say. But it strikes her, Elizabeth Costello {Here names fade away: well, her name is not fading away, not in the least), how passive she has become, how incurious. There are purchases she herself would like to make. Aside from the fantasy of the typewriter, she needs suncream, and soap of her own, not the harsh carbolic soap of the washroom. Yet she makes no move to enquire where in this place one does one's purchasing.

There is something else that strikes her. She has no appetite any more. From yesterday she has the faint after-memory of a lemon gelato and macaroons with coffee. Today the very thought of eating fills her with distaste. Her body feels unpleasantly heavy, unpleasantly corporeal.

Is a new career beginning to beckon: as one of the thin folk, the compulsive fasters, the hunger artists? Will her judges take pity if they see her waste away? She sees herself, a sticklike figure on a public bench in a patch of sunlight scribbling away at her task, a task never to be completed. God save me! she whispers to herself. Too literary, too literary! I must get out of here before I die!

The phrase comes back to her again at dusk, as she is taking a stroll along the town wall, watching the swallows swoop and dive above the square. A light soul. Is she a light soul? What is a light soul? She thinks of soap bubbles floating up among the swallows, rising even higher into the blue empyrean. Is that how the woman sees her, the woman whose job it is to scrub the floor and clean the lavatory (not that she ever sees her doing these things)? Certainly her life has not been a hard one, by most standards, but nor has it been easy. Quiet perhaps, protected perhaps: an antipodean life, removed from the worst of history; but driven too, the word is not too strong. Should she seek out the woman and set her right? Would the woman understand?

She sighs, walks on. How beautiful it is, this world, even if it is only a simulacrum! At least there is that to fall back on.

It is the same courtroom, with the same bailiff, but the panel of judges (the board, as she must now learn to call it) is new. There are seven of them, not nine, one of them a woman; she recognizes none of the faces. And the public benches are no longer empty. She has a spectator, a supporter: the cleaning woman, sitting by herself with a string bag on her lap.

'Elizabeth Costello, applicant, hearing number two,' intones the spokesman of today's board (the chief judge? the judge-in-chief?). 'You have a revised statement, we understand. Please proceed with it.'

She steps forward. 'What I believe,' she reads in a firm voice, like a child doing a recitation.'I was born in the city of Melbourne, but spent part of my childhood in rural Victoria, in a region of climatic extremes: of scorching droughts followed by torrential rains that swelled the rivers with the carcases of drowned animals. That, anyhow, is how I remember it.

'When the waters subsided – I am speaking of the waters of one river in particular now, the Dulgannon – acres of mud were left behind. At night you would hear the belling of tens of thousands of little frogs rejoicing in the largesse of the heavens. The air would be as dense with their calls as it was at noon with the rasping of cicadas.

'Where do they suddenly arrive from, these thousands of frogs? The answer is, they are always there. In the dry season they go underground, burrowing further and further from the heat of the sun until each has created a little tomb for itself. And in those tombs they die, so to speak. Their heartbeat slows, their breathing stops, they turn the colour of mud. Once again the nights are silent.

'Silent until the next rains come, rapping, as it were, on thousands of tiny coffin lids. In those coffins hearts begin to beat, limbs begin to twitch that for months have been lifeless. The dead awake. As the caked mud softens, the frogs begin to dig their way out, and soon their voices resound again in joyous exultation beneath the vault of the heavens.

'Excuse my language. I am or have been a professional writer. Usually I take care to conceal the extravagances of the imagination. But today, for this occasion, I thought I would conceal nothing, bare all. The vivifying flood, the chorus of joyous belling, followed by the subsiding of the waters and the retreat to the grave, then drought seemingly without end, then fresh rains and the resurrection of the dead – it is a story I present transparently without disguise.