The day my sister took me to visit her sister was the brightest and mildest day of the year; we went past a park, and then over another one, until we reached the end of a ruined street that had been bombed a lot during the war, but, my sister said, everyone had decided it was too expensive to repair, and too pretty to pull down.

The latch buzzed, and we entered an impossibly dark hallway. Before I could get my bearings, the door had closed again, with an echo that seemed to resound from every direction. Then Cristina’s heels were ringing on a flight of stone steps above me, and, as I pressed after her, I came out suddenly onto a windowless landing scarcely brighter than the vestibule. There was, however, a faint yellow light beneath several of the apartment doors.

A latch clicked behind me: "Must you always be crashing about?" asked a bored voice. But, as I turned, all that was left was a hand, which deposited a pair of boots on the mat. Faintly, I could still hear Cristina walking above me; I ascended a second flight, and then a third. Cristina was embracing someone in a doorway; like a dress, the darkness had fallen to her heels, and there was nothing in the world but their mingled hair and arms. For some reason - perhaps the recent exertion, my own loneliness, or some unadmitted feelings I harboured toward her - I found that my eyes had started to water, and I put my knuckles between my teeth, so as not to disturb them.

"At last! There, there, what are you crying for?" Cristina turned and said with such surprise that her eyes grew quite round and black. "Don't you like me kissing her? Well, she's my sister, so there's not much either of us can do about it. You're such a child," she added, more compassionately.

“Who’s this, your brother?” the other girl asked hopefully; but she looked at me warily, all the same, as if I were not to be trusted, and everything I said might be a lie.

“Maybe,” I answered, unwilling to resolve anything. I felt bitter, and wanted to pull all the knots tight, even if it only made the tangle worse. Just now, I was between a hundred different meanings, but, most of all, I wanted the potentiality of them all, braided together into something firmer to which I could trust my weight. I remembered the sweat from my father’s thighs seeming to fall from heaven as he retrieved a chess-set from the attic, and I stared up that ladder into the hefty, inscrutable space between his legs. Even now, he was beside us in the bombed building, introducing me to my sister’s sister, introducing her to her sister’s brother. Some ellipsis splashed beneath us, out of sight, and, without thinking, I turned aside sharply, as if its scalding spatter might yet blind me.