V.

Let the ghouls gorge all night long;

Dreams will keep you safe and strong.

Skeletons with poison teeth,

Risen from the world beneath,

Ogre, troll, and loup-garou,

Bloody wraith who looks like you,

Shadow on the window shade,

Harpies in a midnight raid,

Goblins seeking tender prey,

Dreams will chase them all away.

Dreams are like a magic cloak

Woven by the fairy folk,

Covering from top to toe,

Keeping you from winds and woe.

And should the Angel come this night

To fetch your soul away from light,

Cross yourself, and face the wall:

Dreams will help you not at all.”

Outside, the strand wolf screamed again. Mondaugen pounded a bag of dirty laundry into a pillow, doused the light, and lay down trembling on the rug to sleep.

III

But his own musical commentary on dreams had not included the obvious, and perhaps for him indispensable: that if dreams are only waking sensation first stored and later operated on, then the dreams of a voyeur can never be his own. This soon showed up, not too surprisingly, as an increasing inability to distinguish Godolphin from Foppl: it may or may not have been helped along by Vera Meroving, and some of it could have been dreamed. There, precisely, was the difficulty. He'd no idea, for instance, where this had come from:

“. . . so much rot spoken about their inferior kultur-position and our herrenschaft - but that was for the Kaiser and the businessmen at home; no one, not even our gay Lothario (as we called the General), believed it out here. They may have been as civilized as we, I'm not an anthropologist, you can't compare anyway - they were an agricultural, pastoral people. They loved their cattle as we perhaps love toys from childhood. Under Leutwein's administration the cattle were taken away and given to white settlers. Of course the Hereros revolted, though the Bondelswaartz Hottentots actually started it, because their chief Abraham Christian had been shot in Warmbad. No one is sure who fired first. It's an old dispute: who knows, who cares? The flint had been struck, and we were needed, and we came.”

Foppl. Perhaps.

Except that the shape of Mondaugen s "conspiracy" with Vera Meroving was finally beginning to come clear to him. She apparently wanted Godolphin, for reasons he could only guess at, though her desire seemed to arise out of a nostalgic sensuality whose appetites knew nothing at all of nerves, or heat, but instead belonged entirely to the barren touchlessness of memory. She had obviously needed Mondaugen only to be called (he might assume cruelly) a long-ago son, to weaken her prey.

Not unreasonably then, she would also have used Foppl, perhaps to replace the father as she thought she'd replaced the son, Foppl the siege party's demon, who was in fact coming more and more to define his guests assembled, to prescribe their common dream. Possibly Mondaugen alone among them was escaping it, because of his peculiar habits of observation. So in a passage (memory, nightmare, yarn, maundering, anything) ostensibly his host's Mondaugen could at least note that though the events were Foppl's, the humanity could easily have been Godolphin's.

Again one night he heard the Dies Irae, or some organized foreign chant, approach to the verge of his buffer zone of empty rooms. Feeling invisible he glided out to look and not be seen. His neighbor, an elderly merchant from Milan, had in recent days it seemed collapsed from a heart attack, lingered, died. The others, roisterers, had organized a wake. With ceremony they wrapped his body in silk sheets stripped from his bed: but before the last brightness of dead flesh had been covered, Mondaugen saw in a quick sly look its decoration of furrows and poor young scar tissue cut down in its prime. Sjambok, makoss, donkey whip . . . something long that could cut.

They took the cadaver off to a ravine to toss it in. One stayed behind.

"He remains in your room, then," she began.

"By choice."

"He has no choice. You'll make him go."

"You'll have to make him go, Fraulein."

"Then bring me to him?" almost importunate. Her eyes, rimmed in black after Foppl's 1904, needed something less hermetic than this empty corridor to frame them: palazzo's facade, provincial square, esplanade in the winter - yet more human, perhaps only more humorous than, say, the Kalahari. It was her inability to come to rest anywhere inside plausible extremes, her nervous, endless motion, like the counter-crepitating of the ball along its roulette spokes, seeking a random compartment but finally making, having made, sense only as precisely the dynamic uncertainty she was, this that upset Mondaugen enough to scowl quietly and say with a certain dignity no, turn, leave her there and, return to his sferics. They both knew he'd done nothing decisive.