V.

All day, through the slower morning hours, her hearing seemed to grow sharper. So that at noon when the kitchen erupted gently into disorder - nothing outright: a few delayed orders, a dropped plate which shattered like her tender eardrums - she'd heard perhaps more than she was intended to. Fashoda, Fashoda . . . the word washed about Boeblich's like a pestilent rain. Even the faces changed: Grune the chef, Wernher the bartender, Musa the boy who swept floors, Lotte and Eva and the other girls, all seemed to've turned shifty, to've been hiding secrets all this time. There was even something sinister about the usual slap on the buttocks Boeblich gave Hanne as she passed by.

Imagination, she told herself. She'd always been a practical girl, not given to fancy. Could this be one of love's side-effects? To bring on visions, encourage voices which did not exist, to make the chewing and second digestion of any cud only mare difficult? It worried Hanne, who thought she knew everything about love. How was Lepsius different: a little slower, a little weaker; certainly no high priest at the business, no more mysterious or remarkable than any other of a dozen strangers.

Damn men and their politics. Perhaps it was a kind of sex for them. Didn't they even use the same word for what man does to a woman and what a successful politician does to his unlucky opponent? What was Fashoda to her, or Marchand or Kitchener, or whatever their names were, the two who had "met" - met for what? Hanne laughed, shaking her head. She could imagine, for what.

She pushed back a straggle of yellow hair with one soap-bleached hand. Odd how the skin died and grew soggy-white. It looked like leprosy. Since midday a certain leitmotif of disease had come jittering in, had half-revealed itself, latent in the music of Cairo's afternoon; Fashoda, Fashoda, a word to give pale, unspecific headaches, a word suggestive of jungle, and outlandish micro-organisms, and fevers which were not love's (the only she'd known, after all, being a healthy girl) or anything human's. Was it a change in the light, or were the skins of the others actually beginning to show the blotches of disease?

She rinsed and stacked the last plate. No. A stain. Back went the plate into the dishwater. Hanne scrubbed, then examined the plate again tilting it toward the light. The stain was still there. Hardly visible. Roughly triangular, it extended from an apex near the center to a base an inch or so from the edge. A sort of brown color, outlines indistinct against the faded white of the plate's surface. She tilted the plate another few degrees toward the light and the stain disappeared. Puzzled, she moved her head to look at it from another angle. The stain flickered twice in and out of existence. Hanne found that if she focused her eyes a little behind and off the edge of the plate the stain would remain fairly constant, though its shape had begun to change outline; now crescent, now trapezoid. Annoyed, she plunged the plate back into the water and searched among the kitchen gear under the sink for a stiffer brush.

Was the stain real? She didn't like its color. The color of her headache: pallid brown. It is a stain she told herself. That's all it is. She scrubbed fiercely. Outside, the beer-drinkers were coming in from the street. "Hanne," called Boeblich.

O God, would it never go away? She gave it up at last and stacked the plate with the other dishes. But now it seemed the stain had fissioned, and transferred like an overlay to each of her retinae.

A quick look at her hair in the mirror-fragment over the sink; then on went a smile and out went Hanne to wait on her countrymen.

Of course the first face she saw was that of the "competitor." It sickened her. Mottled red and white, and loose wisps of skin hanging . . . He was conferring anxiously with Varkumian the pimp, whom she knew. She began to make passes.

". . . Lord Cromer could keep it from avalanching . . ."

". . . Sir, every whore and assassin in Cairo . . ."

In the corner someone vomited. Hanne rushed to clean it up.

". . . if they should assassinate Cromer . . ."

". . . bad show, to have no Consul-General . . ."

". . . it will degenerate . . ."

Amorous embrace from a customer. Boeblich approached with a friendly scowl.

". . . keep him safe at all costs . . ."

". . . capable men in this sick world are at a . . ."

". . . Bongo-Shaftsbury will try . . ."

". . . the Opera . . ."

". . . where? Not the Opera . . ."

". . . Ezbekiyeh Garden . . ."

". . . the Opera . . . Manon Lescaut . . ."

". . . who did say? I know her . . . Zenobia the Copt . . ."

". . . Kenneth Slime at the Embassy's girl . . ."

Love. She paid attention.

". . . has it from Slime that Cromer is taking no precautions. My God: Goodfellow and I barged in this morning as Irish tourists: he in a moldly morning hat with a shamrock, I in a red beard. They threw us bodily into the street . . ."

". . . no precautions . . . O God . . ."