V.

"Which one is she?" The woman again. In Montmartre, 1913, people materialized.

"Over there with Porcépic."

She hurried over to be introduced. Vulgar, thought Itague, and then amended it at once to "uncontrollable." Perhaps? A little. La Jarretiere stood there only gazing. Porcépic looked upset, as if they'd had an argument. Poor, young, pursued, fatherless. What would Gerfaut make of her? A wanton. In body if he could; in the pages of a manuscript most certainly. Writers had no moral sense.

Porcépic sat at the piano, playing Adoration of the Sun. It was a tango with cross-rhythms. Satin had devised some near-impossible movements to go with it. "It cannot be danced," screamed a young man, leaping from the stage to land, belligerent, in front of Satin.

Mélanie had hurried off to change to her Su Feng costume. Lacing on her slippers she looked up and saw the woman, leaning in the doorway.

"You are not real."

"I . . ." Hands resting dead on her thighs.

"Do you know what a fetish is? Something of a woman which gives pleasure but is not a woman. A shoe, a locket . . . une jarretiere. You are the same, not real but an object of pleasure."

Mélanie could not speak.

"What are you like unclothed? A chaos of flesh. But as Su Feng, lit by hydrogen, oxygen, a cylinder of lime, moving doll-like in the confines of your costume . . . You will drive Paris mad. Women and men alike."

The eyes would not respond. Not with fear, desire, anticipation. Only the Mélanie in the mirror could make them do that. The woman had moved to the foot of the bed, ring hand resting on the lay figure. Mélanie darted past her, continued on toes and in twirls to the wings; appeared on stage, improvising to Porcépic's lackadaisical attack on the piano. Outside thunder could be heard, punctuating the music at random.

It was never going to rain.

The Russian influence in Porcépic's music was usually traced to his mother, who'd been a milliner in St. Petersburg. Porcépic now, between his hashish dreams, his furious attacks on the grand piano out in Les Batignolles, fraternized with a strange collection of Russian expatriates led by a certain Kholsky, a huge and homicidal tailor. They were all engaged in clandestine political activity, they spoke volubly and at length of Bakunin, Marx, Ulyanov.

Kholsky entered as the sun fell, hidden by yellow clouds. He drew Porcépic into an argument. The dancers dispersed, the stage emptied until only Mélanie and the woman remained. Satin produced his guitar; Porcépic sat on the piano, and they sang revolutionary songs. "Porcépic," grinned the tailor, "you'll be surprised one day. At what we will do."

"Nothing surprises me," answered Porcépic. "If history were cyclical, we'd now be in a decadence, would we not, and your projected Revolution only another symptom of it."

"A decadence is a falling-away," said Kholsky. "We rise."

"A decadence," Itague put in, "is a falling-away from what is human, and the further we fall the less human we become. Because we are less human, we foist off the humanity we have lost on inanimate objects and abstract theories."

The girl and the woman had moved away from the stage's one overhead light. They could hardly be seen. No sound came from up there. Itague finished the last of the ice water.

"Your beliefs are non-human," he said. "You talk of people as if they were point-clusters or curves on a graph."

"So they are," mused Kholsky, dreamy-eyed. "I, Satin, Porcépic, may fall by the wayside. No matter. The Socialist Awareness grows, the tide is irresistible and irreversible. It is a bleak world we live in, M. Itague; atoms collide, brain cells fatigue, economies collapse and others rise to succeed them, all in accord with the basic rhythms of History. Perhaps she is a woman; women are a mystery to me. But her ways are at least measurable."

"Rhythm," snorted Itague, "as if you listened to the jitterings and squeaks of a metaphysical bedspring." The tailor laughed, delighted, like a great fierce child. Acoustics of the room gave his mirthfulness a sepulchral ring. The stage was empty.

"Come," said Porcépic. "To L'Ouganda," Satin on a table danced absently to himself.

Outside they passed the woman, holding Mélanie by the arm. They were headed toward the Metro station; neither spoke. Itague stopped at a kiosk to buy a copy of La Patrie, the closest one could get to an anti-Semitic newspaper in the evening. Soon they had vanished down the Boulevard Clichy.