The Zone of Interest

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I WAS NO stranger to the flash of lightning; I was no stranger to the thunderbolt. Enviably experienced in these matters, I was no stranger to the cloudburst — the cloudburst, and then the sunshine and the rainbow.

She was coming back from the Old Town with her two daughters, and they were already well within the Zone of Interest. Up ahead, waiting to receive them stretched an avenue — almost a colonnade — of maples, their branches and lobed leaves interlocking overhead. A late afternoon in midsummer, with minutely glinting midges… My notebook lay open on a tree stump, and the breeze was flicking inquisitively through its pages.

Tall, broad, and full, and yet light of foot, in a crenellated white ankle-length dress and a cream-coloured straw hat with a black band, and swinging a straw bag (the girls, also in white, had the straw hats and the straw bags), she moved in and out of pockets of fuzzy, fawny, leonine warmth. She laughed — head back, with tautened throat. Moving in parallel, I kept pace, in my tailored tweed jacket and twills, with my clipboard, my fountain pen.

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