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As a child Renate could see them from her bedroom window. At night, when the white muslin curtains fluttered out like ballooning wedding dresses, she heard them whispering like figures which had been petrified by a spell during the day and came alive only at night. Their silence by day taught her to read their frozen lips as one reads the messages of deaf mutes. On rainy days their granite eye sockets shed tears mixed with soot.

Renate would never allow anyone to tell her the history of the statues, or to identify them. This would have situated them in the past. She was convinced that people did not die, they became statues. They were people under a spell and if she were watchful enough they would tell her who they were and how they lived now.

Renate’s eyes were sea green and tumultuous like a reduction of the sea itself. When they seemed about to overflow with emotion, her laughter would flutter like windchimes and form a crystal bowl to contain the turquoise waters as if in an aquarium, and then her eyes became scenes of Venice, canals of reflections, and gold specks swam in them like gondolas. Her long black hair was swept away from her face into a knot at the top of her head, then fell over her shoulders.

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