ANNA LED STEPHEN TO a nearby bistro, the Kantorei. They sat in creaky wooden chairs, the legs of which were uneven and annoying. Anna ordered a brandy and Stephen asked for a beer. And then they began to talk. Stephen was a scientist on a short-term sabbatical from MIT with an appointment at the ETH, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology. It is one of the world’s top schools. Einstein was a graduate. Apart from the banks and businesses of Zürich’s financial industry, the ETH is the city’s most prestigious institution. Stephen had sublet an apartment in Wipkingen, a quarter on the city’s north side, and the namesake of the district’s train station. Stephen was, Anna learned, a thermochemist. A pyrologist. He studied combustion. Stephen was an expert on fire.
In the difficult months following the affair, Anna had ample time to consider the symbolic implications of Stephen’s work and the effect the man had had on her. Anna’s conclusions were these: That fire is beautifully cruel. That fusion occurs only at a specific heat. That blood, in fact, can boil. That the dissolution of an affair is an entropic reaction, and the disorder it tends toward is flammable. That a heart will burn. And burn and burn and burn. That an ordinary flame’s hottest point cannot always be seen.
DOKTOR MESSERLI OPENED A book and pointed to a series of related drawings depicting a couple making love in a fountain. In the first they’re rained upon. In the next their bodies have fused together and the pair—now singular—rise. “The result of a union of opposites. King and queen lie down in a mercurial bath. They face each other’s naked truths. The psychosexual union is a symbol of coming to consciousness.”
Anna offered her a quizzical look. “What’s this got to do with me?”
“Schau. The being dies and takes the body with it. But it returns. Transcendence has been achieved, but at a cost. The cost is death.”
“Symbolic death?”
“Of course.”
ANNA STOOD TO THE side and watched her husband interact with his friends. It was strange seeing him like this, chummy and familiar, relaxed among old pals. Twenty years sloughed off him almost instantly. She imagined him a young rake, a scamp with a quirky smile knocking back a beer, his hands darting through the air as he told a story, recounted a soccer match, talked about a girl. That was Bruno at twenty-four. Anna would have been eighteen. Had they met twenty years ago, each would have scared the other off. Anna with her needy solitudes, Bruno with the confidence radiating from the very posture his body seemed to be recalling just then in Daniela’s backyard.
Bruno downed the last swallow of his beer and turned to the blond man and asked if he wanted another. He called him Karl. Karl nodded, Jo g?rn. As Bruno brushed by Anna he bent his head to hers and asked her. His eyes were kinder than they were twenty minutes earlier. It’s the beer, Anna thought. Bruno’s eyes always softened when he started to drink. Water, please. Bruno nodded, winked, then marched off to grab drinks for all of them.
He’d called the blond man Karl. Anna remembered now. He was Karl Tr?tzmüller, a childhood friend of Bruno and Daniela. Anna was embarrassed she hadn’t recalled his name right away. He’d been to the house a dozen times. She blamed her absentmindedness on the weather.