He looks out of a hotel window; his geographical dislocations are so great these days that his body has begun to live in a time zone of its own. There is work to do even though it is the weekend, work he had sought, work that is an effective anesthetic against... everything. From this height he sees clear out to the rim of the horizon, bracketed by a steel-gray foggy lake; a chimney bisecting the view, belching smoke into the April drizzle; three shore birds veering in circles against a building of green glass; even pure white of their wings is a color when seen on days like this.

And without his willing, memory goes back to another city viewed like this, though not through the rain. It must have been Paris; it must have been a church, the view of a much post-carded steel tower and a river; he remembers the gargoyles of Notre Dame; her laughter and her jokes at their appearance. She who was named after the rain, Varsha. But he shouldn't think of her.

Liquidation of first loves such as that one are always the hardest to bear, the hardest to erase. Concentrate instead on the red maple leaf on a flag fluttering desolate against the bronze green-patina of those old roofs and spires in the middle distance. He wonders, if this is how Sabina, his long term Australian lover, perceives him when he is naked in bed with her, when he sees her once a month?

An old stone building, stolid, safe, and filled with unreachable ghosts? A good refuge for herself and her teenage daughter; both refugees from other wars, other genocides, other Balkans, following sudden death of a husband and another daughter. Two bullets in the head, two seconds, right at the threshold of the apartment on a cobble stoned street, must set an example they said, must extract the precise pound of heart-flesh. Sabina's practical iciness he knew right from the start, no one was fooling any one else. He was after all one of her many clients, all high paying ones.

It was only months after this dumb charade - this pretend acting of being a couple about town, the standard payment plus a generous tip left discreetly in a white envelope by the bed followed by an trans-continental flight out of Sydney - months after this charade, when he saw her angrily get up and edge out a drunk pianist in a roof-bar and play, with great fury and great beauty, the Polonaise Waltz, he knew he had seen more than what Sabina wanted him to see. That slip was his point of leverage, his entry to take over her life albeit very discreetly.

Is it the pursuit, he wonders, that he enjoys more that the object of pursuit? A gull chasing another gull against the green expanse of glass? A person who wanted to own the rain?

Note: Avril 14th was playing in the background