Ronald Senator

I thought of the Bridge of Sighs as my nemesis. I am not writing about the wretched condemned prisoners who crossed from the Doge's Palace into the darkness of dungeons, of course. This was Oxford, and a replica of the Venetian original extended across New College Lane, joining the main body of Hertford College to its daughter complex of student rooms

My own two rooms both looked out into Broad Street, a very privileged view with Sir Christopher Wren's Sheldonian Theatre on the left side. I loved to watch those solemn degree ceremonies, when the theatre was flecked out with red and black doctorate and undergraduate gowns. Opposite, the bald stoned New Bodleian Library stood next to Blackwell's famous bookshop. And the pub next to that was where I would regularly meet Dylan Thomas, who was then living with Caitlin in a boathouse in the gardens of Magdalen College.

There were no ghostly Venetian Sighs to be heard upon the Oxford counterfeit Bridge. What it did generate, much to my own alarm, was a cacophony of creaking squeaking rasping floor-board which I might well have welcomed as a kind of avant-garde musique concrete, if only they had not sounded a dead-of-night alarm into the sleeping College eardrums. As it was, I was in danger of being caught red-footed, so to speak, long after the midnight deadline for an undergraduate's venture into the buzzing but dignified kaleidoscope beyond the college solid ten-foot gates.

It had all hinged upon one of those coincidences which no novelist dare use in his fiction for fear of being accused of arm-twisting reality into impossible miracles. I had a rusty old-fashioned key, pre-Yale that is, from my home garden gate by the Thames which, to my stunned amazement, fitted the rusty old-fashioned lock, pre-Yale also, of the college main doors.

I could not return before midnight: the Porter would be awake in his Lodge. I had to return in the early hours. Past Brasenose Lane, the parked bicycles with moonlit glittering chains of silver; past Radcliffe Square and its venerable Camera, now like some monster cylinder, perhaps a colossal oil drum covered with a shroud of phantom moonlight, its interior drained of oil by ardent scholars and replaced with their millions of books.

1944 was the penultimate year of the Second World War, but Oxford felt its seismic shocks only indirectly. When I went up to London to visit Phyllis, I experienced an altogether different universe, one where the norm appeared to be sandbagged buildings, floating aerial whales called barrage balloons, vast areas at devastated streets with standing fragments of walls and even half-houses as if sliced through by a sharp knife. London was swarming with the languages and uniforms of many couritries: Free French, Czech, Polish, Dutch, Indian, as well as Canadian and Australian: above all the Americans, well equipped with food and, later, nylons to entice the gullible, some of who they would take home as a kind of War Trophy. Not since ancient Rome had so many different peoples mingled in so small a space. Never had there existed such a common yet concealed community of mental spasm, ripples of hopeful but fearful anticipation of what everyone knew had to come, and perhaps already tomorrow; the explosion and expulsion out of this crowded teeming island's launching-pad, the incendiary discharge of myriads of men and machines onto heavily fortified beaches guarded by the most cunning and inspired forces the modern world had ever experienced, and with all its savage backfire of slaughter and disfigurement and amputation.

Phyllis and I watched this melange of humanity throng past the square's mini-park facing her room in the Georgian terrace-house of Kensington. We had met at a Conference for senior schoolboys and girls held a Cheltenham College. We were sweet sixteen. At night in the chilly hills above the town I had held her tightly and then kissed her passionately. "Very expert" she had said, smiling through the beautiful gleam of her stainless white teeth, opening wide those large brown eyes which, like some celestial apparitions, had bewitched me.

Calf love. Should have died then and there. But she went on writing me very long letters, mostly about boring domestic squabbles with her younger sister. Always assuming the continuing blaze of my love's sunshine upon her body and soul, while it was actually setting behind some very insistently alien clouds.

That had been some three years back. It was like the exhausted exhaust tail of a plane still dancing a weary old pattern which was now obsolete, anachronistic, fossilized.

But Oxford and its iconic dreaming spires experienced a second-hand War. I had been interviewed for my scholarship by a kindly senior figure.

"I see you are interested in economics" he said, holding up the exam paper.

I shrank. I recognized Sir William Beveridge who had given his name to the famous investigation of what was called the "Welfare State" (a name Beveridge hated): the plan for cradle-to-grave health insurance, free college education, ample pensions, all that would be enacted into law after the War.

But Beveridge also had the foresight and the energy, as early as 1933 when Hitler first came to power, to organize and raise the funding for the rescue of many distinguished Germans to come to Oxford.

I loved to frequent the Oxford clubs and pubs, and I had often encountered heavily accented refugees. They brought with them that unmistakable whiff of warfare, that shifting glance over the shoulder that betrayed the experiences of night-time disappearances. I knew that the major stars of my own discipline, nuclear physics, had passed through Oxford: Einstein, Teller, many others who would be enticed to the USA and its Manhattan Project to build the first atom bomb, because they feared that England could not survive a German invasion. They were probably right, back then in the days Winston Churchill described as "their finest hour", meaning the fight for air supremacy during the terrible Blitz on England's main cities and ports, as well as on its Atlantic supply lines. England was spared because Hitler switch his ambitions to the Soviet Union, and dreamed of a pact whereby we would keep our empire while Germany ruled the whole of Europe. We believed that Rudolph Hess, Hitler's emissary, had flown over to England in rider to seal that pact. Of course he met only stony ears.

Brasenose Lane led from Turl Street, commonly called just The Turl. There had indeed been a twirling gate entrance through the city walls at the north end of that street. Centuries back. But the name stuck.

Number Twelve was my destination night after night. It was a human rabbit-warren of rooms: bedsitters and make-do kitchenettes, all of them pervaded, even haunted, by the odor of Indian cooking spices. For Number Twelve was the property of Mr. Singh, who also presided over Oxford's most popular Indian restaurant, situated on the ground floor of that building, strategically placed both for customers from the street, but also for sending its exotically enticing smells up to the rooms above as if some kind of scented advertisement.

Number Twelve had twelve rooms with twelve kitchenettes but only seven toilets. This was a mysterious lack which, needless to say, often preoccupied the minds of its occupants waiting in line to use them. Mr. Singh had bought the house two years ago from a certain Major Neames with an impeccable upper-class English accent, but who was revealed to be a German named Neumann educated in Harrow. He was also convicted of spying for Germany, and was subsequently executed under wartime emergency regulations. Why he had needed so many rooms was never understood, but there were theories about 'safe houses' for other suspected spies.

This is not a spy story, and so when I mention that there was a German couple still living on the third floor, you must not assume that it is. Actually, the Reinharts were an elderly Jewish couple rather out of place in that fascinating mixture of young people living there when I was so frequent a visitor each night.

Another refugee lived alone in one of the two highest attic room, hers overlooking the Turl and with a spectacular view to the cupola of the Camera. Not quite alone, however. James was her proud, stiff-necked Staffordshire bull-terrier, an independent black-and-white tyrant who fed himself daily, in those days of rationing, by stealing huge joints in the Oxford market.

Husky voiced, very dark in hair and eyes and even in personality, Vera had been on the children's rescue train out of Prague at the eleventh hour of 1939. Her mother had held back her tears at the station, her father was being unnaturally stern to control his own leaking desperation.

She would never see her parents again. They died in Terezin, along with her uncles and aunts. The train journey took her into a strange language with strange people and strange foods. Gifted in drawing and painting, she was accepted at the Slade School, which was evacuated from London to Oxford to escape the Blitz. Vera was the reason for my nightly absence from my college.

The Slade School was a repository of female youth, energy, and beauty, and it spilled its human treasures liberally into Oxford parties, discos and artistic enterprises like the Theatre Club which staged regular offerings of O'Neill, Shaw, Genet, Beckett. Several of these beauties lived in Number Twelve, for the most part as consorts. Prolonged affairs, the carousels of trial and error attractions and bindings. Some would last into the afterlife, I mean life after Oxford. Judy would bear Bob five children in their Chelsea home before he died aged forty, the most distinguished art historian of his time. Most would peter out like a damp squib in the rain. There were others who made a brilliantly explosive parting, like a rocket showering many flashing necklaces of gold, or bursting into streams of precious jewelry, before itself expiring. So Jane and Eric, painters both, held a dazzling joint exhibition of their life-work at the Ashmolean itself in Beaumont Street, with gourmet delicacies and even some hot celebrities waiting opposite in the Randolph Hotel. They said goodbye. They remained friends. Life has many phases.

Denis staged his farewell in Wellington Square, beneath the balcony of Helen his love. Italian opera style. The merest chamber group, strolling serenaders, and a tenor from the Music Faculty. She appeared in her flowery nightgown holding flowers and, true to her role, threw them down in a sunshine yellow shower of daffodils, right onto his waves of black hair. Aimed correctly. Funny but serious. No laughter. Tears maybe. Life has its phases.

So it was with Vera in those overstuffed years at Oxford. The whole world was engaged in tearing itself into shreds of blood and bone. There was a universe out there intent on razing magnificent cities to rubble as it deliberately hastening the Final Apocalyptic Catastrophe of all mankind. The end of our species. But we were building our city. Our world was a newborn baby, we fed it with our love, we nurtured its growth, we taught it a new language which was ours and ours alone. And it radiated with love, it gave off particles of fire and desire, it formed and reformed miniature stars in skies of our own designing. Love bestowed its eternity upon us, so that filled with its power we became master and mistress of the cosmos and all its mysteries of genesis and regeneration, whether of nascent nano-particles or of the most giant of galaxies.

Until it died.

Terezin was liberated by the Russian advance of 1945.

In an Oxford cinema, together Vera and I held hands as we watched the first newsreels of Belsen, stumbled upon by a British advance patrol. Striped skeletons with huge vacant eyes staring at us, yes at Vera and myself, eyes saying, you knew, didn't you, why didn't you do something about it? How could you go about your fine Oxford lives, knowing this horror?

Vera received a letter from the Kosice Government informing her that her parents had died in Terezin. She was the heiress to a house in Prague's Wenceslas Square. There was to be a memorial service at the Terezin concentration camp itself. Could she come over? Transport could be provided.

I did not go with her. She did not come back. The Kosice Government was disbanded, in fact several of its members were condemned by the Communist Courts as traitors to the new regime. We spoke now of an iron curtain cutting through the heart of Europe. It was no longer possible to leave the Soviet bloc. There were invisible walls as well as the famous construction which divided Berlin.

I wrote care of the British Consul. A letter came back many months later , heavily censored. Hardly her voice any longer. She loved her motherland, was glad to see it again. The new regime had much to recommend it, new housing for the poor, national health insurance ... She was teaching in a high school. She was going to Moscow with a party of her students to a great Reception. She did not write again.

The history books will tell you the story better than I can. The eyeball to eyeball confrontation of the two Superpowers, the chessboard of a new world now crisscrossed by a million flights and a million internet connections. Globalization they called it.

What I can tell you is simple and brief. That I married a fellow graduate, that I became a civil servant in what became the Commonwealth Office, that we lived a good life in an England that had come to terms with losing its empire but still had a moral standing in a new world that was tipping the East-West scales. I watched the Dubcek fiasco and the Soviet tanks in the Na Prikova of Prague. Sometimes I thought of Vera, but then ... I had three children now, and life has its phases, has it not?

Until the Berlin Wall came down, and Prague had its own velvet Revolution. At my own request, I was transferred temporarily to a post in the British Embassy in Prague. The house in Wenceslas Square had been demolished to make room for a new workers' apartment tower.

In 1995 a three-day Memorial was initiated in the Terezin camp as a commemoration of the Camp's liberation fifty years earlier. I decided to attend. I could go in my capacity as a UK representative. But of course other motives were lurking and surfacing.

In the courtyard of the fortress town of Terezin a large dais or platform was set up in front of a wall, still pock-marked with bullet holes, where prisoners had been executed. The whole yard was surrounded with cells where prisoners had been confined, often tortured to death. We sat on rows of chairs. Choir and orchestra were squeezed onto the dais, and we listened to Mozart's last and fatal Requiem, there in that fitting place of death.

She was sitting two rows in front of me. I recognized her when she stood up to look for someone else. Grey now, not black. Wrinkles enclosed her eyes with a tangle of etchings.

She saw me. She recognized me. The Requiem began. She sat down again.

We did not embrace, we did not kiss. We just looked at each other silently. What words could have been suitable? Some evasive conversation dictated by a social masking? Some doomed attempt to pick up threads broken off a lifetime before? Apologies? Explanations? They were not appropriate.

As if we both had entered into an old silent movie, the hubbub of moving people around us faded into an eerie silence. Prisoners of time, we could not escape its iron bars which held us captive within our forty years of separate lives and different universes. Time tortures us by permitting our memories but refusing to set back the clocks of our living.

We did not try to do that. She had her family as I did.

I went to a College Gaudy reunion, and I walked over to Number Twelve. It still smelled of Indian spices. There were different faces coming and going, all of them young. New crops. I loved them. I walked over the Bridge of Sighs. The same musique concrete of creaks and squeaks and rasps. But now I imagined I heard the sighs of prisoners. Including my own.

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	NUMBER TWELVE I thought of the Bridge of Sighs as my nemesis. I am not writing about the wretched condemned prisoners who crossed from the Doge's Palace into the darkness of dungeons, of course. This was Oxford, and a replica of the Venetian original extended across New College Lane, joining the main body of Hertford College to its daughter complex of student rooms My own two rooms both looked out into Broad Street, a very privileged view with Sir Christopher Wren's Sheldonian Theatre on the left side. I loved to watch those solemn degree ceremonies, when the theatre was flecked out with red and black doctorate and undergraduate gowns. Opposite, the bald stoned New Bodleian Library stood next to Blackwell's famous bookshop. And the pub next to that was where I would regularly meet Dylan Thomas, who was then living with Caitlin in a boathouse in the gardens of Magdalen College. There were no ghostly Venetian Sighs to be heard upon the Oxford counterfeit Bridge. What it did generate, much to my own alarm, was a cacophony of creaking squeaking rasping floor-board which I might well have welcomed as a kind of avant-garde musique concrete, if only they had not sounded a dead-of-night alarm into the sleeping College eardrums. As it was, I was in danger of being caught red-footed, so to speak, long after the midnight deadline for an undergraduate's venture into the buzzing but dignified kaleidoscope beyond the college solid ten-foot gates. It had all hinged upon one of those coincidences which no novelist dare use in his fiction for fear of being accused of arm-twisting reality into impossible miracles. I had a rusty old-fashioned key, pre-Yale that is, from my home garden gate by the Thames which, to my stunned amazement, fitted the rusty old-fashioned lock, pre-Yale also, of the college main doors. I could not return before midnight: the Porter would be awake in his Lodge. I had to return in the early hours. Past Brasenose Lane, the parked bicycles with moonlit glittering chains of silver; past Radcliffe Square and its venerable Camera, now like some monster cylinder, perhaps a colossal oil drum covered with a shroud of phantom moonlight, its interior drained of oil by ardent scholars and replaced with their millions of books. 1944 was the penultimate year of the Second World War, but Oxford felt its seismic shocks only indirectly. When I went up to London to visit Phyllis, I experienced an altogether different universe, one where the norm appeared to be sandbagged buildings, floating aerial whales called barrage balloons, vast areas at devastated streets with standing fragments of walls and even half-houses as if sliced through by a sharp knife. London was swarming with the languages and uniforms of many couritries: Free French, Czech, Polish, Dutch, Indian, as well as Canadian and Australian: above all the Americans, well equipped with food and, later, nylons to entice the gullible, some of who they would take home as a kind of War Trophy. Not since ancient Rome had so many different peoples mingled in so small a space. Never had there existed such a common yet concealed community of mental spasm, ripples of hopeful but fearful anticipation of what everyone knew had to come, and perhaps already tomorrow; the explosion and expulsion out of this crowded teeming island's launching-pad, the incendiary discharge of myriads of men and machines onto heavily fortified beaches guarded by the most cunning and inspired forces the modern world had ever experienced, and with all its savage backfire of slaughter and disfigurement and amputation. Phyllis and I watched this melange of humanity throng past the square's mini-park facing her room in the Georgian terrace-house of Kensington. We had met at a Conference for senior schoolboys and girls held a Cheltenham College. We were sweet sixteen. At night in the chilly hills above the town I had held her tightly and then kissed her passionately. "Very expert" she had said, smiling through the beautiful gleam of her stainless white teeth, opening wide those large brown eyes which, like some celestial apparitions, had bewitched me. Calf love. Should have died then and there. But she went on writing me very long letters, mostly about boring domestic squabbles with her younger sister. Always assuming the continuing blaze of my love's sunshine upon her body and soul, while it was actually setting behind some very insistently alien clouds. That had been some three years back. It was like the exhausted exhaust tail of a plane still dancing a weary old pattern which was now obsolete, anachronistic, fossilized. But Oxford and its iconic dreaming spires experienced a second-hand War. I had been interviewed for my scholarship by a kindly senior figure. "I see you are interested in economics" he said, holding up the exam paper. I shrank. I recognized Sir William Beveridge who had given his name to the famous investigation of what was called the "Welfare State" (a name Beveridge hated): the plan for cradle-to-grave health insurance, free college education, ample pensions, all that would be enacted into law after the War. But Beveridge also had the foresight and the energy, as early as 1933 when Hitler first came to power, to organize and raise the funding for the rescue of many distinguished Germans to come to Oxford. I loved to frequent the Oxford clubs and pubs, and I had often encountered heavily accented refugees. They brought with them that unmistakable whiff of warfare, that shifting glance over the shoulder that betrayed the experiences of night-time disappearances. I knew that the major stars of my own discipline, nuclear physics, had passed through Oxford: Einstein, Teller, many others who would be enticed to the USA and its Manhattan Project to build the first atom bomb, because they feared that England could not survive a German invasion. They were probably right, back then in the days Winston Churchill described as "their finest hour", meaning the fight for air supremacy during the terrible Blitz on England's main cities and ports, as well as on its Atlantic supply lines. England was spared because Hitler switch his ambitions to the Soviet Union, and dreamed of a pact whereby we would keep our empire while Germany ruled the whole of Europe. We believed that Rudolph Hess, Hitler's emissary, had flown over to England in rider to seal that pact. Of course he met only stony ears. Brasenose Lane led from Turl Street, commonly called just The Turl. There had indeed been a twirling gate entrance through the city walls at the north end of that street. Centuries back. But the name stuck. Number Twelve was my destination night after night. It was a human rabbit-warren of rooms: bedsitters and make-do kitchenettes, all of them pervaded, even haunted, by the odor of Indian cooking spices. For Number Twelve was the property of Mr. Singh, who also presided over Oxford's most popular Indian restaurant, situated on the ground floor of that building, strategically placed both for customers from the street, but also for sending its exotically enticing smells up to the rooms above as if some kind of scented advertisement. Number Twelve had twelve rooms with twelve kitchenettes but only seven toilets. This was a mysterious lack which, needless to say, often preoccupied the minds of its occupants waiting in line to use them. Mr. Singh had bought the house two years ago from a certain Major Neames with an impeccable upper-class English accent, but who was revealed to be a German named Neumann educated in Harrow. He was also convicted of spying for Germany, and was subsequently executed under wartime emergency regulations. Why he had needed so many rooms was never understood, but there were theories about 'safe houses' for other suspected spies. This is not a spy story, and so when I mention that there was a German couple still living on the third floor, you must not assume that it is. Actually, the Reinharts were an elderly Jewish couple rather out of place in that fascinating mixture of young people living there when I was so frequent a visitor each night. Another refugee lived alone in one of the two highest attic room, hers overlooking the Turl and with a spectacular view to the cupola of the Camera. Not quite alone, however. James was her proud, stiff-necked Staffordshire bull-terrier, an independent black-and-white tyrant who fed himself daily, in those days of rationing, by stealing huge joints in the Oxford market. Husky voiced, very dark in hair and eyes and even in personality, Vera had been on the children's rescue train out of Prague at the eleventh hour of 1939. Her mother had held back her tears at the station, her father was being unnaturally stern to control his own leaking desperation. She would never see her parents again. They died in Terezin, along with her uncles and aunts. The train journey took her into a strange language with strange people and strange foods. Gifted in drawing and painting, she was accepted at the Slade School, which was evacuated from London to Oxford to escape the Blitz. Vera was the reason for my nightly absence from my college. The Slade School was a repository of female youth, energy, and beauty, and it spilled its human treasures liberally into Oxford parties, discos and artistic enterprises like the Theatre Club which staged regular offerings of O'Neill, Shaw, Genet, Beckett. Several of these beauties lived in Number Twelve, for the most part as consorts. Prolonged affairs, the carousels of trial and error attractions and bindings. Some would last into the afterlife, I mean life after Oxford. Judy would bear Bob five children in their Chelsea home before he died aged forty, the most distinguished art historian of his time. Most would peter out like a damp squib in the rain. There were others who made a brilliantly explosive parting, like a rocket showering many flashing necklaces of gold, or bursting into streams of precious jewelry, before itself expiring. So Jane and Eric, painters both, held a dazzling joint exhibition of their life-work at the Ashmolean itself in Beaumont Street, with gourmet delicacies and even some hot celebrities waiting opposite in the Randolph Hotel. They said goodbye. They remained friends. Life has many phases. Denis staged his farewell in Wellington Square, beneath the balcony of Helen his love. Italian opera style. The merest chamber group, strolling serenaders, and a tenor from the Music Faculty. She appeared in her flowery nightgown holding flowers and, true to her role, threw them down in a sunshine yellow shower of daffodils, right onto his waves of black hair. Aimed correctly. Funny but serious. No laughter. Tears maybe. Life has its phases. So it was with Vera in those overstuffed years at Oxford. The whole world was engaged in tearing itself into shreds of blood and bone. There was a universe out there intent on razing magnificent cities to rubble as it deliberately hastening the Final Apocalyptic Catastrophe of all mankind. The end of our species. But we were building our city. Our world was a newborn baby, we fed it with our love, we nurtured its growth, we taught it a new language which was ours and ours alone. And it radiated with love, it gave off particles of fire and desire, it formed and reformed miniature stars in skies of our own designing. Love bestowed its eternity upon us, so that filled with its power we became master and mistress of the cosmos and all its mysteries of genesis and regeneration, whether of nascent nano-particles or of the most giant of galaxies. Until it died. Terezin was liberated by the Russian advance of 1945. In an Oxford cinema, together Vera and I held hands as we watched the first newsreels of Belsen, stumbled upon by a British advance patrol. Striped skeletons with huge vacant eyes staring at us, yes at Vera and myself, eyes saying, you knew, didn't you, why didn't you do something about it? How could you go about your fine Oxford lives, knowing this horror? Vera received a letter from the Kosice Government informing her that her parents had died in Terezin. She was the heiress to a house in Prague's Wenceslas Square. There was to be a memorial service at the Terezin concentration camp itself. Could she come over? Transport could be provided. I did not go with her. She did not come back. The Kosice Government was disbanded, in fact several of its members were condemned by the Communist Courts as traitors to the new regime. We spoke now of an iron curtain cutting through the heart of Europe. It was no longer possible to leave the Soviet bloc. There were invisible walls as well as the famous construction which divided Berlin. I wrote care of the British Consul. A letter came back many months later , heavily censored. Hardly her voice any longer. She loved her motherland, was glad to see it again. The new regime had much to recommend it, new housing for the poor, national health insurance ... She was teaching in a high school. She was going to Moscow with a party of her students to a great Reception. She did not write again. The history books will tell you the story better than I can. The eyeball to eyeball confrontation of the two Superpowers, the chessboard of a new world now crisscrossed by a million flights and a million internet connections. Globalization they called it. What I can tell you is simple and brief. That I married a fellow graduate, that I became a civil servant in what became the Commonwealth Office, that we lived a good life in an England that had come to terms with losing its empire but still had a moral standing in a new world that was tipping the East-West scales. I watched the Dubcek fiasco and the Soviet tanks in the Na Prikova of Prague. Sometimes I thought of Vera, but then ... I had three children now, and life has its phases, has it not? Until the Berlin Wall came down, and Prague had its own velvet Revolution. At my own request, I was transferred temporarily to a post in the British Embassy in Prague. The house in Wenceslas Square had been demolished to make room for a new workers' apartment tower. In 1995 a three-day Memorial was initiated in the Terezin camp as a commemoration of the Camp's liberation fifty years earlier. I decided to attend. I could go in my capacity as a UK representative. But of course other motives were lurking and surfacing. In the courtyard of the fortress town of Terezin a large dais or platform was set up in front of a wall, still pock-marked with bullet holes, where prisoners had been executed. The whole yard was surrounded with cells where prisoners had been confined, often tortured to death. We sat on rows of chairs. Choir and orchestra were squeezed onto the dais, and we listened to Mozart's last and fatal Requiem, there in that fitting place of death. She was sitting two rows in front of me. I recognized her when she stood up to look for someone else. Grey now, not black. Wrinkles enclosed her eyes with a tangle of etchings. She saw me. She recognized me. The Requiem began. She sat down again. We did not embrace, we did not kiss. We just looked at each other silently. What words could have been suitable? Some evasive conversation dictated by a social masking? Some doomed attempt to pick up threads broken off a lifetime before? Apologies? Explanations? They were not appropriate. As if we both had entered into an old silent movie, the hubbub of moving people around us faded into an eerie silence. Prisoners of time, we could not escape its iron bars which held us captive within our forty years of separate lives and different universes. Time tortures us by permitting our memories but refusing to set back the clocks of our living. We did not try to do that. She had her family as I did. I went to a College Gaudy reunion, and I walked over to Number Twelve. It still smelled of Indian spices. There were different faces coming and going, all of them young. New crops. I loved them. I walked over the Bridge of Sighs. The same musique concrete of creaks and squeaks and rasps. But now I imagined I heard the sighs of prisoners. Including my own.