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By Root 803 0

resolute about what we intended to do. He asked was I committed to the ceremony and I told him I was. But then I admitted, truthfully, that the sacrifice itself was a part of the ritual I dreaded. It isn’t easy for any of us, he said, and his voice was a soft croon now, an intimate contrast to the elemental noise outside. He spoke about the random tragedies of fate. Take this year alone, he said. Seven hundred dead in the earthquake in Yugoslavia in February. The earth shivers and lives are randomly ended. In March, he reminded me, 1,000 people a week were dying in London at the height of the most recent influenza epidemic. Their deaths were arbitrary, unremarkable.

But not unmourned, I remarked.

And his eyes glinted with the challenge in the gloom of the cabin.

Thousands dead in the Great Mississippi Flood in the spring, he said. A quarter of a million killed by the earthquake in Quinghai Province in China. And so the litany went softly on, as Fischer crooned about human death and its meaninglessness and inevitability, until I was almost convinced. Is there much point, he pondered, in a life of want and rickets, eked out in poverty in a teeming slum, under soot-defeated skies? It would be a life inevitably prey to polio and tuberculosis, endured in the grim anonymity of shared hardship, its passing years made indistinguishable by their endless and relentless toil. And so he painted a picture of stinking privies and constant damp and squalor, the lives lived in the somnolent tenements and terraces of English cities, under the shadow of chimney stacks; the sad, incurious lives lived for the sake of existence alone, without change or improvement or hope. That was a life not worth valuing, he said. There was nothing in it to cherish, or warm to. It was a life, if you thought about it with detachment and objectivity, barely worth having at all.

And I nodded, knowing that his talk had left me no more comfortable at heart about the realities of the sacrifice. Knowing also, though, that I had been right in the hotel to think of his powers as sometimes hypnotic.

We docked at a quiet spot to the west of Compton Bay where Fischer’s man met us and carried what light luggage we had brought to Fischer’s car, a large Mercedes-Benz. Even on the short walk from the jetty to the car, the air felt somehow different, a different pressure and texture on the skin, fresher, the distinct and singular way it does on a small island. Blindfolded, I knew I would still have sensed the change. The squall had settled now into persistent rain driven from the east, out of a lowering sky. The interior of the car was warm and roomy, its upholstery rich with the smell of oiled leather and waxed teak after the brief misery of the boat. And Fischer’s man provided rugs and hot coffee from a brace of vacuum flasks. He was deferential in his manner, but possessed the dormant power of a Carpentier, a Dempsey even, in his neck and shoulders. Looking at him, I doubted driving was the most important talent he possessed. He spoke English only with a heavy accent. He pulled on driving gauntlets and switched on the electric headlamps as soon as he started up the motor. The Mercedes was equipped with a powerful magneto. Twin beams carved a bright yellow path through the wet and the gloom. Dennis offered cigarettes, and I took one and he lit it for me. Fischer’s man put the great car into gear and we roared forward. I was on my way to the Fischer House. I smoked and sipped coffee, hot and bitter, watching the sodden green fields of the island undulate to either side through rain-bleared glass, knowing now that there was to be no going back.

My thoughts during the drive were of what Klaus Fischer did and didn’t know. He made a pass at me on the boat. It was subtle enough, the lightest touch with his fingers on my thigh, and could have been taken as no more than a clumsy attempt to comfort me as the boat rolled and shuddered through the angry sea. It was an easy gesture to ignore without giving the offence of outright rejection. But it was a pass. And I don’t believe