For what crime did he have to atone? He didn't know. What did he have to conceal, to mask, to erase? What secret lay unconscious in him that, with the least modification in his life, would surface like a corpse — a corpse that a murderer had been tempted to drown in a lake. It was his special fate to play a bit part in a play he hadn't written, a play performed years before his birth, with its own actors and audience. And once the curtain was down, he had to remain on the stage with the others, like him, born after the performance, or during, or before, remembering the play they had seen or acted in, as torturer or as victim. Was he waiting for the curtain to go up again?