Anna was still away. The last time I had seen her, in mid–March, it was very windy, with intermittent chilly showers that tore at the trees and shrubbery in the front garden of the church as I walked in through the gate. And then she appeared from around the corner of the church, hurrying, shouting to me: “I have to rush or I'll be late for the lesson!” And then, after the wind's caesura, a sudden thrust of silvery rainy air pushed her black robe back against her body and held it tight. All her contours became sharply delineated: the breasts, the hips, the thighs; I fancied I could even make out her sharp nipples. I stopped in my tracks.

She must have noticed what was happening and intercepted my long look at her below the neckline. She blushed instantly and heavily. “Well, I'd better go in,” she said, turning her back on me and approaching the entrance. Just then, as luck would have it, another blast of wind pressed against her shoulders and back, so that her buttocks clearly showed. They seemed perfectly rounded. Throughout the lesson she was strangely quiet, hardly speaking, and I thought best not to bother her. Every now and then she'd look up at me and then again lower her eyes. In the usual boisterousness of the lesson (“They call our own dear Lord ‘Jeesis’ instead of His real name ‘Eessuhs’? Blasphemers! Shame on them!”) nobody paid her any attention.

I dreamt of her, once in an embarrassingly obvious erotic way and a few times in a beautifully veiled manner. Having read Sigmund Freud's Interpretation of Dreams —not in the faculty library reading room where one required a special pass to be able to ask for half–forbidden books but an old 1920s edition, in a soft cover and dog–eared—I could understand both the perennial sexual symbols and the fluid reality–fed images of those dreams.

I am in the wood at night; the stars are huge, circular and convex, and the nearest tree's black bark reflects their blue light. The tree sways, and I realize it is praying; then its bark slips off and the black leaves of its whole attire blow away.