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Chapter 16

It was late afternoon. Separated from the others, Anna pushed her way through the excited throngs. Alone, like a lost screw of a broken machine, blown by a strong wind, she wandered about, blindly directing her footsteps toward the repose awaiting her on a rose-covered bed, toward the room where a breeze played with white window curtains, where a tree outside the sill extended its comforting arms, its promise of refuge from a chaotic world, her home.

Here, she threw herself on the bed without undressing. Her head was heavy and her heart empty. Her temples throbbed, in rhythm with the beat of the clock, tick-tock, tick-tock. Underneath her closed eyelids spinning points of flame whirled round and round. Her mind, possessed of a new lightness, seemed to be wheeling off into space, the chain of awareness thinning out until it snapped. On swift wings her imagination soared beyond the boundaries of the conscious, past the censorious inhibitions of logic, the whirling confusion of the present, to experience again an ancient longing... the little village in Poland where she was at peace with God and man and with the wonder of the tall hills and the green valleys. Her mind clung to her childhood memories as to a raft of salvation in the midst of a storm-lashed sea.

Benka, the cow, is pasturing in the valley, and she, Anna, is playing ball. The ball is soaring high in the air, and she