Intimacies

LONGLISTED FOR THE 2021 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD IN FICTION

ONE OF BARACK OBAMA’S FAVORITE 2021 READS

“One of the best novels I’ve read in 2021.” – Dwight Garner, The New York Times

A novel from the author of A Separation, an electrifying story about a woman caught between many truths.

An interpreter has come to The Hague to escape New York and work at the International Court. A woman of many languages and identities, she is looking for a place to finally call home.
 
She’s drawn into simmering personal dramas: her lover, Adriaan, is separated from his wife but still entangled in his marriage. Her friend Jana witnesses a seemingly random act of violence, a crime the interpreter becomes increasingly obsessed with as she befriends the victim’s sister. And she’s pulled into an explosive political controversy when she’s asked to interpret for a former president accused of war crimes.
 
A woman of quiet passion, she confronts power, love, and violence, both in her personal intimacies and in her work at the Court. She is soon pushed to the precipice, where betrayal and heartbreak threaten to overwhelm her, forcing her to decide what she wants from her life.Praise for Intimacies

“[C]ooly written and casts a spell… One of Kitamura’s gifts… is to inject every scene with a pinprick of dread…. One of the best novels I’ve read in 2021… A taut, moody novel that moves purposefully between worlds.” —Dwight Garner, New York Times

“[I]ntense, unsettling… Intimacies is very much a story that seems to be something familiar but soon morphs into something disorientingly strange…. [W]ith her Jamesian attention to the slightest movement of bodies and words, Kitamura keeps Intimacies rooted to the ordinary domestic experiences of her narrator, her petty jealousies, her passing suspicions. The effect is a kind of emotional intensity that’s gripping because it feels increasingly unsustainable. Who could endure that raw-nerve sensitivity to the power of language to love, to deceive, to promise, to kill? Kitamura pulls us through a rising panic of hyper-awareness until the story’s fever finally breaks with a note of hope and relief. But that can’t quell the novel’s reverberations, which expose something incomprehensible about the moral dimensions of modern life.” —Ron Charles, Washington Post

“Intimacies is both sleekly gorgeous — those sentences — and psychologically unnerving. She’s an absolutely brilliant writer.” —Julie Otsuka, New York Times Book Review

“A master of cool disquiet… Kitamura writes with forceful, direct prose that makes for a bracing read and leaves the reader mesmerized.” —Lauren Mechling, Vogue

“[A] thriller of a novel…. In exploring how one’s proximity to power and violence can hold endless repercussions, Kitamura interrogates how our intimacies can change the course of our lives.” —Time

“Kitamura’s prose elegantly breaks grammatical convention… this style mirrors the book’s concern with the bleeding lines between intimacies — especially between the sincere and the coercive — while Kitamura’s immense talent smooths the seams…. A novel like this one offers the reader much to work with, raising a chorus of harmonic questions rather than squealing a single answer. Contemporary American novels too often deliver pre-solved moral quandaries and obvious enemies in service to our cultural craving for ethical perfection — the correct word, the right behavior, the sole and righteous position on myriad complex issues. Kitamura works outside of this trendy literality by knowing, as the best writers do, that a story’s apparent subject does not determine its conceptual limits; plot summary would do this book no justice…. Kitamura’s work also contains a keen understanding of human behavior, one that reaches far beyond the pages of this brief and arresting book; she travels to places that ordinary writers cannot go.” —Catherine Lacey, The New York Times Book Review

“Calling all Rachel Cuskheads and W.G. Sebald stans! Kitamura is a novelist of enchanting imagination and minimalist prose style…. The novel’s plot twists are of the subtle, jaw-tightening variety rather than the dramatic, stomach-knotting sort, but it’s still fair to call it a ‘psychological thriller.’ Intimacies is for those who like their addictive novels to sneak up behind them rather than slap them in the face.” —Molly Young, Vulture

“[A] gorgeous, destabilizing meditation on the power differentials built into language and the gradual distortions of our emotional allegiances.” —Raven Leilani, Vulture

“An amazing book, beautiful and captivating’” —Elif Shafak
 
“In spare and elegant prose, Kitamura limns  her unnamed protagonist’s search for home and gifts us a powerful, beautiful book.” —Chika Unigwe

“I love how Katie Kitamura can channel a mind.” —Ruth Ozeki, Observer UK, Best Books of the Year)

 “With Intimacies, Kitamura gives the question of how to voice someone else’s suffering a political urgency of the highest order.” —Jennifer Wilson, The New Republic

“The way I tore through this book like it was a sexy beach read instead of a piercing meditation on the way language moderates our perception of violence! . . . About once every two pages, Kitamura writes a phrase that feels like a key turning inside your body. And if all of this doesn’t sound immobilize-you-on-your-couch-turning-pages-level good, just know that Barack Obama named it one of his favorite books of the year.” —Jenny Singer, Glamour

“Powerful, masterful…. One might call Kitamura one of the most talented thriller writers who doesn’t write thrillers, for her novels are tinged with menace and threat and dark alleys that seem primed for acts of violence. And yet, really, the artistry  . . . .  lies in the delicate ways in which characters continue on, persevere slightly better or slightly worse, and survive.” —Chris Bollen, Interview Magazine

“Just under 250 pages but packs a powerful punch. Beautifully written and mysterious.” —Real Simple

“[T]he book vibrates with tension. . . Kitamura’s prose is responsible for this effect — she writes like a concert violinist, with clarity and control and a sustained, uneasy high pitch.” —Steph Cha, Los Angeles Times

“Kitamura blends the personal and political in spare, elegant, inimitable prose. A standout novel, like nothing I’ve read before.” —Kathryn Ma, San Francisco Chronicle

“Katie Kitamura’s fourth novel spins a taut web of dread from the start. . . In cool, spare prose, Kitamura asks the book’s animating query: How should you go about your little life in a world where horrible things are happening?” —Stephanie Hayes, The Atlantic

“Fans of sparse millennial tales: Run, don’t walk.” —Entertainment Weekly

“In her unforgettable 2017 A Separation, Kitamura took her protagonist to the edge of an island in the Mediterranean; in her new and equally unforgettable novel, she places an interpreter in the middle of The Hague. This woman is also embroiled in many dramas, personal and professional, forcing her to choose a path and an identity.” —Bethanne Patrick, Washington Post

“Kitamura’s voice is chilly but also brave as she strikes a pose between mind and heart. Her searing new novel, Intimacies is, in key ways, a companion piece to A Separation, revisiting themes of duplicity and questionable morality; but it also delves into politics and sexual tension more explicitly, a tale that burns like dry ice . . . In crystalline prose, Kitamura probes the labyrinths of language and the riddles of our humanity . . . Intimacies is a judicious, cerebral novel, but Kitamura seasons it with dashes of glamor. There’s a hint of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Daisy and Tom Buchanan, “careless people [who] smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money.” . . . This slim, graceful novel punches above its weight as Kitamura explores tragedy on an epic scale, reckoning with the ways we deceive each other and ourselves.” —Hamilton Cain, Oprah Daily

“The author’s choice to leave her stories suspended in a gelatinous stew of human behavior is exactly what keeps her fiction so sticky; we can’t shake it off. Intimacies makes you wonder just how much is lost in the most basic translation — from one mind to another.” —Jessica Ferri, Los Angeles Times

“Intimacies feels like a thriller, though I suppose it really isn’t one; the author just has a remarkable way of bringing tension to every encounter in this brief, sly novel about language and identity . . . Kitamura plumbs different kinds of intimacy — physical, verbal, emotional — in prose that creates its own unique rhythms, as if it itself were translated: She strings sentences together with commas, making rivers of words, and eschews quotation marks so that statements blur into reflections. This results in a book that feels almost painfully intimate; it’s as if we’ve slipped inside the head of this quiet woman, navigating an unwelcoming city, feeling its chill, trying to find home.” —Moira Macdonald, Seattle Times

“[F]ascinating and mysterious.” —NPR

“Katie Kitamura dazzles us again with Intimacies. Her style is so perfectly suited to my taste that everything she writes impresses. Her ability to impart vivacious detail with sparse and direct prose is a testament to her talent, and the moments that she is able to create between characters and places are memorable and beautiful. This book has stuck with me for months now, and I think of it often in the small moments of intimacy I find in my life.” —Buzzfeed

“A strange and mesmerizing tale about language, understanding, and the role of strangers in our most intimate moments.” —Bookriot

“[Intimacies asks questions] with both a subtlety and an urgency that makes Kitamura’s voice so distinct within contemporary fiction. I read most of Intimacies in the early hours of the morning, when the shapes and outline of your own home can feel, temporarily, like they belong to someone else. In those hours, the novel’s voice was the one I knew best, and I would forget myself and my family sleeping nearby and become lost in the novel’s suspense, and its beauty.” —Ashley Nelson Levy, BOMB

“[A] novel that carries enormous moral weight, attending to themes of alienation, violence, and love, with every page written in the most taut, gripping prose. It will haunt your dreams long after you’ve turned down the last page.” —Tahmima Anam, E! Online

“Spare, exacting prose . . . with powerful questions about morality, responsibility, and how we tell stories.” – Shondaland

“There’s a restrained intensity to Katie Kitamura’s prose, one that made her last novel, the superb divorce-meets-mystery drama A Separation, feel like you were reading it in the eye of a tornado, the tight, muted sentences suggesting an overwhelming tempest just beyond them. It’s that willingness to keep readers at an intriguing distance before revealing the messy emotions driving it all that should serve her well in the new book, Intimacies, about a woman trying to escape her past.” —A.V. Club

“Though it has all the ingredients for a story of global intrigue…what Katie Kitamura’s new novel, Intimacies, really does is offer intrigue of a more, well, intimate sort. This is the kind of book that quickens the pulse not because of logic-defying plot twists, but rather because of how surgically precise it is in revealing how our emotional realities take on epic dimensions in our own minds, and often threaten our stability in the precise ways that things of global import rarely do….psychologically disconcerting — like all the very best thrillers.” —Refinery29

“Intimacies is a haunting, precise, and morally astute novel that reads like a psychological thriller. It expertly and concisely delves into the paradoxes of language—how language can obscure our own complicity, and how language can enable us to escape our own delusions. Katie Kitamura is a wonder; her work is striking, stylish, and fully realized.” —Dana Spiotta, author of Innocents and Others and Eat the Document

“Gripping and elegant. No one’s work simmers with emotional complexity like Katie Kitamura’s.” —Mira Jacob, author of Good Talk

“A novel about the ruthlessness of power, the check of virtue, and the purportedly neutral bureaucracy meant to mediate between them. Katie Kitamura is among the most brilliant and profound writers at work today; she reminds me how high the moral stakes of fiction can be.” —Garth Greenwell, author of Cleanness and What Belongs to You

“Katie Kitamura writes about being an outsider like no other author. Quiet moments are charged with tension and power. In short, the book is remarkable – beautifully written and intelligent.” —Avni Doshi, author of Burnt Sugar

“Intimacies is a perfect novel—taut and seductive. Kitamura has made the existential thriller all her own, and she effortlessly negotiates the personal and the geopolitical with a complex moral nuance. Simply stunning.” —Brandon Taylor, author of Real Life and Filthy Animals

“Saturated with enigmatic longing, Intimacies peels back the layers of sympathy, antipathy, and morality that both connect and divide us from others, unearthing something precious beneath. Katie Kitamura is a revelatory interpreter of the human heart, in all its brilliance and obscurity.” —Alexandra Kleeman, author of You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine

“Katie Kitamura’s voice — spare, electric, evocative — could take me anywhere. Especially into this landscape of global wanderers, uprooted women, fragmented souls. Intimacies is a singular pleasure — a dangerous, seductive, dagger of a novel.” —Danzy Senna, author of Caucasia and New People

“Katie Kitamura’s beautifully wrought novel is tense and suspenseful, a mystery about human choices. From its protagonist’s work as an interpreter at the Hague, from crimes against humanity, to friendship and a love affair, the interpreter can’t escape questions of judgment and justice. She balances tenuously on an ethical scale, while interpretation itself is brilliantly employed as the faulty method that subsumes all communication. Like a work by Graham Greene, INTIMACIES kept me in its tight grip.” —Lynne Tillman, author of Men and Apparitions

“Like her protagonist, Kitamura… is a master of precisely evocative language. In her work and in her isolation, the interpreter recognizes how familiarity can obscure intimacy, while its lack can yet lead to discomfiting proximity. The novel takes places so deeply within her that it’s truly personlike, at once forthright and mysterious, a piercing and propulsive meditation on closeness of many sorts.” —Booklist (STARRED review)

“A watchful, reticent woman sees peril and tries not to vanish… It’s a delight to accompany the narrator’s astute observational intelligence through these pages… She hears and doesn’t hear the words amid her focus, just as she sees and doesn’t completely register events in her everyday life…This is the crux of Kitamura’s preoccupation. She threads it brilliantly through the intimacies her character is trying to navigate: with new colleagues, women friends, and her beau, who goes away; with the work and with the nature of The Hague itself…The novel packs a controlled but considerable wallop, all the more pleasurable for its nuance. This psychological tone poem is a barbed and splendid meditation on peril.” —Kirkus (STARRED review)

Praise for A Separation

“Kitamura is a writer with a visionary, visual imagination… In A Separation, [she] has made consciousness her territory. The book is all mind, and an observant, taut, astringent mind it is.” —The New Yorker

“A slow burn of a novel that gathers its great force and intensity through careful observation and a refusal to accept old, shopworn narratives of love and loss.” —Jenny Offill, author of Dept. of Speculation and Weather

“The burnt landscape, the disappearance of a man, the brilliantly cold, precise, and yet threatening, churning tone of the narrator—make A Separation an absolutely mesmerizing work of art.” —Rachel Kushner, author of The Flamethrowers

“Fascinating, artful and atmospheric.” —Paula McLain, Parade magazine

“Unsettling… Kitamura traces the narrator’s thoughts in sentences striking for their control and lucidity, their calm surface belied by the instability lurking beneath… The more the narrator tells us, the less we trust her. And the less we trust her, the more this hypnotic novel compels us to confront the limits of what we, too, can know.” —O, the Oprah Magazine

“A novel so seamless, that follows its path with such consequence, that even minor deviations seem loaded with meaning. Wonderful.” —Karl Ove Knausgaard, author of My Struggle

“Accomplished… a coolly unsettling work.” —New York Times Book Review

“Kitamura’s prose gallops, combining Elena Ferrante-style intricacies with the tensions of a top-notch whodunit.” —Elle

“Kitamura weaves a novel of quiet power, mostly due to a narrative voice that is so subtly commanding—so effortlessly self-aware and perceptive, teeming with dry yet empathetic humor—that it’s a challenge not to follow her journey in a single sitting.” —Harper’s Bazaar

“Katie Kitamura breathes new life into the theme of marital breakdown.” —The New RepublicKatie Kitamura‘s most recent novel, A Separation, was a finalist for the Premio Gregor von Rezzori and a New York Times Notable Book. It was named a best book of the year by over a dozen publications and translated into sixteen languages, and is being adapted for film. Her two previous novels, Gone to the Forest and The Longshot, were both finalists for the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award. A recipient of fellowships from the Lannan Foundation and Santa Maddalena Foundation, Katie has written for publications including The New York Times, The Guardian, Granta, BOMB Magazine, Triple Canopy, and Frieze. She teaches in the creative writing program at New York University.

1.

It is never easy to move to a new country, but in truth I was happy to be away from New York. That city had become disorienting to me, after my father’s death and my mother’s sudden retreat to Singapore. For the first time, I understood how much my parents had anchored me to this place none of us were from. It was my father’s long illness that had kept me there, and with its unhappy resolution I was suddenly free to go. I applied for the position of staff interpreter at the Court on impulse, but once I had accepted the job and moved to The Hague, I realized that I had no intention of returning to New York, I no longer knew how to be at home there.

I arrived in The Hague with a one-year contract at the Court and very little else. In those early days when the city was a stranger to me, I rode the tram without purpose and walked for hours at a time, so that I would sometimes become lost and need to consult the map on my phone. The Hague bore a family resemblance to the European cities in which I had spent long stretches of my life, and perhaps for this reason I was surprised by how easily and frequently I lost my bearings. In those moments, when the familiarity of the streets gave way to confusion, I would wonder if I could be more than a visitor here.

Still, as I traversed the roads and neighborhoods, I had a renewed sense of possibility. I had lived with my slow-moving grief for so long that I had ceased to notice it, or recognize how it blunted my feeling. But now it began to lift. A space opened up. As the days passed I felt that I had been right to leave New York, although I didn’t know if I’d been right to come to The Hague. I saw the details of the landscape in high and sometimes startling relief-because the place was not yet worn down by acquaintance or distorted by memory, and because I had begun looking for something, although I didn’t know exactly what.

It was around then that I met Jana, through a mutual acquaintance in London. Jana had moved to the Netherlands two years earlier than me, for her job as a curator at the Mauritshuis-the housekeeper of a national gallery, she called the position with a wry shrug. Her character was the opposite of mine, she was almost compulsively open whereas I had grown guarded in recent years-my father’s illness had served as a quiet warning against too much hope. She entered my life at a moment when I was more than usually susceptible to the promise of intimacy. I felt a cool relief in her garrulous company, and I thought in our differences we achieved a kind of equilibrium.

Jana and I frequently had dinner together, and that night she had offered to cook, she said she was too tired to eat in a restaurant and it would save us both money, there was the matter of her new and not inconsiderable mortgage. Jana had recently purchased an apartment close to the old train station, and had been urging me to move to the area when the lease on my short-term rental ran out. She had taken to sending me listings, assuring me the neighborhood had much to offer, among other things it was well served for transport, in fact her commute was now easier, a direct tram ride rather than a transfer.

As I walked from the tram stop to her apartment, broken glass crunched underfoot. Jana’s building, a modest structure lined with balconies, was wedged between a public housing block and a new condominium of steel and glass, two aspects of a rapidly changing neighborhood. I rang the intercom and she buzzed me in without a word. She opened her door before I was able to knock, things at work were a nightmare, she announced without preamble, she hadn’t moved from London to The Hague in order to spend her days poring over Excel spreadsheets. And yet that was exactly how each day passed, she worried over budgets and press releases and as for the art itself, she barely saw any at all, somehow that had become somebody else’s responsibility. She waved me in and took the bottle of wine I handed her. Come sit with me while I cook, she called over her shoulder as she disappeared into the kitchen.

I hung up my coat. She handed me a glass of wine as I entered the kitchen and turned back to the stove. The food will be ready in a minute, she said. How was work? Have they said anything about your contract? I shook my head. I didn’t know yet whether or not my contract at the Court would be extended. It was something I thought about with increasing frequency, I had begun to think that I would like to stay in The Hague. I found myself scrutinizing the assignments I received, the manner of my supervisor, seeking an augury of some kind. Jana nodded sympathetically and then asked if I had looked at the listings she had sent, there was an apartment available in the condominium opposite.

I told her I had, then took a sip from the glass of wine. Although she had only recently moved, Jana already appeared at home, she had taken possession of the space with characteristic gusto. I knew that the purchase of the apartment represented a kind of security she had hitherto lacked: she had married and divorced while still in her twenties, and had spent the past decade working her way up to her current position at the Mauritshuis. I watched as she opened the cabinet and took out a bottle of olive oil, a pepper grinder, I noticed that everything already had its place. I felt a throb-not of envy, perhaps of admiration, although the two are not unrelated.

Shall we eat at the counter? Jana asked. I nodded and sat down. She set a bowl of pasta before me and then said, I always wanted a kitchen with an eating counter. It must have been something I saw as a child. She sat down on the stool beside me. Jana had grown up in Belgrade with a Serbian mother and Ethiopian father, before being sent to a boarding school in France during the war. She never returned to Yugoslavia, or what was now called former Yugoslavia. I wondered where she had seen her first eating counter, the one that she had at last succeeded in replicating in some form, here in this kitchen.

I congratulated her on the aspiration fulfilled and she smiled. It does feel good, she said. It wasn’t easy, the process of finding the apartment, and then getting the financing-she shook her head and gave me a droll look. It turns out it’s not easy getting a mortgage as a single Black woman in your forties. She reached for her glass of wine. Of course, I am a gentrifier here. But I have to live somewhere-

At that moment the sound of a siren erupted in the street. I looked up, startled. The sound grew louder and then ballooned inside the apartment as the vehicle approached. Red and orange light spiraled through the kitchen. Jana frowned. Outside, the sound of doors slamming and the low rumble of an engine. There are police here all the time, she said as she reached for her glass of wine. There have been a couple muggings, there was a shooting last year. I don’t feel unsafe, she added quickly. Even as she spoke, another pair of sirens drew near. Jana picked up her fork and continued eating. I watched as she chewed slowly, the choral sound outside growing louder. It’s no different to the London neighborhoods I used to live in, Jana said. She raised her voice in order to be heard over the noise. It’s just that living in The Hague inures you. It can be easy to forget what being in a real city is like.

The sirens cut out and we sat in the sudden silence. A siren can mean anything, I said at last. A slip in the bath, a heart attack in the kitchen. She nodded and I realized her apprehension was not caused by the threat of danger or violence, or not that alone-it was that her sense of the apartment had mutated. In that moment, it was no longer a source of the security she had long sought but something else altogether, something more changeable, and uncertain.

The remainder of the evening passed under a cloud of preoccupation, and before too long I said that I would be going. I went into the living room to collect my things, as I pulled on my coat I peered through the curtains at the street below, now dimly lit by streetlamps. The road was still, apart from the glow of a cigarette-a man walking his dog. As I watched, he threw the cigarette to the ground and tugged on the dog’s leash before disappearing around the corner.

Jana leaned against the wall, she had a cup of tea in one hand and she looked more than usually tired. I smiled at her. Get some rest, I said, and she nodded. She opened the front door and as I moved past she suddenly caught me by the arm. Be careful on your way to the tram, will you? I was surprised by the urgency in her voice, the grip of her fingers on my arm. She let go and took a step back. It’s just you can’t be too cautious, she said. I nodded and turned to go, she had already closed the door behind me. I heard the click of one lock turning, and then another, and then silence.

2.

I lived in the city center, in a very different neighborhood to Jana’s. Prior to my arrival, I had found my furnished apartment by way of online listings. The Hague was not a cheap city to live in, but it was cheaper than New York. As a result, I lived in an apartment that was too big for one person, with two bedrooms and separate dining and living rooms.

It took me some time to grow accustomed to the size of the apartment, an effect exacerbated by the furnishings, which were somehow too perfunctory for its proportions. A foldout futon in the living room, a compact dinette in the dining room, the space was designed to be both temporary and impersonal. When I signed the lease I had considered that vacancy a luxury, I remember walking through the apartment, my footsteps hollow, marking one room the bedroom, another a possible study. In time that feeling faded, and the dimensions of the apartment no longer seemed remarkable. Nor did the interim nature of the accommodation, although when I returned that evening from Jana’s, I recalled the ease with which she’d seemed to inhabit her apartment, and felt a ripple of vague longing.

When I woke the next morning it was still dark outside. I made a coffee and pulled on a coat and went out onto the balcony-another feature of the apartment, one that I used even during these frigid winter months. I had wedged a small table and a single folding chair against the wall, along with a few potted plants, now withered. I sat down. It was early enough that the streets below were empty. The Hague was a quiet city, and almost strenuously civilized. But the more time I spent there, the more its air of courtesy, the preserved buildings and manicured parks, imparted a sense of unease. I recalled what Jana had said about living in The Hague, how it inured you to what a real city was like. This was possibly true, increasingly I’d begun to think the docile surface of the city concealed a more complex and contradictory nature.

Only last week, I had been shopping in the Old Town when I saw three uniformed men moving down the busy pedestrian street alongside a large machine. Two of the men held slender picks while the third held a large nozzle that protruded from the machine, the effect was rather as if he were leading an elephant by the trunk. I had paused to observe them without really knowing why, perhaps only because I wondered what manner of slow-moving work they were doing.

They eventually approached and I could see exactly the task they were performing, the two men with the picks were carefully extracting cigarette butts from between the cracks of the cobbled road, one by one by one, painstaking labor that explained their sluggish pace of progress. I looked down and realized that the road was strewn with cigarette butts, this despite the fact that there were several well-placed public ashtrays on that stretch of street alone. The two men continued to flip the cigarette butts out of the cracks while the third man followed with his elephantine vacuum, dutifully sucking up the debris with the machine, the drum of which presumably held many thousands or even hundreds of thousands of cigarette butts, each of which had been disappeared from the street by the work of these men.

The three men were almost certainly immigrants, possibly Turkish and Surinamese. Meanwhile, their labor was necessitated by the heritage aesthetic of the city, not to mention the carelessness of a wealthy population that dropped its cigarette butts onto the pavement without a thought, when the designated receptacle was only a few feet away, I now saw that there were dozens of cigarette butts on the ground directly below the ashtrays. It was only an anecdote. But it was one example of how the city’s veneer of civility was constantly giving way, in places it was barely there at all.

Around me the light was beginning to come up, color blotting the horizon. I went inside and dressed for work. I left the apartment not long after, I was now running late. I hurried to the nearby tram stop. Jana called me while I was waiting, she was still at home and I could hear her moving through the apartment, collecting her keys and gathering her books and papers. She asked if I had made it home safely and I assured her that the journey had passed without incident. There was a pause, I heard the slam of a door, she was on her way out of her building and into the street. She sounded distracted, almost as if she could not remember why she had called, then she reminded me that I was bringing Adriaan to her house for dinner on Saturday, and asked if there was anything in particular he did or did not eat.

US