Veronika decided she would have to go to bed, but Eduard was still standing by the piano.

“I’m tired, Eduard. I need to sleep.” She would have liked to continue playing for him, dredging up from her anesthetized memory all the sonatas, requiems, and adagios she used to know, because he knew how to admire without appearing to demand anything of her. But her body could take no more.

He was so good-looking. If only he would take one step outside his world and see her as a woman, then her last nights on this earth might be the most beautiful of her entire life: Eduard was the only one capable of understanding that Veronika was an artist. Through the pure emotion of a sonata or a minuet she had forged a bond with this man such as she had never known with anyone else.

Eduard was the ideal man, sensitive, educated; a man who had destroyed an indifferent world in order to recreate it again in his head, this time with new colours, new characters, new stories. And this new world included a woman, a piano and a moon that was continuing to grow.

“I could fall in love right now and give everything I have to you,” she said, knowing that he couldn’t understand her. “All you ask from me is a little music, but I am much more than I ever thought I was, and I would like to share other things with you that I have only just begun to understand.”

Eduard smiled. Had he understood? Veronika felt afraid—all the manuals of good behavior say that you should never speak of love so directly, and never to a man you barely know. But she decided to continue, because she had nothing to lose.

“You’re the only man on the face of the earth with whom I could fall in love, Eduard, for the simple reason that, when I die, you will not miss me. I don’t know what schizophrenics feel, but I’m sure they never miss anyone.

“Perhaps, to begin with, you’ll miss the fact that there’s no more night music, but the moon will still rise, there’ll be someone willing to play sonatas for you, especially in a hospital, where each and every one of us is a ‘lunatic.’”

She didn’t quite know what the relationship was between lunatics and the moon, but it must be a strong one, if they used a word like that to describe the insane.

“And I won’t miss you either, Eduard, because I will be dead, far from here. And since I’m not afraid of losing you, I don’t care what you think or don’t think about me. Tonight I played for you like a woman in love. It was wonderful. It was the best moment of my entire life.”

She looked at Mari outside in the garden. She remembered her words. And again she looked at the man standing in front of her.

Veronika took off her sweater and moved closer to Eduard. If she was going to do something, let it be now. Mari would put up with the cold out there for a long time, and only then would she come back in.

He stepped back. The question in his eyes was this: When was she going to play the piano again? When would she play a new piece of music to fill his soul with the same color, pain, suffering, and joy of those insane composers who had leapt the generations with their work?

The woman outside told me to masturbate and to find out how far I can go. Can I really go farther than I’ve ever been before?

She took his hand and tried to pull him toward the sofa, but Eduard politely declined. He preferred to remain standing where he was, beside the piano, waiting patiently for her to play again.

Veronika was disconcerted at first and then realized that she had nothing to lose. She was dead; what was the point of continuing to feed the fears or preconceptions that had always limited her life? She took off her blouse, her trousers, her bra, her panties, and stood before him naked.

Eduard laughed. She didn’t know why, she merely noted that he had laughed. Delicately she took his hand and placed it on her genitals; his hand remained there, immobile. Veronika gave up the idea and removed his hand.

Something was exciting her far more than any physical contact with this man: the fact that she could do whatever she wanted, that there were no limits. Apart from the woman outside, who might come back in at any moment, nobody else would be awake.

Her blood began to race, and the cold—which she had felt when she took off her clothes—was fading. Veronika and Eduard were both standing up, face to face, she naked, he fully clothed. Veronika slid her own hand down to her genitals and started to masturbate; she had done it before, either alone or with certain partners, but never in a situation like this, where the man showed no apparent interest in what was happening.

And this was exciting, very exciting. Standing up, legs apart, Veronika was touching her genitals, her breasts, her hair, surrendering herself as she had never done before, not because she wanted to see Eduard leave his distant world, but because this was something she had never experienced before.

She started talking, saying unthinkable things, things that her parents, her friends, her ancestors would have considered absolute filth. Her first orgasm came, and she bit her lips so as not to cry out with pleasure.

Eduard was looking at her. There was a different light in his eyes, as if he understood, even if it was only the energy, heat, sweat, and smell that her body gave off Veronika was still not satisfied. She knelt down and started masturbating again.

She wanted to die of orgasmic pleasure, thinking about and realizing everything that had always been forbidden to her: she begged him to touch her, to force her, to use her in any way he wanted. She wished Zedka were there too, because a woman knows how to touch another woman’s body better than any man, because she already knows all its secrets.

On her knees before Eduard, who remained standing, she felt possessed, touched, and she used coarse words to describe what she wanted him to do to her. Another orgasm came, stronger than ever, as if everything around her were about to explode. She remembered the heart attack she had had that morning, but what did that matter, she would die in one great explosion of pleasure. She was tempted to touch Eduard— he was there before her—but she did not want to risk spoiling the moment. She was going far, very far, just as Mari had said.

She imagined herself both queen and slave, dominatrix and victim. In her imagination she was making love with men of all skin colors— white, black, yellow—with homosexuals and beggars. She was anyone’s, and anyone could do anything to her. She had one, two, three orgasms, one after another. She imagined everything she had never imagined before, and she gave herself to all that was most base and most pure. At last, unable to contain herself any longer, she cried out with pleasure, with the pain of all those orgasms, all those men and women who had entered and left her body through the doors of her mind.

She lay down on the ground and stayed there, drenched in sweat, her soul full of peace. She had concealed her hidden desires even from herself, unable to say why, but she needed no answer. It was enough that she had done what she had done. She had surrendered herself.

Gradually the universe returned to its proper place and Veronika stood up. Eduard had not moved in all that time, but there seemed to be something different about him: There was a tenderness in his eyes, a very human tenderness.