You had sworn you would not go, yet there you were at the long table nearest the door, in your good brown suit that smelled of the wardrobe like a testimony to a life of small ceremonies, and the rain was combing itself through the iron roof of the church hall while the gramophone turned out a waltz older than everyone in the room, and the women of the Velesgrad Benevolent Society moved up and down the trestle tables with tureens of soup and plates of boiled beef, and the old men sang about the sheep meadows of a country none of them would ever see again, and you, Elias Voss, sat with your left hand deep in your pocket, your thumb travelling the oval of the locket in the same circuit it had travelled a thousand thousand times since the autumn the war took everything you had been shaped to keep.

You ate little, because you never ate at these gatherings; you drank the thin beer because it was expected, and you answered the questions of the women with the politeness of a man who has learned that politeness is the only door left open to him, and then Professor Hearn lowered himself into the chair across from you, and the old man's white hair stood up from his head as if it had been startled, and his black overcoat was damp at the shoulders, and he looked at you for a long moment with the mild and terrible patience of a man who has spent his life waiting for pupils to understand what he has already told them once.

"Elias," he said, "you have not been home."

"Home," you said. "This is home. I have a room. I have work. I have my health."

"Home is not where you keep your hat, Elias. Home is where you bury your dead, and you left her bones unburied in a cellar you have never gone back to."

You felt the heat rise in your face, and your hand closed around the locket in your pocket, and you said, "I go back every night. I am there every night. I go down the lane and the house is standing and the cellar door is open and she is sitting on the coal—"

"She was eight years old, Elias."

"She was eight years old."

"Now," said Professor Hearn, "let me see what you have in your pocket."

"It is nothing," you said. "It is private."

"Nothing that a man polishes every night for thirty years is private, or nothing. Show me."

And because he was Professor Hearn, because he had taken the cane to your knuckles in the grammar school when you were nine years old and had taught you the long and bloody history of a country that no longer existed, you took the locket out of your pocket and laid it on the table between the salt cellar and the dripping candle.

It was an oval the size of a walnut, the colour of old honey, and as you watched his knotted fingers take it up you saw, for the first time as if it were a stranger's possession, how the gold had gone away from it. It had gone from the centre where your thumb had ridden it, and it had gone from the edges where the clasp had scratched, and what remained was a thin and sullen yellow, like the memory of butter on a plate that has been washed too many times. The scrollwork was flat. You had worn the hills and valleys of it level with the plain, the way rain wears the names from the stones of a churchyard, and you had never once understood that you were the rain.

Professor Hearn turned it over in his fingers, and he looked at you over the rim of his spectacles, and he said, "Do you know what this is, Elias?"

"It was my grandmother's," you said. "It was passed to my mother, and my mother gave it to me, and I gave it to Miriam on her sixth birthday, and I told her it was gold, and that as long as she wore it—" and there you stopped, because you had told this story so many times, to so many men in so many rooms across two countries, that you had quite forgotten that it was a story and not a thing that had happened.

"It was not your grandmother's," said Professor Hearn, gently, as if he were delivering a funeral address. "It was bought at the autumn fair in Velesgrad in the year I began at the grammar school, and it was bought from a tinker who gilded tin and brass for the trade, and everyone in the town knew it, and your grandmother knew it as well as anyone, and she paid him her church money because she was a proud woman and she wanted a gold thing to put into her daughter's wedding chest. There was never any gold in it, Elias. There was only the belief, and you have polished the belief until the gold has gone, and now there is nothing left but the thing itself, and the thing itself was never worth a day of your life."

The words did not seem to enter you through your ears; they seemed to enter through the breast pocket of your good brown suit, and they settled there like cold water. You said, "It was gold when she held it."

"It was gold to her," he said, "and that is perhaps the only gold that ever mattered. But you have been polishing it for thirty years, and every night you think you are keeping the gold, and every night you are taking it away. You have polished her away, Elias."

"Her?" you said. "I have polished—"

"Open it."

Your hands would not obey you for a moment, and then they did. The little clasp gave, and the two halves opened like a shell, and inside was the photograph that had been there since the morning you put it in, Miriam at her first communion, in the white dress that had cost your mother a month of night shifts, her hair cut straight across her forehead, her face small and serious and entirely present in the world. Only it was not present any longer. The photograph, like the gold, had been worn away. Your eyes had lived on it so long and so often that the face had gone out of it; you had looked at it so hard that you had erased her, and what remained was a pale smear on the paper, a ghost with the suggestion of a brow and the ghost of a chin, the certain knowledge of a girl who was no longer there.

You closed the locket and you put it in your pocket and you stood up, and the chair went over behind you, and the singing stopped for a moment and then started again, and you walked out into the rain without your coat, and you did not look back at the church hall, because you knew, although you would not have used such a word, that a man does not open a wound to see whether it has healed.

You walked the long way back to the hotel through the wet streets of the city, past the shuttered shops and the bus shelter where a man lay sleeping with his head on a parcel, and you let yourself in by the service door and went down to the boiler room where you kept the night porter's chair, and you sat in the heat of the furnace with the locket in your hand, and you did not open it again, and in the small hours the heat and the long weariness of the day took you down into a sleep that had the quality of a door opening.

And the door opened into Velesgrad.

It was Velesgrad, but it was Velesgrad the way it had been in the years before you were born, or the way it had been in the years after everyone had left it; the cathedral stood at the top of Mill Street with all its clocks stopped at the same dark hour, and the river ran backwards under the stone bridge, smashing against the pier in a white fury, and the snow lay in the gutters even though the lime trees were heavy with July leaves, and the houses were lit with candles and there was no one in any of them. You walked up Mill Street in your brown suit, and your feet made no sound, and you were not afraid, because the country of the dead has no weather and no terror for those who have already lost everything in it.

The house was standing. The numbers were still on the door, the paint flaking in the old way, and the cellar door was open at the foot of the steps, and you went down as you had gone down a thousand nights in the room above the hotel, and she was sitting on the coal in her blue dress with the locket around her neck, and she was singing the song about the bees, the one you had taught her, and the boots were on the stairs.

"Take me instead," you said, and your voice came out of you like something pulled from a well, but the dream held you where you stood, and the captain came down the stairs with his face in shadow, and he tore the locket from her neck and threw it at your feet on the flags, and he said, "Keep your gold, teacher's son. It paid for nothing." And you heard him, and you felt the old and total helplessness, the helplessness that had been the marrow of your life for thirty years, and it rose up through you like a flood, and then the cellar was empty and you were kneeling in the ash, and the only light was the furnace light through the high window, and Professor Hearn was standing at the foot of the stairs with his white hair and his black coat.

"You see," said Professor Hearn, "it was not your fault, and it was not your not-fault. You had one choice, and you made it, and you have spent your life trying to unmake it by polishing a piece of brass."

"I told her it was gold," you said. "I told her it would keep her."

"You told her a true thing," he said. "It kept her, Elias. In the way that all our keeps keep anything. And then you took the keeping upon yourself, and you made a religion of it, and a religion will wear the face out of any photograph and the gold out of any locket, because that is what devotion does when it