Further down the canal, by the bridge, a streetlamp partly illuminated a segment of the water. There was something moving there, a boat of some kind. As the man watched, it entered the patch of lighted water and was revealed in silhouette: a small dinghy being paddled by two bulky, shapeless figures. The craft rounded the corner and disappeared. Silence fell once more. Rubbing his eyes, Aurelio Zen closed the window and went back to bed.

When he awoke again the room was filled with an astringent brilliance which made him blink, an abrasive slapping of wavelets and the edgy scent which had surprised him the moment he stepped out of the train. He had forgotten even the most obvious things about the place, like the pervasive risky odour of the sea.

Since his mother had come to live with him in Rome, Zen had returned only rarely to his native city, brief fleeting visits to ensure that the house was still standing, or to wrestle some necessary piece of paper away from the commune. He had deliberately avoided examining the reasons for this voluntary exile too closely, pretending to himself and others that it was due to the demands of his career. There was something in that, but he sensed that there was much else besides; painful, murky matters which he kept filed away in an inaccessible portion of his mind under the vague heading ‘Personal’.

Now, though, it was all gradually returning to him. The urgent plashing he could hear below, he realized, was the final ripples of wash from a vessel passing down the nearby Cannaregio canal. Last night there had been no such traffic, which is why the similar sound he had heard then had drawn him instinctively to the window. He recalled the dinghy, the muffled figures. The more he thought about the incident, the odder it seemed. What could anyone have been doing rowing around the back canals of the city at such an hour? Perhaps he had never woken at all. Perhaps it had all been a dream. No other solution seemed to make sense.