In Georgios’ house on the outskirts of Athens he and I drank still more ouzo while his wife stuffed tender vine leaves with rice and pine nuts and minced lamb. After dinner we switched to coffee. It was raining outside, as I had thought it might. We warmed ourselves in front of the wood fire, and I opened my flat leather satchel and took out a small charcoal sketch.

It showed a baby, and the baby looked like a baby. Cameras are scarce in Macedonia, and artists there have not been forced into abstraction by the advance of technology. Their task, as they see it, is to convey as well as possible the exact appearance of whatever it is they are drawing. This particular unknown artist had been drawing a baby, and that’s exactly what the sketch looked like.

“A beautiful baby,” I said aloud.

Georgios and his wife examined the sketch and agreed with my estimation. “He resembles you,” Zoe Melas said. “About the eyes and I think the mouth as well.”

“He’s plump like his mother.”

“He is in New York?”

“He is in Macedonia.”

“Ah,” she said. “And you go to see him?”

“Tonight.”

“Tonight!” She darted a look of alarm at Georgios, then fastened her gaze upon me. “But it is a long journey,” she said, “and you have been awake since early this morning. You were sitting before the fire when I myself arose. You could not have had much sleep last night.”

I had not had any sleep the past night. Nor, indeed, had I had any sleep in the past seventeen years, ever since a piece of North Korean shrapnel found its way into my skull and destroyed something called the sleep center, all of which was a source of considerable confusion to the army physicians, who wondered why the hell I seemed to be awake twenty-four hours a day, day after blessed day. Since the phenomenon confuses ordinary mortals as well as doctors, I didn’t bother explaining it to Zoe and Georgios. I said only that I was not at all tired and that I wanted to get to Macedonia as soon as possible.