The Rehearsal

sits at the window with her chin on her fist and looks out over the rooftops and the clouds. Then there is a knock at the door and she puts her mug of black-leaf tea to one side. She smoothes her trouser leg and says, “Come in.”
    Friday
    The ginkgo tree rises out of a small square patch of earth in the middle of the courtyard. The concrete bulges and crumples in peaks around the base of the trunk where the tree has shifted in the ground. The fallen leaves are trodden by now into a yellow-smelling paste, choking the drains and fouling the cobbles with a dirty sallow film.
    She is still early, and dimly she can hear the low honk of a tenor sax playing an ascending scale, the sound drifting over the slate tiles and down into the empty courtyard with its naked ginkgo tree. Rising above the courtyard is the old observatory tower, closed to the public now, the white-ribbed dome stained a patchy lichen green, the stippled wrought-iron staircase waxed over with bird droppings and dirt.
    The saxophone teacher’s studio is in a sprawling cluster of buildings that once housed the museum and a few obscure departments of the university. Now the bricked quadrangles and cloisters and narrow unexpected gardens are privately leased, the old exhibition rooms divided into offices and studio spaces and stores.
    The tenor sax moves up a semitone and repeats the exercise. Isolde checks her watch: she is almost fifteen minutes early. She swings her sax case idly and looks around the courtyard for something to do. The concrete is blackened and dulled with the recent rain, glum puddles pooling underneath the drainpipes, the birds shrugging off the drips as they hop between the wires. Isolde steers herself vaguely away from the tree and the high observatory tower, and wanders into an alley with the dim purpose of finding a bakery and buying a hot bun.
    As she passes through the cloisters she begins to hear the low thump of a far-off drumbeat. Sometimes there is free theater or performance art by the hot-bread wagons that park on the far side of the cloisters, and she absentmindedly pursues the sound through a narrow arch and down a wet bricked alley until she comes to an open door.
    The door is halved horizontally by a steel bar, and at chest-height there is a shiny patch where the oil from thousands of hands has worn the paint away. At present the door is wedged open with a brick, and from within Isolde can hear shouting and the clear thump of a drum.
    She slips in quietly, padding down the corridor and up a small set of white-nosed stairs. She passes several dressing rooms with doors ajar and realizes that she must have entered the old auditorium by the players’ door. She hesitates and almost turns back, but the drum-thump is louder now and she can hear voices, and she resolves to go on and at least take a look before slipping back the way she has come. She emerges in the thick velvet blackness of the wings, and inches forward in the dark until she finds a gap in the cloth that will give her a view of the stage.
    From the wings the stage looks chaotic, the chalk and pencil lines all visible, the painted flats slantwise and cramped together and unbeautiful, and on the far side the jumbled mess of props and costumes in the wings opposite. Isolde can see a small number of backstage watchers, separated from each other by the quivering upright cloth of the wings, some in costume and standing tense on the balls of their feet as they wait for a cue. She can see past the footlights into the foggy dark underbelly of the two-tiered auditorium, and in the foreground the silhouetted players lit around their edges like the bright thread around the rim of a solar eclipse.
    In center stage there is a boy in a scarlet turban, wearing shabby coat-tails, a torn dirty ruff, and white gloves that are loose at the wrist and soiled. Vertical black diamonds are painted over each eye, spearing down his cheeks and cutting a sticky greasy track through the white powder on his face. They give him an odd haunted look, merry and melancholy at once. From where she stands Isolde can barely see his profile, just the curve of his cheek and the swell of his turban above his temple and a flash of black diamond every time he turns his head.
    “This is a complete deck of cards,” the boy is saying into the dark, shuffling a deck of cards so they cascade neatly from his right hand to his left. “No joker. Aces low. The card you draw from this deck will be yours to