mel.     I would like to have added: thats what happened to Esther, and I've only just realized it, remembering now how the look in her eyes changed. I'd always absorbed her life and her energy, and that made me feel happy and confident, able to go forward. She, on the other hand, had looked at me and felt ugly, diminished, because, as the years passed, my career-the career that she had done so much to make a reality-had relegated our relatioship to second place. If I was to see her again, my face needed to be as clean as hers. Before I could find her, I must first find myself. The Zahir.