He sat there listening to Ljubco, trying to smile at his weak witticisms, acutely aware of Elena's presence only a metre or so away, catching a glimpse of her now and then as Ljubco shifted in his seat or she leaned forward. And for a while, although he felt that bittersweet despair growing inside him, things remained more or less stable on the surface and he thought he was coping quite well. Then, suddenly, she did something – a simple but unexpected gesture – which overcame all his defences, and instinctively he raised his hand towards his eyes as if to protect them from the glare of the sun, but his hand stopped halfway. The fact is that then and there, he could have grabbed Elena’s face and covered it with kisses. He could have dropped to his knees and spoken the tenderest words to her. The voices of the demons, muffled until then, had reached him loud and clear. There was a demon urging him to bury his head in her lap. There were other demons inside him that, given half a chance, would have compelled him to jump up and down or to start dancing about the garden, yelling, laughing, beating his chest like a gorilla or loudly praising creation like a shaman faced with a portent of nature. He felt the urge to do all these things but did none of them, of course. Instead, he finally brought his hand up, cleared his throat, and made some trivial remark to Ljubco. He sat there for another quarter of an hour, kept Ljubco going with an occasional question so as to avoid having to say much himself. He sat there, his heart filled with the joy, the terror, of his love for her.
