The Last Enchantments by Charles Finch

degree in physics at the University of Göttingen, she said, but her parents had pushed her into that, both being scientists themselves, and she had decided upon graduation that she wanted to try history instead. That was why she had come to Oxford. She was from Berlin originally.
    Everything about the Crusades, her subject, was deeply shocking to her, as if it were still happening somewhere not far away. “They roasted the Saracens alive over brushfires and ate them, the cannibals,” she told us. “I think it was awful of them. And they had scurvy and bled out of their eyeballs, too.”
    *   *   *
    Here is a story to tell you about Anneliese.
    At Fleet there was a new graduate student named Steffen, from France, who became famous immediately throughout the college for his rudeness. If you spoke to him he mumbled and walked away, and he actually cursed at one of the most complacent porters, Laurence, to the delight of the undergrads who witnessed it.
    One day later in the year, that winter, I saw him on the steps of the Sackler Library, all the way across town, speaking with tremendous and unwonted animation. I could hear what it was about—the food in Fleet’s dining hall, whose quality he seemed to interpret as a personal insult to him as a Frenchman—but I hadn’t even known he could speak in full sentences, and it was only after twenty or thirty seconds of eavesdropping that I realized the person with him was Anneliese. She told me later that they had lunch every week. Thinking of her, I might put it this way: Most people think they’re the same with everybody, when in fact it’s one of the rarest qualities I know. She was.
    In any event, Anneliese filled out our small, sectile, but durable group. There were Tom, Anneliese, Anil, Timmo, and me, with Sophie and a few others drifting in and out of our daily lives. What ratified our friendship was the first Formal Hall of Michaelmas term, and everything good and bad that followed it.
    *   *   *
    On the first day of First Week I got a note in my pigeonhole from an old professor at Fleet, St. John Jarvis. My mother had told me to expect to hear from him. In the sixties he had taught at Columbia on an exchange and become friends with my great-uncle, who was in the philosophy department there. The note offered me a cup of coffee the following afternoon. There was a sketchy map drawn on the envelope. It said to cross the river beyond the lawns by a footbridge, then take a dirt path a half mile to his house.
    “Have you heard of someone named St. John Jarvis?” I asked Tom.
    “Sinjun, not Saint John.”
    “Excuse me?”
    He stopped reading his e-mail and looked at me. “When it’s a proper name in England it’s pronounced Sinjun.”
    “Well, have you hard of Sinjun Jarvis?”
    “No, why?”
    “He’s a don. He pidged me an invitation to coffee.”
    “Don’t fuck up his name.”
    “I’m not going to say, ‘Hey, Sinjun!’ Tom.”
    I arrived the next day, two minutes late. I could still hear the last of the city’s tower bells ringing four o’clock, but otherwise his huddled brown Middle Earth house seemed like the only one for miles. It was at the edge of a growth of apple trees, with green fields beyond them.
    Sinjun himself answered the door. He was an enormous, barrel-chested man, who, though he was seventy-seven, looked as if he were in the prime of late middle age. I had expected must and stink, a polite half hour, but there was none of that. His hair was still dark, and his great florid face grinned at me.
    “Come in, come in,” he said. “You’re three minutes late, but we’ll spare you the firing squad. You look just like your uncle George, you know. Same nose.”
    “Thanks.”
    “I don’t know that it’s such a wonderful compliment. Sit right there on that couch. Larissa, the coffee! I hope you don’t like tea? Never touch the stuff myself, I think it tastes of ashes. I spent four years with your uncle, the Amiables, we called