This week in the saga

The long winter ends without moving. On the anniversary of the handover he is still answering the count, reading an admission into a sentence from the other man's press conference. On the twenty-first he sends word to a march he cannot attend — with you in spirit — and, the same day, writes the only statement of the whole winter that asks for nothing at all: a singer he had put on television twenty years earlier has died, and the note is short, warm and entirely unpolitical. Three days later armies are massing on a border in Europe and his verdict is that it could never have happened under him. Eight weeks, hundreds of statements, four racks of signed paper, and not one vote changed. The paper is the only thing in the room that grew.