This story describes the relationship between Marietta, a refugee from an unnamed, war-torn country, and Mr Kinsky, the man for whom she works as a cleaner and in whose basement she lives. Mr Kinsky develops an erotic fascination with Marietta, which she rebuts, and Lasdun brilliantly describes the subtleties of their charged relationship:
‘Hello, my dear.’ He used the endearment with the authority of someone who has aquired it precisely by virtue of his grace in defeat as a prospective lover.
I first read ‘The Siege’ after hearing about it in a conversation between the author and Adam Shatz, which you can listen to here (they discuss the story around 11 minutes in, and you can hear Lasdun read a short excerpt, accompanied by some of the Schubert that Mr Kinsky plays on his piano in the story).
Collected in The Siege: Selected Stories, Vintage, 1999
A Personal Anthology 