Burnt Shadows

Hiroko and the Burtons attend a party with the social elite of British India. Elizabeth, exhausted by her social duties and wishing to get away from the snobby crowd, rescues Hiroko from awkward conversation. James watches Elizabeth and Hiroko leave the party, unable to understand their friendship. James and Elizabeth are revealed to no longer be sexually intimate.

Away from the other guests, Elizabeth admits that the British Empire makes her feel “German,” or like an outsider. Hiroko tells Elizabeth about the book on cosmopolitanism that Konrad was writing in his purple notebooks. Hiroko interprets Konrad’s book as a way of imagining a world in which Konrad, who grew up in Berlin, and Elizabeth, who left Berlin for London before Konrad was born, could have connected across barriers of language and culture. Hiroko resolves to build something permanent of her life. Elizabeth tells Hiroko that she is sorry for all Hiroko has lost. The two women return to the party, and Hiroko realizes that she and Elizabeth have been speaking in German, not English. 

Elizabeth writes letters to Harry in England and to her cousin Willie Weiss, an openly gay man living in New York City who shares Elizabeth’s sense of being an outsider in the Weiss family.