Mina appears to be the wife of Old John, who himself is occasionally the narrator of the novel. Mina is a rather adventurous creature but more accessible than the wraiths. She drinks coffee with Old John, and watches the passing parade of strange people, offering her observations and sometimes her caustic wit....
"My wife—today she has a black rose in her hair—refers to this parade as the charnel house. They are all dead, she said once, they are walking corpses, troglodytes, cadavers, she waved her red-tipped fingers which held an ivory tube from which extended a cigarette perfumed with clove, it was a special tobacco, densely packed, like a Russian cigarette, so it burned slowly, crackling occasionally, imported at great expense from Darjeeling or Dar-es-Salaam or Dhanishkodi, I could never remember which. She never inhaled. The smoke caressed her face, she said, which made her smile. Her small white teeth lay behind her lips like a glimpse of pearl in an oyster. Her tongue—it is possible for me to remember that tongue, fleshy, pointed, as it maneuvered across lips and into my mouth, a memory I treasure when we sit, on days that are warm, at a small table outside the café, birds fluttering from the trees and pecking at the crumbs we scatter from our plates."
"She pulls a leather glove onto one hand, an act of curious majesty, black leather, her black-shod feet, stockings glossy as she stretches one leg and then another, a bus races past, sooty ashes settle around us, she slides another hand into another glove, we rise from our table, stare momentarily towards the east where a pall of smoke blossoms over the city, and then—arms linked—stroll off down the avenue, myself limping with my cane and my wife doing her pagan strut, as though nothing had happened, nothing at all."
Mina, dancing in the fog
