Parisian cousins nobody has heard from in decades now write letters begging for capons, hams, hens. The dentist is selling wine through the mail.
Choice.
Quantos labirintos existem neste mundo. Os galhos das árvores, as filigranas das raízes, a matriz dos cristais, as ruas que o pai dela tinha recriado nas maquetes. Labirintos nas saliências de conchas...
Radio: it ties a million ears to a single mouth. Out of loudspeakers all around Zollverein, the staccato voice of the Reich grows like some imperturbable tree; its subjects lean toward its branches as...
Why doesn’t glue stick to the inside of the bottle, Frau Elena?
What does he remember? He saw the engineer Bernd close the cellar door and sit on the stairs.
When he last went out, almost twenty-four years ago, he tried to make eye contact, to present what might be considered a normal appearance.
You have to trust someone sometime. If your same blood doesn’t run in the arms and legs of the person you’re next to, you can’t trust anything. And even then.
You have minds. But minds are not to be trusted. Minds are always drifting toward ambiguity, toward questions, when what you really need is certainty. Purpose. Clarity. Do not trust your minds.
That great shuttles of souls might fly about, faded but audible if you listen closely enough? They flow above the chimneys, ride the sidewalks, slip through your jacket and shirt and breastbone and lu...
That his daughter is so curious, so resilient. There is the humility of being a father to someone so powerful, as if he were only a narrow conduit for another, greater thing. That’s how it feels right...
Souls might also travel those paths? That her father and Etienne and Madame Manec and the German boy named Werner Pfennig might harry the sky in flocks, like egrets, like terns, like starlings? That g...
The whiteness
Vitrine. Upstairs his wife runs a vacuum cleaner; he can
Thumb. Marie-Laure’s father is principal locksmith for the National Museum of Natural History. Between the laboratories, warehouses, four separate public museums, the menagerie, the greenhouses, the a...
Then a state-sponsored play out of Berlin begins: a story of invaders sneaking into a village at night. All twelve children sit riveted. In the play, the invaders pose as hook-nosed department-store o...
What are words but sounds these men shape out of breath, weightless vapors they send into the air of the kitchen to dissipate and die.
To be a parent and take an occasional day off from being a parent is a special kind of joy—a lightening, a sweetness made sweeter by its impermanence. We buy tickets, find our seats. The
Werner Pfennig grows up three hundred miles northeast of Paris in a place called Zollverein: a four-thousand-acre coalmining complex outside Essen, Germany. It’s steel country, anthracite country, a p...
Werner and his younger sister, Jutta, are raised at Children's House, a clinker-brick two-story orphanage on Viktoriastrasse whose rooms are populated with the coughs of sick children and the crying o...
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