shelling, and could be seen wandering free
in the city late at night. Sometimes I
wonder if they survive still, awkward
birds and bounding marsupials, hiding in
the foothills of the Austrian Alps, the
last survivors of the siege of Salzburg.
It was a hard winter. We learned to
conserve the slightest bit of heat, so as
to stretch a few sticks of firewood out
over a whole night. Typhus, dysentery, and
pneumonia killed more than the shelling,
which had resumed in force with the onset
of winter. Just after New Year, a fever
attacked me, and there was no medicine to
be had at any price. Johann wrapped me in
blankets and fed me hot water mixed with
salt and a pinch of precious sugar. I
shivered and burned, hallucinating strange
things, now seeing kangaroos and emus
outside my little room, now imagining
myself on the surface of Mars, strangling
in the thin air, and then instantly on
Venus, choking in heat and darkness, and
then floating in interstellar space, my
body growing alternately larger than
galaxies, then smaller than atoms,
floating so far away from anything else
that it would take eons for any signal
from me to ever reach the world where I
had been born.
Eventually the fever broke, and I was
merely back in my room, shivering with
cold, wrapped in sheets that were stinking
with sweat, in a city slowly being pounded
into rubble by distant soldiers whose
faces I had never seen, fighting for an
ideology that I could never understand.
It was after this, at my constant
pleading, that Johann finally took me to
see his molecular still. It was a
dangerous walk across the city,
illuminated by the glow of the Marionette
Theater, set afire by incendiary bombs two
days before. The still was hidden below
the city, farther down even than the bomb
shelters, in catacombs that had been
carved out of rock over two thousand years
