became decorated with black smoke trails
like unreadable graffiti, and the city
parks became weirdly empty lots crossed by
winding sidewalks that meandered past the
craters where the trees had been.
Johannтs wife, my foster mother, a thin,
quiet woman, died by being in the wrong
building at the wrong time. She had been
visiting a friend across the city to
exchange chat and a pinch of hoarded tea.
It might just as easily have been the
building I was in where the bird decided
to build its deadly nest. It took some of
the solidity out of Johann. "Do not fall
in love, little Leah," he told me, many
months later, when our lives had returned
to a fragile stability. "It hurts too
much."
In addition to the nearly full-time job of
bargaining for those necessities that
could be bargained for, substituting or
improvising those that could not, and
hamstering away in basements and shelters
any storable food that could be found, my
foster father Johann had another job, or
perhaps an obsession. I only learned this
slowly. He would disappear, sometimes for
days. One time I followed him as far as an
entrance to the ancient catacombs beneath
the bird-pecked ruins of the beautiful
castle Hohensalzburg. When he disappeared
into the darkness, I dared not follow.
When he returned, I asked him about it. He
was strangely reluctant to speak. When he
did, he did not explain, but only said
that he was working on the molecular
still, and refused to say anything
further, or to let me mention it to anyone
else.
As a child, I spoke a hodgepodge of
languages; the English of the foreigners,
the French of the European Union, the
Japanese that my parents had spoken at
home, the book-German of the schools, and
the Austrian German that was the dominant
tongue of the culture I lived in. At home,
