“You never asked me.”
“Do you think you’ll tell me?”
“My father and I played a game, whenever we sat here. We would look at the windows, over there, and we’d try to guess what they’d be doing, those people in their little lamplit boxes on the other side of the park. But you weren’t allowed to just say it. You had to act.”
She smiles, tilts her head back slightly, and closes her eyes. I dip a finger in the wine and touch her lips with it. She briefly opens them and licks.
“My father,” I tell her, “had quit his job. It was summer and he and the doll doctor, who had his shop downstairs, sat on the balcony, drinking beer. The doll doctor sold model airplanes too, probably because deep down he hated dolls.”
A couple of houses away the loud wailing of Chinese karaoke starts in the restaurant where, earlier today, wedding guests from all over Europe arrived. The smell of lamb cutlets and thyme escapes from the kitchen of the illegal joint next door.
“He used to get boys in his shop who’d ask if they could have a ready-made model. That’s what they were talking about, the doll doctor and my father, when I had an idea. Actually, it was a plan. It was the plan that would save us.”
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
Mendel
The Great Longing
In Babylon
Copyright
This book was originally published in Holland in 2000 by J. M. Meulenhoff, bv.
THE DREAM ROOM. Copyright © 2000 by Marcel Möring. English translation copyright © 2002 by Stacey Knecht. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
FIRST EDITION
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for.
EPub Edition © June 2010 ISBN: 978-0-06-200863-3
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