Julie Orringer

Heidenau, 1944
It is
as though I lay
under a low
sky and breathed
through a needle’s eye.
– W. G. Sebald

When they were boys going off to school, their father had always put his hands on their heads and said the prayer for travel before he let them on the train; now Tibor whispered the words under his breath.

May you be safe from all misfortune on this earth. May God grant you mercy in his eyes and in the eyes of all who see you. He kissed Andras again. “You’ll come back a worldly man,” he said. “An architect. You’ll build me a house. I’m counting on it, do you hear?”

“It’s one thing to love an art and another to be good at it.”

The buildings he designed would be the ships in which human beings would sail toward the horizon of the twentieth century, then off the map and into the new millennium.

“L’architecture n’est pas un jeu d’enfants,” he said in a deep, resonant voice that matched exactly, both in pitch and tone, the voice of Professor Perret. “L’architecture, c’est l’art le plus sériuex de tous.”

Rachmones: a compassion as deep and as undeniable as what a mother felt for her child.

It was still damp where she’d used it to dry her eyes. As if in a dream, he put a corner of it into his mouth and tasted the salt she’d left there.

He would remember it as long as he lived: the way they moved awkwardly through the doorway, his persistent certainty that she would change her mind, his disbelief as she lifted the rose-colored slip over her head.

It could have all ended then-the city of Paris, the world, the universe-and he wouldn’t have cared, would have died happy, could have found no heaven broader or more drenched with light.