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15 The Bal­ cony When she saw a book that ­ Father had left be­ hind on the bal­ cony, my­ mother knew that the day be­ fore, in that mo­ ment ­ between dream and re­ al­ ity, in a flash of in­ sight, her hus­ band must ­ surely have come to that­ long-sought-after de­ ci­ sion, the de­ ci­ sion that now in the day­ light he must under­ take. Then, ten­ derly, as if pro­ long­ ing my ­ father’s touch,­ Mother would take the book that had been left be­ hind and place it care­ fully on one of the ­ shelves in the cab­ i­ net built into the bal­ cony walls ­ rather than in the li­ brary, where ­ nearly all of ­ Father’s books were ar­ ranged. In the cen­ ter of the large, win­ dow­ less wall of the liv­ ing room, the room that ac­ tu­ ally ad­ joined the bal­ cony, there was a ­ two-winged­ wooden cab­ i­ net, which ­ evoked for us chil­ dren the un­ fail­ ing il­ lu­ sion of a world be­ yond, on the other side of the wall, in the bal­ cony cab­ i­ net . . . That cab­ i­ net was ­ rarely ­ opened, and there­ fore it, more than any­ thing else, ­ sparked our child­ hood cu­ ri­ os­ ity. It was al­ ways ­ locked up tight, with its own lock and a sep­ ar­ ate pad­ lock. The cab­ i­ net was a sort of annex to my ­ father’s li­ brary, its heart, for there in­ side it were the old­ est man­ u­ scripts, hand­ writ­ ten sa­ cred books, rare geo­ graphic maps of im­ a­ gined Bal­ kan ­ states, the ­ family’s pre­ cious doc­ u­ ments: ­ papers that ­ proved the ­ family’s iden­ tity. The cab­ i­ net was wide, deep, bound­ less. Most often, it was my ­ father who went in there, more ­ rarely, my ­ mother, and then only when she­ needed to free the books of their col­ lected dust. When my ­ father en­ tered the cab­ i­ net, we chil­ dren had the feel­ ing that he was en­ ter­ ing some new di­ men­ sion of time in the lab­ y­ rinth of his man­ u­ scripts. We chil­ dren ­ thought that there, in my ­ father’s cab­ i­ net, in that lab­ y­ rinth of lost time—how ­ quickly time was lost in the Bal­ kans—were to 16 be found the hurt books, those dam­ aged by too much read­ ing, too much time. As soon as he had “cured” a par­ tic­ u­ lar one of his hurt books, my­ father would re­ turn it to its usual place in the li­ brary. My ­ father or­ di­ nar­ ily kept the cab­ i­ net ­ locked up, and he left the key with my ­ mother in case the books ­ should rise up . . . ...

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