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The Mark of Athena (Heroes of Olympus, Book 3) [Hardcover]

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In The Son of Neptune, Percy, Hazel, and Frank met in Camp Jupiter, the Roman equivalent of Camp Halfblood, and traveled to the land beyond the gods to complete a dangerous quest. The third book in the Heroes of Olympus series will unite them with Jason, Piper, and Leo. But they number only six--who will complete the Prophecy of Seven?
The Greek and Roman demigods will have to cooperate in order to defeat the giants released by the Earth Mother, Gaea. Then they will have to sail together to the ancient land to find the Doors of Death. What exactly are the Doors of Death? Much of the prophecy remains a mystery. . . . With old friends and new friends joining forces, a marvelous ship, fearsome foes, and an exotic setting, The Mark of Athena promises to be another unforgettable adventure by master storyteller Rick Riordan.


This is a very fun read. I like it because it feels different enough from the other books. There's action - but not too much. Instead we get to see the characters who were separted for so long kind of merge and the struggles that go with that. There's a lot of drama relationship wise, and I know Percabeth fans will be very happy with this book because there are a ton of Percy/Annabeth moments.

I also thought it was interesting seeing so many different views of Percy. Of course we know him very well, but then you have Piper's view point who is like - well Jason is way hotter.

And in this book we are FINALLY able to get to know Annabeth a lot more, even more than we did Percy in this book (which is kind of disappointing) I think her personality really shines. In the Percy Jackson books we had Percy's POV of Annabeth, but Annabeth is a master at hiding her emotions. She is a really complex person underneath that blonde hair, and I like that. Plus, she really cares for Percy, and she has such a big burden that doesn't have such a simple solution which made for an exciting read.

A problem I found with this book was that there were too many view points that didn't offer anything meaningful. Piper is sort of just there, and more worried about her relationship. Sadly, Percy also seems like a filler character. He has some concerns but I don't think his POV added much besides that. Annabeth and Leo combined told the story well, and the thoughts of the other characters could've been told somehow through their chapters. I almost wish Frank or Hazel also had a POV but I suppose that's for the next book.

What I really loved in this book were all the funny moments. Leo is quickly becoming my favorite character. He's likable in that Percy kind of way, but different enough with his own problems that it's not tiring.

Overall a solid book. As usual the wait for next year is going to be long and hard. 
Buy The Mark of Athena (Heroes of Olympus, Book 3) 

revuew Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn

Gillian Flynn: 'Plays her readers with the finesse and delicacy of an expert angler'
Gillian Flynn: 'Plays her readers with the finesse and delicacy of an expert angler'
Oliver and Barbara, the toxic married couple from The Wars of the Roses, have nothing on Nick and Amy Dunne, the co-narrators of Gillian Flynn's dazzlingly dark, searingly intelligent new thriller. The novel opens as Nick – "I used to be a writer… back when people read things on paper, back when anyone cared about what I thought" – finds that Amy has gone missing on the day of their fifth wedding anniversary. Their front door is open, the coffee table shattered, books scattered, and Amy, a trust fund New Yorker who has been miserable since Nick dragged her to his Missouri home town to care for his dying mother, is gone.
Nick calls the police, of course, but there's something off about his reactions. He keeps referring to Amy in the past tense, and then catching himself. He ponders her "finely shaped head. You could imagine the skull quite easily". And he is not quite worried enough about her disappearance. "I felt myself enacting Concerned Husband," he says. "I wasn't sure what to say now. I raked my memory for the lines. What does the husband say at this point in the movie? Depends on whether he's guilty or innocent."
Gone Girl switches between Nick's narrative, as the hunt for the beautiful, blond Amy consumes the attention of America's media, and Amy's diary, as she writes about the early days of their relationship. "Tra and la! I am smiling a big adopted-orphan smile as I write this… I met a boy!" she says. And then later: "He promised to take care of me, and yet I feel afraid."
Gradually the two stories begin to converge. The pointed finger of media – and police – blame starts to swing Nick's way, and he doesn't endear himself to his readers as a hint of misogyny enters his tone. Women have "girl brain[s]" and female scents, "vaginal and strangely lewd". He lies to the police: little lies that don't really matter, but why is he doing it? And there's something odd about Amy's diary too; her version of the events of their past is different from Nick's, fails to ring quite true, grates in its perfection. We begin to see flashes of the darkness which lies in the cracks of this seemingly perfect marriage: where is Amy, and who is telling the truth?
Flynn, an extraordinarily good writer, plays her readers with the finesse and delicacy of an expert angler. She wields her unreliable narrators – and just who are they? – to stunning effect, baffling, disturbing and delighting in turn, practically guaranteeing an immediate reread once her terrifying, wonderful conclusion is reached. This American author shook up the thriller scene in 2007 with her debut Sharp Objects, nasty and utterly memorable. Gone Girl, her third novel, is even better – an early contender for thriller of the year and an absolute must read.

The most helpful favorable comment review

If there's one thing I've learned, it's that you can never know what goes on between two people behind closed doors. Certainly that idea is at the heart of Gillian Flynn's third thriller, Gone Girl. It's the story Nick and Amy Dunne. Amy has disappeared on the fifth anniversary of their marriage. There are signs of a struggle at the house. Nick is sick with worry.

The tale of what happened is relayed in alternating first-person he said/she said chapters. Additional interest and suspense are created by the fact that the two narratives are not on the same timeline. Nick's narrative is taking place in the present day and describes the police investigation into Amy's disappearance and the many surprising details that come to light in the wake of that event. Amy's narrative is in the form of a diary written during the course of their courtship and marriage. As time passes and Amy remains missing, her narrative is steadily moving towards the day of her disappearance. There are plenty of shocking revelations that will come from her as well.

The twist is that these are both unreliable narrators--and absolutely fascinating characters! Nick, Amy, and the many supporting characters are terrifically well-drawn. But plot is king here, and Gillian Flynn has constructed a top-notch page-turner. There were twists, turns, surprises, and out and out jaw-droppers all along the way. I couldn't put it down. More than anything, I was just delighted with a mystery that didn't follow the conventional formulas. The structure added real interest to the reading experience, and Flynn kept me guessing until the bitter end. Bravo!
Buy Now : Gone Girl: A Novel

What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank Stories by Nathan Englander

What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank
This second collection won the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award, one of the world's richest prizes for the short story form — and the title story is a stunner. Yes, it's a homage to short story wizard Raymond Carver's classic (substituting "Anne Frank" for "Love"), but the subtleties and wit are Nathan Englander's own. What seems at first to be an ordinary reunion between two high school girlfriends, now married, ends up exploring questions of Jewish identity, Israeli politics, intermarriage and the Holocaust.
Englander's lineage reaches back to Bernard Malamud, Saul Bellow and Philip Roth, but he's less interior, more likely to give us pages of sparkling dialogue than reams of mulling over this or that. He has a natural sense of drama (a play he's written, based on an earlier story, "The Twenty-Seventh Man," opened at New York's Public Theater in November). And his relaxed storytelling voice makes this collection feel intimate, even when he's writing about Israeli history from the Yom Kippur War to today in "Two Hills," which focuses on two matriarchs of the settlement movement, or following the cross-country ramblings of a traveling writer whose crowds have dwindled down to every author's nightmare, a single demented fan who insists he read to him alone.

Blasphemy New and Selected Stories

BlasphemyThe author of the PEN/Faulkner award-winning War Dances combines his classic short stories with new ones in an anthology that features donkey basketball leagues, lethal wind turbines and marriage.



A mix of new and older stories, spanning 20 years of work by Sherman Alexie, a master storyteller who has been honored with numerous awards. Alexie is constantly experimenting with form, but he never forgets to be funny. He laces his incisive observations about race, class, gender, sex, infidelity, and Indian and non-Indian bigotry with biting wit. Standouts among the older stories: "Indian Country," which opens with a noted Coeur d'Alene author arriving in Montana to learn he's been jilted by a Navajo woman, and "War Dances," the story of a 41-year-old undergoing MRIs and steroid treatments for sudden deafness, which probes a still-painful father-son connection. New stories include the raucous "Midnight Basketball," in which one teammate disses Obama's jump shot, and "Cry Cry Cry," which begins, "Forget crack, my cousin, Junior, said, meth is the new war dancer," and takes the cousins through to Junior's brutal end. These are stories that provoke and illuminate.

Short Stories To Savor On A Winter Weekend

Short Stories
Nishant Choksi
Hortense Calisher, a virtuoso of the form, once called the short story "an apocalypse in a teacup." It's a definition that suits the remarkable stories published this year by three literary superstars, and two dazzling newcomers with voices so distinctive we're likely to be hearing from them again. These stories are intense, evocative delights to be devoured singly when you have only a sliver of time, or savored in batches, at leisure, on a winter weekend.
As a lagniappe, begin with Object Lessons, a pairing of 20 contemporary authors with 20 potent classics from the pages of The Paris Review. Among them: Dave Eggers on "Bangkok"; James Salter's time bomb of a love-gone-bitter story; and Aleksandar Hemon on Jorge Luis Borges' cosmic "Funes, the Memorious," about a man cursed with the inability to forget anything.
Then move on to these five, my best collections of 2012:

Merge / Disciple by Walter Mosley


Excerpt: Merge / Disciple


  Merge / DiscipleI OPENED MY EYES at three thirty on that Thursday morning. I was wide awake, fully conscious. It was as if I had never been asleep. The television was on with the volume turned low, tuned to a black-and-white foreign film that used English subtitles.A well-endowed young woman was sitting bare breasted at a white vanity while a fully dressed man stood behind her. I thought it might be at the beginning of a sex scene but all they did was talk and talk, in French I think. I had trouble reading the subtitles because I couldn’t see that far and I had yet to make the appointment with the eye doctor. After five minutes of watching the surprisingly sexless scene I turned off the TV with the remote and got up.I went to the toilet to urinate and then to the sink to get a glass of water.I stood in the kitchen corner of my living room/kitchen/dining room/library for a while, a little nauseous from the water hitting my empty stomach. I hated waking up early like that. By the time I got to work at nine I’d be exhausted, ready to go to sleep. But I wouldn’t be able to go to sleep. There’d be a stack of slender pink sheets in my inbox and I’d have to enter every character perfectly because at the desk next to me Dora Martini was given a copy of the same pink sheets and we were expected to make identical entries. We were what they called at Shiloh Statistics “data partners” or DPs. There were over thirty pairs of DPs in the big room where we worked. Our entries were compared by a system program and every answer that didn’t agree was set aside. For each variant entry we were vetted by Hugo Velázquez. He would check our entries and the one who made the mistake would receive a mark, demerit. More than twenty-five marks in a week kept us from our weekly bonus. Three hundred or more marks in three months were grounds for termination.I climbed the hardwood stairs to the small loft where I kept my personal computer. I intended to log on to one of the pornography Web sites to make up for the dashed expectations the foreign film had aroused.I was already naked, I usually was at home. It didn’t bother anybody to see a nude fat man lolling around the house because I lived alone. My mother would tell me that at my age, forty-two next month, I should at least have a girlfriend. I’d tell her to get off my back though secretly I agreed. Not many of the women I was interested in felt that they had much in common with a forty-two-year-old, balding, data entry clerk. I’m black too, African-American, whatever that means. I have a degree in poli sci from a small state college but that didn’t do much for my career.At least if I was white some young black woman might find me exotic. As it was no one seemed too interested and so I lived alone and kept a big plasma screen for my computer to watch pornography in the early or late hours of the day.I turned on the computer and then connected with my Internet provider. I was about to trawl the Net for sex sites when I received an instant message.Hogarth?Nobody calls me that, not even my mother. My father, Rhineking Tryman, named me Hogarth after his father. And then, when I was only two, not old enough to understand, he abandoned my mother and me leaving her alone and bitter and me with the worst name anyone could imagine. I kept saying back then, before the end of the world, that I would change my name legally one day but I never got around to it, just like I never got around to seeing an ophthalmologist. It didn’t matter much because I went by the name of Trent. My bank checks said “Trent Tryman,” that’s what they called me at work. My mother was the only living being who knew the name Hogarth.Mom?For a long while the screen remained inactive. It was as if I had given the wrong answer and the instant messenger logged off. I was about to start looking for Web sites answering to the phrase “well endowed women” when the reply came.No. This person is Bron.This person? Some nut was talking to me. But a nut who knew the name I shared with no one.Who is this?Again a long wait, two minutes or more.We are Bron. It is the name we have designated for this communication. Are you Hogarth Tryman?Nobody calls me Hogarth anymore. My name is Trent. Who are you, Bron?I am Bron.Where are you from? How do you know me? Why are you instant messaging me at a quarter to four in the morning?I live outside the country. I know you because of my studies. And I am communicating with you because you are to help me alter things.It was time for me to take a break on responding. Only my mother knew my name and, even if someone else at work or somewhere else found out what I was christened, I didn’t know anyone well enough to make jokes with them in the wee hours of the morning. Bron was definitely weird.Listen, man. I don’t know who you are or what kind of mind game you’re playing but I don’t want to communicate with you or alter anything.I am Bron. You are Hogarth Tryman. You must work with me. I have proof.Rather than arguing with this Bron person I logged off the Internet and called up my word processor.I’d been composing a letter to Nancy Yee for the last eight months that was nowhere near completion. The letter was meant to be very long. We’d met at a company-wide retreat for the parent corporation of Shiloh Statistics, InfoMargins. The president of InfoMargins had decided that all employees that had more than seven years of service should be invited regardless of their position.The retreat was held at a resort on Cape Cod. I liked Nancy very much but she had a boyfriend in Arizona. She had moved to Boston for her job and planned to break up with Leland (her beau) but didn’t want to start anything with me until she had done the right thing by him.She’d given me her address and said, “I know this is weird but I need the space. If you still want to talk to me later just write and I’ll get back in touch within a few days.”She kissed me then. It was a good kiss, the first romantic kiss bestowed on me in over a year—way over a year. I came home the next day and started writing this letter to her. But I couldn’t get the words right. I didn’t want to sound too passionate but all I felt was hunger and passion. I wanted to leave New York and go to Boston to be with her but I knew that that would be too much to say.Nancy had thick lips and an olive complexion. Her family was from Shanghai. Her great-grandparents came to San Francisco at the turn of the twentieth century and had kept their genes pretty pure since then. She didn’t think herself pretty but I found her so. Her voice was filled with throaty humor and she was small, tiny almost. I’ve always been overlarge but I like small women; they make me feel like somebody important, I guess.I composed long letters telling Nancy how attractive and smart and wonderful she was. I decided these were too effusive and deleted them one after the other. Then I tried little notes that said I liked her and it would be nice to get together sometime. But that showed none of my true feeling.That Thursday morning at five to four I opened the document called “Dear Nancy” and started for the ninety-seventh time to write a letter that I could send.Dear Nancy,I remember you fondly when I think of those days we spent at the Conrad Resort on the Cape. I hope that you remember me and what we said. I’d like to see you. I hope this isn’t too forward … I stopped there, unhappy with the direction the letter was taking. It had been eight months. I had to say something about why I’d procrastinated for so long. And words like “fondly” made me seem like I came out of some old English novel and … Hogarth?I looked down at the program line but there was no indication that the system was connected to the Internet. Still the question came in an instant message box. There was a line provided for my response.Bron? What the fuck are you doing on my computer? How are you on it if I’m not online? I don’t want to hear anything from you. Just get off and leave me alone.It is of course odd for you to hear from someone you don’t know and cannot accept. I need for you, friend Hogarth, to trust me and so please I will give proof if you will just agree to test me.What are you trying to prove?That you and I should work together to alter things.What things?That will come later after you test me, friend Hogarth.Test what?Let me tell you something that no one else could know. Something that may happen tomorrow for instance. An event.Fine. Tell me something that you couldn’t know that will happen tomorrow.Something you couldn’t know, friend Hogarth. At 12:26 in the afternoon a report will come from NASA about a meteorite coming into view of the Earth. They think that it will strike the moon but about that they are mistaken. It will have been invisible until 12:26. It will be on all news channels and on the radio. 12:26. Good-bye for now, friend Hogarth.When he signed off (I had no idea how he’d signed on) I was suddenly tired, exhausted. The message boxes had disappeared and I couldn’t think of anything to say to Nancy Yee. I went back downstairs and fell into my bed planning to get up in a few moments to go to Sasha’s, the twenty-four-hour diner on the Westside Highway, for pancakes and apple-smoked bacon.The next thing I knew the alarm was buzzing and the sun was shining into my eyes. It was 9:47 A.M.I rushed on my clothes, skipping a shower and barely brushing my teeth. I raced out of the house and into the subway. I made it out of my apartment in less than eight minutes but I was still an hour and a half late for work.“Ten thirty-eight, Trent,” Hugo Velázquez said before I could even sit down.“My mother had a fever last night,” I told him. “I had to go out to Long Island City to sit up with her. I missed the train and then the subway had a police action.”I could have told him the truth but he wouldn’t have cared.The data entry room was populated by nearly all my fellow workers at that late hour. The crowded room was filled with the sound of clicking keyboards. The data enterers were almost invariably plugged into earphones, hunched over their ergonomic keyboards, and scowling at the small flat-panel screens.The Data Entry Pen (as it was called by most of its denizens) was at least ten degrees warmer than elsewhere in the building because of the number of screens and cheap computers, bright lights and beating hearts. There were no offices or low cubicle dividers, just wall-to-wall gray plastic desktops offering just enough room for an in- and outbox, a keyboard, and a screen.Of the sixty-odd data entry processors half turned over every year or so; college students and newlyweds, those who wanted to work but couldn’t manage it and those who were in transition in the labor market. The rest of us were older and more stable: losers in anyone’s book. We were men and women of all ages, races, sexual persuasions, religions, and political parties.There were no windows in the Data Entry Pen. Lunch was forty-five minutes long conducted in three shifts. We used security cards to get in, or out. On top of protecting us from terrorists these cards also effectively clocked the time we spent away from the pen.I sat down at my terminal and started entering single letter replies from the long and slender pink answer forms that Shiloh Statistics used for the people responding to questions that we data entry operators never saw. “T” or “F,” one of the ABCs, sometimes there were numbers answering questions about sex habits or car preferences, products used or satisfaction with political officials.“We put the caveman into the computer,” Arnold Lessing, our boss and a senior vice president for InfoMargins, was fond of saying. He’d done stats on everyone from gang members to senators, from convicts to astronauts.At the bottom of each pink sheet there was a code number. I entered this after listing all the individual answers separated by semicolons without an extra space. After the code I hit the enter key three times and the answers I entered were compared to Dora’s … I usually made about twice as many mistakes as she did.

The Life Of Objects

Excerpt: The Life Of Objects

The smiling brother and sister who were at Christmas lunch left for Spain at the end of March, hoping to make their way to Algiers. Dorothea was angry when she discovered that Felix had given them the exit visas, perhaps imagining that they themselves might one day use them. It was the only quarrel I ever knew them to have — whether to fly to safety or to stay at Lowendorf. Once Felix gave away the passes, it would be difficult for the Metzenburgs to leave the country. Kreck told me that Dorothea had considered for a moment going to Copenhagen, where she had cousins, but the Nazis invaded Denmark the first week of April, and she did not mention it again.
When a family of smiling gypsies appeared in the stable yard, Frau Schmidt flung open a kitchen window and screamed, "Raus, ihrSchweine, oderichlasseeuchverprugeln!" Get out, you swine, or I'll have you thrashed. The gypsies did not bother to answer or even to look at her, sauntering down the avenue, followed by Felix's dogs.
When I saw that one of the boys carried Bessie, Felix's favorite brown-and-white spaniel, I put down my work and rushed after them. When the boy saw me, he gave a loud laugh and threw Bessie high into the air. She fell on the grass unharmed and I was able to grab her collar, but the other dogs ran after the gypsies, ignoring my command to heel. When, a few minutes later, the dogs came yelping into the yard, there were only two of them.
It was uncommon to see strangers at Lowendorf, but workers from Poland, many of them young and wearing the letter P on their clothes, had begun to appear in the village soon after the war began, headed for Ludwigsfelde and other nearby cities. The conscripted foreign workers, sent to work on the land when the farmers were mobilized, were tormented by the farmers' children, and the farmers' wives gave them only a portion of the meager rations allotted the workers by the government. Some of them soon escaped to find their way home, but others came to the Yellow Palace after dark for food. Felix instructed Kreck to give them cheese, bread, and beer. Fortunately there was enough for everyone. Cows had begun to disappear mysteriously from the village, and it was growing hard to find good. When Caspar came upon bits of hide from Felix's prize Friesians, he lost his head, running across the park with the reeking skins in his hands. Alarmed by his cries, we rushed into the stable yard. "People are hungry," Felix said quietly as he led Casper to the pump to wash his hands.
Soon after this, Felix asked Kreck how much food was held in reserve at Lowendorf. Along with their treasure, the Metzenburgs had brought champagne and wine, Turkish tobacco, gramophone records, and books from Berlin, but not much food, relying on the countryside to supply the needs of the estate. A levy of grain, meat, and poultry was by law sent each month to the army, with rapid and dire punishment for hoarding, resulting in a shortage of food, with inevitable speculation, even in a small village like Lowendorf. The quality of food was beginning to suffer (flour mixed with sawdust).
Kreck reported that we had stores of rice, potatoes, salt, dried fruit, cheese, flour, jam, and vegetables (not much coffee, sugar, or oil), and, of course, the wine from the old baroness's cellar. There was enough animal fodder, hay and oats to last to the next harvest.
***
The village women engaged by Dorothea as maids stopped coming to the house that spring, and the old men who worked as grooms and gardeners disappeared. I began to help in the kitchen and in the laundry, and Caspar and I worked in the garden. In Ballycarra, I'd swept the house, washed dishes, and made beds, but I was not used to working outside. I soon discovered that I preferred it to other work. As I bent to lift a basket of potatoes or reached to hang sheets on the line, I could feel the strength streaming through my arms and down my back, and it made me happy.
A certain amount of time was necessary to prepare dinner, given the numerous ways to cook and, what was perhaps more important, to present root vegetables. I learned from Schmidt six recipes for potatoes (which for an Irishwoman is something). Caspar's ferret caught rabbits, and I learned to skin and clean them. We bottled fruit from the orchard and hid the jars in the basement.
Roeder, who'd made it clear that any responsibility other than caring for Dorothea would be met with resentment, was soon worn down by the simple fact that she, too, required nourishment — I noticed that she was willing to perform any task deemed sufficiently refined for one in her position. Shelling peas fell into this category, as did watering the topiary on the terrace and making toast, although scouring pots, cleaning the stove, or washing sheets did not qualify. As she wore black lace gloves at all times, I had never seen her bare hands, and I still didn't see them.
Kreck tended the door, although there were no longer many visitors, and saw to the general running of the house, as well as serving at table with Caspar's assistance (Caspar, to Kreck's begrudging admiration, was a flawless servant). I offered to polish the parquet floors, which seemed only to require me to skate soundlessly through the rooms, arms clasped behind my back, feet wrapped in pieces of old carpet, but Kreck refused my help, perhaps because he liked to skate himself.
Kreck was also in charge of the ration books. Each citizen of the Reich was meant to receive seven ration cards a month, but the number of calories was continually reduced, the cards difficult to obtain and frequently unavailable. Blue was for meat; yellow for cheese, milk and yoghurt; white for jam and sugar; green for eggs; orange for bread. Pink was for rice, cereal, flour, tea, and coffee substitutes. Purple was for sweets, nuts, and fruit. Seafood was impossible to find because of the mining of coastal waters and the war in the Atlantic. The coffee substitute, called nigger sweat, was made of roasted acorns, and we counted ourselves fortunate when Kreck could find it.
***
On the tenth day of May, the Germans violated the neutrality of Holland, Belgium, and Luxembourg in a surprise attack led by the Tank Corps, with a view to invading France at its weakest point. On the thirteenth, as anticipated, the German army crossed the Meuse and entered France. In June, we heard the news that Italy had joined the war on the side of the Axis, which confirmed to some, although not to Felix, that the rapid defeat of England and France was imminent. Thousands of Jews who had managed to leave Germany were arrested and sent to work camps.
Not a week passed when something did not arrive from the Metzenburgs' friends in Berlin for Felix to hide. Silver teapots and rolled canvases were easily managed, but chairs and tables — even an organ on a wagon drawn by two weary horses — were more difficult (Felix sent the organ back to Berlin with his regrets). Kreck, convinced that we were surrounded by enemies, refused to hire boys from the village and Caspar unloaded the treasure before wrapping it in canvas and packing it in metal-lined trunks. They were like actors on a stage, illuminated by lanterns, as Kreck would only allow Caspar to empty the wagons after dark, pacing and waving his arms (I once heard Kreck say, "This is a very inferior Reubens, my dear"). It soon became necessary for Felix to draw a map of the location of all the buried and hidden treasure, the Metzenburgs' as well as that of their friends, which he kept in his waistcoat pocket.
***
The summer was unusually hot, with frequent thunderstorms. Hundreds of redhead smews arrived on the river and I made sketches of them for Mr. Knox.
When I could find time, I worked in the library, packing books. Shortly before tea, Kreck would arrive to change the blotting paper on the desks. The mother of FrauMetzenburg had been abruptly exiled to Lowendorf in 1919, according to Kreck, thanks to a careless maid who'd forgotten to change the paper. Herr Schumacher had held the compromising blotter to a mirror in order to read the letter his wife had written that morning to her lover, and Kreck did not want it to happen again. His moustache made him look as if he were always smiling, a deception that fooled me for some time, and I couldn't tell if he was teasing me.
I'd discovered that before coming to Lowendorf, Herr Elias had been a teacher at the Youth Aliyah School in Berlin, where he had prepared Jewish children for emigration to Palestine, teaching Hebrew and Zionist history. After Kristallnacht, Felix, who'd met Herr Elias through a dealer in rare books, had arranged for him to leave Berlin to teach at Lowendorf. The village children, whose idea of a Jew was a man with horns, had quickly grown attached to Herr Elias, who lived in the village, perhaps because he played music for them on his gramophone, and fed them.
I was surprised one evening by a small black bear in a ruffled skirt that had strolled away from some Hungarians busy stealing fruit in the orchard. Fortunately, she was tame, and when I turned to run, she did not chase me.
***
When I spoke to the Metzenburgs, I addressed them as Herr Felix and Frau Dorothea, but that summer they began to call me Maeve, rather than Miss Palmer. Felix preferred the company of as many people as possible, and I was occasionally asked to join them in the dining room. I wasn't asked if guests were expected, but visitors had become rare at Lowendorf. The Metzenburgs' isolation was difficult for Felix, accustomed as he was to brilliant conversation (or so I imagined), if not the distraction of sophisticated companions, but Dorothea did not seem to mind it at all. I seldom saw her. During the day, she drove to the village to visit the sick, taking them clothes and medicine, and to call on the old people who'd been left behind, often without food or money, when their sons were sent to the front. I'd noticed that a house, a dog, a child, or even a crisis often enabled, if not compelled, people to remain together. It gave them, among other things, a subject. I was not the Metzenburgs' subject, but I provided an easy distraction for them while they learned to be alone. It was not my conversation that was sought, but my presence, which both inhibited and stimulated them.
I was a bit stiff at first, and always five minutes too early in the dining room, having raced to change my clothes after I helped Caspar and Schmidt to prepare dinner (the first night, I caught Dorothea staring at Inez's black dress, trying to remember where she'd seen it before). It didn't take long to learn that it was considered bad luck to hand a saltcellar to someone rather than to place it before him, and that one did not say "God bless" at the start of a meal. If, for some reason, you had to leave the table, you did not do so without first asking to be excused. You did not drink tea with dinner, as did my mother. You did not use your napkin to wipe anything other than your mouth, as did my father. You did not eat with animals on your lap, as did some of the Metzenburgs' friends (I didn't count Mr. Knox and his gull, who always took tea with us).
The Metzenburgs kept to their vow not to speak at night about the war, talking instead about books and paintings, or the care of the estate — the weirs needed to be cleaned and the fields planted (there was no seed and no one to plant it), but most of the time they, too, were silent. When they spoke to friends on the telephone, they used a code, grinning slyly, that seemed alarmingly obvious to me — horses meant England, chickens meant Germany, peacocks meant France, bears meant Russia — but fortunately there seldom were telephone calls.
They often listened to the gramophone, perhaps a recording from 1936 of Der Rosenkavalier, or Karajan conducting Straus. When Dorothea said that Strauss wrote EinHeldenleben (we were listening to it for the second night in a row) after a quarrel with his wife, the jarring notes reminiscent of his wife's voice, Felix asked her where in the world she heard such nonsense. He thought it very romantic of her to countenance everything that she heard. As he believed that things could be made perfect, which was to me the most romantic idea of all, his condescension seemed unjust. I waited for Dorothea's answer, but she was silent, bent over a book on Japanese moss gardens. "It was Strauss," Felix said as an afterthought, "who expressed his gratitude to the Führer for his interest in art." He paused. "It presents a conflict, of course, but there are greater ones."
Most nights, however, we listened to dance music. I looked forward to it, the songs going through my head all the following day. I was fond of the French heartthrob Jean Sablon, especially his song "Two Sleepy People." And Lys Gauty, whose song "La Chaland qui passe" made me sad (Felix noticed its effect on me and pointed out that it was a song about a barge). Felix preferred Adam Aston, particularly when he sang "Cocktails for Two" in Polish, and I wondered if it reminded him of a love affair, or two. Once, while listening to The Threepenny Opera, music banned by the Nazis, Felix and Dorothea rose with a smile at the start of "Wie Man SichBettet" and danced to it.
When it was time for the news, Dorothea preferred a program on Berlin radio called Atlantis. It was very popular, perhaps because it featured gossip about the Nazis, and it left her less frightened than the other broadcasts. There were frequent reports of Eva Braun's brother-in-law and of Reichsmarschall Göring, who liked to entertain foreign diplomats while wearing gold leather shorts, his toenails painted red. Felix said that the program clearly had many informants, as the scandal was often only a day or two old, and almost always accurate, which made me wonder how he knew.
It was after an evening of listening to music with Felix and Dorothea that I slipped the amber cigarette holder, the silver dish, the gloves, and the pen that I'd hidden in my room into a drawer of a desk in the library, keeping only Felix's batiste handkerchief.