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a faint smell of garbage and cement moistened by October drizzle. Toni takes a seat on a stool in the corner. The books on the shelves that tower above her are Papa’s treasures. They are mostly in German with dense print, old-fashioned Gothic letters, and impossible words. Books are precious, Julius says, and their value can’t be reckoned in dollars. Once, Hitler’s men burned books in huge bonfires because they were written by Jewish writers or because they said things Hitler didn’t like. His men hunted down books just as later they hunted down people. But they couldn’t burn everything everywhere. If Lisa had her druthers, the books in the study would be much fewer so she’d have space for an ironing board. “He hardly reads them anyway,” she says. “He collects. And they collect dust.”
    Which isn’t true, of course. Julius does read, sitting still as a statue in his chair, a position of deep devotion, while the flicker of his eyelids and the slight movement of his lips tell you he’s very much awake and, um Gottes willen , don’t interrupt. He keeps everything on the shelves clean and perfectly arranged according to rules Toni will never understand. If she pulls out a volume and shoves it back in the wrong place, he rushes to fix her mistake. Ignoring her own stash of Walt Disneys in the corner, she attempts to remove one of Papa’s books now, a fat cloth-bound tome with gold lettering on the spine, like something a wizard might own.
    “What are you doing?” Julius spins around in his chair.
    “Show me, Papa,” Toni pleads. Not that the books themselves mean anything to her. She just likes how he shows them, how he becomes a different Papa when he does. A soft gleam has already dawned in his eyes. He hesitates, twiddling his pencil, but he can’t stop himself.
    “Ah, by instinct you have found a jewel. Jakob Wassermann.”
    He gingerly places the book on the desk in front of him and draws her close. “A great novelist. One of the best of his era. When this book came out in 1928 we filled our whole display case at Stubling’s with copies. This is a first edition.”
    His eyes have gone from washed-out grey to silver-dollar bright. He enfolds Toni in the crook of his arm, keeping her still, while his right hand gently turns pages with the tips of his fingers. Her father handles his books as if they were butterflies that could be crushed by a clumsy gesture. He can spend hours poring over inscriptions with a magnifying glass or gazing at a decorative border. What a book says, he explains, is sometimes only a small part of what makes it beautiful or important. He loves typefaces, bindings, paper, ink. He loves how a fine book is put together, how it rests in his hands, the musty smells of old paper and glue, a black-and-white photo of the author’s face beneath onion skin paper, an engraving of a maiden posed beside a well. He loves the surprises that sometimes tumble out of the pages: a piece of a moth’s wing, a single white hair, a yellowed newspaper clipping, a grocery list from the olden days—signs the book had another life, in another time.
    “Papa, how many books were in your store in Vienna? A million?”
    She could listen forever to his tales about Vienna, a place of towers and spires, boulevards and cobblestone streets, the emperor’s palace and the giant Ferris wheel in Prater Park. A whiff of long-ago, never-again beauty comes through in her father’s recollections. Once Julius sat on his own father’s shoulders to see the emperor’s plume-bedecked carriage pulled by six prancing white stallions. Once he worked in a bookshop with golden letters on the plate-glass windows and oak display shelves and famous customers, like a certain Dr Freud. Those were the days, when lilting Strauss waltzes poured from outdoor band shells, when smells of roasted coffee, crusty rolls, and fine cigars mingled with the scent of hyacinths from the palace grounds, when people dressed for the theatre or