My Fathers' Ghost is Climbing in the Rain Read Online Free PDF Page A

chopped olives over the meat, along with hard-boiled eggs and anything else you want to add—here the options seem limitless: pieces of pepper, raisins, dried apricots or prunes, almonds, walnuts, hazelnuts, canned vegetables, et cetera—and then knead the meat so that the ingredients you’ve added are well distributed throughout. Then season with salt, paprika, cumin and chili powder and use the dish towel to shape the meat into a compact block that doesn’t break apart as you handle it; if the meat doesn’t stick together well, you can add bread crumbs. When the mixture is ready, place it into a lightly oiled mold and put it in the oven. Bake it until the meat loaf—since that’s what you’re making—isgolden brown. It can be eaten hot or cold and accompanied by a salad.

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    The doctor—perhaps the one from before or maybe a different one; they all look the same to me—said: Anything can happen. And in my head those three words kept turning around until they had no meaning: Anything can happen, anything can happen, anything can happen, anything can happen, anything can happen, anything can happen …

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    My brother was nervously flipping channels until he stopped on one. It was showing a war film. Even though the plot was confusing and the acting was horrible and constantly thwarted by a camera that seemed to have been deliberately placed where the characters’ faces couldn’t be seen or where they should be walking, which brought about inevitable cuts where presumably the actors tripped over the camera and they had to redo the take, I slowly understood that the film was about a man who, after an accident, which wasn’t shownin the film and which presumably had been a car accident or even an airplane crash, woke up in a hospital not knowing who he was. Naturally, the doctors didn’t know either, nor did the numerous police officers who questioned him. A nurse who looked like a butcher, who at the beginning of the film seemed particularly impatient with the man and with his persistent questions about who he was, or had been, and what he was doing there, ended up taking pity on him, and she told him that she’d found among his clothes, or among the shreds of his clothes, a piece of paper with half a dozen names on it, and she handed it to him. The nurse and the patient agreed that he wouldn’t talk to anyone about it, especially not to the head doctor, a tall sickly-looking man who seemed to hate the nurse and from whom she protected the patient when this doctor doubted his version of the facts or pestered him with questions. That night, the patient ran away from the hospital: he had decided to go in search of the people on the list and make them say who or what he was. With the money that was on him when the accident happened—a huge amount, which he didn’t know how he’d gotten, and which the nurse had secretly given him that night, along with some clothes—he checked into a hotel on the outskirts of town and from there began his search with the help of the phone book. But the search wasn’t as simple as anticipated. Three of the six people were alreadydead or had moved, and another two agreed to talk to him only to admit they didn’t know who he was or why their names appeared on that list; on both occasions the conversation was tense and ended badly, with the protagonist getting thrown out. He wasn’t surprised that all of the people on his list were somehow related to the hospital. The one remaining person refused to talk to him, so the protagonist started to hang around his house. He discovered with some surprise that he had a huge talent for spying, a talent that allowed him to observe people without being seen and to blend into the crowd when he was being followed. An incidental talent, which he discovered one night, was picking locks; after opening one, he entered a dark room, some sort of poorly lit living room; he advanced silently a few steps and headed toward an adjacent room that, he