Now I don’t recall why I strode that day down the long gray hallway to Herr Hohenzweig’s office. I know I dreaded him. An eccentric, Hohenzweig fancied himself a country gentleman. At our board meetings he’d wear his shooting shoes tied at the sides with leather thongs, and an idiotic green wool vest. Most unbecoming conduct for a man of his position in our organization! Still, he was diligent and trustworthy.
I opened his door. He was not there. There was a painting of a brace of hares behind his chair. The splatters of red pigment flashed in the light as readily as genuine blood.
His heavy oak desk was strewn with rustic distractions: a bust of Old So-and-so, erect celluloid fountain pens carved to look like antlers’ points, postcards of alpine vistas with pretty skiers in the way. But there was a book in the middle of all of that. It was a great big flagstone of a book, with an oxblood cover, and written in English letters in gold on its face was my name.
It wasn’t my name, but it was! It was my name in dreams and fairy tales, the word a princess might whisper to me when Night drew her cloak about us! How I longed to open that book! To inhale the fragrance of its binding! Tales and tales and tales….
The ridiculous cuckoo of Hohenzweig’s cuckoo clock yanked me from my reverie like a stilleto from a sucking wound. I backed away and closed the door and hurried down the long gray hallway.
That night I dreamt of rising and falling tides, of the slow turning of planets, of clouds and seasons and atmospheres. When I returned to work in the morning, the long gray hallway was closed. “Renovations?” I learned that Hohenzweig had resigned.
“What a disgrace!” said the girl at the typewriter. “He had so much to lose, too!” I was called away on other affairs before I could ask her what had happened.
I am an old woman now. My husband, Gott hab ihn selig, didn't know me before he knew me; he had no inkling of my past life, when I worked in the gray office. I feel now there is so great book being shut on another planet somehwere, and I do not know if it is the Writer or the Reader who shuts it.
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