‘Did you read the diary?’
‘I didn’t want to.’
‘Why?’
‘Comes with the territory.’
Doris smiled. Her teeth were like pearls which was pretty. She smiled at the young man.
‘The territory when you dig up a diary late at night,’ he said. In particular wrapped in
oilcloth - pragmatically preserved. ‘I was,’ he shrugged, ‘I suppose, curious. Curiosity
killed the cat.’
‘It depends on the context.’
He shrugged. Schrödinger’s cat?
‘It depends on the context,’ reiterated Doris.
He was not deaf. ‘Hyperbole?’ he asked.
‘I can’t recall the context.’
‘Eine fette Ratte ist ein gutes Omen.’ A fat rat is a good omen. ‘Schutt und Asche,’ he
recalled. Rubble and Ashes.
‘The Lord works in mysterious ways.’
‘Jog your memory?’
‘I’m afraid not, but there were many many rats, just after the war.’
‘Wie herrenlose Hunde. Like stray dogs,’ he translated. Literature.
‘Like wild dogs,’ she concurred.
‘The Allies were well-fed.’
‘Were they?’
‘X-cept the rats.’
‘Rats are not people.’
‘Some people are rats,’ he syllogized.
‘Erzähl mir keinen Roman (cut to the chase), Henry.’
Obstinate. ‘Okay, I won’t tell you a novel.’
‘Erzähl mir keinen Roman is an expression, a German figure of speech.’ She copyrighted das
Meisterwerk (magnum opus).
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To my descendants and to whom it may concern,
The amount unaccountably missing from my account amounts to
six percent.
© Doris Putz, 1945
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