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446 pages, Hardcover
First published May 4, 2006
Usually, twice during the day and at least once in the night, I do the rounds of all the cabins on both sides of the lake. Early morning, soon as the sun’s up I check all the windows and doors in every cabin, make sure nothing’s been smashed or broken into. If something doesn’t look right I’ll go peek inside. Actually, the dogs are always the first to sense when something’s amiss. They run around each cabin and they give a short bark to say everything’s fine.
Grandfather’s memory was made up of wars instead of calendars or saints’ days. Wars were more important than the seasons, above wars there was only God. According to grandfather, time moved from one war to the next. And in the same way, wars marked out space much more accurately than maps.
Bricklayers, concrete workers, plasterers, welders, electricians, crane operators, drivers, delivery men, all kinds, same in the offices, and it would turn out that one of them had been one thing, another had been something else, one was from here, another from there, they’d been in camps, prisons, one army or another, they’d fought in the uprising, in the woods, they had kidney problems from being beaten, they were missing teeth or fingernails, they were ageless, or still really young but already gray-haired. Every building site in those days was a true Tower of Babel, not of languages, but of what could happen to people.