“We all shared a bed then, my twinsister, Mama and Papa. A restauranton the first floor of our building opened lateand closed before dawn, so we rarely slept.Sunday morning exhaustion felt special:Mama would get up to fry pancakesand sweep the hallway while we stayedin bed with Papa. He wrote poemsduring the war, when he worked refining gold,and after wrote parables and hymns,the opposite of bedtime stories.‘In 1924 a snail lefther small village, yes, Huchenfeldup the hill, to attend the book conventionin Leipzig. She loved to read, and publisherssold copies of the newest novels there.No one had a car then, especially nota snail, so she began to walk (or glide, sure)down the hill, in the direction of the fair.It took three years to cover the distancefrom her village to the bottom of the hill—but she had no idea, snails feel timedifferently from how children feel time.She knew, at least, it had taken a while.To speed things up she waited for trucksand small cars to pass, to maybe flagthem for a ride, but her tiny snail handwas never fast enough to grab attention,and her tiny snail head was never fastenough to check who else would pass.’By that point in the story we felt a solemnvisceral empathy that onlychildren feel to that degree. We neededour snail to make it to Leipzig; our father knewthis and began to revise in real time:‘The book conference, of course, lastedone hundred years—it’s still going on—because you’d need that much timeto read all the new pamphlets and picturebooks, and while the snail waited fora slow logger to piggyback, patronsof the conference brought her storiesthey’d memorized from Leipzig, hundredsand hundreds of pages. Eventuallya crowd formed around the snailat the bottom of the hill, each personreciting a story. The snail never leftand neither did the people, that’s howour town began, with that crowd . . .’ By thatpoint in the story we knew he had lied,or at least imagined that parts of our shared lifewere not true. Like when, at the endof Little Red Riding Hood, the wolfeats no one and is arrested by polizei.Because we did not want to leave our bed,my sister and I, we listened to our fatherimprovise. He sang in the church choir.He never spoke about refining gold.”