Why were you there, Old Man?, Soon finally dares to ask. She doesn’t think he’s opposed to telling her; rather, he thinks of it as common knowledge, as if there were no need to explain or he’d just forgotten to do it. But Soon needs him to explain, even though he looks at her without understanding—there where?, he asks—and she has to specify: at the hospital, why were you a patient in that hospital? Old Man is sitting on the towel, back in his light-colored suit, fresh from the cleaners, with the handkerchief neatly folded and peeking out of his jacket pocket. The weather is harsh that morning, a cold wind shakes the Siberian elm’s branches and the leaves fall around them—day by day, leaf by leaf, the tree is peeling itself onto them. Old Man is thinking, and she’s afraid that now he’s going to hedge, that it wasn’t really a matter of forgetting, but of intentionally keeping a secret. But finally he speaks and says that it was all the fault of the mind police, he wasn’t to blame, he didn’t do anything to deserve being locked up. He was happy doing his work—back then he was working at the bird sanctuary, does Soon remember the sanctuary? But the mind police can’t forgive happiness in people like him, people who don’t have a mother and a father like everyone else, but a mother and a father-grandfather in one! Those people, monsters like him, he goes on—ever more upset, more rushed—aren’t allowed to be happy!, and when they, the mind police, saw how well he was doing his work at the sanctuary, that he was efficient and professional, that he was punctual and showed good judgement, when they saw that all their theories about idiots and simpletons and cretins were falling apart and losing their validity, they got together and agreed to lock him up! They invented an excuse to do it, and voilà!

Old Man’s eyes are burning now, his hair on end and his glasses crooked. As he’s been speaking, he hung the binoculars around his neck, took them off, adjusted them, and put them around his neck again, his movements abrupt and nervous. Astonished, Soon stammers: your … father was also your grandfather? Yes, yes, you heard right!, he replies, taking the binoculars off again and throwing them far away, beyond the shrubs. Why do you have the same look as everyone else?, he asks and jumps up, stomping on the grass. A gust of cold wind blows between them, and Soon is flooded more by curiosity than fear.

Only after a silence, only after he’s apologized, picked up the binoculars and made sure they weren’t damaged, only when he starts to seem more composed—his breathing calmer, his gaze inoffensive—does she ask him to explain. Old Man, really, I don’t understand, she whispers.

Well, at first he didn’t understand either! It took him a long time to understand—he probably wasn’t soon-to-be fourteen, but over fourteen, much older than fourteen! It’s not strange for your father to also be your grandfather if no one has ever told you it’s strange, right? For him, it was the most normal thing in the world! But when he did find out, he understood the evasive looks, the whispers, the house with no visitors, his mother, so silent, his father with his wrinkles and cane. It’s a mistake that Old Man carries with him, like a steer marked with a brand, and that’s why they locked him up, nothing more than that!