Mother, she thought, Mother, these are our final days. Our inner farewell tour. One could talk about feelings. My feeling is that I’m going to take off. See you one last time, smell you, listen to your yammering, to make it easier to go. If I stay with you I’ll become what surrounds me. All these children and youths pulled into the abyss by their parents. Flung to the ground from life or—shall we say—from a vegetative state, these parents. And there they lay. Drunk, depressed, ill, spent, mumbling unhappily, yammering, and the children place a pillow beneath their parents’ head and leave with the feeling that the world owes them something because they have such pathetic parents, who are everything to them. Are. Their world. Which is collapsing. There is nothing more dangerous on earth than children without a foothold. And I don’t want to end up there. I don’t want to let my life be influenced by someone who despises me. Even if that word is a bit of an overstatement. Even if I know it’s really just yourself that you don’t like. Mother. Because you blame yourself for your misery. Because you think women bring unhappiness upon themselves. And even if I realize that the world, this wonderful world, where ever more people come into money, and yeah, yeah, infant mortality rates and all that, that this world has made losers of our parents. Because they didn’t inherit anything. Because they were born into the wrong families. Because they just passed on what was inside them. Thought Don. She would like to have said these words, but didn’t know what good it would do. Don had collected enough information about her situation to know that it couldn’t be much worse. She had to get out of here. The bottle clanking in the empty street, the sounds of the small, damp city—just not cool. These are small-town sounds. The squeaking of pram wheels and sparrows. Aside from the sparrows no birds even strayed into this town.

On the way to school,

Which Don for reasons that are not clear is the only one from the group still attending, she hears a couple of cars and Pakistanis fighting with each other. She hears the sparrows and thinks for a moment what a real city must sound like, Chinese advertisements, cars honking in traffic, all sorts of languages, helicopters, sirens, and she becomes dizzy with the desire for excitement and grandeur.