Nonetheless, there was something of his illness in the very fact that he kept the letter at all. One day when Wilhelm—back when he was Wilhelm, an old-fashioned name even then—was about eight or nine years old, he discovered the key to the locked drawer in his father’s desk. First checking on tiptoe to be sure that no adult was nearby, Wilhelm scampered into his father’s study in their old apartment in Vienna. He climbed up on a chair to better reach the drawer, an old wooden desk drawer crisscrossed with scrape marks, as if someone had been scratching to get into it. Wilhelm inserted the key into the lock with a fervor he could taste and turned it in slow restrained ecstasy, and was astounded and thrilled when the drawer burst forth, gaping and beautiful. Papers mostly, but ah, secret papers! No school compositions, these! Letters on official printed stationery, some of them, from places with unreadably long names. Long lists of numbers, more complicated than a web of tangled shoelaces, with return addresses in Switzerland. Telegrams, written in incoherent stunted sentences. And long brown-inked letters in Hebrew script—Yiddish, Wilhelm knew—written in a shaky hand. Wilhelm plunged his hands into the pile of treasures and pulled one out at random. A gem: a crisp yellowing sheet, typed and printed on letterhead with a giant seal of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, a horrifyingly dark, feathery eagle clutching clawfuls of spears. Wilhelm savored that picture as if it were a portrait of his mother, committing its every detail to memory. But quickly, so that he could move on to the text. And on he read:

Our diagnosis of Private Nadav Landsmann’s psychological state reflects that Private Landsmann is experiencing sustained mental trauma of the type broadly termed “shell shock.” The condition varies in its effect on patients. Some may require lifelong hospitalization; others experience little disturbance in their civilian lives. In Private Landsmann’s case, the illness may express itself, among other symptoms, in continuous nervous behavior verging on paranoia, in sudden or violent fits of temper, in obsessive or compulsive neurotic tendencies, or in the repression of normal emotional response. Further analysis will be necessary to determine the extent and nature of Private Landsmann’s disorder.

Wilhelm Landsmann was blessed with a photographic memory, and he quickly filed all the hard words away in his mind like a spy memorizing a secret code, to hunt them down later in the dictionary. Thrilled to the very bone, he continued reading: “Recommended treatment may worsen the—”

Suddenly a giant hand dropped down from the heavens, smashing the letter down into the drawer and slamming the drawer shut. But the magic drawer wouldn’t quite close, since Wilhelm’s fingers, unaware, were blocking it. And when the hand noticed the reason why the drawer wasn’t closing, slamming it once more wasn’t enough—the hand slammed it again, and again, and again, and again like cannon fire, faster and faster, harder and harder, deliberately catching Wilhelm’s tiny fingers over and over, crushing them again and again until they jumped out of the drawer like animals narrowly escaping a trap.