Nadav snarled. “People like you, you idiot, who know so little that their vocabulary doesn’t even include descriptions of themselves.”

Out of hopeful habit Wilhelm looked to his mother for rescue, but she just sat there staring at her food, stirring it absently as if she were eating alone. In less than a year she would be gone, but she might as well have been gone already. Wilhelm copied her movements, hiding from his father’s face. His father pushed his plate away and left the room, and his mother wordlessly got up and began clearing the table, as if nothing had happened. This was always how things went.

Later Wilhelm took out the dictionary. The dictionary—an immense volume, not a children’s book, with thousands upon thousands of words—was without question his favorite book. He liked reading just about anything, though most of the books he wanted to read were still too hard for him. But the dictionary! He could sit for hours flipping through its pages, reading the definitions, the etymologies, the sample sentences that made each word seem like the cornerstone of a giant house of speech. Everything in it was necessary, yet nothing was excluded. A perfect economy. By an early age, Wilhelm was convinced that every known fact about the world was included in the dictionary. Why ask people questions when the answers were all right here?

Wilhelm opened the dictionary with care, taking his time as he turned the pages. After all, half the fun lay in the words discovered en route to the destination, the stones kicked up on the path to reveal the diamond mines beneath. Since the word Barbar was in the B’s, he turned right to the beginning, glancing at the opening lines of the preface before he plunged into the words themselves. “Language,” it read,

is a people’s most essential common bond, the one true voice of a nation. Yet the core of language lies not in a dictionary such as this, but rather in the living voice. Through the shared words they speak and hear every day, the people of a nation constantly acknowledge the lives and goals they share, their common destiny.

Idiots, Wilhelm thought once he had deciphered the text, stopping on some of the dictionary’s back pages along the way to do so. They don’t even like their own book. To the words, then. He passed by a picture of a man playing an accordion, squeezing his eyes closed as if to better hear his own music. In the same section he found another picture, this time of a rat-like animal with long strange thumbs, its arms and legs spread out in all directions as if flattened by a truck. The caption read, “Opossum mouse, Acrobates pygmaeus.” The definition of Acrobates pygmaeus, listed under its Latin name, read, “A genus of marsupial animals found in Australasia, including the opossum mouse, which flies with the aid of its phalanges.” This, naturally, meant that Wilhelm had to look up Phalangen, on the way to which he detoured to Penis, which was disappointing—“The male sexual organ; in mammals it is also the organ through which urine is expelled.” Phalangen, meanwhile, had something to do with fingers. Staring at his own fingers, he found himself wondering whether there might be some people in the world who could use their fingers to fly, like the Acrobates pygmaeus. Wouldn’t that be neat? Enough flying around now, though. He rushed back to the front of the book, this time directly to