BooksBarbecue
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Chapters (32)
  1. Cover
  2. PART ONE
  3. 1
  4. 2
  5. 3
  6. 4
  7. 5
  8. 6
  9. 7
  10. 8
  11. 9
  12. 10
  13. 11
  14. 12
  15. 13
  16. 14
  17. PART TWO
  18. 1
  19. 2
  20. 3
  21. 4
  22. 5
  23. 6
  24. 7
  25. 8
  26. 9
  27. 10
  28. AFTERWORD
  29. 1
  30. 2
  31. 3
  32. 4

Look around, Seif, look at the wide world around you, and picture it as one enormous house. You’ve got your living room and your hallway, bedrooms and a kitchen, a roof and stairs, maybe even a basement or storage room. And there are bathrooms, too, and in these bathrooms are toilets and drains. These drains…no matter how pretty you make them, how much you dress them up, they’re still drains. Anyone who dreams of turning a bathroom into a living room is crazy, and crazier if they attempt it.

So it was, under the effects of the inspiration that came to me beneath the officer’s shoe, I resolved that, should I live, should I ever get out from under, I would quit this toilet. I would leave it all behind and go to other countries, to other lands, and revel in their variety. For this one, say, is like a living room, warm and welcoming, and that country is a window, made to gaze out of, and another is a garden—a paradise by day and inky black at night—and then there’s one that is a corridor, only good for passing between two more. The point was, you never go back to the toilet, unless…

I finished it for him: “Unless to shit?”

Bahr smiled, “Let’s say, unless I had to.”

“So why did you have to, now?”

He looked at me without replying for a moment, and then, before he could speak again, a great shadow loomed up over us, and there was a man, young but with graying hair, holding out his hand and saying, “Bahr?”

12

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BEGGARS WITH CLASS

When they reopened the district it was immediately evident that they had succeeded. Restored to how it once had been, and better: a slice of Europe; a glistening slice whose pristine beauty drew in high-end stores, their high-end prices filtering out the déclassé shoppers who had filled the streets through the period of its decline.

Seeing the district restored to its former glory, one of the project’s wealthy backers felt tears come to his eyes. He lived in a private residence to which he shipped the most beautiful, rarest, and largest flowers in the world. Being a man in his fifties, he had never witnessed this former glory for himself, but in his mind’s eye he held an image of how it must have been, and it filled him with pride to see it made real.