I’ll never get the key. I fall back against the seat, cover my face with my hands. I’m crying. All I can do is cry. The tears keep pouring out. Locked inside this little box, I can’t go anywhere. It’s the middle of the night. The men keep rocking the car back and forth. They’re going to turn it over.

—translated by Jay Rubin

THE FALL OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE , THE 1881 INDIAN UPRISING, HITLER’S INVASION OF POLAND, AND THE REALM OF RAGING WINDS

1.
THE FALL
OF THE
ROMAN EMPIRE

I FIRST NOTICED the wind had begun to blow in the afternoon on Sunday. Or more precisely, at seven past two in the afternoon.

At the time, just like always—just like I always do on Sunday afternoons, that is—I was sitting at the kitchen table, listening to some innocuous music while catching up on a week’s worth of entries in my diary. I make a practice of jotting down each day’s events throughout the week, then writing them up on Sunday.

I’d just finished with the three days up through Tuesday when I became aware of the strong winds droning past my window. I canned the diary entries, capped my pen, and went out to the veranda to take in the laundry. The things on the line were all aflutter, whipping out loud, dry cracks, streaming their crazed comet tails off into space.

When I least suspected it, the wind seemed to have picked up out of nowhere. Hanging out the laundry on the veranda in the morning—at eighteen past ten in the morning, to be exact—there hadn’t been the slightest whisper of a breeze. About that my memory is as airtight as the lid on a blast furnace. Because for a second there I’d even thought: No need for clothespins on such a calm day.

There honest to goodness hadn’t been a puff of air moving anywhere.

Swiftly gathering up the laundry, I then went around shutting all the windows in the apartment. Once the windows were closed, I could hardly hear the wind at all. Outside in the absence of sound, the trees—Himalayan cedars and chestnuts, mostly—squirmed like dogs with an uncontrollable itch. Swatches of cloud cover slipped across the sky and out of sight like shifty-eyed secret agents, while on the veranda of an apartment across the way several shirts had wrapped themselves around a plastic clothesline and were clinging frantically, like abandoned orphans.

It’s really blowing up a gale, I thought.

Upon opening the newspaper and checking out the weather map, however, I didn’t find any sign of a typhoon. The probability of rainfall was listed at 0%. A peaceful Sunday afternoon like the heyday of the Roman Empire, it was supposed to have been.