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Crystal Night: Berlin 1938
It is so still she can hear the piano next door; someone is practicing being alien. In her bedroom a large child stares at a homemade dollhouse. She frowns; she moves figures around. She takes away the furniture in the living room three times: a pasted couch and tables, empty spools. There is nothing in the kitchen but in the bathroom a small plastic toilet gives private delight. The piano stops stumbling. Its large silence makes a vacancy, if only someone were warned. But the child is intent on her dollhouse family, placing them with thick steady fingers: they do what she wants. In their wallpaper nest the mother and father are rigid as little matchsticks: mother slants back against the sofa and father in the armchair also doesn't listen. The puppet master child can hardly breathe, there is such fixed concentration in the cutaway shoebox dollhouse. Upstairs a toy baby flops in a small pink bassinette and the older sister feels ugly. She lies on a floor waiting to be used. Outside it is wartime or snow raging. The winds are carrying. whole countries, shattered glass, away. But the child moves furniture into place and tacks down the curtains, just so. Now the pink baby is smacked rather too hard, the doll sister shoved roughly onto her bed while downstairs mother and father, stiffly, do not stir. Night, masked, impassive, peeps in the window and the future, that hit man, takes his position in the shrubbery.