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guard. It’s my duty as mayor, and as … Please don’t leave the path, I beg you, and don’t go looking for what has never existed—or what doesn’t exist anymore.”
    He drew up his great carcass to its full height, yawned, and stretched his huge arms toward the ceiling. “Come with me,” he said. “I want to show you something.”
    He was a good head taller than I was. We left the kitchen and entered a long corridor which wound its way through the entire house. I had the feeling we’d never get out of that corridor; it made my head spin and filled me with dread. I knew Orschwir’s house was big, but I would never have imagined it to be so labyrinthine.
    It was an ancient structure, frequently remodeled, and it bore witness to a time unconcerned with alignment or logic. Diodemus told me that the oldest walls of the house dated back more than four centuries. According to an act he’d found in the archives, the Emperor stopped there in the fall of 1567, on his way to the marches of Carinthia and an encounter with the Grand Turk. I walked behind Orschwir, who stepped out smartly, displacing a quantity of air. I felt as though I were being pulled along in his wake, drawn by his scent, a combination of leather, night, fried bacon, beard, and unwashed skin. We met no one. Sometimes we went up a few steps or down two or three others. I would be hard put to say how long we walked—a few minutes, a few hours—because that corridor erased all the reference points of space and time. Finally Orschwir stopped in front of a large door covered with weathered green copper and square nails. He opened the door, and the milky light behind it dazzled me. I had to stand still for a moment with my eyes closed before I could open them to the light again. And see.
    We were about to step out into the area behind the house. I had never gotten a look at this part of Orschwir’s property except from very far away, while hiking up in the mountains. I knew that the sheds and outhouses back here sheltered the mayor’s entire fortune, and before him his father’s fortune, and that of his father’s father. A pink, noisy fortune, which spent its time wallowing in mud. A squealing fortune, which produced a diabolical racket all day long.
    Orschwir’s gold was swine. For several generations, his family had lived on and grown rich from hog fat. They had the largest pig farm for fifty kilometers around. Every morning, vehicles left the property—carrying either freshly killed corpses or panic-stricken, squealing animals bound for slaughter—and drove to the villages, the markets, and the butcher shops in the surrounding region. These daily rounds constituted a well-ordered ballet which not even the war had managed to disrupt. People eat in wartime, too. At least some of them.
    For three months after the war began, there was a long moment of stupefied calm when everyone gazed eastward and cocked an ear for the sound of marching boots, a specialty of the still-invisible Fratergekeime . (That’s the word in our dialect for those who came here to spread death and ashes, for the men who made me become an animal, men very much like us. Having gone to university in their Capital, I happened to know them well. We associated with some of them, since they often visited our village, brought here by business and trade fairs, and spoke a language which is the twin sister of ours and which we understand with little difficulty.) When the calm ended and our border posts were suddenly swept aside like paper flowers scattered by a child’s breath, Orschwir was not even slightly worried: He kept on raising, selling, and eating his pigs. His door remained immaculate; no obscenities were painted on it. Although the conquerors marching in triumph through our streets bore at least a little responsibility for the idiotic deaths of his two sons, he had no qualms about selling them the fattest of his hogs in exchange for the pieces of silver they pulled out of their