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companions, to our places in the dining room.
    There are not many dishes on the table. And they’re the same ones we saw at breakfast, the same ones that are set down on the table every day. They are dishes whose contents never vary. We try to make up for it, though, by sitting down together and then, when we finish eating, by carrying the plates together into the kitchen. Back in our old home, my mother cooked something new every day even though we could have eaten perfectly well from leftovers of the day before. Trying to tell her not to tire herself out, when my father returned home from his shop he would declare that she was cooking food on top of food! At breakfast we would slice thin slivers of cheese from the large rounds that my father so carefully and elaborately selected—naming each kind—from the grocers near his shop.
    Come to the table! my father calls with a vigor that suggests he is summoning us to an overflowing banquet, or at least to a seating that will last longer than the five or ten minutes we will actually sit there, rising quickly afterward to carry the few plates into the kitchen. My mother intones her proverb to remind us how anxious she is: We eat our own flesh if no pennies come afresh! But she no longer has it in her heart to demand that my father must search for a new shop, nor that we must economize more. For she has left to my father the business of figuring out the balance between available funds and time remaining, which of course no one can predict. She’s scolding us again, says my father, exasperated but unable to let it go. How?! he asks. How can a woman who does not know how to add two numbers together have in her head the sum of money we spend daily against the amount of money we have left?
    But even while saying this, my mother did not truly mean that my father should go on looking for a new shop. And no one was saying that I would need to find work either . The watchmakers had scattered after leaving their old workshops. It was no longer possible for my father to imagine me sitting in one of those dark shops, bringing a watch up to my eyes, perched on a chair behind a table in a place he would know well, where the surroundings would be so utterly familiar. In fact, now, none of us could really imagine any real change to our situation, now that we were so accustomed to ordering our life around the few matters we could still arrange in our reduced circumstances: a spare amount of food and as part of that ration, a portion of meat that was far too minimal. Cut it into smaller pieces! my father demands of my mother, leaning forward to peer even more closely at the knife she wields, his pointing finger accusing the meat. It’s the right thing to do, he feels, since after all, the damage meat causes is greater than the benefit it brings. Cut it smaller, he tells her, meaning the meat, and then he will tell her, as she is beginning to cook it, that the fat causes more harm than good. These little things that we find ourselves doing every day as if they are necessary, like getting up to go off to bed the moment my father starts closing and locking windows and doors, like living and moving about in the apartment exactly as we have always done. My mother restores order to the modest chaos we cause by sitting on the balcony. She returns the cushions to their official positions, as if by doing so she can bring the chairs back to a pristine state untouched by our use.
    By the same token, he no longer asks me if I would like him to buy me a magazine to read. As for the books—well, I have a lot of them already, he thinks. Ever since our move, the question he has directed at me will take on another meaning in his eyes whenever he looks at the books: Will you really be able to read all of them? He believes the time has come for these books I bought but still have not read, even now. I have a lot of them, he thinks, and as he watches me heading into the room after breakfast, he