Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

conversation was taking place that meant, “I can't read it here like this. I'll take it to the bedroom, I'll read it slowly, carefully, I'll give your life story what it deserves.” But in what I knew to be the context of our conversation it meant, “I have failed you.”
    Do you know what time it is?
    The first time Anna and I made love was behind her father's shed, the previous owner had been a farmer, but Dresden started to overtake the surrounding villages and the farm was divided into nine plots of land, Anna's family owned the largest. The walls of the shed collapsed one autumn afternoon—“a leaf too many,” her father joked—and the next day he made new walls of shelves, so that the books themselves would separate inside from outside. (The new, overhanging roof protected the books from rain, but during the winter the pages would freeze together, come spring, they let out a sigh.) He made a little salon of the space, carpets, two small couches, he loved to go out there in the evenings with a glass of whiskey and a pipe, and take down books and look through the wall at the center of the city. He was an intellectual, although he wasn't important, maybe he would have been important if he had lived longer, maybe great books were coiled within him like springs, books that could have separated inside from outside. The day Anna and I made love for the first time, he met me in the yard, he was standing with a disheveled man whose curly hair sprang up in every direction, whose glasses were bent, whose white shirt was stained with the fingerprints of his print-stained hands, “Thomas, please meet my friend Simon Goldberg.” I said hello, I didn't know who he was or why I was being introduced to him, I wanted to find Anna, Mr. Goldberg asked me what I did, his voice was handsome and broken, like a cobblestone street, I told him, “I don't do anything,” he laughed, “Don't be so modest,” Anna's father said. “I want to be a sculptor.” Mr. Goldberg took off his glasses, untucked his shirt from his pants, and cleaned his lenses with his shirttail. “You want to be a sculptor?” I said, “I am trying to be a sculptor.” He put his glasses back on his face, pulling the wire earpieces behind his ears, and said, “In your case, trying is being.” “What do you do?” I asked, in a voice more challenging than I'd wanted. He said, “I don't do anything anymore.” Anna's father told him, “Don't be so modest,” although he didn't laugh this time, and he told me, “Simon is one of the great minds of our age.” “I'm trying,” Mr. Goldberg said to me, as if only the two of us existed. “Trying what?” I asked, in a voice more concerned than I'd wanted, he took off his glasses again, “Trying to be.” While her father and Mr. Goldberg spoke inside the makeshift salon, whose books separated inside from outside, Anna and I went for a walk over the reeds that lay across the gray-green clay by what once was a stall for horses, and down to where you could see the edge of the water if you knew where and how to look, we got mud halfway up our socks, and juice from the fallen fruit we kicked out of our way, from the top of the property we could see the busy train station, the commotion of the war grew nearer and nearer, soldiers went east through our town, and refugees went west, or stayed there, trains arrived and departed, hundreds of them, we ended where we began, outside the shed that was a salon. “Let's sit down,” she said, we lowered ourselves to the ground, our backs against the shelves, we could hear them talking inside and smell the pipe smoke that seeped between the books, Anna started kissing me, “But what if they come out?” I whispered, she touched my ears, which meant their voices would keep us safe. She put her hands all over me, I didn't know what she was doing, I touched every part of her, what was I doing, did we understand something that we couldn't explain? Her father said, “You can stay for as long as you need. You can stay forever.” She pulled her shirt over her head, I held her breasts in my hands, it was awkward and it was natural, she pulled my shirt over my head, in the moment I couldn't see, Mr. Goldberg laughed and said, “Forever,” I heard him pacing in the small room, I put my hand under her skirt, between her legs, everything felt on the verge of bursting into flames, without any experience I knew what to do, it was exactly as it had been in my dreams, as if