The Shadow of the Object

He’d been gone for many years, vanished one Sunday into the labyrinth of the city, after going to play chess with a colleague. The rave had been held in a huge building in Mexico City, soon to be the first AIDS hospital in Latin America. It was an odd choice of photograph: in it, she was turning away from the camera, as if someone were calling her name. In the end, he was one of twenty-nine Nuremberg toymakers, including Bing and Spier, forced to sell off their firms.