Extraits

“My God, Silvia” was the first thing she said to me face-to face, standing out there by the Morningside gate with her camera while my mother and I dragged our suitcases up the hill. “Are we going to have enough rations for you?”

The Morningside had changed hands a number of times and was then in the care of a man named Popovich. He was from Back Home, in the old country, which was how my aunt had come to work for him.

Long ago, before the desert, when my mother and I first arrived in Island City, we moved to a tower called the Morningside, where my aunt had already been serving as superintendent for about ten years.

The Morningside had been the jewel of an upper-city neighborhood called Battle Hill for more than a century. Save for the descendants of a handful of its original residents, however, the tower was, and looked, deserted. It reared above the park and the surrounding townhomes with just a few lighted windows skittering up its black edifice like notes of an unfinished song, here-and-there brightness all the way to the thirtythird floor, where Bezi Duras’s penthouse windows blazed, day and night, in all directions.