Fabio Pusterla

There were no alarms, no sentries: how could there have been? The doors were even standing open, and if we could do it again we wouldn't have it any other way. Defenseless—isn't that better? Unarmed? Now we follow these strangers, who lead us along without loving us, without curiosity or comprehension, merely sufficiently convinced of our value, and perhaps intent on profiting from us. We will be passed from hand to hand in the markets of the great prairie. We will grow ever quieter, ever more condemned to wrap ourselves in the blind solitude of objects. Beneath the touch of countless rags, we will let the slightest traces of our origin be erased.

You're dreaming of Cratoids, Armpullers, the Blownose Dragon. Who knows what Anna Brichtova dreamed about, the girl who comes looking for us tonight with her mosaic of colored paper: her house with its red roof, some trees on a green lawn, the sky—outside, the concentration camp. This is the real gift I brought back from Prague without telling you. It was with me on the train the morning I thought I was living in hell: Stuttgart, or south of there, amid a drone of people working—they don't know at what or for whom, but they're working, pressing keys, sending messages to unknown persons through the air. Nothing but eyes and fingers, nothing but one day after the next, interminable passage of a time that doesn't vary, that belongs forever to others, to something outside themselves, and the fear, the hatred of one pariah for another, this brawl of lost souls, of new slaves. The Great Drinker of Beer, the Woman Staring into Space, Mazinger Z: these were my traveling companions. Who knows what Anna Brichtova dreamed about, or what you're dreaming now, or how you children see the world. Will you find, among your games, the game that saves us? It's what we all are hoping as we watch you sleep.