Back home we had a big library we were working on. Three thousand volumes we had collected in seven years. Had at least one work by every winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. It was quite an accomplishment to find a good Croatian translation of Bunin, so we taught ourselves basic Russian from a MIG 27 Flight Manual and labels collected from jars of black caviar and transparent vodka.

For the last year that we were gathering these books we made literature a part of our lives. Every morning we would start the day by reading a few lines from the Bible, La Divina Commedia, Good Soldier Schweik, Bukowski's Post Office and the Farmer's Almanac. We would play games, guessing the names of all the Dostoevsky's character, or construct elaborate edifices with books as building blocks. We used to separate the pages with thrilling, illuminating passages, crush them in our soup instead of dried basil leaves, boil pots of paper tea, make love on a bed of open volumes, wipe our asses with last pages of first editions only, careful to rub the pages with our knuckles.

Then we had to leave and leave everything behind.

We take a look at “A Way In the World”. Take turns in taking a look at it. Interestingly enough, Naipaul was the only Nobel Prize winner not included in our abandoned library. Now we think it's more than just a coincidence. Now we think he deserved it.

And we deserve a break.

It's been raining, off and on, for the past week. All we did was just run between the car and the apartment, laughing to ourselves how a person could live an entire life in California without ever owning an umbrella. But now we really have to take out the trash.

Next to the dumpster we find a box full of rain soaked books.

“Horrible! Horrible Americans!” says N.

“Savages!” says O.

There's no respect for the written word in the consumerist society, we complain. For them a book is worth no more than an empty Coke can. Useless, once you drink up the contents. Throw it away. Recycle. Forget.

We dig in like the homeless. The first layer of books is ruined, wet pages crumble in our hands, but underneath some are quite dry. The vile smell of decomposing garbage finally chases us away. We could use a fifth hand to let us back in the building.

…

A woman in her thirties. Brown, rather than black. Pacing. In a room. Measuring it, from a door to a window, from a wall of shelves to a wall of framed photographs. The photographs stare at her, menacing, with black and white faces, with big blown up eyes that speak in a foreign language. Shelves are grinning with their missing teeth, like a mouth of a person lying too close next to her, stealing her breath, suffocating. The window scares her so much that she doesn't even walk all the way up to it. The door?

We pick through our newly found treasure. Read the titles out loud in the order we had taken them out of the box. Most of them are still damp so we sort them out on our kitchen floor to dry.

The Norton Anthology of English Literature Volume Two
The Fire of Your Life… Scream When You Burn
How To Read a Poem… Eating Chinese Food Naked
America's Dream… Women and Common Life
The Dreams of Women… Goddesses in Every Woman
Beloved, Crooked Little Heart
How To Work a Room… Putting Away Childish Things
Born of a Woman… In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd
The Mother I Carry… The Chorus of Stones
Innocence
The Fruitful Darkness
City of One
Abnormal Psychology
Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton

“Beloved?” says N.

Interestingly enough, Morrison was the only Nobel Prize winner not included in our abandoned library. More than just coincidence. O. opens the book and out falls the letter.