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Glass everywhere from the broken window. He'd have to find clothes elsewhere.
Thus toward the middle of the morning on December 21, 1933, a naked Nubar Wallenstein, sole heir to
the largest oil fortune in the Middle East, sucking his thumb and shivering violently in a swirling fog, left his
fetal position in the master bedroom of his spacious Venetian palazzo and wandered into the corridor on
the second floor, in search of clothes to wear on what would be the longest day of his life, under his arm
a stack of incoherent journals, bewilderingly contradictory, titled The Boy.
It was dark in the corridor, the chandeliers having all been removed months ago. Nubar sucked his
thumb and worked his way along the wall. Behind him the fog from his bedroom billowed out into the
corridor in impressive clouds.
Fog. Ahead to the left a feeble yellow glow came from what had once been the music room. Nubar
tiptoed over and peeked in.
A gang of about a dozen servants and their relatives were milling around the room with torches and heavy
crowbars, arguing loudly about who should hold the torches and who wield the crowbars to pry up the
marble flooring.
One of the women had left a battered old pair of brown galoshes outside the door. Nubar stepped into
them. They were torn and cracked and much too large for him, about twice the size of his small feet, but
at least walking on rubber would be better than going barefoot on the cold marble floors.
Nubar shuffled forward, slowly moving away from the weak yellow glow that already seemed dimmer.
Behind him the demolition crew in the music room erupted into passionate Italian curses as they bumped
into one another and knocked each other down, suddenly unable to see what they were doing because of
the thick fog rolling into the room from the corridor.
Somewhere back there a voice screamed, followed by a different scream and a third. Crowbars were
striking something solid with heavy thuds. Heads being broken? A falling-out over loot? Why not, the
thieves deserved it. Nubar sucked his thumb and giggled. He skated over to the top of the grand
staircase, where a torch had been jammed into a hole in the wall.
He removed the torch and examined his finger. It was still bleeding slightly. He put the thumb back in his
mouth and waddled down the staircase toward the grand entrance-hall on the ground floor, the volumes
of The Boy pressed tightly against his sunken chest.
Disorder on every side. Holes in the walls, craters in the floors. Here and there flickering corners heaped
with chunks of rotting bread and gnawed bones and the glittering skeletons of chickens picked clean,
stinking salami wrappers and twisted olive-oil tins and mounds of rigid tangled pasta, the debris his
servants had left around the makeshift cooking fires they had hastily set up and abandoned on their
destructive migrations through the palazzo.
Rampaging Visigoths, thought Nubar. Marauding Ostrogoths. The fools. Didn't they realize that when
they pillaged him they were pillaging the very foundations of Western civilization? Idiots. When would
they ever learn?
Nubar picked his way carefully around the smoldering campfires toward the lofty devastated space that
had once been the salon, through the desolate wasted savanna that had once been the library.
Mad savages, he muttered as he shuffled forward, his destination a small room behind the kitchen where
the cooks had once changed into their uniforms before coming on duty, months ago when that was still
done. He thought there might be some clothes there but when he finally reached the small room, now a
murky cave with assorted shards and bones scattered around the entrance, he found only some
underwear hanging on a hook, women's underwear, monstrously large even by Italian working-class
standards.
Women's underwear. Monstrous. Nubar poked through the huge damp articles and found mold
everywhere. They must have been hanging there for months, at least since the rains of the previous spring.
Still, he had to have something to wear.
An enormous pair of thick brown stockings, too big for him to use as stockings. A scarf? Nubar wound
the stockings around and around his neck, making a thick scarf for himself.
Enormous brown bloomers. Nubar stepped into them and found that the waistband came all the way up
to his armpits. He wound the bloomers around the top of his chest, tying knots, three or four times
around his chest and dozens of knots before the bloomers would stay up. He sucked his thumb and
studied the next article.
An immense brown canvas corset, boned. The corset was also big enough to go around him three or four
times. Nubar looped the corset ties over his shoulders and knotted them under his armpits. The corset
reached down below his knees and was pleasantly warm. Because it restricted his legs he found he had
to take small mincing steps, but no matter. He had to take small mincing steps anyway because he
couldn't lift the large brown galoshes off the floor, only push them forward a little bit at a time.
A brown canvas brassiere, each cup large enough to held a man's head.
Nubar giggled.
Why not? His ears were aching from the damp cold of the fog that had followed him down the main
staircase from his bedroom. Impenetrable fog. Soon it would become so thick it would obscure all the
rooms on the first floor as well.
Nubar pulled one of the brassiere cups over his head and fitted it snugly around his ears, tying the strap
under his chin. With half of the brassiere now a warm skullcap enclosing his head, the other half hung on
his back shaped like a roomy rucksack.
Why not? thought Nubar. He tied the strap from the lower half of the brassiere to an eyelet in the corset,
so the rucksack could be steady and not dump out its contents when he moved.
Steady. Nubar floated into the pantry and removed the wooden canteen he kept hidden there behind a
broken wagon wheel. Then he filled the canteen with mulberry raki from a demijohn he kept hidden
under the decomposing carcass of a sheep that looked as if it had been slaughtered for ritualistic
purposes.
Barbarians. You couldn't be too careful. Anything of value had to be hidden from these pillaging hordes.
Steady. Voices approaching. Perhaps a patrol?
Nubar pressed himself against the wall in the pantry and held his breath as a wrecking crew of servants
trooped through the kitchen shouting loudly to each other, apparently coming from the direction of the
main dining room with something long and heavy, perhaps a beam, going toward the back door. The
noisy gang passed no more than a few yards away but Nubar, dull brown and immobile, was able to
escape detection in the thick fog.
He dropped the canteen into his rucksack and entered the scullery, there to make his most spectacular
find of the morning, a long greasy housecoat propped up on a pole, like an animal skin, beside the dead
embers of a campfire, no doubt left behind by some woman vandalizing another wing of the palazzo.
Nubar pulled it down and found that the housecoat was a fine garment in faded violet with a large floppy
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