Chapter 1

Subject: The chicken nugget question and its relation to the infusion of Andrea's in the local environment

7 April
Is Andrea trying to tell me something important when, upon planning a dinner party, she complains, "My sister's children only eat chicken nuggets?"
Is she trying to say, "How did I get caught up worrying about things like this and how do I stop?"
Or is she saying, "Is eating chicken nuggets a metaphor for ingesting evil and should I be afraid that I'll catch their moral disease by eating dinner with them?"
Or does she really mean, "I'd really like to eat chicken nuggets too, but I'm afraid?"

Please get back to me on this asap.
Jen

Jennifer then contemplated the news that really interested her: Friedrich von Waldbach was opening up the grounds of his residence. Would he open up the piece of forest through which the Waldbach ran or just permit access to the garden and adjoining meadow? Everyone in town was curious about the castle and the Waldbach family skeletons. Town legend had it that Friedrich's grandfather had belonged to the mundane, decadent Berlin society of the 30's. The father was considered classy, but decidedly uncolorful. Then came Friedrich, who turned out gay. In these three generations, the castle must have gone through violent shifts in personality, as well as decor, but Jennifer had never heard of anyone being invited inside to view the evidence.

Jennifer didn't remember ever having seen Friedrich, much less made his acquaintance. He was said to make himself scarce locally, preferring the nightlife of Hannover and Berlin. This made sense. She'd never seen much evidence of a gay scene in Altenstadt, aside from a frumpy, smoke-filled café on a side street near the center of town. The coffee was oily and the decor was worse. It was interesting that the local residents still found someone like Friedrich scandalous, but then Altenstadt was the equivalent of a redneck nest in rural North America and probably had a history of ostracizing social deviants.

All in all, curiosity about Friedrich von Waldbach or his family history was not quite enough to drag her into a community event. What had caught Jennifer's attention was the private piece of forest adjoining the castle gardens, where she suspected red-starred bluethroats of nesting, and red-starred bluethroats, as she had been told by the local ornithologists to whom she had reported her sighting, were not to be found in Altenstadt. Idiots, she thought.

She surveyed the desktop: soldering iron, pliers, wire, drawings, and pencils took up a large portion of the space. In the left-hand corner, however, was a neat tray with several hardcover notebooks and three round-cornered, dog-eared paperbacks: on the top was a volume of philosophical texts by Ludwig Wittegenstein entitled Über Gewissheit; in the middle was a biography on Wittgenstein entitled Duty to Genius; and on the bottom was a volume of Wittgenstein's correspondence entitled Briefe. Picking up Über Gewissheit, she let it fall open in her hands to a random page, blindly pointed to a place on the page, and read.

285. Wenn Einer etwas sucht und wühlt etwa an einem bestimmten Platz die Erde auf, so zeigt er damit, dass er glaubt das, was er sucht, sei dort.

Although Jennifer read as little German and as much English as possible, she had always heard this voice more clearly in German. She used the act of translation as a means of encoding its secret message: "If someone is looking for something and begins rooting around in a certain patch of earth, he demonstrates the belief that what he is looking for is in that place." Jennifer closed the book, murmuring this sentence. She was not surprised at the aptness of the quote with its obvious reference to her search for the bluethroat. She was used to Wittgenstein's voice at her inner ear. What surprised her was that she had come across this quote previously. It had led to marriage. It was a portentous quote – much too portentous for just bluethroats.