So much hot air rising above the tables in the Café Heck or the Osteria Bavaria, like smoke from the ovens. It was difficult to believe from this perspective that Hitler was going to lay waste to the world in a few years’ time.

“Time isn’t circular,” she said to Dr. Kellet. “It’s like a palimpsest.”
“Oh, dear,” he said. “That sounds very vexing.”
“And memories are sometimes in the future.”

He had never met the farmer’s daughter in the yard, feeding the geese. Wasn’t there a nursery rhyme in there somewhere? No, he was thinking of the farmer’s wifem wasn’t he?—cutting off tails with a carving knife. A horrid image. Poor mice, he had thought when he was a boy. Still thought the same now that he was a man. Nursery rhymes were brutal affairs.