To recap: my novel The Decision comes out on Thursday, August 15th, and I'll be doing a reading-and-signing event that evening. I'm trying to choose an excerpt to read, and I'm enlisting your assistance. The first excerpt is here, and the second follows. (Again, I'm not taking the time to reproduce the more standard formatting in the book.)
This actually takes place earlier than the previous excerpt, in spring/summer 1917. "Mutti" means "Mom" or "Mommy."
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Now that it was getting a little warmer, Mutti sent Hansi
out sometimes to try to get food. Aunt Gertrud had heard that the Central
Market near the Alexanderplatz train station might have some bread, though she
didn’t know where the bread or the potatoes to make bread
could have come from. Mutti told Hansi to go and see and gave him a handful of
ration cards. She’d saved them up, since there hadn’t been any bread anywhere
for so long.
He couldn’t walk very fast, so it took him a long
time to get there. When he’d reached the train station and was almost at the
market, he smelled something bad, something rotten. He should go straight to
the market, but he really wanted to know what smelled so awful, so he got
closer and tried to see.
At first he didn’t see anything
different, but then he saw a whole lot of people standing around near some
train cars, pointing and yelling. He crept up behind the people and carefully
wormed his way toward the front. Then he saw that the cars were leaking. There was some sort
of liquid coming out of them, and that’s what smelled. And
there were some police standing around it, standing very straight as if they
were on guard, and acting like they didn’t mind the smell.
He looked around for a grownup who didn’t
look as angry and wasn’t very big. He found a woman, as thin as everyone these
days, wearing an apron and wringing it in her hands but not yelling. He tapped
her on the arm and said timidly, “What is that stuff that stinks so much?”
He’d thought her voice would be quiet, but it was more of a
wail. “It’s food! At least, it used to be food! The government found some
profiteers and took the food away from them, and then they just left it in those cars to rot! It’s just sitting there rotting, and the police just
stand there as if it were still worth something and they had to keep anyone
from stealing it! Why do they bother?”
She finally shook her fist the way some of the others were doing, and then
slumped her shoulders, turned, and walked away.
Hansi stared at the police. He hadn’t
thought for a long time about the policeman who helped him when he got lost,
but now he remembered, and looked to see if he was there guarding the train
cars. None of them looked familiar. Would that policeman have stood around the
stinking cars like the others? He didn’t want to think so.
Hansi turned and walked away, dragging his feet, until he
got to the market. No one at the market had any bread. Even the feed baskets
for the cart horses were empty, except for a few broken bits of brittle-looking
hay. He turned around and walked home.
Mutti looked at him and sighed. She didn’t
seem surprised that he wasn’t carrying bread. He pulled the ration cards out of
his pocket and held them out for her, but she just stared at them. She stared
so long it started to scare him, and he said, hearing his voice shake, “Mutti?
What is it?”
Mutti spun around and ran to where she kept her purse,
then ran back and stuck both hands into it. Her hands jerked around inside it
before she pulled out two big handfuls of ration cards, at least twice as many
as she’d given him before. And then she laughed, a crazy sort
of laugh, and kept laughing, and threw all the coupons up in the air. She
grabbed more coupons and threw them in the air too, laughing all the time.
Hansi had seen paper confetti once, and it looked like that, except the bigger
pieces of paper fell down faster, fell all over the floor.
Otto ran in to see what was going on. This time Mutti
threw cards right at him. “Have some rations! Everyone, come and get
some rations! There’s plenty for everyone, as long as all you want is cards!”
Then she scooped up one of the cards from the floor and stuffed it in her
mouth, chewing at it with all her might.
Otto hurried to her and grabbed her chin, pulling it down
so she couldn’t keep chewing. “Spit it out, Mutti!” he begged, in a
tone Hansi had never heard from him before. “Please, Mutti, spit it out!”
For a few moments, Mutti tried to keep chewing,
struggling against Otto’s grip. Then she stopped and let her mouth sag open.
Otto reached in and pulled the wad of paper out of her mouth, once and again,
until he’d gotten all of it that he could reach.
Mutti walked slowly to the sofa and sat down all at once, as if she were falling instead of sitting. Otto walked over, slowly, as if afraid of what might happen next, and sat down beside her. Hansi came last, sitting as close to her as he could on her other side, burrowing against her as if he could hide there. They sat like that for a long time.
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Now I need to pick the third possible excerpt! In the meantime, here's the Amazon preorder link and the book cover (below).
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