Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr Page A

and sets it on the wood stove. The bottom half burns Zeno’s tongue; the top half is slush.
    â€œThis be terrific homes, yes, lamb chop? Tremendous, yes?”
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    All night cold seeps through a thousand chinks in the walls and the boy cannot get warm. Navigating the canyon of shoveled snow to the privy an hour before dawn is a horror so grim he prays he will never have to pee again. At daybreak Papa walks him a mile to the general store and spends four dollars on eight pairs of Utah Woolen Mills socks, the best they have, and they sit on the floor beside the register and Papa pulls two socks over each of Zeno’s feet.
    â€œYou remembers, boy,” he says, “there is no bad weathers, only bad clothes.”
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    Half the children in the schoolhouse are Finns and the rest are Swedes, but Zeno has dark eyelashes, nut-brown irises, skin the color of milk tea, and that name. Olivepicker, Sheep Shagger, Wop, Zero—even when he doesn’t understand the epithets, their message is plain: don’t stink, don’t breathe, stop shivering, stop being different. After school he wanders the labyrinth of plowed snow that is downtown Lakeport, five feet atop the service station, six feet on the roof of M. S. Morris Hardware. Inside Cadwell’s Confectionery, older boys chew bubble gum and talk of lamebrains and fairies and flivvers; they go quiet when they notice him; they say, “Don’t be a spook.”
    Eight days after arriving in Lakeport, he pauses in front of a light-blue two-story Victorian on the corner of Lake and Park. Icicles fang the eaves; the sign, half-submerged in snow, says:

    He’s peering through a window when the door opens and two identical-looking women in high-collared housedresses beckon him in.
    â€œWhy,” says one, “you don’t look warm at all.”
    â€œWhere,” says the other, “is your mother?”
    Goose-necked lamps illuminate reading tables; a needlepoint on the wall says Questions Answered Here.
    â€œMama,” he says, “lives in the Celestial City now. Where everyone is untouched by sorrow and no one wants for anything.”
    The librarians incline their heads at the exact same angle. One seats him in a spindle-back chair in front of the fireplace while the other disappears into the shelves and returns with a clothbound book in a lemon-yellow jacket.
    â€œAh,” says the first sister, “fine choice,” and they sit on either side of him and the one who fetched the book says, “On a day like this,when it’s chilly and damp, and you can’t get warm, sometimes all you need are the Greeks”—she shows him a page, dense with verse—“to fly you all the way around the world to somewhere hot and stony and bright.”
    The fire flickers, and the brass pulls on the card catalogue drawers glimmer, and Zeno tucks his hands beneath his thighs as the second sister begins to read. In the story a lonely sailor, the loneliest man in the world, rides a raft for eighteen days before he is caught in a terrible storm. His raft is smashed, and he washes naked onto the rocks of an island. But a goddess named Athena disguises herself as a little girl carrying a pitcher of water and escorts him into an enchanted city.
    The chief with wonder sees the extended streets, she reads,
The spreading harbors, and the riding fleets;
    He next their princes’ lofty domes admires,
    In separate islands, crown’d with rising spires;
    And deep entrenchments, and high walls of stone,
    That gird the city like a marble zone.
    Zeno sits rapt. He hears the waves crash on the rocks, smells the salt of the sea, sees the lofty domes shine in the sun. Is the island of the Phaeacians the same thing as the Celestial City and did his mother also have to float alone beneath the stars for eighteen days to get there?
    The goddess tells the lonely sailor not to be afraid, that it is better to be brave in all things, and he enters a