Max and Me
1.
I was, maybe, fifteen and my brother Max—six, when our old man acquired permanent ownership of a wooden villa, whose sole inconvenience was that you could only lie down in it horizontally, and that it was two meters beneath the ground. He arranged his journey into a better world this way: he fell down drunk from a footbridge into a stream, whose water was only knee high. He managed the fall so well that it’s possible he had help, though we certainly wouldn’t know anything about that.
It’s true that on that very evening mom ordered my brother and me to lay a rope across the footbridge and to slightly saw the handrails. She didn’t say why, and I’m still wondering about that. When the corpse was found in the morning, the ropes were certainly gone.
Mom started wailing:
“O wo
