“It was as if there was a roulette wheel turning, not with numbers, but with destinations that had evocative names: Sofia, Odessa, Bangkok, Istanbul. He had been watching the wheel spin, waiting to see where the ball would finally land. He would be happy to go to any of these faraway places and so assumed there was no way he could lose. Black or red would satisfy him in equal measure. The same was true of even, odd, or any individual number. It seemed like the best of all possible bets.
But he had forgotten about one thing, the green zero, that anomaly of an otherwise symmetrical wheel, that natural, unglamorous color so unsuited to a casino’s style and which would send him nowhere he wanted to go, but to the very place he thought he had forever escaped from.”
– From an extract of The Cathedral of Es, a novel about spies, writers, and a lost generation in training in 1990s Prague. The extract was published in Budapest’s Pilvax Magazine.
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Photos – 1) Street scene with the French Cathedral, Berlin, Lyonel Feininger, 2) Street scene with the French Cathedral, Berlin, Lyonel Feininger, negative
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