In the light of the gooseneck lamp, he stretches out on the sofa with the Guardian. Flash flooding up in Yorkshire, suicide bombings in Palestine and Iraq. The doors to the garden are open to the June night. It is too late now for the piano; next door, Esther is probably asleep. He hears it in his head instead, the blue halftones of Bach.

He inhales the night air: humid, earthy, green. In the shady garden of the house on Hesabi Street, there was a shallow pool that turned green as glass in the summer heat. Around it, his mother kept coleus and geraniums in clay pots. They had two turtles, too—Xerxes and Artaxerxes, impossible to tell apart—that he fed lettuce leaves and celery stalks. He remembers how they lumbered, oddly agile, on their stubby legs; the green-brown patchwork of their shells, their armored underbellies, the precise chewing movements of their small, sharp beaks. Turtles were long-lived creatures. Perhaps they were there still. His sister Darya was still living in the house. She and her husband, the dentist, had two daughters, already grown. The dentist was bearded, devout. The women blackbirds in chador. He has not seen his sister in nearly 30 years.

Thus it was that Minas’s “social skills,” as Teta called them, never developed through regular interactions with his peers.

—Let the child be, was Evthalia’s advice. He doesn’t have any real peers at school, he’ll nd them at the university.

It was a convenient solution, since it pushed the problem off to a future date, which at the time had seemed fairly distant. At the time. Now, though, when the much-discussed year of exam preparation had arrived and his parents’ high expectations had suddenly flown out the window, Minas’s social isolation presented yet another burden—though at this precise moment such issues paled in comparison to Minas’s provocative declarations concerning the Panhellenic Exams.

Teta watched as the other kids ran their long-distance race. The other mothers never missed an opportunity to update her on their children’s progress. With glee, it seemed to her, though they probably thought they were just being friendly. Teta felt like a turtle missing its shell. Her brief chats with other mothers on the phone and their chance encounters around the neighborhood lled her with a dreadful guilt. No matter how hard she fought it, no matter how many times Evthalia tried to comfort her with the observation that these things happen, just try to adjust, she still felt that she must have done something wrong to make Minas fall apart at the very moment when the other kids were rising to the challenge, even those who were clearly not destined to succeed.

Meanwhile, the news about the NYPL’s plan was circulating, and polemics were soon matched to satire. On April 7, 2012, radio bard Garrison Keillor used his fictional detective, Guy Noir, to address the NYPL controversy on A Prairie Home Companion. In the segment, Guy Noir has been hired by a Manhattan client keen to sell his “big one bedroom” apartment for $11 million. Rumor has it that an elusive Russian “natural gas multibillionaire” from Siberia might be interested in purchasing the unit. “Go find me that Russian,” Noir is told.

Noir races around New York City in search of a Russian accent, and nally shows up at the 42nd Street Library — “to see if anybody had taken out Pushkin recently.” A hunch-backed librarian, whose name is Igor, uses an old elevator to bring the gumshoe deep into the “sub-sub-sub basement, in the stacks”: