Chapter 1
Chocolate PeopleThe old women seemed deeply troubled. The older they were, the more grief was etched into their faces. The eldest bit her lips, frozen in place, one hand covering her mouth.
They stood together in a small circle around a rectangular stone monument. The inscription told everyone that a village had once stood there, until it was burned to the ground by the Nazis during the Second World War.
It was late autumn. Cold rain drifted through the wind, and the sky hung low and gray. The women, all in their sixties and seventies, wore similar coats and scarves. From a distance, they looked almost identical, as if they belonged to the same forgotten family.
"The house was here," one of them whispered.
The wind suddenly fell silent.
In that perfect stillness, a house appeared.
It was a wooden house with a terrace stretching across its front. A table and several chairs stood neatly arranged outside. Everything, the walls, the porch, the furniture, was the color of dark chocolate.
People moved across the terrace.
Women.
Children.
They, too, were made of chocolate. Thick chocolate dripped slowly from their bodies, as though they had just climbed from a pool of melted cocoa and had never bothered to dry themselves.
No one at the memorial spoke.
Then the women gasped together.
One of them whispered, her voice trembling,
"This is the least we can do."
