He'd been a musician, a conductor. Three days before he died, he conducted his final concert in the Stadthalle. Gyorgy, Ligeti, Bartok, Conrad Beck.--My mother loved him all  her life. Not that he noticed. That anyone noticed. No one knew of her passion, not a word did she ever speak on the subject. 'Edwin,' mind you, she would whisper when she stood alone at the lake, holding her child's hand. There, in the shade, surrounded by quacking ducks, she'd look across at the sunlit shore opposite. 'Edwin!' The conductor's name was Edwin.

Perhaps the leopards symbolized something. A leopard is a wild beast. Capitalists are ferocious in their greed for profit and their exploitation of the proletariat. Killing a leopard in a zoo might be a way of demonstrating to the capitalists that their days were numbered. But, reasoned Mousy, workers are also ferocious when demanding their ...