In addition to the house, as a kind of advertising brochure or instruction booklet, I was buying a story. From then on, I would be the owner of a house that had been constructed, even if only in the senile imagination of a nonagenarian, on top of a gigantic coil buried in the earth. It was as though Mr. Mikola, in an inexplicable magnanimity, had given me a bell jar containing his own brain, with a boat-shaped house built upon its hemispheres.
