The broken window

Avenue du Pérou, Brussels 1979.

The broken window

It was one afternoon at my parents’ house in Brussels. The sound of breaking glass startled us all. We searched the entire house to find out where it had come from, until we noticed in my mother’s study, this shattered picture frame. It held a photo of Parpaillon, my parents’ beloved home in the South of France. But it remained a real mystery because the frame had been set on a shelf above the chest of drawers, far from the edge. No one had been in the room, whose door was closed. And the window as well, thus eliminating the draft theory. How had this picture frame been thrown off the shelf? An hour later, while still pondering it all, the phone rang. It was our neighbors from the South of France. The Parpaillon had just been burgled about an hour ago. To gain entrance to the house, the burglars had broken a window.