The Boy Who Fed the Sparrows

The Boy Who Fed the Sparrows

The courtyard of the Gemeindebau in Simmering was not a place for play. It was a functional rectangle of concrete and clipped hedges, designed in the 1970s to contain human life with maximum efficiency and minimum sentiment. At 5:47 PM in late August the heat stood in the air like a wall of warm glass. It pressed down on the grey pavement, on the metal railings, on the perfectly spaced bird feeder that someone from the Hausverwaltung had mounted on a thin pole in the exact center.