Signs and Symbols

The first time I read Signs and Symbols, I thought I understood the gist of the story.  A crazy boy who's parents try to come and see him but can't and go home about their day.  But then I read it again, and again, and again.  I started to highlight different things.  First I highlighted all the numbers: fourth time in four years, ten different fruit jellies in ten different fruit jars, a real American of almost forty years, ten minutes (man sitting on the steps), different ages of the boy (four eight and ten), midnight when her husband got up, knave of hearts, nine of spades and ace of spades (which I realize now is equal to ten), and the fact that the phone rings three times.  Numbers were somehow important to this story, but why?  Then I read it again and noticed the emphasis on another thing.  One was names and the other was birds.  I noticed the first name was Mrs. Sol.  This is also another word for sun, I circled the name and moved on.  The second name was Isaac, who was also nicknamed the Prince, and the third name was Soloveichiks.

The Triumph of Death by Pieter Bruegel

At this point I was frustrated.  I didn't understand and I felt pulled in a few directions.  I realized that the story was about chances, or opportunities missed, but I was having a hard time wrapping my mind around it (and to be honest still am).  So I decided to continue in searching, and at that moment, Google was looking very inviting.  When I typed "Signs and Symbols" into the search bar and pushed images, one in general caught my eye.  A piece by an artist that we had recently been talking about, Pieter Bruegel.  Only this time, his painting was The Triumph of Death.  Now I was even more confused, and therefore, my fingers flew across the keypad in order to gain some understanding of the information that had just been unfolded in front of me.  And suddenly, it was clear.  The story was about a Jewish family who had escaped from Germany, and the picture in the book the boy was afraid of was this one.  The picture "which merely showed an idyllic landscape with rocks on a hillside and an old cart wheel hanging from the one branch of a leafless tree."

But now that this picture was involved, my first theory seemed a little more out of reach.  I had thought at first that the story was about Tereus Procne and Philomela.  It made sense in my head.  Opportunities missed.  Procne missed the opportunity to see her sister, Philomela missed the opportunity to grow up normally, and Itys missed opportunity to grow up at all.  Somewhere along the way, while I tried to research this story, I stumbled across a finding of another.  I found that the word for Nightingale in Russian is Solovey, which is very close to the name from the story, Soloveichiks.  I must say that although I am still not sure, my interpretation led me to believe that Signs and Symbols was an interpretation of the story of Terius Procne and Philomela, although I will still be researching this because it will drive me crazy until the puzzle is solved.