Stella. Takis Wurger
had no scent, she said. The sunflower tempts bees with its beauty, she said, but has no drops of nectar at its heart, only nasty seeds.
I walked into the fields to find the scent of the flowers, and among the flower heads I felt sure that the cook was wrong. On hot summer days, when the heat burned into the pollen, the sunflowers gave out a fragrance; it was subtle, but I could smell them. And once I had recognized their scent, I smelled it again when I left the window open when I went to sleep.
It was important to have a good sense of smell. I could smell the alcohol in the hall when I came home.
I asked the beekeeper and the gardeners what sunflowers smelled like, but nobody knew. I thought it meant something, that I could smell them.
In the year 1935, Mother drank a bottle of potato schnapps when the Nuremberg Laws were announced. Mother topped up her glass a lot. I sat beside her and counted. She raised the glass to Adolf Hitler’s health, calling him “Adolphe,” as if he were a Frenchman.
That night, as Mother slept on the parquet floor of the ballroom, I went into the kitchen. The cook sat crying by the stove, eating freshly whipped buttercream from a wooden spoon to soothe herself. I stroked her cheek, like Father had done to me when I was little.
A few days later I overheard an argument between Mother and Father, in which she demanded that he fire the cook, whose challah she ate happily every morning. Mother called her a Jewish sow. Father said he wasn’t going to fire anybody.
Mother spent more and more time with her canvases. When she wasn’t painting, the canvases leaned against the wall of the attic, turned backward. Nobody was allowed to look at them.
The night after they argued, Father came to my bedside. I pretended I was asleep. He sat down cross-legged at the foot of the bed and said, “My boy, one thing . . .” then there was a long pause. I wasn’t sure he would finish the sentence. “The Lord created everything imaginable, do you know that? Blackbirds and elephants . . . According to Luke, God is in every creature. Do you understand, son? We must take good care of them, these creatures.”
The earnestness in his voice made me uncomfortable. I didn’t answer. He pinched my foot and said, “I know you’re awake.”
In the year 1938, the traveling exhibition “Degenerate Art” opened in Berlin, 1,406 synagogues and places of worship burned down in Germany in a single night, and in late summer I went into the sunflower field with the cook’s son. We were already tall enough to see over the flowers. The cook’s son was mentally disabled; he couldn’t count, he couldn’t remember anything, and he constantly chewed on his lower lip.
“Can you smell them?” I asked, reaching up to rest my hand on a crown of petals. The cook’s son shook his head.
There was a thunderstorm that day; a lightning bolt struck an old ash tree in our garden and the rain knocked down the flowers. The gardener was gathering up flower heads to save the sunflower seeds, cursing and calling God a rotten toad.
We went through the field, the first warm drops falling on my forehead. Shortly before our house we came to the fork in the beaten path. One way led home, the other to the dairy.
As I recall, a billy goat was grazing in the dairy yard—the farmwife had tied him to a gate there. In the valley everyone knew that the goat was called Hieronymus.
His coat was white and long; he belonged to the Gletschergeiss breed. The sunshine up at the mountain peaks had blinded him years ago. I would have liked to pet him, but he bit. In the mornings, when I went to get milk, I sometimes threw him leaves from our blackberry bushes.
For the children of the valley, it was a test of courage to tug Hieronymus’s horns. Once I saw the dairyman’s son kick him in his soft belly.
That day, while we were running in the sunflower field, rain pattered on our faces. We made funnels out of maple leaves and drank the rainwater. I was happy about our house, that it was warm inside, and about Father, who was home in those days. I thought about what he’d said about the presence of God in all creatures and looked through the rain across the meadow up to the dairy yard. The billy goat had been standing at the gate since the morning. The first lightning bolts flashed. The cook’s son cried. I took his hand and brought him to the servants’ entrance of our house. Without explanation, I turned around and ran into the rain.
“Thunder,” called the cook’s son. “Thunder.”
The climb felt easy to me, though I slipped a couple times.
I had learned to mistrust my eyes, so I wasn’t surprised when the lightning bolts in the dairy yard traveled from the grass up to the sky. Thunder crashed. At the gate, Hieronymus was chewing the dirt. He had laid his muzzle on the grass and closed his eyes, as if he were waiting for death. Or maybe he was just sleeping, because the thunderstorm didn’t interest him.
I untied the rope that was knotted firmly to the gate. Hieronymus lunged in my direction. I stood still. Sometimes it hurts when you do the right thing. Hieronymus bit my left hand. His teeth had fallen out years ago. He chomped into the air, then bit my right hand, which I stretched out to him. “Hey, I’m the one who gives you blackberry leaves.”
Raindrops beaded his coat, which was pale and bristly. I took the rope. I laid my hand on Hieronymus’s muzzle. He didn’t try to bite me again; he stood still. Maybe he’d forgotten how to walk because he had been tied up too long, I thought. I knelt down in front of him in the meadow and draped him over my shoulders. His ribs pressed against my collarbone.
The billy goat was scrawny, but heavier than I’d thought he would be. He reeked of the barn. My thighs trembled.
“I’m sorry I didn’t protect you when you got kicked.” That day I told the billy goat things I never told anybody. How I missed my mother, even though she was there. How unconfident I felt. That I never wanted to lie, because then life would lose its meaning. On the walk down, I stumbled and scraped my knees.
As I walked down the cedar-lined path in front of our house, my pants were torn and mud was stuck under my fingernails. The billy goat had bitten my shirt collar.
Father ran to meet me on the path.
“Son.”
As he hugged me, Hieronymus snapped at him.
“Didn’t you see the lightning?”
I knelt on the gravel and let the billy goat slide off my shoulders. Father brushed the water off my hair. Tears came to my eyes. I was happy that he couldn’t see them in the rain.
“A lightning bolt can vaporize you,” said Father. Of course he could see that I was crying; he was my father.
“We must take care of all creatures,” I said.
I wanted to explain to him how beautifully the lightning had flashed in the sky, and why I was happy that the coachman had come, and why sometimes I loved Mother more than him. I kept silent. And then I blurted out, so suddenly that I was startled by the sound of my voice, “You broke your word, Papa.”
“What do you mean, son?”
“You said we must speak the truth. But you lie about Mother.”
I saw the pain in his face. I hadn’t meant to hurt him. The rainwater tasted sweet. He took my hand and went with me to the house.
As we stood in the hall, he asked softly, “Have you ever seen a hibiscus flower in bloom?” He crouched down in front of me so that he was smaller than I was. “That’s what the truth is like, boy. Someday you will see it. In Egypt you will find whole gardens. It’s gorgeously beautiful there. Whole gardens, where the hibiscus blooms in a thousand varieties.”
Hieronymus spent the night in our greenhouse, where, by morning, he had gobbled up half the year’s zucchini harvest. During the night I had gone to see him. He had let me stroke the fur at his throat.
The farmer came to get him the next morning, shook my hand, excused himself over and over again, and said he would make sure that nothing like the zucchini