Stella. Takis Wurger
was the year when the members of the Swiss Goat Breeders Association decided which bloodlines would be continued, a process that was officially called “breed correction.” The association categorized the Capra Sempione, to which Hieronymus belonged, as unworthy of support.
Late in the summer, Father told me that shortly after the night of the storm, the farmer led Hieronymus out to the slurry pit and, from a distance of two meters, shot the animal between the horns with a double-barreled shotgun.
That same year, Mother summoned an eye doctor from Munich. He said that my inability to see colors had to do with my head, not my eyes. Mother believed that I just needed to try harder. She went with me to the attic.
“Now everything will be all right again,” she said.
Her paintings leaned against the wall. Mother put a paint box on the table and switched around the pots of paint. Then she asked me which pot held which color. When I guessed right, she nodded. When I got it wrong, she said I just needed to concentrate. For these sessions she wore her riding boots, which she called army boots.
One of the first times up in the attic, she said, “Please, red at least, I beg you.”
When Mother had been drinking, she would sometimes raise her fist, but she stuck to her resolve not to touch me.
After a few hours of lessons, a braided rattan rug beater appeared among the canvases, leaning in a corner of the attic. She said that it hurt her more than it hurt me. Every now and then the blows made me fall facefirst into the pots.
Mother said, “Wash your face before you go, please. Don’t let anybody see that you’ve been crying.”
Once I just stayed that way, with my forehead resting in the paint, and noticed that the paint pots gave off different smells. The paints were made of natural pigments. Indigo blue smelled of the butterfly blossoms in our washhouse; Naples yellow of lead; cadmium red of clayey earth in summer; black of coal; white of chalk.
I liked the coal scent best. Mother didn’t give me any more instruction beyond the hours in the attic. The museum visits stopped.
Now when I had to identify colors for mother, I leaned near the tray of paints. Sometimes I took the paint pot in my hand so I could smell it better. Mother hit me less often. Once I guessed three colors right in a row. Mother stroked my index finger.
Every Saturday after the Jewish Sabbath, when it got dark, the cook held a compress of Saint-John’s-wort against the scar on my face, even years after the injury. She said it would help me look elegant again. Sometimes the cook hugged me before I went to bed on those nights. I waited for it.
The cook was the fattest woman I knew. Every day she baked cakes, with blueberries in summer, apples in the fall, almonds in winter. She said her cooking was too precious for the staff, and because of that, there was always too much cake lying around. So at night she sat by the oven, playing solitaire and eating.
Once, after applying my compresses, she sat down next to me on a milking stool, gave me a plate with two pieces of honey cake, which she spread with butter, and looked at me.
“People in the house say that you always tell the truth,” said the cook.
I kept silent.
“Is that true?”
“Nearly always,” I said.
“Then please tell me the truth about myself.”
The cook laid her hand on my head.
“Tell me, am I fat?”
Out of nervousness, I forked up a big piece of cake and shoved it in my mouth. I choked, and when the cook gave me a glass of milk, I coughed, and milk ran out my nose.
“I know that I’m a little plump, but I mean, am I fat?”
I nodded as unobtrusively as I could. It hurt her, I could see, and I didn’t want that.
“Do you think that’s why I can’t find a new husband?” she asked.
I looked at the floor. I was sixteen years old and understood very little about men and women and why they liked each other. I shrugged my shoulders. The cook gripped me with her soft hand.
“Please tell the truth, Friedrich.”
“Yes,” I said.
“Do you think I’m alone because I like to eat too much?”
“You aren’t alone.”
“But I am fat?”
“Yes.”
She exhaled. “Thank you.”
“But I hurt you.”
The oven was warm; we could hear wood crackling in the embers.
“Silence is worse.”
We sat awhile longer on the milking stools and looked into the flames of the oven, in which a bundt cake was baking for the next day, slowly browning, until the crust began to steam. I brought down the wooden oven peel from the wall, took the cake out and put it on the kitchen countertop.
“Thank you, my golden boy, it was about to go all wrong,” said the cook.
She hugged me. I pretended I didn’t see her tears.
Early in 1941, as German tanks rolled through Libya as part of Operation Sunflower, Mother put up a flag with a swastika on it on the tower of our house. It was the first time in my life that I heard Father raise his voice. Father calmly told one of the stable boys to please remove the flag from the pole, then he went into the greenhouse, shut the frosted-glass door, and let out the shout that announced the end of his marriage.
From the beginning of the war, Mother wore her riding boots more and more often and drank until she lost the power of speech. One morning she lay on the floor inside the door of the house and didn’t move. I called out to her, trying to wake her. She opened her eyes and looked at me; I wasn’t sure she recognized me.
“Do you still love me?” she asked.
Then she wrapped both arms around my head and held me so tightly to her throat that it was hard for me to breathe.
“I am so . . .” she said. “For everything here, for everything, I am so . . .”
It was so beautiful that I got lost on my way to school.
Sometimes I wished that during the day I could forget that Mother was at home sitting on the terrace and drinking arak.
But I knew that would mean that nobody was paying attention to her and that this was my responsibility. Secretly, I sometimes laid my head against her chest when she was lying on the floor, immobile. I was checking to see if she was still breathing.
Because of the new trade embargo, Father had problems with his velvet exports. He said he would go to Istanbul and ride out the war there, but he would keep the villa in Choulex. Mother wanted to move to Munich and live off Father’s money. I wanted to travel and see a little of the world. Father suggested Tehran, because there the war was far away.
During the summer I had heard stories from the stable boys about secret nightclubs in Berlin, about hustlers, cocaine, an ivory fountain in a grand hotel, and a singing Negress who rode in a coach drawn by an ostrich.
One of the stable boys had worked for a while as a horse dung collector in Berlin and said he had moved away because he couldn’t stand the Berlin dialect, the “Ah” instead of “I,” the “wut?” instead of “what?” It was obnoxious, he said. Even the hairdressers felt free to tell you what was on their mind.
“Is that true?” I asked.
“Everything’s idiotic there, the girls, too. No culture,” he said. That night was the first time I heard the rumor. In Berlin, the stable boy said, a moving truck drives into the Scheunenviertel at night and takes away the Jews. “They never come back,” he said.
“Is