Stella. Takis Wurger

A place where even the hairdressers told you what was on their minds.

      I asked Father about his trips to Berlin and he gave me Theodor Fontane to read. I read the novels that were in our library and Fontane’s correspondence, too. In a letter he wrote to the writer Paul Heyse in 1862, I read:

      No matter how much we like to mock Berlin, and however gladly I concede that it occasionally deserves this mockery, it cannot be denied that what happens and doesn’t happen here is directly caught up in the great gear of world events. It has become a necessity to me to hear the whirring of that flywheel close by, even at the risk that it might turn into the proverbial grindstone.

      At night I lay awake and thought about the word “flywheel” and about the rumor from the Scheunenviertel. In my head, the Germans were what I wanted to be. I had seen pictures of marching soldiers at the movie theater. I did not want to be a soldier, but maybe a little bit of their strength could pass to me. I asked Father about the furniture truck.

      “It’s something I heard,” I said.

      “Why are people spreading rumors?” Father’s voice sounded uneasy as he answered. “I don’t know, maybe it’s a gray area. There must also be good Germans. I think that the truth is never more in danger than in wartime.”

      He turned and looked at me.

      “I know what you’re thinking.”

      I looked him directly in the face. He was trying to smile, as if it were nothing serious. I could tell he was afraid.

      “Don’t do it,” Father said. “I beg you, not this time.”

      A couple of days later, Father and Mother sat together in the library, although they had long since stopped listening to each other.

      “I will begin my travels with a short trip to Berlin,” I said.

      Mother laughed. “And what do you want to do there?”

      “To see it.”

      “See what?”

      “And take some drawing lessons.”

      Mother fell silent.

      “You want to take drawing lessons during a war?” Father asked.

      “Only for a few days.”

      “It’s too dangerous.”

      “Berlin is safe.”

      “But there’s a war.”

      “In the east. Not in Berlin. No bombs have fallen there for weeks.”

      “It’s still too dangerous.”

      “I’m going there, Father, I want to see it. This gray area.”

      Father nodded and stroked his chin.

      Somebody had to be able to distinguish between rumors and reality. Back then I thought I was brave.

      “But it’s a city of Jews,” Mother said.

      After Christmas, a dark-colored car with German license plates pulled to a stop on the gravel of our drive. A man in uniform stepped out. I hid in the hayloft and watched while he put his hand on Mother’s backside. Later the cook would tell me that Mother had introduced the man as her nephew.

      She wanted her piano and clothes to be sent on after.

      The cook told me she was supposed to inform me that I should continue the exercises with the paint box. It had broken Mother’s heart that I had not come to see her off.

      Two years later, Mother would burn up in a garden shed during an air raid in Nymphenburg. Her nephew would say that Mother had probably drunk so much that she had mistaken the shed for the air-raid shelter.

      I booked my train ticket from Geneva. The cook gave me a cap she had knitted and a woven basket that she filled with honey cakes. She hugged me. I secretly tucked my best fishhooks into a pocket of her apron.

      Father gave me a parting kiss on my forehead. “Be well,” he said.

      He looked like he wanted to say something else, but he kept silent.

      Before he drove me to the train station, I went up into the attic and walked up to a canvas that was turned backward, leaning against the wall. For a long time I had wondered what it was that Mother painted. I turned the canvas to face the light. I went to the next one. Without haste, I turned every canvas in the attic. The canvases were bare.

      The dried-up paint box was lying on the table. I took it with me. I went alone to the lake, took a rock from the shore, let it break the surface of the ice, which was still thin, and threw the paint box into the water.