I have to think about Aunt Selma, my dead mother’s sister. There is little likelihood that she ever told me horror stories, but she has their romantic poetry within herself. In all her being is the tomb-like darkness of a well shaft. Deep down lies a pure surface, dark and round, a hare’s eye staring at the heavens. Of course, you have to catch her off guard. This is not easy, considering her harshness. The image of her afternoon nap blots out any other image that I have of Aunt Selma. There was no way of talking her into lying down. As if to demonstrate that it was her accursed destiny to slave away for us and allow herself scant relaxation and no full rest, she took her nap sitting on a kitchen chair. Seldom did she really sleep. She dozed like a horse in its harness. Her head jerked forward, eventually swaying back and forth as though to a mute internal singsong. Earlier, we were told, her hair had been extraordinarily rich and lovely. She had cut it off because “it got in the way during housework.” The part in it, dividing the ashen strands down the middle, expressed a harsh humility. If you touched her shoulder to suggest that she lie down on the living-room sofa or the bed in her own room, the weary draft-horse head yanked up and murmured with closed eyes, “Just wait—I’m coming. I’m just going to rest for a minute.”

If she intended to arouse our sympathy, then it was only to reject it gruffly. Fate had decreed that she be our servant. She used up her life for us in a feeling, rooted deep in peasant blood, of responsibility for her clan: for her sister Hertha, whom she really didn’t care for that much and toward whom she acted as a quarrelsome older sister; for her brother-in-law, whom she despised; for Cousin Wolfgang, whom she felt indifferent towards even though she thought he had all the qualities of a “dear, well-behaved, hardworking boy”; for me, whom she regarded as her booty, something of her own, the sole property ever granted her. She worked her fingers to the bone for us in stolidly monotonous housework, performed with an anger that was more or less part of the routine and that she put on with her kitchen apron, laboring with tooth-gnashing gee-up, with the cumbersome creaking and obstinate squeaking of wheels on the cart she dragged over her life’s stony paths.