It was, as she revealingly put it, a “cherished ordeal.” She rose “with the chickens” at dawn, got us all up, prepared our breakfasts, made sure we left the house on time. And then, all alone and probably with odd bits of incoherent monologue, she “slaved” the morning away, airing the beds hanging out the rugs washing the breakfast dishes sweeping the floors straightening up making the beds re-placing the rugs peeling potatoes scrubbing vegetables slicing onions and wiping the tears from her eyes with her apron putting water on handling pots pans plates left and right up and down like a percussionist dropping the gas ring swearing at the gas cursing the gas company accusing life wiping the hair out of her face tearing the lid from the pot that had boiled over sucking her scorched finger—that was how she spent the morning until lunchtime, when Cousin Wolfgang and I came back from school, I from the realschule, he from his stuck-up humanistic gymnasium, Uncle Helmuth from the plant, and Aunt Hertha from the office (she was bookkeeper in an ancient, oddball, lopsided little music-publishing firm). Aunt Selma set the table and served the loveless food, cooked from thrifty recipes. She hardly allowed herself time for even a bite: every day for twelve years I heard the sentence “Selma, would you please finally sit down!” alternately from Uncle Helmuth’s and Aunt Hertha’s lips. No sooner were we fed and the table cleared than she began to do the dishes, and at times it almost came to fisticuffs when Aunt Hertha tried to help her. “No, I simply won’t hear of it—please! You’re tired and overworked yourself; you’re in the office all day long; please let me do it!”

Uncle Helmuth and Aunt Hertha caught the trolley back to the plant and the office, and Cousin Wolfgang and I started our homework (but only during my boyhood and early adolescence; later, I broke out, ignoring threats and rebukes, playing hooky and strolling through the adventure of Vienna). Meanwhile, Aunt Selma spent the afternoon waxing the floors watering the flowers polishing the silver doing the major laundry the minor laundry patching linen sewing ironing darning, until Uncle Helmuth and Aunt Hertha came home for supper (always cold: usually sliced cold cuts with mustard pickles, a hard-boiled egg, kippers, vegetables left over from lunch). Her years thus passed, like the potatoes with which she prepared Bohemian dumplings (Cousin Wolfgang’s favorite dish), vanishing between her fingers on the grater. And it was “just for fifteen minutes now” after lunch, when she had cleared and washed and put everything in order, that she permitted herself some rest in the harness. Seldom did she let herself go so far as to put her folded arms on the table and drop her head on them like a sobbing woman. I was the only one who knew that she was different than this: that she was really indolent, work-shy, and moony. I was her property, the fatherless orphan-boy of her dead sister, placed under her guardianship by the court, her booty; but that was not the only reason she favored me wherever and however she could, sacrificing herself for me even more thoroughly than for the others. Whenever she winked, luring me into the kitchen to slip a penny into my pocket or spirit a piece of cake topped with whipped cream into my outstretched hand, I would sense that this was also a bribe. She knew that I saw through her. We were the same sort.