More than once, I managed to catch her unawares, but each time, it was as if she were catching me. I recall the first time precisely. We were alone in the apartment, a delicious silence. I lay in bed with one of those marvelous childhood diseases that are painless but that keep you out of school and free from responsibility. The adults are full of loving care; they don’t criticize, threaten, or demand. Moreover, the fever gives your thoughts a gliding lightness, as if in slow motion, and the least exertion changes them, like images in a kaleidoscope, into something totally different. Words are transformed into numbers, just as they are in the minutes before you drop off to sleep, or into images, entire sentences standing there abruptly, like totem poles looming out of slow waters, while at the back of your neck, at the base of your skull, a small, sticky knob like a medlar fills your mouth with a lukewarm taste of brass. I was thirsty and I wanted to pee too. So instead of calling Aunt Selma, I got up and went to the bathroom. And that was when I saw her through the open kitchen door. She was standing at the window, gazing out into the courtyard; or rather, she had been gazing at the courtyard (or the sky above it), but, upon hearing me, she shifted her eyes to me. And even though there was absolutely nothing to see outside but the ugly wall of the left wing of the apartment building and a patch of indifferent sky overhead, her gaze was full of something very definite, something she had seen with great clarity, with a hungry, wolf-like sharpness, even. And she was smiling. Of course, it was just the vague start of a smile, its tenderness contrasting poetically with the danger in her gaze. Since then, I have often thought that La Gioconda’s smile, which people make such a fuss over, can be understood only if one imagines that she was peering into the distance a millisecond earlier and the smile remains as she looks over toward us.

Later, I often lurked about to see this distant gaze of Aunt Selma’s. It was never in her eyes when she slaved away. Her entire nature was confused at such times, bewildered and jittery, quarrelsome and vehement. She had a way of wiping her forehead with the back of her hand as if she had run into a cobweb and was whisking it out of her face. But no sooner did she drop her arms than that gaze came into her eyes. Her truer being now seemed to be flooding over and into her, and it was silent and listening. Neither Aunt Hertha nor Uncle Helmuth nor even Cousin Wolfgang noticed this strange presence of Aunt Selma when her mind was absent. (Even though, for Uncle Helmuth, this must have been one of the most ordinary circumstances of his weekly spiritist séances. But, of course, when Aunt Selma’s spirit was absent, no spirit of a departed man or woman entered the momentarily vacant shell of her body; it was she herself who entered it—and that should have provided the mathematician in Uncle Helmuth with food for thought.)