Thus we lived, with our spooks in our heads and our webs across our eyes. Or with eyes that saw through them, and thus stared into space, into sheer nothingness.

Twice a day, the dining table united us in a group of five, and not even quarreling could lure us out of the terrible indifference and solitude within which each of us kept his league-long shadow. When we had been fed lunch, the table cleared and the dishes washed, and the Helmuth/Hertha duality was happily gone, then Aunt Selma would grant herself her cart-horse snooze in harness (hardly ever more than twenty minutes). Next, while Cousin Wolfgang and I got down to our homework, she would go back to her drudging. Usually, but not always. And I caught her unawares one last time.

It was one of those wasting, silent afternoons that only a large, teeming city can produce (according to the stereotype, I should have someone practicing the piano on another floor of the building). Once again, I had failed to understand something (let’s say it was differential and integral calculus this time), and I wanted to pee, or drink a glass of milk in the kitchen. Cousin Wolfgang, in order to be completely undisturbed, was probably cramming in the shitter. I did not hear Aunt Selma drudging anywhere, but the door to her room was ajar, and I peered inside. She was sitting on her bed, looking through a couple of magazines. This time, she did not sense my eavesdropping, so I found her fully emerged from her well, so to speak. She was slowly turning a page. I could see by the covers of the other magazines strewn across her bed that these were fashion and society magazines (“smart-set gazettes,” Uncle Helmuth would have said indignantly; she had probably pinched and scraped to save up the pennies to buy them). As she sat there on the edge of the bed, very straight, her legs in front of her and her knees scarcely bent, her posture very noble, I saw for the first time that she was tall and slender and had full, firm, high breasts. Her throat, her neck, which I had always seen in the draft-horse collar, was now free and lithe, and her slightly bowed head perched on it gracefully. I saw that she must have been very attractive as a young girl, equal in beauty to her frivolous sister. But I saw this well nigh at the edge of my gaze. What my eyes grasped fully was that she was dematerialized and thereby entirely her true self.

Again she had the vague Gioconda smile hovering around her lips, but now it showed no cruelty, it was gentle, shadowy, charmingly dreamy. She turned a page and, before looking down, lifted her head and stared out the window with her distant gaze, as if her eyes were holding their breath. She seemed to be listening for something, something that was not sound and certainly not speech, notion, or thought. The smile stirred her lips to the bare extent that the surface of the well water is ruffled when, from above, from the small blue disk of sky at the end of the shaft, a voice calls.