(S. and Christa exchange a look, S. visibly with a guilty conscience.)

And suddenly Christa makes a comment, which is rare. And even rarer, an ironic one. “There were a lot of them—the uncles, I mean—a disconcerting number.” (S. stares at the floor.)

“You can say that again.” I smile at Schwab. Little beads of sweat are shining on his upper lip, which trembles almost imperceptibly. “I have at least a dozen hypothetical fathers. For example, here’s Uncle John—I told you about him already. Christa met him, briefly, in Nuremberg. He at any rate was my protector there, and was also one of my mother’s friends, if you will. It was with his wife that I later—here she is: Stella—what a magnificent Semitic profile, eh? . . . in a dirndl, no less. For a while we were in fact living—adulterously—in the lake district near Salzburg—but that was already 1938 . . . what I’m really looking for . . . here it is: me in my pony cart, at home, I mean in Bessarabia. Hard to recognize me, however”—

(Christa bores her eyes into Schwab’s. He looks down like he’s been spanked.)

—and I revel in his embarrassment. What’s triggering it? Is it Christa’s severity, her unassailably unpoetical standpoint? Or is it envy of my audacious self-invention? . . .

“The stern person next to me is my nanny Miss Fern . . . Gloves, yes, one wore them back then, even as a child, and of course, especially when driving a carriage—it sounds funny to you, but Christa can confirm that, at least . . . You wear gloves to set yourself apart and at the same time, as in handling the reins of a carriage, to have a finer feel of control.—But can you make out the background in this photo? There on the left, beyond the birches, must have been the pond—we’ll find a photo of the entire thing soon. It plays an important role in the story of my childhood . . .”

“. . . and you don’t know if she did it herself . . . ?” Cousin Wolfgang’s whisper is oily with curiosity—childish curiosity, the kind of primal curiosity about creepy, spooky, gruesome things that trickles down your spine and raises the hairs on the back of your neck . . . and what does he know of my distress at not knowing what happened, not having any picture of her death, only the nothingness her disappearance left behind, the hole in the world into which I’ve fallen . . .

It’s black as pitch in our room—a servant’s room in earlier times when this floor of the run-down apartment building hadn’t yet been divided into flats for the lower middle class and they didn’t have to live like proles—Aunt Hertha and Aunt Selma’s constant lament. Uncle Helmuth grimly accepts it. He himself was one of nine siblings, the children of a pastor in Thuringia, so he has no sense of the bitterness of being déclassé. As a university graduate, his prestige is assured. His engineering diploma ennobles his jacket’s threadbare elbows. Cousin Wolfgang has never known anything but this petit bourgeois fustiness. He was born in the General Hospital and was brought here almost as soon as the umbilical cord was cut. At least he had this room to himself for the first few years, the proud occupant of his own room until he was assigned me as a roommate, me, the bastard, the foundling in silk suits and high-button spats, an object of ridicule and contempt for the children of the back courtyards. I am the aura of pony rides through the estate park, of thés dansants aboard the yachts off the Côte d’Azur in which my mother, the beautiful and infamous Maud, was one of the brilliant queens . . . Me, bursting with fairy-tale stories I whisper in the dark to my fearful, philistine cousin. . .