Violin music floated out from the living room. I hadn’t heard my brother play in a long time. I turned around in my chair and peered inside. Dave was standing in the middle of the room, improvising a czardas, while Lotte watched. His head was tilted slightly forward so that his hair fell across his face. I saw the fingers of his left hand moving over the strings. I sat up straighter to listen to him, but he broke off suddenly and a moment later I heard the lid of the violin case bang shut.

The next morning I saw the medicine bottle in the bathroom. I carefully removed the cork. It smelled bitter. I also noticed that it was no longer full. It was an ordinary bottle, like so many bottles in a medicine cabinet, except that this one didn’t have a label. In the afternoon it still stood in the same spot, but it was now empty and the cork lay beside it. Just as I was heading down the stairs, my brother was coming up. At the top step he turned, went back down and came right back up again. He looked pale, and his face was beaded with sweat.

‘Does it work fast?’ I asked.

‘Yes,’ he mumbled, mounting the stairs again.

‘Do you really have to climb up and down the stairs so much?’

‘I really have to do all sorts of things,’ he said, pausing at the top before dashing down to the bottom. ‘Down is still easy,’ he said, ‘but up is already pretty hard.’

‘How long are you going to keep at it?’ I asked.

‘We have to leave in a few minutes,’ he said.

A long time went by before they came back.

‘Maybe they’re keeping them there,’ said my mother.

‘A lot of people have to be examined,’ I said.

‘As long as that bottle did its job,’ said Lotte.

They came home a few hours later. Dave looked even sicker than before, but he as well as my father were in excellent spirits since they had both failed the physical.

‘What did the doctor say?’ Lotte wanted to know.

‘Not much, but he found me unfit for a work camp,’ said Dave. He lay down on the sofa. His hair was a mess and he had dark circles under his eyes.

A few years before I had once seen him lying around like that. He was a college student in Rotterdam at the time and, when my father paid him an unannounced visit, it turned out that my brother had been partying for more than a week and was in a constant state of drunkenness. My father took him home. ‘All that drinking,’ he’d said, ‘is bound to ruin your health.’

My brother let his arm dangle limply down from the sofa; he had unbuttoned his shirt.

‘All that from just a couple of drops,’ he said.