My grandfather had shown Selma an okapi for the first time, in a black-and-white photograph he had found in a newspaper. He’d shown it to her with as much joy as if he had been the first to discover the okapi in real life and hadn’t merely found it in a newspaper.

“What kind of creature is that?” Selma had asked.

“It’s an okapi, my dearest, and if such a thing exists, then anything is possible—even that you might marry me and that I might build us a house,” my grandfather had said. “Yes, me,” he’d added when Selma looked at him skeptically. My grandfather had distinguished himself as her great love, but not so much as a carpenter.

His name was Heinrich, like Iron Henry in the fairy tale of the Frog King, but he must not have been particularly ironclad, since he died long before I was born. But whenever anyone said “Heinrich,” Martin and I still shouted the line from the fairy tale in chorus, “The coach is breaking!”—which Selma didn’t find the least bit funny.

No one had explicitly told me that my grandfather had died; it was something I had concluded on my own. Selma claimed that Heinrich had fallen in the war, which sounded to me like he had tripped. My father said he hadn’t come home from the war, which sounded to me like the war was somewhere you stayed for a long time at some point in your life.

Martin and I admired my grandfather because he’d often behaved more mischievously, if not outrageously, than we would ever dare. Again and again we asked Elsbeth to tell us how as a child my grandfather had been suspended from school because he’d hoisted the principal’s camel-hair coat up the flagpole, or how he’d shown up in school one day with a homemade bandage wrapped around his head and claimed that he hadn’t been able to do his homework because of a basilar skull fracture. We’d shout, “The coach is breaking!” and sometimes my father would add, “Not the coach but the house,” which also didn’t amuse Selma.

In fact, the floor in the downstairs apartment was so thin in places that Selma had broken through several times. Far from being rattled, she would almost wax nostalgic about it. Once she had broken through the kitchen floor while holding the roasted Christmas goose. From her hips down, Selma had dangled into the cellar and still managed to hold the roast goose steady. The optician had helped her out and repaired the hole in the floor with my father’s help. Neither the optician nor my father was particularly skilled at home repair. Palm would have done a much better job, but no one wanted to ask him.