style="font-size:15px;"> About a dozen of us boys were in the church square, throwing snowballs at the metal weather vane on top of the tower. I don’t know who was the first to throw one at the coachman. The snowballs crossed in flight and splattered on the wood walls of the sleigh. One snowball hit the man on the temple; I thought it was mine. I hoped the other boys would like me for it. The man didn’t flinch.
He reined in his pony. He took his time about it, stepped down from his perch, whispered in the animal’s ear, and went up to us. As he stood before us, snowmelt dripped into his collar.
We were young; we didn’t run away. Fear was something I had yet to learn. The coachman carried something short, forged, and dark in his hand.
He spoke Urner German, I think, a dialect you rarely heard in my area.
“Who threw that?” he asked softly, looking at us. I heard the snow crunch under the soles of my shoes; it was frozen over and glittered. The air smelled of wet wool.
Father had told me that telling the truth was a sign of love. Truth was a gift. Back then I was sure that was right.
I was a child. I liked gifts. What love was, I didn’t know. I stepped forward.
“Me.”
The point of the anvil horn entered my right cheek, cut through to the jaw, and split my face open to the corner of my mouth. I lost two back teeth and half an incisor. I have no memory of this. My memory returns at the moment when I looked into Mother’s gray eyes. She was sitting beside my hospital bed and drinking tea with corn liquor in it, which she poured from a flask. Father was traveling.
“I’m so glad that nothing happened to your painting hand,” Mother said. She stroked my fingers.
My cheek was held together with stitches soaked in carbolic acid. The wound was inflamed. In the coming weeks, I lived off chicken broth that our cook prepared each day. At first, the broth oozed through the sutures.
The medicine made me groggy. The first time I looked into a mirror, I realized that, because of the coachman’s blow, I had lost the ability to see colors.
Many people can’t tell the difference between red and green, but I had lost all the colors. Crimson, emerald, violet, purple, azure, blond . . . all of them were nothing for me but names for different shades of gray. The doctors would speak of cerebral achromatopsia, of a color sense disruption that sometimes occurs to old people after a stroke.
You’ll grow out of it, they said.
Mother put a sketchpad on my lap and brought me a box of paints. She had gotten them from Zurich so we could begin instruction in the hospital.
“The colors are gone,” I said. I knew how important painting was to her.
Mother crooked her head, as if she hadn’t heard me.
“Mama, forgive me.”
She called for a doctor. I had to look at a couple of pictures and have liquid poured into my eyes.
The doctor explained to Mother that this happens sometimes, it wasn’t such a terrible thing; after all, when you went to the cinema the films were always in black and white.
“Forgive me, Mama,” I said, “please forgive me. Mama?”
The doctor said it was a miracle that my facial nerves had remained intact. If they had been damaged, my speech would have been impaired, and saliva would have dripped from my mouth. The doctor said something about what a lucky boy I was. Mother just sat there, taking big swigs of her drink.
Mother sent a telegram to Father in Genoa. He drove all night.
“It’s my fault,” I said.
“There’s no blame here,” he said.
He stayed in the hospital and slept on a metal cot beside me.
Mother said, “What will people think?”
Father said, “Why should we worry about that?”
When the wound throbbed, he told me stories he had heard on his journeys to the silk dealers of Peshawar. Father gave me an old metal box from Haifa, etched with a rose pattern, which he said would make your wishes come true if you stroked the top of the casing three times counterclockwise. The lid stuck. Mother said if the box didn’t disappear, she was leaving.
Mother hardly touched me at all. When I reached for her hand while we walked, she flinched. When she wished me good night, she stood in the doorway and looked out the window, though it was dark outside. Soon Father left again for his travels.
After I was hurt, Mother would drink so much that she would lie down on the dining room floor, and the cook and I would have to carry her to her bedroom.
Some nights Mother climbed alone into the Alpine meadows. Sometimes she would spend two days in a row shut up with her canvases. I was eight years old and didn’t know if it was because of me.
My favorite place was the lake behind the Minorite monastery. On one side it was bordered by a mossy wall, on the other by a rock face.
At the lake I’d lie down among the reeds and smoke tobacco cigarettes, which I’d made from my father’s cigars. The cook showed me how to catch trout with the help of a stick, string, and bent nail. Later the cook would gut the fish and stuff it with chopped garlic and parsley, and then we would grill it over a fire on the riverbank and eat it while it was piping hot.
The cook showed me how to suck nectar from lilac blossoms.
I helped her braid the challah and carried milk cans from the dairy to our house. Sometimes we skimmed off the cream and shared it.
At a time when other boys were making friends and bringing them home, I couldn’t, because Mother was there. Perhaps I got used to loneliness because I could not miss what I did not know.
Mother drank arak, which clouded when she infused it with ice water. I would pretend she was drinking milk. There was a jetty on the lake that creaked in the summer heat. Once I stood there in the fall, on the far edge, at dawn, and skimmed flat stones across the water. When the cook and Father had no time for me, and Mother drank away her days, I felt invisible.
I looked at the rock wall that edged the lake and asked myself why I had never seen anyone jump from it.
I grabbed the tall grass and the rock outcroppings and clambered up. From the top I could look at the lake bed and see how the algae swayed. I ran to the end of the rock and farther, into the air. The impact was hard on the leather soles of my shoes, and the cold water roared in my ears. When I came to the surface, it was hard to breathe, but I had enough air left to let out a cry. I saw the waves that my impact on the water had left behind.
With dripping pant legs, I stepped onto the kitchen tiles. The cook was kneading dough and asked whose idea it had been. I didn’t know what to say. Falling is something you can only do alone, I thought. I leaned against the warm oven. The cook rapped her hand, dusty with flour, on the tiles. She gave me a washcloth.
Father had them call for me that night. When he was home, he mostly sat in his library. He liked to read for hours on end: Russian novels, Eastern philosophy, haikus. I knew that Father and Mother
