a flowering reed I had plucked from the riverbank.
“The priests say you jumped,” said Father.
I nodded.
“Why?” he asked.
I kept silent.
“Do you know that silence is sometimes worse than lies?” he asked.
He sat me on the armrest of his reading chair.
We listened to the ticking of the clock.
“It felt good, Papa. Why does it feel so good to fall, Papa?”
He thought about it for a long time. Softly he began to hum a melody. After a couple minutes he came to a conclusion. “Because we are stupid creatures,” he said.
We both were silent together. He shook his head. His hands were heavy on my shoulders, and he smelled of his books.
“What’s wrong, boy? I recognize that look.”
“Is Mother all right?”
He took a deep breath. “She . . .” he said. He grimaced. “Your mother . . . everything is fine, be kind to her.”
I understood what he meant and that it would be easier to keep silent. Keeping silent was my way of crying.
“We can handle it,” Father said, laying a hand on my neck.
I nodded. He looked at me. I knew I would jump again if I had the chance.
When I think of home, I remember the sunflowers that grew behind the house all the way to the woods beyond the hill.
Our cook didn’t like sunflowers, because they had no scent, she said. The sunflower tempts bees with its beauty, she said, but has no drops of nectar at its heart, only nasty seeds.
I walked into the fields to find the scent of the flowers, and among the flower heads I felt sure that the cook was wrong. On hot summer days, when the heat burned into the pollen, the sunflowers gave out a fragrance; it was subtle, but I could smell them. And once I had recognized their scent, I smelled it again when I left the window open when I went to sleep.
It was important to have a good sense of smell. I could smell the alcohol in the hall when I came home.
I asked the beekeeper and the gardeners what sunflowers smelled like, but nobody knew. I thought it meant something, that I could smell them.
In the year 1935, Mother drank a bottle of potato schnapps when the Nuremberg Laws were announced. Mother topped up her glass a lot. I sat beside her and counted. She raised the glass to Adolf Hitler’s health, calling him “Adolphe,” as if he were a Frenchman.
That night, as Mother slept on the parquet floor of the ballroom, I went into the kitchen. The cook sat crying by the stove, eating freshly whipped buttercream from a wooden spoon to soothe herself. I stroked her cheek, like Father had done to me when I was little.
A few days later I overheard an argument between Mother and Father, in which she demanded that he fire the cook, whose challah she ate happily every morning. Mother called her a Jewish sow. Father said he wasn’t going to fire anybody.
Mother spent more and more time with her canvases. When she wasn’t painting, the canvases leaned against the wall of the attic, turned backward. Nobody was allowed to look at them.
The night after they argued, Father came to my bedside. I pretended I was asleep. He sat down cross-legged at the foot of the bed and said, “My boy, one thing . . .” then there was a long pause. I wasn’t sure he would finish the sentence. “The Lord created everything imaginable, do you know that? Blackbirds and elephants . . . According to Luke, God is in every creature. Do you understand, son? We must take good care of them, these creatures.”
The earnestness in his voice made me uncomfortable. I didn’t answer. He pinched my foot and said, “I know you’re awake.”
In the year 1938, the traveling exhibition “Degenerate Art” opened in Berlin, 1,406 synagogues and places of worship burned down in Germany in a single night, and in late summer I went into the sunflower field with the cook’s son. We were already tall enough to see over the flowers. The cook’s son was mentally disabled; he couldn’t count, he couldn’t remember anything, and he constantly chewed on his lower lip.
“Can you smell them?” I asked, reaching up to rest my hand on a crown of petals. The cook’s son shook his head.
There was a thunderstorm that day; a lightning bolt struck an old ash tree in our garden and the rain knocked down the flowers. The gardener was gathering up flower heads to save the sunflower seeds, cursing and calling God a rotten toad.
We went through the field, the first warm drops falling on my forehead. Shortly before our house we came to the fork in the beaten path. One way led home, the other to the dairy.
As I recall, a billy goat was grazing in the dairy yard—the farmwife had tied him to a gate there. In the valley everyone knew that the goat was called Hieronymus.
His coat was white and long; he belonged to the Gletschergeiss breed. The sunshine up at the mountain peaks had blinded him years ago. I would have liked to pet him, but he bit. In the mornings, when I went to get milk, I sometimes threw him leaves from our blackberry bushes.
For the children of the valley, it was a test of courage to tug Hieronymus’s horns. Once I saw the dairyman’s son kick him in his soft belly.
That day, while we were running in the sunflower field, rain pattered on our faces. We made funnels out of maple leaves and drank the rainwater. I was happy about our house, that it was warm inside, and about Father, who was home in those days. I thought about what he’d said about the presence of God in all creatures and looked through the rain across the meadow up to the dairy yard. The billy goat had been standing at the gate since the morning. The first lightning bolts flashed. The cook’s son cried. I took his hand and brought him to the servants’ entrance of our house. Without explanation, I turned around and ran into the rain.
“Thunder,” called the cook’s son. “Thunder.”
The climb felt easy to me, though I slipped a couple times.
I had learned to mistrust my eyes, so I wasn’t surprised when the lightning bolts in the dairy yard traveled from the grass up to the sky. Thunder crashed. At the gate, Hieronymus was chewing the dirt. He had laid his muzzle on the grass and closed his eyes, as if he were waiting for death. Or maybe he was just sleeping, because the thunderstorm didn’t interest him.
I untied the rope that was knotted firmly to the gate. Hieronymus lunged in my direction. I stood still. Sometimes it hurts when you do the right thing. Hieronymus bit my left hand. His teeth had fallen out years ago. He chomped into the air, then bit my right hand, which I stretched out to him. “Hey, I’m the one who gives you blackberry leaves.”
Raindrops beaded his coat, which was pale and bristly. I took the rope. I laid my hand on Hieronymus’s muzzle. He didn’t try to bite me again; he stood still. Maybe he’d forgotten how to walk because he had been tied up too long, I thought. I knelt down in front of him in the meadow and draped him over my shoulders. His ribs pressed against my collarbone.
The billy
