sorry I didn’t protect you when you got kicked.” That day I told the billy goat things I never told anybody. How I missed my mother, even though she was there. How unconfident I felt. That I never wanted to lie, because then life would lose its meaning. On the walk down, I stumbled and scraped my knees.
As I walked down the cedar-lined path in front of our house, my pants were torn and mud was stuck under my fingernails. The billy goat had bitten my shirt collar.
Father ran to meet me on the path.
“Son.”
As he hugged me, Hieronymus snapped at him.
“Didn’t you see the lightning?”
I knelt on the gravel and let the billy goat slide off my shoulders. Father brushed the water off my hair. Tears came to my eyes. I was happy that he couldn’t see them in the rain.
“A lightning bolt can vaporize you,” said Father. Of course he could see that I was crying; he was my father.
“We must take care of all creatures,” I said.
I wanted to explain to him how beautifully the lightning had flashed in the sky, and why I was happy that the coachman had come, and why sometimes I loved Mother more than him. I kept silent. And then I blurted out, so suddenly that I was startled by the sound of my voice, “You broke your word, Papa.”
“What do you mean, son?”
“You said we must speak the truth. But you lie about Mother.”
I saw the pain in his face. I hadn’t meant to hurt him. The rainwater tasted sweet. He took my hand and went with me to the house.
As we stood in the hall, he asked softly, “Have you ever seen a hibiscus flower in bloom?” He crouched down in front of me so that he was smaller than I was. “That’s what the truth is like, boy. Someday you will see it. In Egypt you will find whole gardens. It’s gorgeously beautiful there. Whole gardens, where the hibiscus blooms in a thousand varieties.”
Hieronymus spent the night in our greenhouse, where, by morning, he had gobbled up half the year’s zucchini harvest. During the night I had gone to see him. He had let me stroke the fur at his throat.
The farmer came to get him the next morning, shook my hand, excused himself over and over again, and said he would make sure that nothing like the zucchini incident would ever happen again. He hit Hieronymus between the horns many times, with the side of his hand.
That was the year when the members of the Swiss Goat Breeders Association decided which bloodlines would be continued, a process that was officially called “breed correction.” The association categorized the Capra Sempione, to which Hieronymus belonged, as unworthy of support.
Late in the summer, Father told me that shortly after the night of the storm, the farmer led Hieronymus out to the slurry pit and, from a distance of two meters, shot the animal between the horns with a double-barreled shotgun.
That same year, Mother summoned an eye doctor from Munich. He said that my inability to see colors had to do with my head, not my eyes. Mother believed that I just needed to try harder. She went with me to the attic.
“Now everything will be all right again,” she said.
Her paintings leaned against the wall. Mother put a paint box on the table and switched around the pots of paint. Then she asked me which pot held which color. When I guessed right, she nodded. When I got it wrong, she said I just needed to concentrate. For these sessions she wore her riding boots, which she called army boots.
One of the first times up in the attic, she said, “Please, red at least, I beg you.”
When Mother had been drinking, she would sometimes raise her fist, but she stuck to her resolve not to touch me.
After a few hours of lessons, a braided rattan rug beater appeared among the canvases, leaning in a corner of the attic. She said that it hurt her more than it hurt me. Every now and then the blows made me fall facefirst into the pots.
Mother said, “Wash your face before you go, please. Don’t let anybody see that you’ve been crying.”
Once I just stayed that way, with my forehead resting in the paint, and noticed that the paint pots gave off different smells. The paints were made of natural pigments. Indigo blue smelled of the butterfly blossoms in our washhouse; Naples yellow of lead; cadmium red of clayey earth in summer; black of coal; white of chalk.
I liked the coal scent best. Mother didn’t give me any more instruction beyond the hours in the attic. The museum visits stopped.
Now when I had to identify colors for mother, I leaned near the tray of paints. Sometimes I took the paint pot in my hand so I could smell it better. Mother hit me less often. Once I guessed three colors right in a row. Mother stroked my index finger.
Every Saturday after the Jewish Sabbath, when it got dark, the cook held a compress of Saint-John’s-wort against the scar on my face, even years after the injury. She said it would help me look elegant again. Sometimes the cook hugged me before I went to bed on those nights. I waited for it.
The cook was the fattest woman I knew. Every day she baked cakes, with blueberries in summer, apples in the fall, almonds in winter. She said her cooking was too precious for the staff, and because of that, there was always too much cake lying around. So at night she sat by the oven, playing solitaire and eating.
Once, after applying my compresses, she sat down next to me on a milking stool, gave me a plate with two pieces of honey cake, which she spread with butter, and looked at me.
“People in the house say that you always tell the truth,” said the cook.
I kept silent.
“Is that true?”
“Nearly always,” I said.
“Then please tell me the truth about myself.”
The cook laid her hand on my head.
“Tell me, am I fat?”
Out of nervousness, I forked up a big piece of cake and shoved it in my mouth. I choked, and when the cook gave me a glass of milk, I coughed, and milk ran out my nose.
“I know that I’m a little plump, but I mean, am I fat?”
I nodded as unobtrusively as I could. It hurt her, I could see, and I didn’t want that.
“Do you think that’s why I can’t find a new husband?” she asked.
I looked at the floor. I was sixteen years old and understood very little about men and women and why they liked each other. I shrugged my shoulders. The cook gripped me with her soft hand.
“Please tell the truth, Friedrich.”
“Yes,” I said.
“Do you think I’m alone because I like to eat too much?”
“You aren’t alone.”
“But I am fat?”
