In 1922, a judge sentenced Adolf Hitler to three months in prison for disturbing the peace, an English archaeologist discovered Tutankhamen’s tomb, James Joyce published the novel Ulysses, Russia’s Communist Party elected Joseph Stalin general secretary, and I was born.
I grew up in a villa on the outskirts of Choulex, near Geneva, with cedars in front. We had thirty acres of land and linen curtains in the windows. In the cellar there was a strip where I learned to fence. In the attic, I learned to identify cadmium red and Naples yellow by their scent and to know what it felt like to be hit with a woven rattan rug beater.
In my part of the world, you answered the question of who you were by giving your parents’ names. I could say that Father was the third generation to run a factory that imported velvet from Italy. I could say that Mother was the daughter of a major German landowner who lost his fortune because he drank too much Armagnac. All schnappsed up, Mother would say, which didn’t lessen her pride. She liked to talk about how the entire leadership of the Black Reichswehr came to his funeral.
At night, Mother sang lullabies about shooting stars, and when Father was traveling and Mother was drinking to ward off loneliness, she would push the dining room table against the wall, put on a record, and dance Viennese waltzes with me; I had to stretch my arm high to put my hand on her shoulder. She said I would learn how to lead well one day. I knew she was lying.
She said I was the handsomest boy in Germany, though we didn’t live in Germany. Sometimes she let me comb her hair with a buffalo
horn comb Father had given her; she said her hair should be like silk. She made me promise that when I was a grown man with a wife, I would comb my wife’s hair. I observed Mother in the mirror, how she sat before me with her eyes closed, how her hair shimmered. I promised.
When she came to my room to bid me good night, she laid both her hands on my cheeks. When we went for walks, she held my hand. When we went hiking up in the mountains and she drank seven or eight shots up at the peak, I was happy that I could support her on the way back down.
Mother was an artist—she painted. Two of her paintings hung in our hall, oil on canvas. A large still life of tulips and grapes. And a small painting, a rear view of a girl who held her arms crossed at the base of her spine. I looked at that painting a long time. Once I tried to cross my fingers like the girl in the picture. I couldn’t make it work. My mother had painted the wrists in an unnatural position that would have broken the bones of any real person.
Mother often spoke about what a great painter I would become and seldom about her own art. Late in the evening, she would talk about how easy painting had been for her in her youth. When she was a girl, she had applied to the painting school of the art academy in Vienna and failed the charcoal drawing test. Maybe another reason she was rejected was that, back then, hardly any women were permitted to study at academies. I knew I wasn’t allowed to ask about that.
When I was born, Mother decided that I would attend the art academy in Vienna in her place, or at least the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich.
Definitely, I was to avoid having anything to do with the Feige-Strassburger art school in Berlin or the Röver school in Hamburg, which were thick with Jews, she said.
Mother showed me how to hold a paintbrush and how to mix oil paints. I took pains to do it right because I wanted to make her happy, and I studied further when I was alone. We drove to Paris, looked at Cézanne’s pictures in the Musée de l’Orangerie, and Mother said that when anyone painted an apple, it should look like one of Cézanne’s. I was allowed to prime Mother’s canvases, went hand in hand with her through museums, and tried to take note of everything when she praised the depth of color in one painting and criticized the perspective of another. I never saw her paint.
In the year 1929, the stock market in New York collapsed, the Nazi Party won five of ninety-six seats in the state elections in Saxony, and, shortly before Christmas, a horse-drawn sleigh drove into my hometown.
It slid on runners across the snow. A stranger sat in the driver’s seat in a floor-length dark green loden coat. Father would never be able to find him later, despite all the assistance the police offered. It remained unclear why the man was transporting an anvil horn with him up on the driver’s seat.
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
he 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.
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