“Oh my goodness,” my mother said, once we were both back home and she’d heard the details of my stay. “You’ve been so understanding… Jacket potatoes with Maggi? How is that even possible?” 
     The operation had gone brilliantly. Already after fourteen days she was tiptoeing across the corridor. The doctors couldn’t believe it, they were all amazed. 
     “You’re one tough broad,” one doctor said. 
     All of them had laughed when she’d said that she’d “lent out” her little fellow. 
     And impeccable care. Great. No Nazi nurses. 
     “Do you want to see the scar?” she asked me. 

She was to go to Graal now, for her recovery. I was therefore to travel to Hamburg, to stay with Grandfather de Bonsac. 
     “It’ll be a holiday,” my mother said. “It’ll be lovely.”

The station staff gave me paper and a pencil to take with me so that the ride didn’t get too boring. 
     “Write down all the stations you pass through,” they said. “Then afterwards you’ll know where you’ve been.”
     I pressed my nose against the window for much of the journey. Maybe going to Hamburg wasn’t so bad. 

Just before we arrived, I stood in the aisle for a better view. If you looked out for it, you could see my grandfather’s house from the train. On previous trips they would stand out back on the compost heap and wave to us. It was a big house full of cousins. One of them, a boy, was quite proper; the rest were all pretty girls.
     Grandfather de Bonsac built the house with a single year’s surplus from the textile export business. In 1902 every man in Japan just had to have a dark blue suit. All my grandfather had had to do was pass on the orders and pocket the commission.
     The house had a timber-framed gable, and a round window on the ground floor. This was situated beneath a cantilevered roof, from which they hung a flag on either the Kaiser’s or the Führer’s birthday.
     The black family clock stood in the front porch. It had been a wedding present from Uncle Bertram, dated from 1885, with the carved crest of the family de Bonsac on it: the grapes and chalice.

          Bonum bono, good things to the good man.

     Next to the clock there was a cast-iron stand with brushes on each side, in which you could clean your shoes. It was chained up so no one would steal it.

The cousins wanted to play a game called war right away, so we went out into the garden. (“You’re not to jump over the vegetable beds,” my grandfather said.) Next door, their neighbor pottered around in his private bunker. He was a pensioner, my cousins told me, so he didn’t have anything else to do. He carried logs inside—all of which had been cut to measure—and climbed up on the roof of the shelter, bouncing up and down to ensure it wouldn’t give.
     Together my cousins and I walked on wooden stilts over the damp garden paths. Seeing us, my grandfather knocked on the window with his ring. The stilts were leaving deep holes all over his garden. His mouth opened and closed behind the window; we couldn’t hear him, but it was clear he wanted us to stop. 

My cousins left the next day. They were traveling to East Prussia, to their father, who had a very different situation there. And I was left alone in the house with the old man and with Schura, the Ukrainian servant girl.
     It was a real shame, I had already begun to imagine that I might seduce my cousins. I’d have said, “Let’s attack each other, for fun”—or something like that. 

With his departure, I moved into my cousin’s room. He had looked around the room one last time before he gave it up. His pencils lay like a pipe organ on the table and the books on the shelf were arranged by size. A light rust-red eiderdown lay on the bed, and the mattress was very soft. Next to the bed was a crystal radio receiver, with headphones, mounted on a cigar crate, as well as a signal clock from the German Office of Hydrography. Outside my new window, the train to the suburbs rolled by.
     Next door was one of the girls’ rooms. Floral patterned curtains. A teddy bear on the window seat. There was also the big doll’s house, from my great-grandmother who had lived on Ritterstraße. The father doll was at the piano but appeared very casual, almost lying down rather than sitting. 

I ate breakfast with my grandfather on the red slate terrace. He sat there in his velvet jacket and chewed endlessly; his hands were always folded in front of him while he did so. His hair, barely showing signs of grey, was oiled and cleanly parted. A single curl hung down on the left. He would however burp now and then.
     There was a young birch tree in the corner of his garden—a lithophyte—which had been pruned back so as to avoid any of the plants coming too close to one another. The garden was made up of two large oval lawns. Looking down on the garden from the veranda, the second, rear lawn was almost entirely obscured by a hedge. (“Oh, there’s more? Is that all yours?”) They’d have to cut out the roses and the weeds in the lawn, I noticed: they were beginning to get the upper hand. The potato knife and the canning jar were standing at the ready. 

Schura, the Ukrainian, poured milk into my grandfather’s tea. There was news going around that mass graves had been discovered in Vinnytsia again. Representatives of the Swedish Red Cross had already begun the official excavation.
     “You hun’ry?” She meant, was I hungry? 

Schura served us small circular loaves, Rundstücke. We called them rolls. We’d add either nut butter or Vitam-R to them: a brown paste that was served in stoneware bowls.
     “Vitam-R is a pure wheat product,” my grandfather said (taking a bite, chewing and swallowing before continuing), “whose good taste is achieved by separating the wheat cells” (bite, chew, swallow) “and by killing off the microbes” (bite, chew, swallow) “living in the wheat.”
     When he bit his own tongue (which he did fairly often), he’d sit shaking his head for a long time. His big hands felt around, shaking roughly, at his temples, the little finger bent with gout. “It’s enough to drive you to despair!” he said. 

My grandfather asked me how long, in my opinion, he still had to live.
     “You’re seventy-six?” I replied. “Maybe another ten, fifteen years?”
     He was quite content with that answer.
     “My heart works just fine, I get a lot of fresh air, my digestion is good too—I always chew thirty-two times, once for each tooth!” Vitam-R, nut butter, and pepper powder: these were his secrets, he told me. “They eat peppers all over the Balkans, and people there grow to be as old as the hills.”

          400 tanks destroyed in Belgorod! 

     He was squinting at the newspaper with his good eye, trying to find out how his stocks were doing.
     “Our boys are lying in trenches” (bite, chew, swallow), “a wide plain in front of them… The enemies coming from the east, and our guns go tak-tak-tak, shooting them down.”
     That was how he imagined the war.
     “We provide the munitions, the Russians provide the tanks. Like two rollers moving towards each other. Woe to anyone who gets caught between them. It’s a battle of attrition.
     “That’s 752 Soviet tanks destroyed… I’m surprised they had any left.”

There were always interesting stories in the Miscellaneous section: a fire in a room caused by neglect; a slip and fall; a story of a little boy in São Paulo who was killed by a wild swarm of bees; and in Auschwitz, at Kattowitz, a bloody marital drama had played out in the street.
     “The tragedy of the German people…” my grandfather sighed. “I once heard a lecture about how everything turned out like this. It was a long time ago, mind. It was about the disunity of the German rulers, and the constant aggression from France over many centuries. When you thought about Frederick Barbarossa, that he of all people, a leader who could have done great things, had to drown… And as for the World War, after the assassination in Sarajevo, what was the Kaiser supposed to do? He was bound by his promise.
     “Hitler really is a piece of good fortune. A fabulous man. What is a country in our position supposed to do without him? It’s just a shame he can’t leave the Church alone.”

When he’d finished eating he wiped his beard mechanically with his napkin, and rolled it into the shape of a mouse. He then covered his mouth with his hand while he used a short, knife-like object to clean the gaps between his teeth. He always carried it with him; it hung in a silver Tula sheath on his watch chain. Occasionally he would pause and suck breath in through his teeth, to assess his progress. 

“What are you planning to do today?”
     “I thought I’d visit the art museum,” I said. (I’d have to leave the house quickly, otherwise he’d try to scotch my plans.) A pause, in which he was distracted by his teeth again (“Hm, something isn’t right back there”), before he made his disappointment known.
     “Then I won’t be able to put you to work in the garden, I suppose. How frustrating. The lawn needs your attention, and I thought you might help with replanting the lilies-of-the-valley. But it seems that’s not going to be possible. Haven’t you already been to the art museums, though? I have to say, I don’t see what good will come from your visits.”
     Schura came and began clearing the table.
     “Either way, go ahead. You can visit the art museum every day as far as I’m concerned! You’ll see what good it does you. And why are you always cutting more bread?” he suddenly snapped, turning to Schura. “You never learn!”
     At that, he picked himself up and hurried into the garden. (“I have to do everything myself!”) 

                                                                          * * *

I lay out in the deckchair and worked on my novel, which was about an elephant. Next to me, weighted down with a stone, was enough writing paper for the job.
     I told my grandfather, who was digging up the lilies-of-the-valley, sighing and groaning, that this was schoolwork: an essay comparing the formation of the English and Japanese Empires. He kept glancing over at me while I worked. 

I hadn’t been working for long when I realized I had to get up and fetch a stool from the kitchen to put my feet on. It would make writing easier.
     Then, a little later, I noticed that I had left my sunglasses inside (they were new, made by Zeiss Umbral). What’s more, my head was lying too far back—I needed a cushion, which required another trip inside. So, up again.
     In the veranda I found a cushion that looked old and faded, such that my grandfather wouldn’t come running. (“For God’s sake, boy, not the Chinese one!”)
     It had to be about the last elephant of the herd, that’s how I imagined my novel. Things were going quite badly for him: he was surrounded by pygmies who wanted him dead. If they caught him, his legs would be hollowed out and sold as waste-paper baskets to white farmers. Unfortunately, however, the writing was slow going because I didn’t have enough knowledge of the subject. 

I stumbled through the house looking for an encyclopedia. My Uncle Richard’s bookcase was locked. Fine Chinese silverwork lined the shelves, set in front of the gold-printed spines: the pictures, brought back from Hong Kong, showed junks and coolies. There was also a pine cone on the shelves, though that came from Ohlsdorf.
     At the very bottom, visible only if you pressed up against the glass, were the de Bonsac papers. Our family was ennobled in the fifteenth century, but, as with racehorses, the line was thoroughly overbred. None the less, there were transcripts from Gotha—in Thuringia—and correspondence with other people named de Bonsac, all of whom testified to the de Bonsacs being of the most noble blood. 

My grandfather’s dining room had twenty-four chairs.
     “Here’s where your grandmother used to eat her corn flakes.” She had struggled with stomach ulcers for the last years of her life, and half her body had been paralyzed since 1918. She then lost her ability to speak, except for a few words. She couldn’t write, couldn’t read. Upon first noticing her deterioration, she’d hit herself in the mouth out of frustration. (“Oh terrible, you little . . .”) But the language centre was soon no more.

                                                                          * * *

One night there was a heavy air raid. We sat all together in the garage, which had been rebuilt as a bomb shelter. It was a real rat trap though: there was only one exit and it went into the house. It was a wonder it was even permitted. I had helped bring my cousin’s Schiffer piano down into the shelter so we’d have it to pass the time. However, it stayed shut. “Black Eyes” went unplayed.
     A great whistling sound encircled us, and we all fell to the ground—and then it hit. Schura screamed shrilly and my grandfather hit his head against a support beam.
     “What a stupid and impudent boy you are!” he screamed over the crashing, holding his head with both hands. 

When everything was over we climbed into the house through the shattered doorway. The roof was gone; the red sky hung above us. The family clock lay on its face and didn’t make a single sound. (Bonum bono. Chalice and grapes.) I stood it up, pulled the weights high and set the pendulum in motion. I set the time to three-thirty.
     In the meantime my grandfather went to check whether his workspace was still in one piece, and found that all of his tools had fallen off the worktable.
     All the windows in the house had been blown away, and rubble, dust and mortar lay a foot deep on the carpet beside them. A single cobblestone lay on the desk next to my uncle’s marble writing implements, and all the silver junks and coolies had squished together in the bookcase. (The upside being that you could reach the books quite easily now.) The snowscape, meanwhile, was speckled with shards of glass, and the frame had lost a wing.
     My grandfather pulled glass shards out of the windows of his conservatory, sucking his teeth, and tied the maple in place again. On the street the macadamia tree had been torn out, he said, and showed me a piece of it. He’d switched on the lamp, which still worked, surprisingly.
     “Fabulous,” he said, “everything turned upside down except the grandfather clock.” It ticked on, unmoved.
     Schura straightened the chairs and I brushed the ash off the table with the silver crumb brush. I swept it carefully on to the floor, so as not to ruin Grandmother’s crocheted runner. It would be cleaned up later. 

A gigantic sinkhole had opened up behind the house. The flowerbed with the lilies-of-the-valley had disappeared, and all the roses were covered in ash.
     Next door, the garden bunker had been destroyed by a direct hit. Thankfully there had been no one inside. A pair of Grandfather’s long underpants hung in the bush. (That too was “fabulous.”)
     Where had the other bombs fallen? I wondered. 

It was only then that we became aware that the villa across the street was burning. There was a horse bucking in the front garden; it had become tangled up in the wire fence. Behind it, the flames raged. The wind was strong and caused them to burst out of the windows.
     We were called over to see if anything could be salvaged. In the living room we found heavy green armchairs. If they had been smaller, someone might have pulled them out. Instead I grabbed a model ship from a chest and brought it out to the owner of the villa, who stood outside among the few possessions that had been saved, meek and quiet. There were table linens in the chest that were more important.
     “But thanks anyway, my lad.”

We saw a political leader dragging beds into an arbor. (“Everyone at Krammon’s is dead,” I heard someone say. “And Poststraße has been completely destroyed.”) Where there was once a bridge over the railway lines, there was now a yawning hole. The security and emergency services blocked it off. (“Now you can’t get into the city any more…”) Everyone was angry. (“I’ll kill them all myself! Dropping bombs here for no reason!”) Sternstraße was still intact, for the most part, I noticed.
     Then a time fuse exploded. All of the windowpanes burst out into the street. At first I thought it was just paper being thrown out. (“Why is everyone throwing paper out the window at the same time?”) It was only afterwards that I heard the explosion. 

I saw black clumps in the front garden. I thought they might be corpses, so didn’t explore any further. (“Careful! Don’t step on the wires!”) Blood sausage was handed out to everyone, but I soon escaped the street to pack my trunk.
     “I can understand why you’re leaving,” my grandfather said. He fished a 5-mark note, one of the new ones, hesitantly out of his wallet. On the front there was a young German soldier with Brunswick looming behind him. (“Since the outbreak of the war the demand for paper money in small denominations has been constantly rising,” the paper had reported.)
     My grandfather probably thought it was his fault that I’d experienced a raid here. He was giving me money out of guilt. It made me feel sorry to leave him sitting there like that. At Wandsbek Station, refugees sat and waited. There were hundreds of them. Why they hadn’t left already was a mystery to me. There were women in tracksuit bottoms—wearing two coats, one on top of the other, with kerchiefs on their heads—and old men too. Each sat with a pot of soup.
     A double-decker train stood empty on the track. I got in, paying no attention to where it was going. Getting out of Hamburg was the main thing. 

It turned out to be going to Lübeck. The only passenger besides me was a young man.
     “These double-deckers are so draughty,” he said, “that’s the downside. Wherever you sit, there’s a draught.”
     Why did I choose to spend my vacation in Hamburg? Who would come up with such an idea… 

When we arrived in Lübeck the sky was dark. The trees were covered with ash, blown over from Hamburg. Book halves lay abandoned in gardens. They had such nice little bunkers in Lübeck, I noted: they had timber frames, and were camouflaged as towers.
     “Oh heavens!” my mother said, when I called to update her. Her whole recovery was down the drain now. “Typical.”