Other People’s Houses Read Online Free Page A

looked large out of all proportion. Her lips seemed a dark pink, with a rough surface as if they were sore.
    “I don’t know, darling.”
    “Is it because of the kidney again?”
    “Nobody knows what it is this time. The doctors are testing for an ulcer. Lorle, I have a favor to ask: Will you be a real friend and not ask me anything for the next twenty minutes? By then this migrainewill be better, and we will talk again. All right?”
    “All right. What time is it now?”
    “You can talk to Lore as you would to a grownup,” my mother told my grandmother. Sometimes my mother talked to me about my father. I was flattered, but I did not like to listen, and I cannot remember what she told me.
    And always my father would get better again and come home. It seemed strange to see him uprightagain, wearing his navy-blue business suit. My mother would cook him special diets and fetch him his bicarbonate of soda, and on Sundays he and I would take our morning walks. “Don’t fill her up with ice cream before lunch,” my mother would call after us.
    And my father always bought me an ice cream and said when we went home we would make a joke with Mutti. The joke was our ringing the bell andhaving my mother find us standing outside the door with our hands before our chests like squirrels, trembling in mock terror, which meant we had been bad again and I had had an ice cream.
    The Sunday after my father came out to Fischamend, I said I would rather stay in and read a book or draw with crayons, but my mother said the fresh air was good for me, and my father said he would tell me astory.
    The trouble with my father’s stories was that they were all one interminable Kipling story about the fight that Rikki-tikki-tavi, the mongoose, had with a snake. My father’s voice droned above my head. I walked beside him, telling myself my own delicious, mildly sexy stories. The air was just the temperature of my bare legs and arms, so that I could not tell where I ended and the worldbegan. I remember, now, that the water meadows along the Danube are so thickly grown with pink-tipped daisies and yellow buttercups that you can’t help walking on them; they form a carpet underfoot. The mosquitos had ripened and raged that year. There were some local children skipping flat pebbles across the water, and my father sat down on the crest of the bank and told me to go and play with them.

    I remember to this day the pressure of my father’s hand on the precise spot on my back, three inches to the right of my spine, where he used to push me to go and play. The fact was, I always longed to play with other children but never knew how. This time I had walked forward and stopped, and stood rubbing the back of my left hand to and fro across my temple, watching the group by the river. Thebiggest, a man-sized boy, turned and threw a little pebble. I thought it was a game and felt pleased; all the children were coming toward me up the bank. Then I saw that they had filled their mouths with Danube water, and I turned and ran, but they spat it down the back of my dress and called me “Jew.” I howled all the way home, walking beside my father, I don’t know whether from shock and frightor because of the obscene wetness that glued the stuff of my dress to my skin.
    “That’s that Willi Weber’s young brother Karl,” said my grandmother. “He is the leader of the Hitler Youth Brigade.”
    “The bastard!” said my Uncle Paul. “And I always linked his paragraphs for him! Teacher Berthold had a thing one year about linking consecutive ideas, and Willi Weber never could connect anything.”
    “Yes!” said my grandmother. “If you’d spent more time on your own work instead of writing everybody else’s essays, you might be married to Liesel now and on your way out of the country.”
    Paul looked sad. He had had a letter from Liesel that morning to say that she was going to be married and she and her husband were leaving for Paraguay. Paul said,