by Lily Tuck
Uli married again, and, with her second husband, went to live in America. She had several more children, and although a good mother and wife, she nevertheless always thought of Felix as the love of her life. Her defining love. The man against whom she measured all other men—notably, her two husbands. Felix had, at once, been patient, assured and adoring. He had been careful to make sex for Uli comfortable and pleasurable. In turn, a willing pupil, she had let him instruct her. She trusted him and learned to feel at ease with herself and with nakedness. And although their affair lasted only a few months and Uli was very young, she often wondered how she had lived for so long in ignorance and without desire.
Sonia, Adele’s daughter, married a professor of physics; with her husband, she moved to England. Fortunately, Adele also was able to go to England before the start of the Second World War (Friederike, Elizabeth and Waldemar stayed in Germany and were not so fortunate; Miss Tennyson, the governess, had, of course, left years ago). Adele went to live with Margaret, the kind plump sister. Margaret was married to an Englishman and lived on a farm in Essex. In either 1938 or 1939—Adele could no longer remember which year—she suffered a detached retina and was forced to stay in bed, lying immobile on her back, for several months. In addition, sand bags were placed around her head to keep her from moving it. The only thing she remembered clearly of that time—besides listening to the increasingly distressing news on the BBC—was Margaret reading out loud to her in the afternoons. No intellectual, Margaret was nevertheless an avid reader of novels and, of all the novels that Margaret read to her, Adele’s favorite was Jane Eyre. The passage she liked best was the one where Jane first meets Mr. Rochester on the road to Thornfield Hall and where Mr. Rochester’s horse slips and falls on the ice. Margaret had to reread this passage twice to Adele.
Walli chose to take quite a different path from that of his academic father. In 1933, he went to live in Paris, where he fell in love and where he began to make films. One of his films begins with a man walking unsteadily in between the cars of a speeding train. The credits are rolling on the screen, which makes it difficult to tell whether the man is in physical pain or so preoccupied with his thoughts—thoughts that may have to do with how similar passages in Homer and Hesiod suggest a relationship—when a young woman with indistinct features but with very blonde hair, her arms outstretched as if to embrace him, comes toward him and so startles him that he loses his footing on the uneven metal couplings that join the two cars and, stumbling against the side door, which is not shut properly, he falls out of the speeding train.
