Stella
Also by Takis Würger
The Club
Stella
TAKIS WÜRGER
Translated from the German by Liesl Schillinger
Grove Press
New York
Copyright © 2019 by Carl Hanser Verlag GmbH & Co. KG, Munich. All rights reserved.
English translation © 2021 by Liesl Schillinger
Jacket design by Becca Fox Design
Jacket photograph © ullstein bild/GRANGER
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For lyric permission details, see Acknowledgments.
Parts of this story are true. The text in italics contains excerpts from testimony used in a court trial held in Berlin. The original documents are located in the Berlin State Archive.
First published in the German language by Carl Hanser Verlag in 2019.
Published simultaneously in Canada
Printed in the United States of America
This book is set in 11.5-pt. Scala LF by Alpha Design & Composition of Pittsfield, NH.
First Grove Atlantic hardcover edition: January 2021
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available for this title.
ISBN 978-0-8021-4917-6
eISBN 978-0-8021-4919-0
Grove Press
an imprint of Grove Atlantic
154 West 14th Street
New York, NY 10011
Distributed by Publishers Group West
For my great-grandfather Willi Waga,
who was gassed in 1941 as part of the involuntary euthanasia program Aktion T4
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 the 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