Siebenkästhat I had teased her with years ago? For decades she had been obsessed with the Siebenkäsepisode, which Inow realized had affected her as much as it had affected me. We had left the Hassler, Gambetti, on one of those wonderful Roman evenings that make you believe in paradise, and we’d gone only a few yards when she asked me, What is Siebenkäs? Can you tell me? I told her that Siebenkäswas an invention of Jean Paul. However, as she had no idea who Jean Paul was, I had to add that he was a writer and that Siebenkäs was one of his books. Oh, she said, if only I’d known! I thought Siebenkäswas something you’d invented to spite me. I thought you were just playing a nasty trick. I laughed uproariously over this disclosure on the way from the Hassler to the Austrian Embassy, as I had every reason to do, but she remained silent. Then she asked me if it was really true that Jean Paul was a writer and that Siebenkäs was one of his works. She did not believe it at first, having never believed anything I told her. So Siebenkäs is a book by a writer called Jean Paul, my mother said more than once on the way to the Austrian Embassy. During the first part of our walk to the embassy she hardly said another word, but when we were halfway there she suddenly asked, And is Kafka a writer too? Yes, Kafka’s a writer. What a pity, she said. I thought you’d invented them all! What a pity! She could not get over the fact that Jean Paul and Kafka were writers, the authors of Siebenkäs and The Trial, and not inventions of mine designed to trick her. So now, I said to Gambetti, you can see the intellectual state my family is in. That Wolfsegg is in. Five libraries, Gambetti, and not the foggiest notion of our greatest writers, to say nothing of the epoch-making philosophers, whose names my mother has never heard of, at least not consciously. My father knows their names, of course, but even he has no idea what these people thought and wrote. Being a farmer, he has always had a primitive contempt for the intellect: cows and pigs mean everything to him, the intellect more or less nothing. If my father could choose between the company of Kant and that of a prize porker, I told Gambetti, he would instantly plump for the porker. I didn’t introduce you to my mother when she was in Rome, Gambetti, because she wouldn’t have understood you. She would only have found fault with you, for not wearing a necktie, for instance, or for carrying a work of philosophy under your arm instead of an income tax table. Though you actually missed something, I said. We arrived late for the embassy dinner, of course; everyone else had arrived and was waiting for us. These people stand around and run one another down, showing off about their backgrounds and decorations, constantly telling you that they’ve been accredited in China, Japan, Persia, and Peru, stirring the stale old diplomatic broth, repeatedly declaring that they know God and the world and nothing else, and that they are as bored in their city apartments as they are on their country estates. They talk about books as if they were a kind of tasteless crispbread, and they know as much about conducting a symphony orchestra as they do about Spinoza, as much about Heidegger as about Dante, yet to the keen observer they always appear to have seen everything and nothing. All in all, my mother doesn’t cut a bad figure at such receptions, because she keeps up her normal role without seeming out of place and diverts her metropolitan audience with her lighthearted country chatter, in which the futility of her fatuous existence comes into its own. As her escort I am condemned to silence and ultimately to playing the fool for her. When we left the embassy, at about midnight, she again asked me whether I had told her the truth about Jean Paul being a writer and Siebenkäs being one of his books. Having never believed anything I told her, Gambetti, she disbelieved me on this point too. My mother came to Rome only to satisfy her curiosity, I said, because she had to know where and how I lived. Impelled by this curiosity, she got on a train one day and came to Rome to spy out the land, as Uncle Georg would have put it. The Piazza Minerva meant nothing to her, and the Pantheon was just a weird name she’d heard somewhere. All the same, the fact that I had taken one of the finest apartments in Rome and actually occupied the whole of it made a big impression on her. A real palazzo,she exclaimed on seeing the building where I had my fourth-floor apartment. With a view of the Pantheon, I told her, as you’ll see shortly. She couldn’t wait. You really live like a prince, she said, even before she’d seen the apartment, and her tone was almost reproachful. That’s a tremendous doorway! she exclaimed, standing in front of the palazzo and looking up at the marble facade. I’d pictured it all quite differently, she said. I suggested she should go in and walk up to the fourth floor with me. There’s no elevator, I said — that wouldn’t suit you. As she went up the stairs, she turned around every few moments to exclaim, Like a real prince! The fact that the house — I didn’t say palazzo—has no elevator makes the apartment relatively cheap, I told her, but the rent I have to pay is still one of the highest. I couldn’t refrain from saying this as I went up the stairs with her to my apartment, now three steps in front of her, now behind her. There was a certain solemnity about it all, as you can imagine, Gambetti. At last we reached the fourth floor and stood outside the door of my apartment. She was a little put out to see no nameplate on the door. No nameplate, she said, so not even the postman knows you live here. You always loved being anonymous, she said before we entered, to which I replied that it had always seemed more agreeable to preserve my anonymity. She, by contrast, was always anxious to make herself known as somebody special, though she never knew quite what it was about her that was special. Looking at the photograph of my parents boarding the Dover train at Victoria Station in London, I remembered how my mother had entered my apartment on the Piazza Minerva. Once inside, she was both astonished and alarmed. At first it took her breath away and she had difficulty finding words to express her feelings. I, meanwhile, having unlocked the door of the apartment, couldn’t help thinking of something totally absurd, Gambetti. Many years earlier my mother had lost one of her strongbox keys, which was never found. She searched not only her own rooms but all the other rooms, and she had others search them too, but the key was nowhere to be found. Suddenly she suspected me of having taken it for some reason that she couldn’t fathom, though clearly I had done it out of some base motive, as she put it. She accused me, on no grounds whatever, of getting rid of the key as soon as suspicion had fallen on me, out of dire necessity, so to speak, surmising that at the very last moment I had thrown her strongbox key down the well shaft outside her window in order to avoid being unmasked as a common thief. The well shaft had dried out long before. And just imagine, Gambetti, my mother gave orders for it to be searched, and she looked on as one of the gardeners was lowered down the shaft: by a workmate to retrieve the key that I, the