His father went to sea. The sadness of his forefathers was deep in him. In Hamburg harbor he lay with a woman whose name he didn’t know, nor she his; he really didn’t like any women, but this one looked like a man, which helped. He signed on as a ship’s cook on a boat headed for India, but it sank three weeks out from port. Fish stranger than any he could have imagined ate his flesh, his bones turned to coral, his hair to sea grass, his eyes to pearls.
His father was dark-skinned. He was the son of a landowner and a maid who came from Trinidad and was as black as night. Nobody paid attention to him as he was growing up, which was perhaps his good fortune, but when he was fifteen his father gave him some money and he left. He didn’t know where he was going, one place seemed just like another, and he had no plans. Time, he thought as he leaned his head against the window of the stagecoach, was strictly an illusion. Others before him had crossed these hills, others would cross them after him, but they remained the same hills and the ground was the same ground. And fundamentally the horses were the same horses, where was the difference? As for people, he thought, the differences really aren’t that great either. Might it be possible that we’re always the same, in ever-changing dreams? Only the names deceive us. Set them aside and you see it right away.
He had himself set down in a small village. The inhabitants found it amazing that he was black, they’d never seen such a thing before. At first he worked as a farrier, then as a horse doctor; he had an instinct for their bodies and what hurt them. A blessing hung over him. The animals trusted him and people didn’t hate him. He married and had seven children; some died at birth, others survived, and to his surprise they were all white. God sends us on mysterious paths, he said to his wife, and we must walk those paths without complaint.
And so he grew old. He was content, the only one in the line of his ancestors ever to be so. One rainy afternoon he sank to his knees in front of the house, looked around with curiosity, closed his eyes, laid his head back as if to listen to the earth beneath him, and never came back.
His father, the landowner, was an alchemist who never succeeded in transforming dross into gold, but this was in no way surprising, since no other alchemist ever did either. He lived in a drafty manor house, sired more than a dozen children with the maids, among them a black girl from Trinidad who could both mesmerize and heal. He never married. He also spent a lot of time contemplating whether he should be Catholic or Protestant. The black girl, on the other hand, thought often of the place from which she came: she remembered its warmth, she remembered rain that was as light as air, she remembered the power of the sun, and she remembered the fragrance of its plants. She tended her dark son, she kissed and hugged him whenever she could, which was not often, for her work was hard, and when he finally set off on his own road, she knew that he would not come back.
Meanwhile the landowner was plagued by trouble with his teeth. One after the other, they fell out, and sometimes the pain drove him to the brink of madness. One clammy morning an abscess in the jaw made him so ill that he had to go to bed. Someone he no longer recognized squashed herbs against his face, and they had a stinging smell. Half an hour later he died of blood poisoning and never came back.
His father was made big by the biggest of all wars. At Lüttich he lost three fingers, outside Antwerp an ear, at Prague a hand, but alas not the one already missing the fingers. But he knew how to plunder, he knew where gold was to be found, and when he’d accrued enough he left service with the Swedish king and bought a manor. He married, sired three children, and shortly thereafter fell victim to a band of marauders. It was a long-drawn-out event, because they had all sorts of things they wanted to try out on him; meanwhile his wife and children hid themselves in the cellar. When the intruders left, he was still alive, but his family could barely recognize him anymore; it took him two days to die. He did come back. Even today, there are nightly sightings of what must be his ghost, wandering through the house and looking exhausted.
His mother was an unusual woman. She had vivid dreams, and sometimes she felt she could see the future, or things that were happening far, far away. If she had been a man, many avenues would have been open to her, and she would have had a destiny. One night she dreamed about a one-eyed, one-legged old man, hidden in a shed. He felt his body grow stiff, he felt a cold hand on his neck, and he laughed as if nothing that interesting had ever happened to him. But before he died, she woke up.
She was interested in many things. She secretly dissected corpses, of which there was an ample supply, given that the war had lasted so long that there were old people who had never known peace. She focused on muscles, fibers, nerves; in between times she gave her husband five children, of whom three survived birth, but then a roof tile fell on her head. It wasn’t part of God’s plan, no destiny had willed it, it was just that the roofer was incompetent, and she never came back.
Her father had originally been a highwayman. His mother had abandoned him and he was brought up by a farming couple who needed a cheap laborer. They gave him the minimum to eat, and he left as soon as he could.
He hadn’t imagined the forest could go on forever. It had no governing law, and whoever needed to get through it was protected neither by God nor any ruling prince. For a time he robbed travelers and slept in holes in the ground, but one day, unexpectedly, he found himself face-to-face with a witch: a hideous creature that was all hair and warts, one-third woman, one-third man, and one-third tusked hog. She was eating a small, bloody creature, a fawn perhaps, maybe even a human child, he didn’t dare to look. The witch raised her head. Her eyes were poison green, and the pupils a mere dot. He grasped that she had seen into the very heart of his being and that she wouldn’t forget him. He ran and he ran. His breath rattled, branches struck him in the face, first night came and then day. Utterly exhausted, he finally reached a walled city.
Once there he allowed himself to settle down, and he worked as a guardian of houses, properties, and fields. He had nine children, three of whom — all girls — survived. He made friends and earned money and lived as if he’d forgotten the threat over his head. He taught his daughters as if they were sons, and was proud of them. They married and gave him grandchildren. The family was solidly Catholic because the town was solidly Catholic. Every Sunday he went to church and paid the priest for the salvation of his soul. People said there was going to be war, but he didn’t believe it. And one night the witch appeared before him. He saw her quite clearly, although the room was pitch black and she herself was darker than the darkness. They found him the next morning. He never came back.
His father was a tutor in the household of Count Schulenburg. The count had a daughter. There were secret letters, oaths, and plans to flee overseas, to a country that had just apparently been discovered, but might also be no more than a fairy tale, how could one possibly know? Their fate seemed to the two of them to be so weighty that it must be written down somewhere in a book.
But when the girl became pregnant, two men trapped the tutor on the street and beat him to death with iron bars. She gave birth in secret, the child was given away, and she was forced to marry a local minor nobleman who never knew he wasn’t the first.
After some years, she withdrew from worldly life into the convent at Passau, where she wrote a commentary on Aristotle’s book on clouds. God, she explained, was not outside the world, He was the world, which was thus without either beginning or end. As a consequence one could describe God as neither good nor bad — He was the sum of all things and thus there was neither chance nor stroke of fate, for the world was not a theater. She would be renowned until today, if the manuscript had not been devoured by termites.