Free Nothing But Fear by Knud Romer

pinched her cheek so hard that she got a bruise, and Mother said that she was his and only his, and worked her way into him one smile at a time. She managed to carve out a place for herself – if not in his heart, at least in the car. And on Sundays they drove out into the blue yonder and folded down the hood and sang
Wochenend und Sonnenschein
. It felt almost like having a family, and she pressed herself against his side. Then they drove straight into the car in front and Mother went clean through the windscreen.
    She sat there with blood streaming from a face that was cut to shreds – just like his – and in reality maybe this was why Papa Schneider accepted her after the accident. She was given the best treatment money could buy at the university clinic in Vienna, and the cuts healed without leaving scars – except around her one eye, Mother always pointed out, and I nodded even though I could see nothing – and he took her under his wing, put her photograph in his wallet and became a different person. Mother was allowed to do almost anything – and did. She had boyfriends and made trouble and, when she came home with Stichling, who was ten years older than her, she even got away with that. Papa Schneider forgave her everything. She was the only person who could sweeten him when he lost his temper. She could talk him into anything, and, if she had spent too much money, he would laugh and say,
‘Motto Hilde: Immer druf!’
And maybe that was Mother’s motto:
Don’t stop there!
    Papa Schneider loved her more than the horses, loved her as much as he was able to love anyone, and Motherwas included in the family portrait alongside his dog. They were on an outing in the countryside. Grandmother was sitting in the grass with Eva in her arms, Papa Schneider was reading a book, and Mother had on a short dress – it was almost transparent – and a pageboy haircut. She was standing next to Bello looking out at me from the painting in the dining room when we sat down to eat, and Mother told me that it had been painted by Magnus Zeller. He was one of the expressionists from the München group,
Der Blaue Reiter
. Papa Schneider supported him and bought his pictures – he was also a patron of Max Pechstein and Emil Nolde. They had all hung on the walls until 1937, when he had been forced to take them down – they were what Hitler called ‘degenerate art’ – and he rolled them up and hid them in the cellar. While Nolde’s fear led him to paint flowers, Pechstein and Zeller took up landscape painting. Two of them hung in heavy gold frames in our living room – one of mountains and flowing water in the Harz mountains, where Papa Schneider went on his fishing trips, and another of some sombre trees by a lake. The others had been taken by Auntie Eva – and that was not the end of it. She had taken everything.
    It was just like in the fairytale. The stepsister was evil, and Mother had grown up with a snake that grew more poisonous with every year that passed. Eva was fat and ugly and red-haired, and even though she never had to achieve anything and had everything served up on a plate, it fell through her fingers and shattered around her. She was put on a circus horse and fell off and never got on again. Shewas as tone deaf as a set of bagpipes and conjugated French verbs out of all recognition. Eva was father’s little girl and was sat on his knee and applauded for nothing, but it was no good. On the contrary it made the worm of envy turn more viciously in her whenever she hit the ball into the net and she watched Mother walk round in her tennis skirt being everything that she was not – beautiful and popular. Mother dressed her in smart clothes, put her hair up and took her along to parties when she became a teenager. Eva was a wallflower and her birthday parties attracted only bores. To inject a bit of life into it, Mother made a punch and dished it