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played the first three of Bach’s six cello suites, and after a few bars I realized I would never be able to forget Theresa. On that warm summer evening in the grand salon of the nineteenth-century villa, with its tall mullioned glass doors opened wide onto the park that was all lit up, I experienced one of those rare moments of absolute happiness that only music can give us.
    Tackler was a second-generation building contractor. He and his father were self-assertive, intelligent men who’d made their money in Frankfurt with real estate. All his life, his father had carried a revolver in his right trouser pocket and a roll of cash in the left. Tackler no longer needed a weapon.
    Three years after Leonhard was born, his mother visited one of her husband’s new high-rise buildings. The topping-out ceremony was taking place on the eighteenth floor. Someone had forgotten to secure a parapet. The last Tackler saw of his wife was her handbag and a champagne glass, which she had set down next to her on a table.
    In the years that followed, a whole cavalcade of “mothers” paraded past the children. None of them stayed longer than three years. Tackler ran a prosperous home; there was a driver, a cook, a whole series of cleaning women, and two gardeners for the park. He didn’t have time to occupy himself with his children’s upbringing, so the one constant in their lives was an elderly nurse. She had already brought up Tackler, smelled of lavender, and was known to one and all simply as Etta. Her main interest was ducks. In her two-room attic apartment in Tackler’s house, she had hung five stuffed specimens on the walls, and even the brown felt hat she always wore when she went out had two blue drake’s feathers tucked into the band. Children didn’t especially appeal to her.
    Etta had always stayed; she’d long ago become one of the family. Tackler considered childhood a waste of time and barely remembered his own. He trusted Etta, because she agreed with him about the fundamentals of child rearing. They should grow up with discipline and without what Tackler called “conceit.” Sometimes severity was required.
    Theresa and Leonhard had to earn their own pocket money. In summer, they weeded dandelions in the garden and received a ha’penny for each plant—“but only with its roots; otherwise you get nothing,” said Etta. She counted the individual plants as meanly as she counted the pennies. In winter, they had to shovel snow. Etta paid by the yard.
    When Leonhard was nine, he ran away from the house. He climbed a pine tree in the park and waited for them to come searching for him. He imagined first Etta and then his father despairing and lamenting his flight. Nobody despaired. Before supper, Etta called that if he didn’t come right now, there would be nothing more to eat and he’d get his bottom smacked. Leonhard gave up. His clothes were full of resin, and he was given a slap on the ears.
    At Christmas, Tackler gave the children soap and pullovers. There was only one time when a business friend, who’d made a lot of money with Tackler in the course of the year, gave Leonhard a toy gun and Theresa a doll’s kitchen. Etta took the toys down to the cellar. “They don’t need that sort of thing,” she said, and Tackler, who hadn’t been listening, agreed.
    Etta considered their upbringing complete when brother and sister could behave themselves at table, speak proper German, and otherwise keep quiet. She told Tackler she thought they’d come to a bad end. They were too soft, not real Tacklers like him and his father. It was a sentence he remembered.
    Etta got Alzheimer’s, slowly regressed, and became gentler. She left her birds to a museum of local history, which had no use for them and ordered the stuffed creatures destroyed. Tackler and the two children were the only ones at her funeral. On the way back, he said, “So, now that’s out of the way.”
    Leonhard worked for Tackler during the vacations. He