Your Mother in the Snow Doesn’t Look Back

SOME TIME after your mother has died, while removing stuff from the attic to leave out on the street—as though you could get rid of your memories of her by putting the recyclables in their yellow bags, the paper and glass in their boxes, which you’ll leave in the containers located there on the corner and that you and everyone else use for the good of the environment, under the assumption that not doing so would cause the principles on which our society is founded to collapse—you’ll find a small photo album, a simple notebook with a yellow oilcloth cover held together by a red, silken thread, and on the notebook’s last page will be the following inscription, dated the twenty-ninth of May 1967 in Göttingen: “In memory of the three years of study I greatly enjoyed in your home and under your kind care. Many thanks. Yours, Gertraud Bode.” As you read this inscription, you’ll think distractedly about the things your mother told you about her years spent studying in Göttingen, most of which were inconsequential, or whose only purpose seemed to be to teach you the virtues of hard work and discipline and that were, in fact, most likely lifted from one of those parenting magazines your mother never stopped reading, perhaps in hopes of making you look and act like one of the children in their pages, and you’ll remember how different you were from those children: you had dark skin like your father and were an average student, with a sickly look about you that you could never shake—not even on vacation, when you’d all go to the North Sea and they’d make you lie there in the sun and drink Rabenhorst (that fruit juice German mothers love to give their children) until you couldn’t take it any more and you’d miss the black clouds from the soot of the coal mines, which by then had been killing the inhabitants of the city where you lived with the same facility that unemployment and despair later did, when the mines closed and Gelsenkirchen (for that’s what your city was called) became