It felt like a late-summer day. Above the trees, still thick with leaves, clouds piled up into towering white masses, untroubled by autumn storms. Business at the wine shop had been slow, as it always was when the weather was fine enough for people to sit drinking on their own terraces in the afternoon.

It was nearly three o’clock, time to close. I could hardly wait. It was warm enough to sit in a beer garden. First, though, or perhaps instead, I would visit my mother. She had recently been placed in a nursing home after a stay in hospital, where, for the benefit of the next generation of medical professionals, she had been subjected to rather more treatment than was strictly necessary. She no longer recognised me.

I hadn’t seen her all week, having allowed even the most trivial excuse to prevent me from driving to the home. Weren’t these visits, by now, really just about me and the soothing of my conscience? What difference did my presence make to my mother, who took me either for one of her long-dead brothers or simply for a friendly stranger?

Friendly? A stranger? As though my mother had ever considered a stranger friendly! Dementia had only deepened her naturally reserved disposition. On her worst days she wouldn’t speak to me at all, barely raising her head to look at me.

I loathed the home, and I loathed myself for having been unable to spare her it. Although I knew I had done everything I could—even to the point of a loud and open confrontation with the chief physician in the hospital corridor over the necessity of a third general anaesthetic in two days—I felt responsible and guilty, and utterly beyond absolution.

The building alone repelled me: a neoclassical monstrosity painted Schönbrunn yellow, always overheated, always stuffy. Inside, an aromatic medley of assorted incontinences, unaired beds, clothes worn for too long, vegetables steamed to mush in industrial-sized kitchen pots, and the ubiquitous chamomile or peppermint tea, whose vapours drifted through the corridors in clouds.

My stomach always turned a little as I entered the lobby, made my way along the corridors and finally puffed up the stairs to the second floor. I disliked taking the lift: what if there was a corpse on its way down to the refrigerated rooms in the basement, and we got stuck?

The week before, the visit had been easier. That day, too, had been sunny. I had managed to slip away a little early, brought along a chilled bottle of Pinot Gris, wheeled my mother around the nursing home’s garden for a while, and then settled beneath a pergola with her to raise a glass to the fine weather.

She had been lucid and alert, had praised the wine from the Palatinate and had even consented to another of the establishment’s unfortunate inmates joining us, after he had asked permission with somewhat rusty good manners and been rewarded with a plastic cup of wine.

And although hardly a word was spoken, it had almost turned into a little party.

The memory made me realise how nervous I was. A woman in her eighties who could no longer use a telephone ought not to be left entirely to the nursing staff for a whole week. Of course they would notify me if ’something‘ appeared to be imminent—a telephone call, from whoever it might be, that call I had dreaded all my life—but that wasn’t the point. I wanted, if at all possible, not to arrive too late, like someone summoned home by telegram from overseas who, despite all the speed of modern travel, must reckon with the possibility of not reaching his mother in time.

What did in time actually mean in a case like this?

I ordered a taxi for shortly after three. The accounts, the tidying up—they could wait until Monday. I felt I would be wasting time if I submitted to the long walk to the train and the equally long journey into town. A taxi would get me to the home in half the time. Perhaps there would even be time for a beer after work, my back against the sun-warmed wall of a pub, before the gathering dusk brought a sudden chill.

The taxi driver was Turkish and spoke flawless Bavarian.

„In a bit of a hurry, are you?“

„What makes you think that?“ I asked.

„You look it,“ the driver replied. „Off to see your sweetheart?“

„You’re a mind-reader, are you?“ I tried to smile.

„Can’t keep the ladies waiting! They’ll be gone before you can blink!“

The driver put his foot down as though he were on his way to collect a lottery jackpot. In scarcely fifteen minutes we had arrived. I jumped out of the taxi, to hell with the receipt, avoided the visitor-packed entrance hall and hurried through the rear entrance, officially reserved for staff. I knew that the door, supposedly secured by a numerical code, was rarely shut. I dashed up the stairwell to the second floor.

The fourth door on the left bore my mother’s name—but also that of her roommate. A loner all her life, my mother had been condemned by her admission to the home to spend the final chapter of her existence in enforced companionship with a complete stranger. The thought made me shudder. What would I do in her position? Throw the other woman out of the window? How much trouble could you get into, after all, for forcibly claiming a little privacy in a place where people were simply waiting to die? Though perhaps, by then, you were too weak for that. Too indifferent, even.

The bedroom door stood ajar, as though a nurse were inside or had just stepped out to fetch something.

For all the sunshine, the room lay in half-light. The bed at the far end, by the window, belonged to her roommate. It was empty.

My mother’s bed stood against the wall on the right. She was lying on her left side, in her nightdress, with the covers only half pulled over her.

„Well, sleepyhead?“ I whispered. „Isn’t it a bit early to be turning in?“

I touched her gently on the right shoulder. She felt warm.

„Hello, Mum. It’s me. Richard.“

I touched her shoulder again, giving it a little shake this time. It yielded, though there was a peculiar resistance to it.

„Mum, wake up!“ I was no longer whispering.

It took a few seconds for the primal fear inside me to rouse itself from decades of slumber, for the thought to dawn on me that this might be the moment when there really was something to be afraid of.

Then something wrenched me out of the room.

I ran to the staff room—empty, as always—caught sight of a nurse disappearing into another room, caught up with him and dragged him back with me.

„Please, come and look at my mother! She won’t wake up!“

The nurse was experienced enough not to resist. Once inside my mother’s room, he sat down beside her on the bed, shook her, spoke to her and gave her cheek a light slap. Finally, he pinched a fold of skin on her neck between two fingers and twisted it. When even that brought no response, he turned to me and shook his head.

„I’m terribly sorry,“ he said, and I could hear the sincerity in his voice, though for him this must have been routine, „but I’m afraid your mother has just passed away.“

Exactly four weeks to the day later, the cemetery left no doubt as to the season. An icy wind drove snowflakes horizontally across the square outside the funeral chapel, and the handful of mourners hurried out of the blizzard into the cold of the building, which, after all, had never been intended to make anyone feel comfortable.

In my case, it succeeded admirably, for this was the first funeral at which the leading role had fallen to me. It is by no means the deceased who is the most important person at such a ceremony, but rather the chief mourner. All eyes are upon him. People scrutinise him, eager to see how he acquits himself. How long will he manage to hold back his tears? Will he perhaps even milk the drama for all it’s worth and oblige the assembled mourners by collapsing? Wasn’t that the same suit he had worn to his uncle’s funeral—his godfather, wasn’t he? Fancy it still fitting him! And who had polished his shoes to such a shine? Wasn’t he supposed to be single?

I was well aware of all this. Ever since an uncle had admonished me, decades earlier, coram publico, at my grandmother’s almost equally freezing funeral, to take my blue-with-cold fingers out of my trouser pockets in deference to the dignity of the occasion, I had known that this gathering, like every other gathering of my relatives, would be concerned with one thing only: making la più bella figura, as my semi-Italophone aunt liked to say.

And so there I stood in the spotlight of the great funeral candles. I had chosen the time of the funeral, the urn, the flowers, the music, and, last but not least, written the eulogy for the pastor. How much could possibly go wrong?

As soon as I arrived, I had sought out the Pakistani cemetery attendant in his little cubbyhole and handed him the CD containing Franz Schubert’s Ständchen. Three times—no, four—I had impressed upon him that it was track five, which he was kindly to play after the pastor’s opening words. I even made him point to the correct line on the label with his finger, just to make sure that ‚five‘ meant ‚five‘ in Pakistani, too.

What actually came blasting out, a few seconds too early and cutting the pastor off rather abruptly, was not gentle, melancholy piano music but an outrageously lively string quartet by a lesser-known composer, perilously close to twelve-tone music, played at tremendous volume and lasting a wildly excessive four and a half minutes.

Plenty of time to reassure myself that no one could possibly notice the mistake, since nobody knew what was supposed to have been played. Oh, really? asked another voice in my head. Are you sure it isn’t obvious to everyone that you don’t play that sort of thing at a funeral? What a spectacularly inappropriate occasion to acquaint the world with your avant-garde musical tastes. Don’t kid yourself: everyone knows it’s the wrong piece—and there’s a sandstorm raging inside your mother’s urn!

I had no idea I could be so vicious to myself. By the time it finally ended, I was slumped in my folding chair in the front row like a wrung-out towel.

But there was no respite, for the pastor now resumed his eulogy, seasoning it with a little history lesson. Instead of following my instructions and saying that my mother had been denied the chance to rest in Transylvanian soil, he simply transformed the Hungarian ‚Széklerland‘ of her origins into ‚Romania‘.

„Now that’s quite enough!“ I heard my mother’s voice say, perfectly clearly, from somewhere offstage.

„Would you mind giving that halfwit a good whack round the ears with the holy-water bucket?!“

Perhaps it would have been a good idea even earlier, for before the ceremony I had already failed in an attempt at a foolish little gesture. Alone with the urn, I had tried to open it quickly and slip in a tiny chocolate heart wrapped in tinfoil, but couldn’t get the lid off before the pastor suddenly appeared at my side. With my heart almost melting in my trouser pocket, I at least managed, right at the very end—the cemetery gardeners were already preparing to shovel the earth back into the grave—to drop my little offering of love somewhere vaguely near the right spot.

„About time, too!“ came Mamá’s voice once again.

Looking back further still, even the preparations for the ceremony had proved complicated, although fat Dimi, a relic of Russian descent from our days together in the Bundeswehr, who described himself as „fatalism grown fat“, had already relieved me of the hardest part: choosing a funeral director. He had gone about it with ruthlessly matter-of-fact enquiries, comparisons of every conceivable kind and not the slightest trace of sentimentality.

„You don’t know what goes on behind the scenes anyway,“ Dimi had said. „You can fork out ten thousand euros and they’ll nick the dead woman’s gold teeth. Better to pay only a thousand, eh?“

„My mother didn’t have any gold teeth,“ I objected, though I knew perfectly well that wasn’t the point.

„All right, all right. You get what I mean, don’t you?“

Having lost both parents within two years, Dimi had bestowed upon himself the title of professional bereaved relative and liked to compare himself to ‚The Undertaker‘, an American professional wrestler who always entered the ring with a coffin. He had come to believe that funeral expenses should be cut wherever possible, since the savings could then be put to more effective use drinking away the grief. And indeed, it had taken him very little time to find a funeral director who promised respectability at a reasonable price.

What followed I experienced exactly as I imagined one was supposed to experience such things: sleepwalking, absent, on autopilot, and whatever other descriptions there were for the days following the initial shock. In truth, my condition made some things easier, and so, as though pulled along by strings, I eventually signed the contract and went, with Dimi, who had been waiting outside smoking, straight to the next Greek restaurant, in broad daylight and by the shortest possible route.

By the third Ouzo, something came over me.

„She isn’t even being cremated here, can you imagine! They’re taking her to Mainburg. I haven’t even checked where that is. Should I have paid more? I mean, for a crematorium in Munich?“

Dimi looked at me through his beer glass.

„From everything I know about your mother, she loved travelling. So a little trip into the countryside at the end isn’t the worst thing, is it? And I’ll bet she’s never been to Mainburg.“

It was Dimi, too, who had sat beside me during the funeral service and placed his heavy Russian hand on my knee when grief finally overwhelmed me with all its force.

Just as the pastor was reading out my words in his eulogy, castigating the exploitation of human beings by their own brothers and sisters—in this case, the exploitation of my mother, an underpaid single parent, by the medium-sized company to which she had devoted all her strength for almost twenty years—I caught sight of a finely dressed elderly lady who seemed to be sitting on a block of ice. After a slight delay, I recognised her as the mother of that very company’s current managing director.

„Oh God, Mum’s old boss! What’s she doing here?“ I groaned behind my hand.

„That’ll teach her,“ Dimi murmured into my right ear.

When at last the final few yards behind the urn had been covered, the holy water sprinkled, the earth shovelled, the condolences offered and the hands shaken, everyone gathered at a nearby inn, where the final chapter was to go wrong as well.

I had chosen the unfamiliar place in great haste, chiefly on the principle of not going to yet another restaurant that had already hosted the funeral meal of some other deceased member of the family. It proved unequal to the occasion. The massive oak tables beneath their green-and-white checked tablecloths would have been better suited to an outing by a skittles club, and a dog’s feeding bowl would have been more appropriate for the food.

So everyone made it brief. Their advanced age came in very handy for some of the mourners. Sitting wasn’t so comfortable with an artificial hip, someone said; the dog was alone at home; a granddaughter had to be collected from the airport on her return from a year as an au pair; it got dark very quickly at night.

When it became clear that my remaining aunts and uncles were determined, despite my vehement protests, to split the bill between them—something that, at that moment, felt to me like a line ruled beneath the sum total of my life—Dimi had the presence of mind to order a bottle of „Absolut“ vodka and let me know where I could find him once everyone else had gone.

And so, in Dimi’s Fiat Cinquecento, with its engine running and the heater on, the fifth of December quietly slipped out of its own significance. In the end, Dimi drove home completely drunk, while I was sitting in a taxi once again, just as I had been four weeks earlier, but this time it was taking me to a place where, at last, nothing mattered.