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gray-green lino cold beneath my toes. Aunt Inga had been the only one not to have carpet in her room; my mother, Great-Grandma Käthe, and Aunt Harriet, who were at the back of the house, had a hard, rust-colored sisal carpet that scratched the soles of your feet if you walked across it barefoot. On the large landing there were raffia mats on the wood. It was only the girls’ room, which had long been a storage room, that had bare floorboards, but these were coated in a thick brown varnish. They no longer made a sound.
    I went onto the landing, opened the walnut wardrobe, and found that all the dresses were still hanging there; a little less vibrant but there, unmistakably, was the tulle dream from Aunt Harriet’s end-of-dancing-course ball, the golden dress my mother had worn to her engagement party, and that black spangly-sparkly number, a tea gown from the thirties. It was one of Bertha’s. I rummaged further until I came across an ankle-length green silk dress, the top half of which was embroidered with sequins. It belonged to Aunt Inga. I put it on; it smelled of dust and lavender, the hem was torn and there were some sequins missing, but it was cool against my body and felt a thousand times better than my black one that I had slept in. I had never before spent so long in the house without swapping my outfit for one from the old wardrobes; in my own clothes I felt as if I had been in disguise all day long.
    Wearing Inga’s silk dress I went back into her room and sat on the wicker chair. The afternoon sun that flickered through the treetops bathed the room in a lime-green light. The streaks in the lino seemed to move like water, a breeze came in through the open window, and it felt as if I were sitting in the tranquil current of a green river.

Chapter III
    AUNT INGA WORE AMBER . Long chains of polished beads in which you could see tiny insects. We were convinced that they would shake their wings and fly away the second their resinous shells broke. Around Inga’s wrist was a chunky milky-yellow bracelet. She didn’t wear this jewelry from the sea because of her deep-sea bedroom and mermaid dress, but, as she said, for health reasons. Even as a baby she gave everyone who held her an electric shock, barely noticeable, but the spark was there; and at nighttime when Bertha put her on her breast she got a sharp shock from her child, almost like a bite, before Inga started suckling. Bertha didn’t talk to anybody about it, not even to Christa, my mother, who was two at the time and who used to flinch whenever she touched her sister.
    The older Inga got, the stronger her electrical charge became. Soon other people noticed it, too, but then every child has something that marks them out from others and that people either tease them for or admire. In Inga’s case it was these electric shocks. Hinnerk, my grandfather, got angry when Inga was close to the radio and upset the reception. There would be static, and through the hissing and crackling Inga would sometimes hear voices talking softly to one another or calling her name. As a result, when Hinnerk was listening to the radio she wasn’t allowed into the living room. Mind you, he always listened to the radio when he was in the living room. When he wasn’t in the living room he sat in the study, where no one was allowed to disturb him anyway. This meant that during the colder months of the year Hinnerk and Inga saw each other only at mealtimes. In summer everyone was outside, and in the evenings Hinnerk would sit on the terrace or ride his bike through the pasture. Inga avoided riding a bike: too much metal, too much friction. It was more Christa’s thing, and so on summer evenings and Sundays Christa and Hinnerk would ride to the lock, the lake, and to cousins in the neighboring villages. Inga stayed close to home; she rarely left the property and thus knew it better than the rest of us.
    Frau Koop, Bertha’s neighbor, used to tell us girls that Inga was born during a