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violent storm; lightning had been raging overhead, and at the very instant that a bolt had flashed through the house from top to bottom, Inga was born. Inga hadn’t made a sound; the first cry came from her mouth when the thunder boomed, and from then on she was electric. “The littl ’un,” Frau Koop would tell anyone willing to listen, “hadn’t been earthed yet,” but was still “half hanging in the other world, the poor little worm.” Admittedly, Rosmarie had come up with “the poor little worm” afterward. But if Frau Koop hadn’t actually said that, it was definitely what she meant. In any case, we would never tell each other this story without adding the “poor little worm” at the end; we thought it sounded so much better like that.
    Christa, my mother, had inherited the height and the long, rather pointy nose of the Deelwaters. From the Lünschens she had her thick brown hair, but her lips were sharply defined, her eyebrows strong, and her gray eyes narrow. Too severe to be considered a beauty in the fifties. I looked like my mother, only everything about me, my head, my hands, my body, even my knees, was rounder than Christa. Too round to be considered a beauty in the nineties. So that was another thing we had in common. Harriet, the youngest, wasn’t exactly pretty, but looked lovely—always a little disheveled, with red cheeks, chestnut-brown hair, and healthy teeth that were slightly crooked. Her loping stride and large hands were reminiscent of a puppy. But Inga, she was beautiful. As tall as Bertha, if not taller, with a grace in the way she moved and a sweetness in her features that somehow refused to fit into the barren landscape here. Her hair was dark, darker than Hinnerk’s, her eyes were blue like her mother’s but larger and framed by curled dark eyelashes. Her red lips curved mockingly. She spoke in a soft, clear voice, though her vowels resonated deeply, which filled even the most empty words with promise. All men fell in love with Inga. But my aunt always kept them at arm’s length; this wasn’t so much coyness on her part as fear of the physical repercussions if she kissed them, let alone made love to them. So she withdrew, stayed at home listening to music on a bulky record player that a smart admirer who was good with his hands had made for her out of spare parts, and danced alone on the matte lino floor of her bedroom.
    Besides a few electronics textbooks, her bookshelves contained fat, sad romance novels. My mother told us that when they were young the thing Inga enjoyed reading most of all was one particular story in the tattered old book of fairy tales that had belonged to my great-grandmother Käthe: the tale of the Amber Witch. Maybe Inga thought she was an amber witch herself, living at the bottom of the sea, luring people into the depths. She had started wearing amber jewelry as a child, because in one of the electronics textbooks she had read that elektron was the Greek word for amber, a substance particularly good at absorbing electric charges.
    After finishing school she did a photography apprenticeship and now had her own highly regarded studio in Bremen. She specialized in photographing trees and plants, held small exhibitions from time to time, and received ever larger commissions for waiting rooms, conference halls, and other spaces where people stared at walls for hours on end and discovered for the first time that tree trunks could be as smooth as a woman’s legs in silk stockings, that the fruits of the cranesbill really did look like cranes’ bills, and that most old trees had human features. Inga never married. She was now in her mid-fifties and more beautiful than most women of twenty-five.
    Rosmarie, Mira, and I were convinced that she had lovers. Aunt Harriet had once hinted that the DIY friend who made the record player had revealed his feelings for Inga, but she was still living at home at the time: for the three sisters, love affairs under Hinnerk’s