My mother’s situation—and now I’ll get to the point—often forced me to visit Zurich, this city of posers and braggarts and debasement, and had completely paralyzed me for years. It had become vile, altogether heinous, it had become more than I was able to bear, than one should have to bear. My mother, in short, was very sick, which is to say sick in the head, too—not just there, but primarily there. In order not to lose touch with her, I’d decided at some point to accept the misery in which she had been wasting away for decades, surrounded by empty vodka bottles, unopened bills from various Zurich sable-fur warehouses, and the crinkling foils of her pain medication. Not to mention all those still shrink-wrapped articles of clothing she had bought, out of some compulsion stemming from the war and the postwar years—the sweaters and cardigans and pleated slacks, which had wandered into the armoires in her apartment, stacked and stowed away and archived, as it were, next to the dozens of Hermès handbags and the quite literally hundreds of Ferragamo shoes that were never worn.

She had neither an email address nor a mobile phone, and spurned the internet altogether. Too complicated, she’d always said, and the computer keys? Too small. I guessed, however, that she refused it all out of arrogance. She made a performance of liking to read the newspapers and Stendhal. Her skin had the texture of dry silk, and she was always slightly sunburned despite never sitting outside on the terrace, among the hydrangeas.