The memory of the dark, single-story house on what was then still a large plot of land, where my mother grew up. I hardly remember it. I see a blur of dark brown and some green. Even squinting, I cannot make out anything more. Right next to it, the family of my Japanese aunt built themselves a modern detached house, bright and white, where we stay when we visit.

I remember the typhoon breaking in among the tall trees. Chestnuts with especially long spikes come pelting down around me. Spikes like toothpicks. Chestnuts unlike any I had ever seen before, and now they are striking the ground to my left and right. I am still quite small and flee with my hands protectively over my head. From somewhere, a similar memory surfaces: fist-sized hailstones in the Englischer Garten, when a storm caught us by surprise after a visit to a beer garden. I am about the same age. Balls of ice, chestnuts raining from the sky.

My grandmother’s house is dark and smells of age, almost of mildew. Dampness, cellar, mold. Though the hot summer day is separated from it by no more than a thin wooden wall, inside it is cool. The floor is built in the traditional way on stilts. Wooden boards, only a few centimeters above the ground. On top of them lies a simple dark green carpet, old-fashioned fitted carpeting of the sort sold in hardware stores and garden centers, just as suitable for outdoors. I remember the places in the floor where a board is missing beneath the carpet. Rotten, broken. The carpet stretches over the holes. When you walk across it, you can feel yourself stepping into a hole, your foot only just held by the carpet as it gives way a little.

I am certain that my grandparents’ house did not stand much longer after the time of that memory. And my grandfather did not live much longer either. My grandmother then lived in the new house until her death. There she lay in bed for many years in a bright room on the ground floor. After her death, she was laid out in that room, on ice and among flowers, and the family spent the night with her, drinking, eating snacks, laughing a great deal, so that obāchan’s soul would not be afraid and would feel encouraged to set out on the next journey.

But at the time of this memory, my grandmother and grandfather are still living in the house with the carpet stretched over holes, making sure that no one disappears into them. The house is surrounded by tall trees, from whose crowns chestnuts fall and strike down anyone who is not careful.

Age drove my grandfather mad. They say he had always been mad. As a young man he signed on to a merchant ship so that he would not have to go to war. In Hiroshima he found my grandmother, who was a teacher there at a school. Together they fled the grandmother’s family, who were unwilling to tolerate—let alone acknowledge—her marriage to a foreigner, and left the city. Yokatta—thank goodness—because it was precisely on that school that the bomb was dropped on the sixth of August, killing the students. My grandmother, who had previously had to leave her parents and the city in disgrace with my grandfather, did not die.

My grandparents moved to the property near Tokyo and lived there, shunned by the neighbors because of their foreign marriage and love, yet holding fast to it, because it had saved their lives. The property was large, on the edge of fields, and over the years it was divided again and again, turned into asphalt parking lots and more houses. Later the modern detached house was built, directly beside the old house in which my grandmother lived while my grandfather was still alive, he who had always been mad. In that house a carpet stretched over holes in the floor; it was dark, damp, and during a typhoon chestnuts hailed down outside. Whoever did not know how to protect themselves was hit and injured.

I am sitting on the green carpet. I have just been forbidden to step deliberately on the holes, although that is what I especially like to do. I breathe the dark air and hold objects in my hands, made of wood and of paper. The sticky dampness I have brought in from outside dries cool on my skin. I cannot remember! Were these things given to me? Am I supposed to play with them? Did I take them myself out of curiosity? From outside, through the windowpanes, dusty rays of sunlight fall onto the dark green carpet and leave emerald-green patches.

My grandfather left everything behind when, as a young man, he traveled to Japan on a ship in order not to have to go to war. A large, sharp-edged man from South Tyrol with a longing for great stones, some of which he later had placed in his Japanese garden. When my grandfather died, the stones disappeared from the garden, buried by his son-in-law. Were they too rough in that foreign setting?
I barely knew my grandfather. That summer he chased me with his dentures, which he took out of his mouth and which, in his hand, snapped at me of their own accord, beneath the trees where chestnuts still hung even after the typhoon, while the heat blazed.