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friendship books and copy out little didactic verses alongside: “Be like the violet in the grass / modest and pure in her proper station, / Don’t be like the prideful rose / always wanting admiration.” My brother drew a caricature in my album of German chancellor Kiesinger (“big”) on the left, de Gaulle (“bigger”) in the middle, and on the right, at the top, on a victory podium and with a wide grin on his face, a beaming man with elephant ears and a crew cut: unmistakably Martin. His little poem: “Love is like an EVAG city bus / It makes you wait and doesn’t care / And when at last it hurries by / The driver yells ‘Full!’ and leaves you there / Your [and then in a heart:] big brother, Martin.”

      Everything about Martin is here: the humor, the mockery, the irony (directed at himself, too). His poking fun at pretense and his lack of respect for power, along with his own ambition and boastfulness. His linking the banal with the elevated, and kippenbergerizing an existing rhyme with a personal detail (“EVAG” stands for Essener Verkehrs AG, the Essen transit authority). The longing for love, and the fear of being excluded from love and remaining alone. The draftsmanship, the tenderness, and the pride he had in being a big brother.

[ 1 ] A rhyme in German: Wahrheit ist Arbeit.

      CHAPTER ONE

      PARENTS AND CHILDHOOD

      “He was running away.”

      The answer came before I even asked the question: How did it happen that he went and stayed with you when he was so young, just nine years old? His first long trip away from home, going with total strangers all the way from deep in the Ruhr on the western edge of Germany to deep in the Bavarian Forest in the east, near the Czech border—what was that like?

      “He couldn’t wait,” she says.

      He wasn’t coming to see her—he was leaving where he was.

      Our parents and Wiltrud Roser barely knew each other. Our mother had written a letter to the artist just six months earlier, the first of many that would travel from Essen to Cham. “Dear Wiltrud!” she started the letter—to a woman she didn’t know, and didn’t know anything about except that she illustrated beautiful children’s books. All she knew was Waldemar, Roser’s illustrated dog.) “I’m addressing you by your first name because it’s right either way: I don’t know if you’re a Miss Roser or Mrs. Roser, and you’d be offended (actually you probably wouldn’t be, but you might be) if I wrote the wrong one.” Our mother definitely didn’t want that, since she wanted something else from this stranger: a picture. She wanted to surprise our father for Christmas with a family portrait just like the one in Waldemar. He might well have come up with the same idea himself—“that happens to us a lot, that we plan the same surprises for each other”—and if so, Wiltrud should say yes to her and no to him.

      Instead of a photograph for Wiltrud to copy, she sent short descriptions:

      Dad: broad-shouldered and stocky

      Mom: no distinguishing characteristics, like all mothers

      Barbara (“Babs”): 11 yrs old, thin, bangs, strawb. blond short hair, freckles & a very critical look

      Bettina: 10, strong, long dark blond pigtails, maternal, head usually tilted

      Martin (“the Boy”): 8, short hair, lots and lots of freckles

      Bine (Sabine): 6, short and stumpy, blocky head like Dad, light blond pigtails & an electric socket in the middle of her face

      Little Sanni (Susanne): 4, dark blond pigtails, clever

      “Will you do it? It would be great! We are such a crazy and fun family that we would probably give you a ton of material for more children’s books.” Our mother wrote that she had already met many Munich artists in similar fashion and had become friends with them. “I think you’d be a good fit with us too.” Would Wiltrud ever have the chance to come to Essen for a visit?

      Wiltrud Roser drew the picture, which still exists, and she came to our house for an artist party. The next morning the two women sat at the breakfast table coming up with plans for everything Wiltrud should do in the big city: plays, museums, and more. And then our mother said she didn’t know what she was going to do, Martin simply refused to go to school anymore. He was sick, too. “Incredibly pale” is how Wiltrud Roser remembers him. He was suffering from what our mother called the proletariat sickness or Ruhr anemia: a sallow, bloodless face. “The sky was yellow in the Ruhr”; the chimneys in Essen still spewed smoke then—fresh-washed clothes were black if you left them hanging on the clothesline for a few hours.

      In Bavaria, the sky was blue.

      “Why doesn’t he come with me?” Wiltrud Roser said. She had a son, too, just a year younger than Martin, and the school year was almost over anyway.

      “Martin, would you like to come home with me?” she asked him when he came into the kitchen.

      “When do we leave?” he answered.

      So that was that. No more plays, no museums, no shopping trip to the big city—Martin was determined and didn’t give Wiltrud any peace. They left the next day for practically the outermost reaches of the German world, a little town where teachers and students were often transferred as punishment.

      Our family as drawn by Wiltrud Roser

       © Wiltrud Roser

      The address couldn’t have been more perfect: 1 Spring Street (Frühlingstrasse 1). He liked the old house with all its nooks and crannies, right on the Regen River, with a sawmill out back—a giant, adventure-filled playground. It was a house like ours: cold in temperature but warm in every other way, full of pictures and books, with little wooden figures standing around everywhere, even in the bathroom. Albrecht, the father, was only a distant figure—he worked as a puppeteer in Stuttgart; the aunt was a Chiemsee painter; Wiltrud worked on her picture books; the grandmother took care of the children. Martin did what he would so often do later in life: he got other people to work for him, hiring Wiltrud’s son Sebastian to do his homework. His grades in math and writing improved, though only temporarily—school remained torture for him and for everyone around him. The boys spent a lot of time with Wiltrud in her studio, each one busy with his own picture. One time, “with a fabulous gesture,” Martin swept everything in front of him off the tabletop.

      “Martin, what are you doing?!”

      “Making room.”

      And, she thought, he was right. Other people might have called it naughty. She called it kingly. “He was never bad, just kingly: bossy but generous.”

      He sat for her as a model, too, and our mother said that when the book with those drawings came out, he showed it “to everyone, whether they wanted to look at it or not.”

      Martin was “terribly easy to take care of,” a darling boy, and Wiltrud, a short woman with short hair, cheerful and sassy and always a straight talker, was certainly right for him. At eighty she can still laugh about the gaudy kitsch in the Cham Catholic church. She has lived in Cham her whole life, in her parents’ house at the edge of a small town, but has few ties with the locals. She just lives there.

      She told me that Martin wasn’t homesick, “not at all,” but that he made presents for his sisters the whole time he was there. Martin stayed six weeks; it seemed like months and months to her. And at the end of the stay he went back to Essen just as eagerly as he had left.

      The thank-you letter that our mother sent to Wiltrud Roser sounds euphoric: Martin regaled the family with his stories, like the one about Vicar Bear and his cane, until we cried with laughter. “Already on the first morning he danced the polka, around to the right and around to the left, in his long nightshirt, it was a scream. He can sure dance, and paint too!” He’d been painting what he had seen in Bavaria, including Sebastian (“it couldn’t have been any more like him”) and Vicar Bear (“who looks terrifying”).

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