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It isn’t easy to talk of one’s early life, even after so many years. However, allowing for lapses of memory, I intend to hold nothing back, otherwise telling the story would be a fruitless exercise. Much of it remains unclear, including why my father shortly after his fiftieth birthday went off his head. That was all the more surprising because he had never given any impression that he was anything other than the sanest person on earth. So, at least, he appeared to those who knew him. And he was known to a great many people: as a country doctor he covered twenty villages and was paid regular visits by patients ranging from pregnant girls to old men requiring colostomies. It is true that the doctor in the neighbouring district was of a friendlier disposition, but my father could boast a much higher rate of cure. That’s why he felt that a guarded measure of disdain for one’s patients was hardly a crime. Surprisingly, he was exceptionally pleasant to hypochondriacs, for whom he harboured a special feeling of closeness.

In my mother’s opinion he could have been a little less pleasant to young pregnant girls, who appeared to be his favourite patients. As far as I remember, that never caused any problems, except once, when a particularly attractive Gypsy girl from a hamlet in the nearby woods came for an examination insufficiently clean. This upset Father so that he locked her into a bathing cabin, releasing her only after she had showered twice and once more for good measure. Although he later denied accusations that he had spent half an hour drying her with a miniscule towel, the Gypsies threatened him with court action until he mollified them with a wad of cash, about half of his monthly salary.

My father was a quiet man, but occasionally he was struck by a fit of anger of such magnitude that he was more shocked by it than anyone else. Usually it was my mother who pushed him over the border of self-restraint, especially when she dared to criticize his ‘experiments’ in the basement of the health centre. In her opinion he should have refrained from any work that was not part of his duties at the surgery, and devoted the rest of his time, like most husbands, to his family.

“Family?” was his usual response. “One bastard and one feebleminded woman are hardly a family.”

Mother could bear his rudeness only by turning it into a joke. “Everybody’s got what they deserve,” she would observe with a bitter smile whenever she felt disinclined to argue. Her capacity, not to mention the will, to argue with Father had eventually waned, and they settled for aiming their words past each other, with Father exploding only when he was hit accidentally. But never, not even in the throes of his worst distemper, did he hit Mother, however much I felt that that was what she was trying to get him to do.

Whenever I summon my father to memory I see a tall, slightly stooping gentleman of middle age, with slow, careful movements, somewhat plumper round his waist than he wou