Being so clearly left at that time was an improbable thing. That was even more so for a farmer up here, in a village where the Soviets had squatted for long after the war. Opa Nagl had been more than willing to concede that Stalin was a lunatic certainly he was! and the Russians could be barbarians undoubtedly so! but a few times he had used his fists to defend his claim that none of these meant socialism wasn’t good, that socialism wasn’t Austria’s future.

So well liked by almost everybody, Lisi had reminded him. She didn’t need to say the name, of course. They hadn’t talked about the enmity between the two sides of the family since then. It had been one evening not long after their father’s funeral, one of those strangely giddy times, days when nobody had slept, when nights and days seemed little different. There had been a surreal look to everything, Felix recalled, a dreamy quality to the talk and the faces.

It was a time when grief and laughter collided, and memories cratered into loss so sharp it stabbed, and odd things were dredged up, even odder conversations.

Opa Nagl didn’t hate Opa Kimmel he had just given up on him years ago. He had mocked him, or to be accurate, people like him who believed in that stuff. No doubt it had turned sour and bitter by times. It hadn’t helped, of course, that Opa Nagl could come up with barbs: “That housepainter arshloch with the moustache, the one who just about burned the world to the ground for some stupid Reich dream!” So savage as to be memorable, word for word.

But the little pantomimes he did, with his forefinger for a moustache, and his arse in the air goose-step one had surely been performed sometime in the past for the benefit of Opa Kimmel. How else to explain the loathing, the silences, one about the other, over the years? Felix’s mind went back to the goose-stepping troublemaker.

“What are you smiling about?” his mother asked. “The good memories?”