Only later did it strike me that he seemed to understand, or at least put up with, this odd behaviour, despite the fact that our relationship was almost cool and a gesture of this kind normally had no place in it. At all events, it was that light touch that gave me the strength to get through those long meals. And after a few weeks of tense endurance, I had grown so used to the unsettling atmosphere of those gatherings, with the well-nigh endless adaptability of a child, that it no longer cost me any effort to sit at table for two hours; now, indeed, the time passed relatively quickly, because I kept myself occupied observing the others present.

My grandfather called us all ‘the family’, and I heard the others use this wholly arbitrary term as well. In fact these four people, though distantly related, did not belong together in any way. My uncle, who sat next to me, was an old man on whose tough, tanned face there were a number of black flecks which I learned he had got when a powder charge exploded; a sullen malcontent, he had retired from the army at the rank of major and now conducted alchemical experiments in some room in the manor that was unfamiliar to me, and moreover, as I heard the servants say, was in touch with a prison which supplied him with corpses once or twice a year, whereupon he would lock himself away with them for days and nights, dissecting the bodies and preparing them in some mysterious manner to resist decomposition. Opposite him sat Miss Mathilde Brahe. She was a person of uncertain age, a distant cousin of my mother's, and nothing was known about her except that she maintained an extremely vigorous correspondence with an Austrian spiritualist who called himself Baron Nolde and was completely under his thumb, never doing the smallest thing without first obtaining his approval or, rather, what amounted to his blessing. At that time, she was exceptionally sturdy of build, of a soft and buxom languor that seemed to have been negligently poured, as it were, into her loose, light-coloured dresses; her movements were weary and vague, and her eyes were forever watering. And nonetheless there was something in her that reminded me of my delicate and slender mother. The longer I looked at her, the more I perceived in her face all those fine and gentle features which I had never been able to remember clearly since my mother's death; only now, seeing Mathilde Brahe every day, did I know again what my mother had looked like; indeed, it may have been that I knew it for the first time. Only now did the hundreds and hundreds of details come together within me, making an image of my dead mother, the image that accompanies me everywhere. Later I realized that all of the characteristics of my mother's features really were present in Miss Brahe's face – but it was as if some unfamiliar face had been interposed among them, thrusting them apart, distorting them, leaving them unrelated to each other.

Beside this lady sat the little son of a cousin, a boy about my own age, but smaller and more weakly. His slender, pale neck rose from a pleated ruff and disappeared beneath a long chin. His lips were thin and shut tight, and his nostrils trembled slightly. He could move only one of his beautiful dark brown eyes; from time to time, it gazed across at me, tranquil and melancholy, while the other always remained fixed in the same direction, as if it had been sold and there were no longer any point in considering it.

At the head of the table stood my grandfather's enormous armchair, which a servant with nothing else to do pushed in beneath him, and in which the old man took up very little room. He was an imperious old gentleman, hard of hearing, and some people addressed him as ‘Your Excellency’ or ‘Marshal’, while others styled him ‘General’. And undoubtedly he possessed all the distinction that went with these titles; but it had been so long since he had held any position that using them no longer made much sense. For myself, I had the sense that no particular name could attach to his personality, which at times was so keen and yet was forever losing its focus. I could never bring myself to call him Grandfather, although on occasion he could be friendly to me and would even call me to him, trying to say my name in a playful way. The fact was that the entire family was overawed and intimidated by the Count, and little Erik was the only one to enjoy any kind of intimacy with the ancient master of the house; at times his one good eye would flash a look of accord, which Grandfather returned with an equal swiftness; and sometimes on the long afternoons they could be seen appearing at the end of the long gallery and walking hand in hand past the dark old portraits, not saying a word but evidently communicating in some other way.

I spent most of the day in the grounds or out in the beech forests or on the heath. As good fortune would have it, there were dogs at Urnekloster to keep me company; and there would be a tenant's house or dairy croft here and there, where I could get milk and bread and fruit. I think I took a fairly carefree pleasure in my freedom, without letting the thought of the evening gatherings frighten me, at least for the next week or so. I spoke to hardly anyone, for I delighted in solitude; the dogs were the only ones I had the odd brief conversation with, and we understood each other very well. Taciturnity ran in the family, anyway; I was used to it from my father, and it did not surprise me that next to nothing was said at dinner.

In the first few days after we arrived, however, Mathilde Brahe was distinctly talkative. She asked my father about old acquaintances in foreign cities, she brought impressions of far-off times back to mind, and she moved herself to tears by recalling women friends who had died and a certain young man who, she intimated, had been in love with her, though she had felt unable to return his fervent, hopeless affections. My father listened politely, inclining his head now and then in agreement and offering only the essential minimum by way of reply. The Count, at the head of the table, had a constant smile on his down-turned lips; his face seemed larger than usual, as if he were wearing a mask. From time to time, he put in a word himself, addressing no one in particular in a voice which, though very soft, could nonetheless be heard in the whole dining hall. It had something of the regular, unconcerned tocking of a clock; the silence around it seemed to have an empty resonance all of its own, the same for every syllable.

Count Brahe intended a particular courtesy towards my father in talking of his late wife, my mother. He called her Countess Sibylle, and whenever he finished a sentence it was as if he were enquiring after her.