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74 | Esmeralda I cannot remember the move at all. The first thing I do remember about Munich was my mother and me getting out of the tram at the stop almost in front of our new apartment, and some guy pushing my mother because he thought she was too slow. It was summer and my mother was very pregnant . I yelled at that guy. I was very protective of my pregnant mother. Later that summer my brother and I were sent to Hattenheim, where we awaited the arrival of our sister Andrea. Before she was born, our name for her was Esmeralda. After she was born, on 13 August 1959, our grandfather forbade us to refer to her as Esmeralda. It took us some time to get Esmeralda out of our systems. When we returned to Munich, there she was, a tiny little bundle. My mother became very sick soon afterwards, and I had to learn how to change diapers in a hurry. My grandmother came from Hattenheim a few days after my mother had been hospitalized. Nobody knew what was wrong with her. She could not keep down any food. The physicians at the hospital had practically given up on her when my father insisted on exploratory surgery. They found that a large benign tumour was blocking her colon. It had not shown up on X-rays. My mother soon recovered and came home. We were a family of five now. 75 | The apartment We now lived in a brand-new apartment building. There were four such buildings, some not quite finished, and grouped around a large inner part five Munich 199 courtyard. Each was three or four stories high and contained about nine apartments. There were no elevators. Our apartment was on the second floor. My father’s practice was on the same floor across the hallway. We were in the building closest to a large street that ran south out of Munich in the direction of Lake Starnberg. It was the first building ready, and Frau Kubaschewski thought it would be the best one for opening a practice. Compared to Tutzing and Ebenhausen, the neighbourhood was loud. There was a constant flow of traffic. The loudest noise came from the trams, which screeched around a slight curve in the street and slowed down for the next stop, which was ours. There was a living room that contained the dining table, my mother’s desk, and the piano; a small bedroom for the parents out front next to the living room; a larger room with two windows towards the courtyard, which my brother and I shared; and a small kitchen and bathroom. There was an electric boiler that supplied hot water day and night—that was a big improvement. So was central heating: no more carrying coal up from the basement. Michi and I liked the new place immediately. We did not mind that the floors were linoleum now rather than hardwood, or that the terrace and garden had been replaced with a narrow balcony that could hardly be used because of the traffic noise and the dirt that came with it. It was all different, unlike anything we had ever seen before. It was new. My parents made the best of it. They were quite shocked, initially, at how small it all was again. We needed thick curtains to block out the streetlights at night, and of course all the windows had to have sheers as well for privacy. My mother liked the “modern living” aspect after all the old houses she had been in. She wanted new furniture but had to fight for quite some time before my father relented and we got a set of teak furniture with a kidney-shaped coffee table. When my father brought along friends or dragged patients over from the practice, he would say: “This is our little city apartment.” He liked it, too, but in the back of his head was always the villa in Solln that he would move back to one day. No need to buy new furniture: there would be an overabundance of old furniture there. The apartment really was too small. My brother and I had to share a room again, which I began to resent, being thirteen years of age and all. My parents had a tiny bedroom, again, which now also contained Andrea’s crib as well as the changing table. The practice across the hallway also was rather small: a consulting room...

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