Things must have been different with his father. After coming back from the Rhineland, J had to help out in the business, under his father’s supervision, a man who allegedly viewed him with disapproval. After completing his tasks, J would set off to walk the three kilometres home to neighbouring Bad Nauheim, taking the same path I have often taken during the last ten years in remembrance of him (or as his revenant), past the Kühlen Grund and then through the floodplain along the Usa, our river, right along to the allotment gardens in Nauheim. If someone wanted to take this route today, they wouldn’t be able to, because the main artery of the bypass runs there now. My uncle used to walk there (back when this there still existed) to get home, the home that my grandfather was driving towards in his car at the exact same time. I don’t know what model car he had, for it was long before my day. Back then, after the Rhineland, my uncle got taller and taller, seventeen or eighteen years old by then, but his legs were still so thin, as if they could barely hold him up and were about to snap. His ears jutted out from his head, as if they wanted to escape, in the same way his eyes did. And so he would walk his daily kilometres through the Wetterau countryside, across the meadows and the fields that the farmers had sewn, gradually becoming accustomed to it; he must have gotten his enthusiasm for nature from somewhere, after all, or had he simply been born with it? Perhaps it was his father’s alleged (I don’t know for sure, after all, I just heard about it) hate for him that led him to the Usa, the Wetterau and the forest, and from there perhaps to Heino and German music and Luis Trenker, mountain rescue, the Wehrmacht, heroic pilots and heroic generals and the great old days in general (which no one spoke of anymore by that point, something which J was only ever able to accept without really understanding). And because there were times in his younger days when he was excluded, presumably he found peace out there from many things, and ultimately from himself. In this respect, his father had even more of an influence on him than his mother, for his father gave him a world, the daily three kilometres, and with it perhaps the whole of the Wetterau right up to Forsthaus Winterstein, which J would escape to, just as I would later escape to the cemetery whenever J came to our house in Friedberg and I could no longer breathe, and as a result I spent every weekend learning the inscriptions on the gravestones off by heart. J’s mother, on the other hand, was always just the home and the law. And yet if there had only ever been her, he wouldn’t have had anything to flee from. Three kilometres, my uncle alone with himself every day, at seventeen, eighteen years of age, and maybe he saw his first kingfisher there, maybe it was where everything started for him, and in the inns he was allowed to drink beer, which he probably wasn’t allowed to do at the family business, on the crane, in the halls, in the driver’s cabins, and so in the inns he could still somehow be one of the Boll stonemasons. During these three kilometres (there was an inn along the route, Zum Kühlen Grund), he got to know the flowers and animals as well as the beer and the inn, perhaps as practically one and the same from the very beginning (he always preferred going to inns that you needed to go through a forest to reach). Later on, hunting became the sum of them both. A hunter goes into the forest, then to the forest inn. Perhaps the best possible combination for my uncle. Perhaps the best things in the world, hunting and the forest inn.