If the facts indicate otherwise, then too bad for the facts.

1

“You don’t look anything like him,” the innkeeper said, his eyes narrowing in disbelief. His German was harsh, but impeccable. He tried his utmost to keep others from accusing him of not trying his utmost. Even his lodgings, circumstances aside, testified to his pedantry. It was a hole in the wall three doors down from the Armenian Orthodox church, in the centre of town (although, truth to tell, was anything in Lemberg really downtown), squeezed in between the neighbouring buildings and the street, upholstered with drunks, and yet every tablecloth, every drinking glass was neatly arranged in its place, as if in a showroom. He had to be trying his utmost – the innkeeper – to keep order in this place, with nobody looking, with everything constantly straining towards chaos.

“You don’t look a thing like him.” And to be perfectly honest, I didn’t. I looked much more like this stranger of an innkeeper, if only with respect to our hair colour, than I looked like Leo­pold. It would have been quite the comedy if it actually turned out that this man was my father.

His tone of voice hinted that I should take the emphasis on the difference as a compliment, although there was no warmth to accompany it. The determination with which he sustained the conversation surprised me a bit; particularly because it was obvious it gave him no pleasure. He asked his questions – where I was from, where I was going – questions that, asked in a different way, might have seemed frivolous, but which his inborn sense of annoyance made seem like an interrogation. He wasn’t exactly what you’d call the salt of the earth, this innkeeper. He was cold and practical, not effusive. At the mention of my surname he immediately recalled the old chief of police, a good man, he said, and only then recollected that the police chief had a son, who apparently had become a writer, he said.

“With quite a vivid imagination, I’ve heard tell,” he said as he wiped a glass dry. “Imagining that you’re being whipped by women in furs, that’s a fantasy that only somebody who’s never been whipped can indulge. You don’t look a thing like him.”

What he really meant to say was that Leo­pold von Sacher-­Masoch was a disgusting human being, but you somehow seem likeable. “Are you sure you’re his daughter?”

Although, strictly speaking, it wasn’t the truth, Leo­pold would gladly tell anyone who had a moment to spare the story of his
wild child.

“This is Nada, my wild child,” he would say and repeat until it finally stuck and everyone who knew him also knew that he had adopted and was raising a wild child. Considering the fact that he found me when I was barely a day old, there hadn’t been even the slightest chance that I’d grown up in a cage kept by some madman or been raised by Carpathian mountain men, or by wolves, but why bother with facts when fiction is so much more useful?

Judging from the way Leo­pold peddled the story of my birth, you could tell that it would have best served his interests if I’d had no human parents at all. He also liked to emphasize that, no, he really wasn’t my father, as though he couldn’t imagine that the girl who placed all her trust and all the love of her childhood in him would ever take that as the most fundamental, the most unconditional rejection of all. Yes, I suppose he loved me, but his love could really be useless.

How unfair, I often thought after Anna died, that the woman for whom my birth and the pregnancy preceding it