When my father died unexpectedly in 1976 at the age of 39, leaving my mother a smashingly beautiful widow at 40 with 2 small children, everyone thought of fate and chance, odds and omens. I can tell interesting stories that have been woven in and out of the perspective of my life, but suffice here to say that I sometimes get an eerie feeling that revolves around an imaginary dialogue between my mother and my father: ‘Why didn’t it work out for us?’ my father asks, and mother answers: ‘Because you served the gods that were not my gods.’

Some two months after my father’s death, my mother, a logician and metaphysician of the dark, had a dream: My father was buried in his grave, but it was possible to see him from his waste to the head. He said to her: ‘Stop crying. I lived exactly as much as…