I looked around but nobody was following me, neither my counterfeit son nor a blue Mercedes. The woman who opened the door at Schuler’s house was his niece. She had been crying and again burst into tears the moment she began to speak. “He smelled and grouched and nagged. But he was such a good person, such a good person. Everyone knew it, and his students liked him and came to see him, and he helped them every way he could.”
She herself had been a student of his, as had her husband. They met when both happened to drop by one day to see Schuler.
We sat in the kitchen, which she had tidied up a little. She had made some tea and offered me a cup. “There’s no sugar. When it came to sugar, I managed to talk some sense into him. As for alcohol, he wouldn’t listen.” The thought of this brought more tears to her eyes. “He wasn’t long for this world, but that doesn’t make it any better. Do you know what I mean? It doesn’t make it any better.”
“What do the police say?”
“The police?”
I told her that her uncle’s accident had happened right outside my door. “I came to Schwetzingen right away to inform you, but the police were already here.”
“Yes, the precinct in Mannheim called our local station, and they came by. It was a coincidence that I happened to be here. I don’t come every day. He wants … I mean, he wanted …” Again she began to cry.
“Did the police say anything, or ask you anything?”
“No.”
“Your uncle was in a terrible state when he came to see me right before his accident. It was as if he’d suffered a shock, as if something had really frightened him.”
“Why did you let him drive?” She looked at me reproachfully through her tears.
“It all happened much too fast. Your uncle … He was here one minute, gone the next.”
“But surely you could have held him back, I mean you could have …” She pulled out a handkerchief and blew her nose. “I’m sorry. I know how difficult he could be once he’d gotten something into his head. And here I am, practically accusing you. I didn’t mean to.” She looked at me sadly, but I reproached myself with everything she wasn’t reproaching me with. She was right: Why hadn’t I held him back? Why didn’t I at least try? This time it wasn’t only my emotions that had been too slow.
“I …” But I didn’t know what to say. I looked at her as she sat bent forward, her hands weakly clasping the handker-chief, her face warm, innocent. She hadn’t asked me who I was, but had simply taken me for a friend of her uncle’s, a companion in grief. I felt as if I’d not only let Schuler down, but her as well, and I sought absolution in her face. But I could find none. Without confession there is no absolution.
16
No class
When Brigitte and I arrived at the retirement party the Nägelsbachs were throwing at their place in the Pfaffengrund settlement, Nägelsbach was already tipsy and morosely cheerful.
“Well, Herr Self? At first my colleagues didn’t want to hand your friend over to Forensics, but I had a word with them and they finally sent him over. Speaking of which, from now on you’ll have to make do on your own. I won’t be able to help you anymore.”
His wife took Brigitte and me aside. “His boss asked me what kind of present he might like,” she said. “I’m afraid he’s thinking of turning up here uninvited. If he does come, can you intercept him? I don’t want him suddenly coming face-to-face with my husband.”
She was wearing a long black gown—I couldn’t tell if it was for mourning at the end of her husband’s career, or because it was beautiful and suited her, or if she wanted to portray somebody: Virginia Woolf, Juliette Gréco, or Charlotte Corday on her way to the scaffold. She does things like that.
The guests were crowded into the dining area and living room, which were connected by an open sliding door. I greeted this and that police officer I recognized from the Heidelberg headquarters. Brigitte whispered to me: “Forensics? Did he just mention forensics? Do you have anything to do with forensics?”
Frau Nägelsbach brought us two glasses of apricot punch.
The doorbell kept ringing, and guests kept arriving. The hall door stood open and I heard a voice I recognized. “No, I’m not a guest. I’m with Herr Self and need to speak to him.” It was Karl-Heinz Ulbrich, wearing a beige anorak over a white nylon shirt and a flowery tie. He came straight over to me, took me by the arm, and steered me through the hall into the empty kitchen.
“It’s the Russians,” he whispered, as if they were standing right next to him and might overhear.
“Who?”
“The men in the bank and the blue Mercedes. Russians, or Chechens, or Georgians, or Azerbaijanis.” He looked at me meaningfully and expectantly.
“And?”
“You really don’t know?” he asked, shaking his head. “They’re not to be trifled with. The Russian Mafia’s nothing like what you’ve got here in the West—nothing like the Italians or Turks. The Russians are brutal.”
“You’re saying this as if you were proud.”
“You must take precautions. When they want something, they get it. Whatever’s in that attaché case, it’s not worth crossing them.”
Was he puffing himself up? Or was he one of them, whoever they might be? Were they the rough guys, while he was sent to soften me up, all in an attempt to get back the attaché case?
“What’s in the attaché case?” I asked him.
He stared at me despondently. “How are we to work together if you don’t trust me? Not to mention, how do you expect to get through this if we don’t work together?”
Brigitte came into the kitchen. “His boss has arrived, and Frau Nägelsbach …”
But it was already too late. We heard Nägelsbach greeting his boss with exaggerated civility. Would he like a glass of punch? Or perhaps two or three? Some situations are bearable only with alcohol. Some people, too.
Brigitte and I went into the living room, though Ulbrich still kept after me. As a good-bye present Nägelsbach’s boss had brought him a photograph of the Heidelberg police head quarters, as if it were the Grand Hotel, and he was doing his best to be pleasant, unaware of the emotions he was triggering. I started chatting with him about the police in different parts of the country and the secret services, and judging by the things he said, he knew a thing or two. I asked him about the Russian Mafia but he shrugged his shoulders. “Do you know what someone from RTL Television said to me the other day? All the private stations are scouring material for T V, but one thing you can’t offer the public is the Russian Mafia. Not because it doesn’t exist. The thing is, it has no class, no style, no tradition, no religion—none of the things one likes about the Italians. All the Russian Mafia has is brutality.” He shook his head in disappointment. “In this case, too, Communism has steamrolled over culture.”
By the time Brigitte and I headed back home, Ulbrich had disappeared. I hoped it was the headlights of his Fiesta that I saw in my rearview mirror. If not, they now knew about Brigitte.
17
The black attaché case
I lay awake that night. Should I give Samarin the black attaché case? Or should I give it to the police, making certain that the men in the blue Mercedes followed me to the station and saw what I did? Or should I put it by the lamppost outside my office while they were parked a few cars away and wait for them to get out, pick it up, and drive off—out of my life?
When I called Nägelsbach in the morning, he was hungover. It wasn’t easy to explain to him what I intended to do. When he finally understood, he was appalled. “You want to do that at the Heidelberg police headquarters? Where all my life I—” He hung up. Half an hour later he called back. “Okay, we can do that at the headquarters in Mannheim. They know me, and there’ll be no problem with me parking there for a while. Did you say at five?”
“Yes, and could you please thank your wife for me?”
He laughed. “She put in a good word for you.”
I packed only a few things. It all
had to fit in the black attaché case. I didn’t need a lot; it wouldn’t take more than a couple of days.
Turbo sensed that I was going away. The neighbors would look after him, but he pouted and disappeared, as children do when they realize that Mom and Dad are about to go on a trip.
I took my things and dropped in at Brigitte’s massage practice at the Collini-Center. I had to wait, so I read an article in an old magazine about a movie set in East Germany before reunification: a young couple set out on heists in Bonnie-and-Clyde fashion, robbing the old-style, vulnerable banks of the new currency that had just been introduced. Until they got too wild and began robbing banks in Berlin and got shot.
Brigitte saw her patient off and sat down next to me. “I’m expecting the next client any minute, and thank God for that, because the health-care reform has cost me a third of my old patients, and finding new ones who’ll come in even though their insurance won’t reimburse them isn’t easy.”
I nodded.
“What’s going on?”
“I’ll be away for a few days. My case has ground to a halt. I might be able to get it going again someplace else. Not to mention that I feel a bit spooky around here. If anyone asks for me, you can tell them that.”
She got up with a hurt look. “I know the script well enough: ‘What’s going on?’ she asks him. ‘Nothing,’ he replies, looking out the window into the twilight with a stony glare. Then he turns and looks deep into her eyes. ‘It’s better this way, honey. The less you know, the better. I don’t want the guys to get on your case, too.’”
“Come on, Brigitte. I’ll tell you all about it when I get back. Believe me, I don’t want to hide anything from you. But right now it’s better if you don’t know what’s going on. Believe me.”
“‘Trust me, my darling,’ he tells her, looking at her intently. ‘I’ve got to think for the two of us right now.’” The bell rang and Brigitte got up to open the door. “Well, take care of yourself!”
I found a place to park on the Augustaanlage, not far from my office. When I got out of the car I didn’t see the blue Mercedes anywhere. Back at my office, I took out the black attaché case and emptied the bills into a trash bag. There was a large plant pot under my desk and a bag of soil that I had bought quite a while ago to replant my potted palm. I put the trash bag inside the new pot beneath the palm tree; the plant didn’t get quite as much soil under its roots as I’d initially planned, but if it didn’t like it, it could go to hell. I never liked that plant.
I put my overnight bag into the attaché case. When I left my office with it, the blue Mercedes was waiting on the other side of the street. The man beside the driver opened the door, got out, and came running toward me. By the time he made it across the street through the evening traffic I was already in my Opel, driving off. He waved to the Mercedes, which honked its horn and cut into traffic and made a U-turn to my side of the street at Werderstrasse, despite a red light. There it picked up the other man and tailed me through the Schwetzingerstadt district.
Mollstrasse, Seckenheimer Strasse, Heinrich-Lanz-Strasse—the streets were filled with cars and bicycles, the stores were open, the sidewalks were bustling, and children were playing in front of the Heilig-Geist Church. This was my safe everyday world. What could happen to me here? Yet the Mercedes was tailing me so closely that I couldn’t see its grille in my rearview mirror but could clearly make out the humorless, set faces of the driver and the man beside him. In the Heinrich-Lanz Strasse he tapped me—a gentle meeting of his bumper with mine—and fear crept up my spine. When the light turned red at the Reichskanzler-Müller-Strasse and we stopped, the man got out of his car and walked up to my locked door, and I don’t know what he would have done if a patrol car hadn’t gone by and the light turned green.
In front of police headquarters I drove half up onto the sidewalk and, clutching the attaché case, was out of the car, up the stairs, and through the door before the man could even get out of the Mercedes. I leaned against the wall, hugging the attaché case to my chest and panting as if I’d run all the way from the Augustaanlage.
Nägelsbach was waiting in his Audi inside the yard of the police station. I gave him the attaché case and he put it on the floor by the front seat. Then he helped me climb into the trunk. “My wife’s put a blanket in there—do you think you’ll manage?”
When he let me out at the airport parking lot at Neuostheim, he was certain nobody had followed him. He was also certain that nobody had seen me climb out of the trunk.
“Do you want me to come along with you?”
“Are you already at loose ends at home, with all that free time on your hands?”
“Not at all. I’ve been conscripted into cleaning up after yesterday’s party.” But he stood there, hesitant and somewhat despondent. “Well, then.”
A little later I was in the air, looking down at Mannheim, keeping my eyes peeled for beige Fiestas and blue Mercedes.
18
Fear of flying
The woman next to me was afraid of flying. She asked me to hold her hand, and I did. As we were taking off, I reassured her with the information that most airplane accidents occur not during takeoff but during landing. An hour and a half later, when our plane began to descend, I confessed that I had not been all that honest with her. The truth is that most airplane accidents do in fact occur during takeoff, not when the plane is landing. We had taken off quite a while ago, so she could sit back and relax. But she didn’t, and at Berlin Tempelhof she rushed off without so much as a good-bye.
I hadn’t been in Berlin since 1942, and I wouldn’t have been tempted to come if the fastest route to Cottbus hadn’t been by plane via Berlin. I knew that the five-story house in which I had grown up had been destroyed in 1945, along with all the neighboring houses, and replaced in the fifties by a six-story apartment block. My parents had died in the attack. Klara’s parents had moved out of their villa near Wannsee to a villa on Lake Starnberg shortly before the end of the war. The friends of my childhood and youth had dispersed in all directions. In the seventies we had a class reunion. I didn’t go. I don’t want to remember.
I found a cheap hotel at the intersection of Friedrichstrasse and Unter den Linden. As I stood by the window, looking down at the traffic, I got the urge to go out and take a look around and perhaps find a restaurant where the food tastes like it used to, like it did at home. I went to the Brandenburg Gate, saw the buildings rising on the Pariser Platz, the cranes towering into the skies. On the Potsdamer Platz they had sawed open the city’s torso and were conducting open heart surgery: floodlights, excavations, cranes, scaffolding, and building skeletons, sometimes already floor after floor with finished masonry, balconies, and windows. I walked on and recognized the Ministry of Aviation and the remains of the Anhalter train station, and on Tempelhofer Ufer the building where I had worked as a junior clerk for a lawyer. I avoided the street where I had been a child.
I didn’t find a restaurant whose food promised to taste the way it used to. But I found an Italian restaurant where the perch and the crème caramel were the way they ought to be, and the carafe of Sardinian white wine overshadowed all the Frascati, suave, or pinot grigios. I was content, asked where the nearest metro station was, and set out for my hotel.
I wanted to transfer at the Hallesches Tor, but as I got off the last car I came face-to-face with seven or eight young men with shaved heads, black jackets, and military boots, standing there as if they’d been waiting for me.
“Hey! Granddad!”
I wanted to keep going but they wouldn’t let me through, and when I tried to sidestep them they wouldn’t let me pass. They forced me back toward the outer edge of the platform. The metro line here crosses the Landwehr Canal like an elevated railway, and I could see the dark water beneath me.
“Where are you heading, Grandpa?”
On the opposite platform I saw some youths who were looking at us with interest. Otherwise the platforms were empty. “To my hotel and to bed.?
??
They laughed as if I’d just uttered the greatest one-liner. “To his hotel!” one of them hooted, leaning forward and slapping his thighs. “To bed!” Then he said: “You were there, right?”
“Where?”
“With the Führer, where else? Did you ever get to see him?”
I nodded.
“Give Grandpa some of your beer; he saw the Führer.” The leader of the pack nudged the young man next to him, and he offered me his can of beer.
“Thank you, but I’ve already drunk enough this evening.”
“Did you hear that? He got to see the Führer!” the leader announced to his pack; he also yelled it out to the youths on the opposite platform. Then he asked me: “And how did you greet him?”
“Come on, surely you know that.”
“Show me, Grandpa!”
“I don’t want to do that.”
“You don’t want to show us? Then do as I do!” He clicked his heels together, flung his right arm into the air, and yelled: “Heil Hitler!” The others didn’t utter a sound. He brought his arm down. “So?”
“I don’t want to.”
“You’d rather take a swim down there?”
“No, I just want to go—to my hotel, and to bed.”
This time nobody laughed. The leader came closer and I edged back until I felt the railing against my spine. He raised his hands and patted me down, as if he were searching for weapons. “You’re not wearing a life jacket, Grandpa. You might drown. If you get water in your nose—” With a jolt he jammed his index and middle fingers into my nostrils and pushed my head backward until I was at the point of losing my balance. “So?” He let go of me.