“Have you just given up smoking? When you took the tissue out of its packet just now, you held the packet out to me for a moment the way a smoker would hold out a pack of cigarettes.”

  She laughed. “Did I? Yes, I’ve given them up. I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to write without them, but I can. When I was at the newspaper, I never wrote without a cigarette, even if I forgot about it and it burned down in the ashtray. When the same thing happened there as everywhere else—falling circulation, collapsing advertising revenue, redundancies—I said goodbye not just to the newspaper, but to smoking as well. That was five weeks ago. Since then, I’ve been writing freelance and hoping I can make a living from it.”

  I asked more questions, and by the time we left, I knew how she had stopped smoking; that she wrote about gardens, food, and health, had an allotment, and was divorced; that her daughter and granddaughter lived in America; that she translated poems from English into German and enjoyed living alone. She asked me questions too, and by the time we left, she knew all about my circumstances.

  “May I invite you to dinner at my place? The good restaurants are all crowded and loud, which makes it difficult for me to hear. I’m not a bad cook.”

  She accepted; I dropped her off at the guest house and described the short walk to my house. “See you at eight!”

  23

  I had already prepared dinner—cauliflower soup, beef stroganoff, baked apples. I didn’t have to start cooking right away; I could sit down and think for a bit. Who did Adelheid Volkmann remind me of? What was it about her that reminded me? Her face? Her youthful voice or her calm way of speaking? Her confident, assertive manner? At least I understood why she had to economize.

  I’d thought we would eat first and then talk, but she started while we were still on our aperitifs.

  “My father returned from captivity in Russia in 1955—one of the last. He’d gotten married in 1939; my mother had my brother in 1940, and in 1956 she was still young enough to have me. Things didn’t go well between my parents. She’d managed without him for fifteen years and didn’t need him; he hadn’t had a woman in fifteen years, hadn’t harassed any either, and he wanted to make up for that. And he didn’t know what to do with my brother, who’d dropped the name Adolf and was calling himself Dolf instead.

  “He focused on me. He told me about the war and captivity, why he’d fallen in love with my mother and why he shouldn’t have fallen in love with her, why he couldn’t stand her anymore and was having an affair with the neighbor. I was flattered; I felt taken seriously and loved. It was only after his death that I realized he’d used me. He wasn’t good for me. He was a police detective, incidentally, the head of the criminal investigation department when he retired. Died of lung cancer in 1972.” She smiled. “He was the one who introduced me to smoking too.”

  She took a sip, shook her head, and stared into space. I was about to remind her of dinner when she continued talking.

  “When everyone was rebelling against their parents, I rebelled against my dead father. His egotism, his bigotry, his bragging, his behavior toward his wife and us children—there was more than enough. I knew that he’d lied about his past; there were too many things that didn’t fit together. He claimed to have studied architecture, but was with the criminal investigation department. He—”

  “Was his name Eik?”

  “Good, so you know something about him. His parents and siblings must have died during the expulsion from East Prussia; he made inquiries through the tracing service, all in vain. But there was this aunt, Olga Rinke, who was very fond of him, and he was very fond of her. He’d lived with her for a long time when he was a child, after the war, and she’d told him lots of stories about her friend Herbert Schröder, which he then told me. My father loved German heroes.”

  “He only died in 1972? Olga Rinke was still alive then.”

  “But the two of them don’t seem to have been in touch. Why? And is there anything about my father in her will? What was he like as a child, and as a young man? Did he really study architecture, and what did he do with it? How did he end up a detective? Are the things he told me about the seventeen-year-old girl he married true?”

  She gave me a questioning look. Eik’s daughter. The last thing Olga had told me about Eik was about his visits to her after she’d lost her hearing. After that, he had simply dropped out of her stories. Why had I never wondered about that?

  “Do you know what Olga Rinke looked like?”

  I took her into my study and showed her the photograph. She looked at it for a long time, and then at the others on the wall.

  “Is that your wife? Are those your children? Who’s that?”

  I introduced her to my wife and my children, my parents and siblings, my friends, and also to the black cat with white paws that my daughter was given at the age of twelve, which had stayed with us for seventeen years.

  “Shall we eat? I can tell you what little I know over dinner.”

  24

  I started with what I knew about Eik, his parents, his journey from the farm to Tilsit and Berlin and Italy, his entry into the Party and the SS, Olga’s role in his life, and his visits to her. Then she wanted to hear about Olga and Herbert, their childhood and their love, his colonial and Arctic dreams, his expedition to Nordaustlandet, her poste restante letters. Finally, she wanted to know how Olga and I had gotten to know each other and become close.

  I talked through the starter, the main dish, the dessert. When I finished, I apologized for talking for so long.

  “No, no, I kept on asking questions.” She traced circles on the tablecloth with her wine glass. “Father in the Party and the SS—it would have been nice if things had been different, but I thought it must have been something like that. It fits. What you told me about him and Olga . . . I don’t understand it. She was devoted to him and looked after him, and I can’t see why Father would have lied when he said he lived with her for a long time. Did they have contact after the war that we don’t know about? Why did they keep it secret?”

  “I don’t know.” I carried the dishes into the kitchen. When I came back, she was still playing with her wine glass. “What did your mother say?”

  “My mother?” She started out of her reverie. “She never mentioned Olga. When Father was a prisoner of war, she hardly said anything about him, and soon after he came back she only said nasty things. She got dementia not long before he died. She should have left him, sooner rather than later. She was a nurse—she didn’t need him financially. But divorce was out of the question for her.”

  She got up, looked out of the window into the night, walked up and down the room, ran her eyes over my books and my CDs, and turned to the picture that hung between the shelves, Jean-Jacques Rousseau in fur hat and kaftan, a late eighteenth-century print.

  She asked, “Was there a rift between the two of them? Why?”

  “You can’t ask me that. I don’t understand anything about rifts.”

  “What is there to understand? If it doesn’t work anymore, it doesn’t work, and you separate.”

  “Yes—you said you were divorced . . .”

  She answered the question I didn’t dare ask. “He was a painter, perhaps a genius, I don’t know. At first I liked his obsessiveness. But he paid no attention to anything apart from his art. I was responsible for the money and for Jana and for the house, an old farm he’d inherited on the edge of the Teutoburg Forest that was falling apart. After a few years I couldn’t do it anymore. And I couldn’t stand him anymore either, this narcissistic child, bigger than Jana but more troublesome. Breaking up with him wasn’t hard for me.”

  “I can’t bear rifts. I’ve stayed in touch with everyone I’ve been connected to over the course of my life, and, bumpy as our marriage was, divorce was out of the question for me too.”

  “How did Olga Rinke deal with rifts? Did she find them hard? Easy?”

  “I don’t know. I thought I knew her. But until she died I had no idea about her nocturnal walks, and until hearing your story I knew she’d looked after Eik, but not that he lived with her for years. I’m guessing those were the years when the village where his parents lived was occupied by the French or the Lithuanians and he was at high school in Tilsit. There were no rifts in our relationship, and I thought Olga was as constant as me. But apparently not.”

  She nodded. She knew that others are often not as we think they are. “Thank you for this evening, the dinner, all you’ve told me. Tomorrow I’m going to research an article about last year’s horticultural show so I can put the trip on the expense account. Do you feel like coming with me?”

  I promised to pick her up in the car at nine o’clock, and I walked her back to her guest house two streets away.

  25

  When I meet confident, assertive people like her and also learn that they find committing and detaching themselves easy, I don’t want to even begin to get involved with them: I already know that they’ll leave me. But there was an easy familiarity between us on the drive to the Black Forest; we each talked about ourselves as if we really wanted to discover the other, we used the informal du form of address, and when we were silent, there was no need for speech.

  The mayor had used the horticultural show to restore some sparkle to the town, which had seen better days, having lost its industries and its rich citizens: a park around the remains of the old castle, a fresh bed for the little river that had been bricked over, a riverbank promenade. The residents had joined in, putting flower boxes in their windows that promised a rich display of blooms in summer, and the sun shone on many a freshly plastered house. The last vestiges of snow were turning gray in shaded corners. Adelheid had a camera with her and was taking photographs.

  “Winter After the Horticultural Show” was the title of the article she was writing for Park and Garden. She had set up interviews with the mayor, the director of the horticultural show, and the editor in chief of the local newspaper, and I sat in on them and saw how good she was at her job. She was well informed and friendly, and doggedly persistent when they tried to dodge questions about the follow-up costs and debts incurred. The mayor insisted on inviting us to dinner at the Golden Swan, which had acquired a new manager and a new cook for the horticultural show and was now promoting the city on the gastronomic front as well.

  We left later than we had intended. The day had started out warm and sunny, like the day before. In the afternoon the weather had turned, the temperature had dropped, and the blue sky had gone gray. As we stepped out of the Golden Swan into the night and headed for the car, a few snowflakes started to fall.

  I drove off fast. I thought that if it was snowing, we’d be better off on the autobahn than on the country road, and I could reach the autobahn before the snow got any heavier. But after just a few kilometers it was already falling so heavily that the windshield wipers could only move with difficulty, and I too had to go slowly. I could hardly see a thing. The white road, white guardrail, and white embankment blurred into one another, the snowflakes refracted the light from the headlights, and oncoming cars only became visible right at the last moment. Sometimes the wheels spun, and we skidded, but recovered. We passed a car that had gotten stuck in the ditch by the side of the road. The driver waved us on; if we had stopped on that uphill slope, we probably wouldn’t have been able to get going again.

  Adelheid and I didn’t talk. I sat, tensed up, staring into the white flurry and clutching the steering wheel tighter than necessary. Until she placed her hand on my shoulder and said, “I like this. This cold outside, and the warmth inside, the slowness. It doesn’t matter if we don’t get back till midnight.”

  I nodded, but it took a while before I finally relaxed and was able to ask, “What else did Eik say about Olga? What was she like? Strict? Indulgent? Did she try to educate him, or did she leave that to his parents?”

  “For a long time, I forgave Father everything. I thought that after fifteen years of war and captivity a man just wants to live, and if his wife rejects him, he needs a lover. It was only much later, only when Mother already had dementia, that he told me he’d already been unfaithful to her when they were young newlyweds and she was pregnant, that he hadn’t even hidden it from her.” She sighed. “Because Mother, in her dementia, was such a stranger to me by then, I even forgave him for this. It was only after her death that I could sympathize with that young woman and understand what he had done to her and what she’d suffered.” She sighed again.

  “But you’re asking about Olga. From what he told me, I imagined a loving, determined woman who could tell wonderful tales and whose stories always had a moral. Herbert among the Indians: something about a wound and trust; I can’t piece it together anymore. Herbert among the Herero: he didn’t really look, and you must look at others closely; the more ‘other’ they are, the closer you need to look. Herbert in the Arctic: big undertakings should be well planned and well prepared. I don’t know whether the moral was always Olga’s or sometimes Father’s.”

  We got home long after midnight. Adelheid hadn’t thought it necessary to ask for a front door key that morning, and the guest house had no night porter, so she accepted the offer of my guest room. She was hungry; I reheated the beef stroganoff, made a salad, and we ate, saying little.

  “Thank you for everything.” We stood up; she came to me, put her arms around my neck and her head on my chest, and I held her. “I have to leave tomorrow at six. It’s a short night. Will you come to my bed?” She raised her head and looked at me, and when I didn’t answer immediately, she laid her head on my chest again.

  “I . . . if it’s good, I won’t be able to bear it that you’ll be gone again in the morning. And if it’s not good, I don’t want it.”

  “I understand.” She laughed quietly. “Perhaps I’ll come again and stay longer. Or perhaps you’ll come to Berlin.” Then she gently disengaged herself, said, “Sleep well,” and went to her room.

  26

  I heard nothing from Tromsø in March. I considered calling and asking how it was going, but left it. If the prospect of money didn’t motivate the bookseller to conduct his search, my call wouldn’t either.

  Adelheid and I wrote to and phoned each other. She sent me the draft of her article, and I sent her the plans for redesigning my garden. She sent me photographs of Eik and her mother, and of herself as a child and young girl. We exchanged opinions on books, music, and films, how she preferred to holiday in the south and I in the north, that she would like to have a dog again, I a cat.

  As a child too and as a young girl, Adelheid reminded me of someone. One of my sisters? Emilie? My wife, whom I hadn’t known as a child or young girl but had seen in photographs? One of the children or young girls I’d played or danced with or had a crush on? In the basement I had a box of old photographs that I wanted to go through to compare them, but I didn’t get around to it.

  The letter arrived from Tromsø in mid-April. The bookseller had found thirty-one letters and one postcard to Herbert Schröder. After deducting the upfront payment, he expected 7,600 euros to be transferred to his account at a bank in London. He would dispatch the items once this had been received. If I wanted them sent by courier, I should transfer an additional 120 euros.

  This was far more money than I had just lying around. As I considered how I might raise this much cash, I remembered Olga’s savings book. I took it to the bank, and the 12,000 marks had turned into more than 16,000 euros, more than enough for the transfer.

  It was another two weeks before the courier brought me the large envelope at eleven o’clock one Wednesday. Inside were a second envelope and a letter from the bookseller with no date, no salutation, no greeting, just a signature:

  Sorry you had to wait. It wasn’t only that I had a lot to do. At first I couldn’t work my way through the mountain of letters without repeatedly picking one up and reading it. Then it became an addiction. I found one letter that told a tale of jealousy, and one about a feud between two brothers; I was fascinated and wanted more. I found a letter from the time of the occupation that revealed a drama of perfidy and betrayal, and one from the time after liberation in which the writer, a collaborator, announced his suicide. I studied history, you understand, and I thought I would finally be able to grasp the past as it really was. Instead, after another thirty or forty letters, my greedy invasion of other lives disgusted me. History is not the past as it really was. It’s the shape we give it. I wish you more joy of your letters than I had of mine.

  Aksel Helland

  27

  Inside the envelope were a bundle of letters from Olga to Herbert. Even without undoing the thin blue thread that tied them together, I could see that there were twenty-five letters from the years 1913 to 1915, chronologically ordered, the oldest at the bottom, the most recent at the top. To my astonishment I also found more letters from Olga to Herbert, three from the 1930s, one from 1956, and one from 1971. There was a letter from Herbert’s father dated August 10, 1913, and a postcard from a friend in January 1914 with a picture of the Imperial Palace in Vienna:

  Old chap,

  I hear from Erwin that you’re gadding about in the ice and snow. What the blazes! I’ve been transferred to Vienna. The balls are starting and we need every dancer we can find. Leave the Eskimo women, come and shake a leg over here!

  Your old friend Moritz

  The letter from his father, whose name was embossed on the heavy notepaper and envelope, was the epitome of futility: