Alice

IV. Malte

It was raining the day Alice saw Frederick for the first and only time. A light rain but steady — diagonal lines against the winter sky. Mid-November. Frederick had said he was coming to Berlin anyway; he hadn’t picked this weather for their meeting; neither had Alice, although it was the sort of weather that made her feel good. Reason enough to feel sleepy and lethargic, rain enough for an umbrella. As usual, her car was parked far away, umpteen streets away, at the edge of the district. Alice left the house too early, carrying an umbrella, wearing high heels, a grey coat, her bag slung over one shoulder, and feeling as if she were dressed for a state visit. On a whim, Frederick had taken a hotel room in the centre of the city, right by the river. Alice thought of it as a whim, but it might simply have been practical, a room downtown. With a view of the water and a steel bridge with pigeons nesting in its struts and trains rolling across from east to west and back. Milky green water with shimmering streaks of oil. The beautiful River Spree, its rusty freight barges, excursion boats, shabby tugboats, everything the same today as it had been forty years ago. Maybe Frederick chose the location because of that.

Alice was to pick him up at the hotel, around eleven.

In your room?

In the lobby. Not in the room. I’ll come down to the lobby.

She didn’t know exactly how old Frederick was. About seventy, a miracle actually that he was still around; he could have been gone by now; that would have been more likely. She had phoned him. He had answered the phone. This startled her so much she almost hung up. His voice sounded low and soft. Not frail. But soft. She took a deep breath. Hello, my name is Alice, she said. We don’t know each other, but I’m Malte’s niece.

For a moment Frederick said nothing. Then he asked how she got hold of his phone number, his voice neither friendly nor unfriendly, matter-of-fact.

From the phone book, Alice had said. It was the truth.

In that moment, during which he said nothing, in that very short stretch of time, Alice knew that her call had forced Frederick to think back over almost forty years — whether he wanted to or not. Back through all the ups and downs, back to the day his friend Malte had taken his own life. Was that hard for him? With her phone call Alice had turned Frederick’s day upside down, had ripped him out of whatever he was just then doing, out of the equilibrium of his everyday world. Thoughtless and needy. By reminding him of a name — pronounced as softly and gently as possible.

Oh, Frederick had said. And what’s this all about?

Still, Frederick had said, Oh, and what’s this all about, and Alice, grateful for the almost casual tone in his voice, had said that she didn’t really know what she was hoping for, but she’d like to see him.

I’d like to meet you. That’s all. I can’t give you a good reason.

He seemed to understand that. Or it seemed to be all right with him. He asked, Do you live in Berlin? — He meant: Do you live in Berlin, just as Malte had lived in Berlin, even though, unlike Malte, you’re obviously not dead — and Alice said, yes, she lived in Berlin, and as she was saying it, saw in her mind’s eye the picture of a plant in a clay pot on the windowsill of a ground-floor apartment that looked out on a dark rear courtyard, on dustbins and carpet rods. All around the pot were the crunchy shells of insects. That’s what came to mind. Who knows why.

Well, I still get to Berlin, Frederick said. Frequently. Let’s meet in Berlin. Give me your phone number. I’ll call you the next time I’m in Berlin.

He had set the conditions. His voice had suddenly become strong, alert. Alice gave him her phone number; he didn’t repeat it. And it might have gone no further. But two months later he had actually called her.

Alice stumbled in her high heels, tripped, and was surprised by the brief jolt to her spine, an icy throbbing. She should have worn different shoes, should have left her shoulder bag at home. Her coat was already spotted from the rain and by the time she arrived, the right shoulder would be crumpled by her bag. Who was it she actually wanted to introduce to Frederick? Obviously not herself. Alice tipped back her umbrella and looked up into the black tree branches; her face got wet. The day was so grey that everything glowed: the orange of the refuse truck, the yellow of the mail trucks, the golden halos behind the fogged-up windows of the cafés. Roller shutters rattled. The bin men clanged dustbins into the entryways, as noisily as possible. From behind the scaffolding that covered the house facades came music from transistor radios, drowned out by an avalanche of construction debris. Fire-engine sirens, sounding a four-note interval, a helicopter hurtling across the sky with a deafening roar. Twilight. The temperature barely above freezing on this day in November. What is this all about? What’s it all about? Alice might also have said, Frederick, you know, it’s actually all about me. But she didn’t say it, and she wasn’t going to say it. Frederick would know anyway.

Alice hadn’t known Malte. Malte would have been her uncle if he hadn’t committed suicide on a day in March — almost forty years ago. Alice was born in April, one month later. But by the time her life began Malte was already lying under the green grass — stones, jasmine and rhododendron around his grave. You are the light in our darkness, Alice’s grandmother, Malte’s mother, had written on her calendar in a clear, deliberate hand.

Alice shook her head, clicked her tongue. To be the light in someone’s darkness. She could see her car now. It was standing where she had parked it yesterday, next to the planetarium behind a row of shaggy forsythia bushes. She was always surprised to find her car exactly where she’d left it. There was a message clamped under the windscreen wiper. The bearer of the message was already ten cars away, a skinny gypsy in a black leotard. His shoulders were bare; his right leg dragged, and he was preaching at the top of his lungs — incomprehensible, full of rage or ecstasy, it could have been either. The dome of the planetarium was varnished with rain. Fat crows in the winter grass, and along the edge of the meadow, the clatter of the S-Bahn. Alice waited until the gypsy had turned the corner and disappeared into the new housing development. He was slow, limping from windscreen to windscreen, now and then looking up into the sky. Alice followed his gaze. Nothing to be seen. Rain clouds, dark as ink. When she looked back again at the row of cars, he was gone. On the little red plastic card under the wiper was the phone number of some stranger who was interested in buying Alice’s car. Hurriedly and distractedly, she searched for her car key in her bag, opened the car door, put the little card on the passenger seat, her bag next to it, got in and slammed the car door shut, as usual much too hard. It was a Japanese car. Tiny, made of Japanese cardboard. Hanging on the rear-view mirror, a dream-catcher — a web of string with brown and white feathers attached. Chewing-gum wrappers in the tray next to the gearstick. Tickets from parking meters, some coins, the smell of damp plastic — what an absolutely personal space. Something made the tears come to Alice’s eyes, possibly it was only weariness. She inserted the key in the ignition, started the engine, and awkwardly manoeuvred the car out of its parking space. The gypsy had not returned. The windscreen wipers started up and, chirping softly, traced clean half-moons on the wet glass.

Alice knew that Malte didn’t have a driving licence, in the late sixties in West Berlin. As far as she knew, he didn’t know how to drive, may have wanted to learn, but never got round to it. Too much to do. He liked going to Prinzenbad, the public pool. Would lie around at the pool on Prinzen Strasse day after day in June, July, and August. Smoking, of course. Garbáty Kalif? Wearing check shirts, narrow trousers. Back then a ticket on the U-Bahn cost 50 Pfennig. Lovely 10-Pfennig coins in his trouser pocket, the ticket made of heavy paper. The U-Bahn ran above ground on Prinzen Strasse between the bullet-riddled grey buildings, then hurtled underground before it reached Wittenberg Platz, and only re-emerged into the light just before Krumme Lanke. Zehlendorf. Malte had lived in his mother’s house in Zehlendorf. A three-storey house, lilacs, elderberry bushes, a porch in the back. When he was eighteen years old, Frederick was ten years older, and the war had been over for twenty years. The grass grew high, the dandelions too. The whole garden was overgrown with weeds. The name of the street was Waldhüterpfad. The U-Bahn station was called Onkel Toms Hütte. Reeds grew all around the edges of Krumme Lanke lake. There was a rowboat, called Maori. And a cat named Pumi in the tall grass, among the dandelions and juicy leaves of clover. Lemonade in scratched glasses. And such starry clear nights!

Malte had loved Frederick, and Frederick had loved Malte. That much Alice knew, a handful of words, and some sensory impressions — the smell of pine trees, lake water, and sun-warmed cat fur. That much she’d pieced together from the little they had told her. And they hadn’t told her much. Worked it out from the photos — a cat in the grass, her rear legs stretched out, her little head facing the camera with a haughty cat expression, that certain feline all-knowingness, a snapshot in black and white. Beneath it, on the photographic paper, her grandmother had used a crayon to write: Pumi. A photo of Malte, smoking. Wearing a striped shirt, sitting on the porch, his hair hanging over his forehead, his eyes cast down, twenty years old. Three years later Alice was born. No photo of the lake, no photo of the boat. Alice knew the lakes and boats. The word Maori had a good sound, a nice sound. Kissing in the heat. Skin and hair. To think of only one man, feeling despair and delight.

Alice didn’t know why Malte had taken his own life. She was surprised that nobody had been able to tell her why; they just looked at her in surprise, wide-eyed, when she asked. With faces like clowns. Well, there’s no way to know. There’s nothing to know. Depression, melancholy, manic-depressive psychosis? Tired of life. He was weary of life. But how could that be?

Alice drove her Japanese car down the narrow street, past the planetarium towards the main road, and was caught up in the morning traffic, her eyes half closed. The dream-catcher swung from side to side in slow motion, the coins rattled in the tray next to the gearstick. The traffic lights glowed. She had no idea why she’d phoned Frederick at this particular time. This year. In the autumn. Because he was getting older and older, just as she was. Because people were suddenly gone, vanishing from the scene from one day to the next. That’s probably why. She had been thinking about him ever since she had first heard his name mentioned; he was part of Malte’s story, but not part of the family; that was what made him stand out. He had some perspective. No one else did. Tidying up — it had something to do with tidying up, putting things in order, the desire to know which assumptions one could lay aside, and which ones not yet. To drop this particular assumption, and to look for another instead. To see connections, or to see that there weren’t any connections at all. Just presumed relationships. Illusions, like reflections, nothing more than changes in the temperature, the light, the seasons.

She drove down the main road from the north-east towards the west, towards the compass-needle point of the TV tower. Traffic stopped and then slowly started moving again. Behind the window of a coffee shop, a woman took off her sweater, her braid catching in the collar; the blouse under the sweater was a faded pink; her legs were twisted around the struts of a bar stool. At an entrance gate a worker stopped the drum of a cement mixer and stripped off his gloves. The driver of a taxi parked at the kerb was sleeping, his head on his chest. Fallow land, garages with caved-in roofs, a petrol station, a plastic tiger swinging from steel cables. Convention hotels, tourist hotels, lofts. Behind the panoramic windows of factory buildings people were running on treadmills, their heads turned up to watch TV monitors, the pictures changing rapidly. Advertising billboards: Smoked Fish. Play your Heroes. Ubu Roi. Bang bang, the night is over. Black Maple. The grey-green trunks of plane trees. Crows or magpies, or jackdaws. Red lights. In the car next to Alice’s, a woman was filing her nails, a cellphone clamped between her left ear and shoulder. Apparently she was saying a weary, slow goodbye, agitated, shifting gears, stepping on the gas. Then the woman turned off the main road, and Alice drove on towards the tall buildings of newspaper offices, the Haus des Lehrers, and the Haus des Reisens; a tram cut through the intersection, and a young woman who had taken shelter at the tram stop searched in the depths of her purse for something, something very small and apparently precious.

And Frederick. Frederick, meanwhile, was in his room at the hotel near the river. It was half an hour before his meeting with Alice, whom he didn’t know, whom he had never before seen, and of whom he knew nothing all these years. What is it like for him? Alice wondered. Is it like a game, is it serious, or does none of it matter to him? It’s possible he doesn’t care about anything. Or that it interests him only a little. That’s all.

She tried to imagine his hotel room, a single room with a wide, queen-size bed and an armchair at the window, a wine-red carpet, his overnight bag for short trips on the luggage rack and beside it, on a hook, his coat on a hanger, a sea-blue housecoat. Next to the door, framed in brass, a map showing the emergency exit routes in case of fire. You are here, a little red cross. True, in many ways. Signs to hang on the doorknob for the chambermaid: Do not disturb, Make up the room. Soundproof windows, a noisy air-conditioner. On the bedside table, a telephone next to the bedside lamp, a pad and pencil with the name of the hotel on them, and a piece of dark chocolate in a black and gold wrapper. I’ll call once I’m in the lobby, Alice had said. Is that all right with you?

Eventually Malte had moved out of the Zehlendorf house, the one with the porch, the cat, and the dandelions. He lived by himself in a one-room apartment in Kreuzberg, on a street called Eisenbahn Strasse, Railway Street. Frederick was away, studying elsewhere; they exchanged letters, saw each other rarely. A nearly empty room, a bed, no table, no chair, a clothes rail, and hanging on it, a wire hanger with a blue shirt, a second hanger with a pair of black trousers. A cast-iron lamp, a tape recorder, reels of tape, a radio, a record player on the floor, and books stacked in crooked piles. File folders. A pair of dumb-bells. Photo albums, records. Malte’s room, Malte, who, they said, showed a troublesome inclination towards ending it all — did the others say that? Or did he say that about himself? Alice wedged her car into the street by the river, without paying attention to any of the traffic signs, exhaled, and finally took her foot off the accelerator. Almost forty years ago, the janitor had to force the door to that room open with a crowbar because the key was in the lock on the inside and Malte had not answered his mother’s persistent, fearful knocking. Once the door was open, it was too late. It was all over. All of this so long ago.

How did he kill himself? With painkillers, pills. Barbiturates — a word almost as sonorous as Maori. Back then you could still get barbiturates without a prescription, not any more, and that was all Alice knew. The end. That’s as far as she could think. Delicate threads between her in her Japanese car in the no-parking zone outside the hotel, shoulder-bag on her knees and fingertips on her throbbing eyelids, and Frederick in his room with the river view, waiting for the phone to ring, and Malte for whom there had been no one at the end to be a light in the darkness. Threads as fine as a spider’s web, cut the moment she tried to think about it. Alice opened the car door and got out.

In her own room there was a picture leaning against the wall next to the window. An owl. Its wings spread before a whorl of shadows. It was a picture Malte had painted. She couldn’t have said whether it was a good painting or not. That wasn’t the point. Sometimes she would sit at the table and gaze at the owl. Involuntarily cocking her head to the side. Then she’d get up and do something else.

The golden hand of a train-station clock hanging above the hotel reception desk moved to the top of the hour. The smell of leather and furniture polish, peppermints in a glass bowl. Alice said, Hello, would you please ring Room 34, her left hand on the reception desk in an attempt to get some attention. Water dripped onto the floor tiles from her furled umbrella; she could hear it drip. The hotel clerk had a deformed ear; it was twisted and stunted; his hair looked as if it had been cut with nail scissors, but the name-plate on his lapel shone like filmed-over silver. He ignored Alice for a while, drawing lines and circles with a pencil in a big ledger, deadly earnest; Alice couldn’t see exactly what he was doing. Two waitresses were clearing away the buffet in the breakfast room, aggressively clattering the plates, sweeping off the tables with hand brooms, collecting crumpled newspapers. Disorder, a restless atmosphere, coy giggles. The hotel clerk mumbled to himself, his head averted.

Would you do that please Alice said.

Of course, he said. Gently, with an expression of unlimited patience. As if he had just wanted to give Alice a little time, a small span of time, so that she could reconsider everything. Change her mind, retreat. Alice thought, But that’s something I never learned to do. Sorry, that’s not possible any more. She didn’t smile, felt her left eyelid twitch; inconspicuously she withdrew her hand from the counter, leaving a damp mark that vanished as she watched. The clerk closed the ledger and put the pencil down next to it. He lifted the telephone receiver and, as if he were in a silent film, dialled a number and held the receiver out to her over the counter. Alice angrily rejected it, almost pushing away the hand extending the telephone to her, almost touching him.

Tell him Alice is here, she whispered. He raised his eyebrows, put the receiver to his good ear, and listened. No one there? Would someone have to break down the door? Did Frederick need a little more time so that he could change his mind about the whole thing? After all he’d had to learn to do without.

Alice knew that Frederick, sitting in the armchair next to the suddenly ringing telephone, must have flinched in shock. Even though he had been waiting for it to ring. Just because of that. The abrupt shock. His heart pounding, the theoretical acknowledgement of futility.

Alice is here, the clerk said. Almost pleading. He had been given the key word, knew the text. He nodded, listened some more, a pained half-smile on his lips. Then he replaced the receiver. Looking at Alice, looking right through her, he said, The gentleman is coming down to the lobby. Right away.

Alice didn’t know where to go. She was standing in front of the elevator, in the middle of the lobby, the reception desk to her right and the breakfast room to her left. Circling the elevator were the stairs, a cabaret stairway with wide steps, the banister rail of dark wood and golden diagonal posts. Would Frederick take the elevator or the stairs? Either way he’d be making an entrance. The elevator was waiting on the fourth floor; the digital display above the elevator door remained steadily on the number 4. The lobby floor was paved with black and white tiles, freshly washed, showing distinctly the tracks left by Alice’s shoes and her dripping umbrella. An old woman was pushing a cart full of wrinkled, soiled laundry past the reception desk down the long hall. Umbrellas swam by outside the windows; it seemed to be getting dark already. The hotel clerk yawned like a tired child. He undid the foil wrapper around a stick of chewing gum and pushed it into his mouth. Sucking on it thoughtfully. In the breakfast room the waitresses were crawling around on their hands and knees under the tables. They straightened tablecloths, flower arrangements, cinnamon sticks, and dried orange slices. They bumped their heads, pulled their braids tight with both hands.

Alice switched the bag from her right shoulder to the left, took the umbrella into her left hand. She thought of her grandmother who all her life had had a recurring dream in which she was in a large room, sitting at a festive table set only for her, in front of a tureen made of the finest porcelain. When she raised the lid, there in the white bowl was a black, multi-legged, unusually intricately equipped insect, stretching out and flicking up its shiny feelers. Tentacles. Tendrils like wire. In the autumn, Alice’s grandmother liked raking the leaves of the nut trees, leathery leaves, the smell of earth and oil. Every other year, there would be nuts, shrivelled and plentiful; they would lie spread out on newspapers by the window, and at noon the sun would shine for an hour on their shrivelled husks. Her grandmother had supported the first small sunflower stems with paint brushes, tying the stems to the brushes with thread. When she came downstairs to the kitchen after her midday nap, her bronze bracelet clattered on the banister. She believed in the nerve-strengthening power of bananas. In the evenings she played Napoleon patience and, despairing when it didn’t come out, would leaf through a French grammar book to compensate, rustling the yellowed pages until her eyes closed. Then she would feel for the switch inside the shade of the cast-iron lamp that had been her mother’s and her mother’s mother’s before that and afterwards had been Malte’s, and then again hers and now Alice’s. Alice’s grandmother had died in a hospital even though she had expressly asked to be allowed to die at home. In her last hour of life she had spoken steadily and insistently, but Alice hadn’t understood a single word because the nurses refused to put her grandmother’s teeth back in her mouth — saying she might have a convulsion and choke to death. That’s how it was. Then, later, Alice was handed a plastic bag containing her grandmother’s cardigan, a pair of shoes, and the bronze bracelet. She had turned down the offer to say goodbye to her one more time in the morgue the following day.

Her grandmother wouldn’t have said anything about the meeting between Alice and Frederick. Neither for nor against it, not the one nor the other. Alice thought that her grandmother, in her old age, had been a happy person in a humble way. Frederick came down the stairs. An old man. Very fine hair, white, almost gleaming, and Alice realised with amazement that she had actually assumed he would be young. As young as he had been almost forty years ago. She had assumed Frederick had stopped ageing when Malte died. That his story had stopped at the point where hers began. She made an almost apologetic movement towards him, and Frederick let go of the banister on the last step and came towards her, his gaze focused attentively on Alice’s face — and Alice knew that he would be disappointed at finding no external resemblance between her and Malte, not the least. On the other hand it was no longer possible to know what Frederick had looked like back then. On the porch. Light, shadow, and light, alternating on his features. But despite all that, they looked at each other. Shook hands and their touching was encouraging, it was what was left to them.

Well now, let’s go outside for a bit, Frederick said. He had a slight squint. Sounded indulgent, and he smiled that way too. Good thing you brought an umbrella, he said.

They walked together along the river. The voices of the tourist guides on the excursion boats floated across the water, fragmented and windblown, … once stood here, used to be, will be and is today. Frederick walked under the umbrella Alice held over him, every now and then sticking his face out into the rain. He was shorter than she was. They walked slowly. He was carrying a plastic bag with something in it. No coat over his blue suit. Alice thought he would dissolve if it weren’t for the umbrella she was holding over him. Dissolve and run like watercolours, different hues of blue: marine, hyacinth, hydrangea. An express train roared across the bridge. Pigeons flew up. Signals. Departure and arrival. The river water lapped against the bulwark, carrying trash, paper and bottles. Building cranes swayed next to the Tränenpalast. Frederick said, This time I’d like to go to the Bode Museum. Back then, he paused, it wasn’t possible. But I’m going there this afternoon. It was not an invitation for her to go with him.

They sat across from each other, the only customers in a dimly lit café, Alice drinking tea, Frederick too, no sugar, no milk. The waitress behind the counter was reading a book. At Frederick’s request she had turned off the radio. An ice crystal was rotating with psychedelic slowness on the computer screen of the cash register. Now and then Alice gazed at Frederick, his white, feathery light hair, his reflective glasses, his skin dark and meticulously shaved, an expression of weariness and arrogance around the mouth. Also a childish look of hurt feelings. He had a problem with swallowing. Coughed frequently. His hands looked soft, carefully cut fingernails and a signet ring showing a rising or a setting sun.

Alice wondered what Malte would have looked like today. What sort of mood, what sort of shape would he be in. Her homosexual uncle. No children, unmarried. A long table of scarred wood, the smell of oil paints, turpentine, varnish, sticks of charcoal, hand-rolled cigarettes, pale, transparent cigarette paper as thin as tissue, and tobacco, black and dry. A slightly acrid smell that clung to his fingertips for a long time, the index and middle fingertips on his right hand tinted yellow. An inclination towards ending it all. He would have pushed aside the papers, cups, ashtrays, and sticks of charcoal to make room for her at his table. Alice thought, I would have gone to see him, lovesick. Would have picked up a short, cynical remark of consolation. An indication. And she realised with amazement that she missed Malte, that his departure had spread into her life, even if only as an illusion, a projection aimed almost into nothingness.

How is your father? Frederick asked. He spoke past Alice, through the window. Wait a minute — yes, yes, your father, Christian, Malte’s brother.

He’s well, Alice said automatically. He’s well.

And Alice? He pronounced the name of Alice’s grandmother as if he had forgotten that Alice had the same name. True. It wasn’t the same. Not the same name.

Alice has been dead a long time already, Alice said. She stumbled inwardly, but only over the short, dry word. It wasn’t as if she were talking about herself, it had never been like that. Her grandmother had been dead for almost twenty years. That was hard to believe; she had to repeat it. Alice died twenty years ago. But she wasn’t sick for long. She felt fine, almost to the end.

I’m glad, Frederick said. She was very gentle. Your grandmother. A gentle, wise, and patient woman, extraordinarily patient, considering what a hard time she had. And not only with Malte.

Alice’s grandmother had not been gentle. Or patient.

Those weren’t the right words, not at all. But Alice didn’t contradict him; she hadn’t known her as Malte’s mother. Had no image of the woman who walked out on the porch of the house on Waldhüterpfad in the mornings. The cat purring around her feet, its matted fur. Her grandmother’s hands half a century ago. Her voice back then, Malte’s voice, her gestures, the tender words, all the futile good intentions. When finally her sons were grown men, she got sick. Malte and Christian sold the house on Waldhüterpfad.

There was nothing left of all that. Only the picture of the owl, three chairs, the cast-iron lamp, a few records, the two dumb-bells for a while — and then those too were gone, swept away by something. What’s it like? Alice asked her father every year as they passed the house on their way to the cemetery to place a candle in a red plastic container on the neglected grave. Every year they stopped at the house, and Alice would peer in at the window next to the front door, into the living room, past the furniture of strangers, and out to the rear of the garden, without understanding anything. To be allowed to sit on the porch just once. Just once. What is it like to stand outside the house in which you grew up, now that other people are living in it? Her father raised his hands. What can I say?

Does Christian know we’re meeting? Frederick asked, at the same time signalling to the waitress. The waitress saw him out of the corner of her eye, got up, but not until she had finished reading the page she was on, only then did she close her book.

No, Alice said. No one knows. But not for any particular reason; it’s just that — this is my affair. It’s my business. And Frederick nodded, that’s how he felt too.

Well, then, the bill for the two pots of tea, please.

The waitress stood next to their table, not as if Frederick had signalled to her, but as if she had been assigned by someone else to put an end to their meeting. She held her waitress purse open in her left hand, having placed the right one protectively over her left wrist, covering her pulse. Out of politeness, Alice leaned down to get her shoulder bag, but Frederick paid for them both, leaving the correct tip. Scarcely looked at the waitress, not interested. The waitress snapped her purse shut with a flourish, rattling the coins. Well now, she said. Have a nice day, Hope the rain lets up.

I brought you something, Frederick said. It was a small, fat blue file folder that he had been carrying in the plastic bag. He put it on the table in front of him without opening it.

Malte’s letters. These are the letters Malte wrote to me in the years before he died. You can read them. I think they’ll tell you everything you might want to know. Actually everything is in those letters.

Yes. He looked at the blue folder as if he wanted to reconsider, then he slid the file folder back into the bag, pushed the bag across the table. Alice kept her hands in her lap.

The letters have been in a safe deposit box at the bank all this time. I’m getting old now, and I don’t know when I might pass out and not regain consciousness or something, and I don’t know who might find me then.

He got up, pushed the chair back against the table. His voice sounded quite unemotional. He probably wanted it that way to make it all bearable.

He said, I’d like to have the letters back after you’ve read them.

They both knew this wouldn’t happen.

I’ll give them back to you, Alice said emphatically. Thanks.

She said, By the way, I was there once. I passed by there once.

Where, Frederick asked. Passed by what?

Eisenbahn Strasse 5, Alice said. The house where Malte lived in those days.

Really, Frederick said. And what was it like? He seemed to be truly interested, even if at some remove, from a safe distance.

It was strange, Alice said. How can I describe it — I was nervous; it was as if I were following someone. Spying on someone …

For quite a while she had stood across the street from the house, looking at it, an apartment house like all the others, from the 1870s, its facade renovated. She had thought about the fact that Malte had come and gone across that threshold for a whole year, and then walked in one last time and had not walked out again; they had carried him out, a sheet covering his body and his face. But she preferred imagining what it would be like if the front door were to suddenly open and he were to walk out, hands in his jacket pockets, casting an inquiring glance up at the sky. She wondered if she would recognise him and how — by the scar on his forehead, the protruding ears, old Alice’s eyes, his posture in general. She was sure she would recognise him, and a wave of indignation and affection passed through her, even though the front door remained shut tight and no one left or entered. But it could have been possible. Anything was possible. Raymond might have come out of the house. Or the Romanian. Or Misha, who seemed more alive the longer he was dead; everything seemed to be connected with everything else, and from that perspective it wasn’t surprising that the thing that glittered among the paving stones directly in front of the apartment house door should turn out to be an undamaged gold-coloured cartridge. Without looking to the left or to the right, Alice had crossed the street heading towards the front door, had bent down and picked the cartridge up out of the soft, sandy depression between two cobblestones. And put it in her pocket.

You know, she said, I suddenly had the thought that he didn’t die at all. That all this time he’s been living in the house on Eisenbahn Strasse, all these years. It’s as if I’d finally found out something. Do you know what I mean?

Well, I can imagine it, at least, Frederick said.

There was a cartridge lying outside the front door, Alice said. A nine-millimetre Parabellum.

It’s for you, Frederick said. Just like that, he said.

Yes, for me, Alice said. I wonder why.

You’ll find out, Frederick said. You will find out.

Afterwards he walked across the bridge over the river, the brackish water the same today as back then, the iron Prussian eagles forged into the bridge railing by their wings. And nobody was watching. Except Alice, who watched him walk off, freed now from the burden of the little bag containing the letters Malte had written in those years. It had stopped raining. Frederick strolled off, stopped once and turned to look up at the building cranes. What was he thinking about? Then he walked on. It wasn’t he who had phoned Alice. Alice had phoned him. Was there someone after Malte? Alice had asked him. No, Frederick had replied. After Malte there was no longer anyone, only some physical encounters, but that’s something quite different. It seemed he didn’t think it remarkable that there was no one else after Malte.

A flatbed pickup truck was coming out of the narrow street of the hotel where the clerk handed room keys attached to heavy brass weights across the counter to new hotel guests, where the waitresses took off their aprons in the laundry room, brushing their hair in the light of fluorescent tubes. The pickup truck, turning with deliberate speed out of the narrow street on the eastern bank of the river, was carrying Alice’s Japanese cardboard car. With its dream-catcher, petrol receipts, hair clips, broken umbrellas, picnic blankets, old newspapers, sand from Lake Müritz, peanut shells, sweet wrappers, and aspirin. On the passenger seat the little plastic card from the gypsy who — on the periphery of the new housing development — had looked up into the sky, the way Frederick had, and then had disappeared, vanished, never to reappear. Alice watched the pickup truck. She had a brief, feeble impulse to run after it but tripped again in her high heels.

Gripping the bag containing Malte’s letters, she walked up the stairs to the train station. And now what? Read the letters right away or later or not at all? It didn’t matter what was in them — it wouldn’t change anything. But it would add something — one more ring around an unknowable permanent centre. Alice tightened her hold on the bag of letters. I am, after all, one of many, she thought, losing herself in the splendid, cold and wintry hall of the train station among so many others, and all the many possibilities of travelling here or there.