One More Story: Thirteen Stories in the Time-Honored Mode

New Year’s Eve Confusions

I used to be afraid of New Year’s Eve. But then I was leading an impossible life. Only the professional side of things was functioning. Functioning even better than I actually liked.

When I try to cast about for the beginning of this story, I instantly find myself leaning back in my office chair, my right foot on the handle of the middle desk drawer, the tip of my shoe wedged in under the desktop. I’m holding the phone receiver in my left hand, while my right hand plays the spiral cord like a violin string pressed against my knee. The smoke above the ashtray assumes shapes — a rumpled handkerchief, an upturned ice-cream cone, a castle from a cartoon fairy tale.

Startled at first by the display showing a call from Berlin, I was as always disappointed to recognize Claudia’s phone number. Claudia called me only when she couldn’t get hold of Ute at our branch in the old city. This time, however, she was in a chatty mood. She wanted to talk about New Year’s Eve, and I had no idea why she was telling me whom she would be inviting — the names meant nothing to me. But after a brief pause she added, emphasizing each word: “And your Julia too!”

This was on October 9, 1999, shortly before five o’clock.

Maybe you also have someone in your life who means the world to you, for whom you would sacrifice ten years of your life, for whom without hesitation you would leave your wife and child, give up your career. For me that was Julia, the Julia I first met at a carnival party thrown by the Arts Academy in Dresden in 1989. She was dressed as Hans in Luck, and could in fact have passed for a young lad, had it not been for the way she walked. She ordered a beer, I ordered a beer, we waited for them. I complimented her on her costume and went on to say that I had a thing for women who drink beer — a remark that leaves me blushing even now. We toasted. Julia assumed my general enthusiasm for theater — and in particular for a production of Kate from Heilbronn at the Leipziger Strasse rehearsal stage — came from my having recognized her. When the music struck up, we danced. Julia danced the whole evening just with me.

I was studying physics at the Technical University and working on my final-year paper. Julia was doing her year of practical training at the Staatsschauspiel.

The second time we met, as we sat across from each other in a milk bar near Goose Thief Fountain, Julia stretched her hands out to the middle of the table — and even a little farther — so that I couldn’t help laying my hands on hers.

Despite a lot of big promises, she hadn’t gotten hired in Dresden, and according to Julia the reason was her evaluation by the Berlin Acting School, which claimed she had problems “recognizing the leading role of the working class.”

Julia was more than happy to land a spot with a theater in A., a district capital, although I found that almost more frustrating than she did. But since I was convinced that sooner or later someone would be captivated by her, I came around to believing that A. was better for her than Dresden. For an acting student to get involved with a guy from a technical university was unusual in those days, to say the least. The best her theater bunch could come up with was Dürrenmatt’s The Physicists. They had no idea what it meant to plug away at five years of technical studies and — without becoming a party member — be granted a research slot, even if it was only at a technical school in B.

Even today I don’t find it easy to describe Julia. It’s like trying to supply reasons for why I loved her. It annoyed me when people called her a “standout,” as if she were a precocious child. The most amazing thing about her was that, especially as an actor, she was scarcely aware of the effect she had. When I told her I knew of no other woman who walked in such an easy and yet decisive way, she said it was my infatuation. For Julia the most important thing each morning was to tell me about her dreams, as if she felt some need to confess. Julia never missed a party, even if it usually looked as if she was bored once she got there. She often learned her role on the train or would set her alarm for four in the morning. I loved everything about Julia — except the way she could encapsulate herself! From one moment to the next Julia could close up for apparently no reason whatever. She would then treat me as an object she needed to evade, even while she was flirting with a salesclerk or chatting for minutes on end with some stagehand we might run into on the street.

In June of ’89 my left foot buckled under me while I was taking a run in the woods. I tore a tendon and ended up in a cast. Julia dropped everything, including her graduation party in Berlin, to take care of me and cook for me — she even called the taxi that took me to the oral defense of my paper.

That cast marked the beginning of our loveliest time together. We were almost inseparable. When I could actually walk again, we took a trip to Budapest and Szeged, returning in the middle of August, which raised smiles on some faces at the time. But Julia and I had never so much as mentioned leaving for the West, just as we never spoke about having children or moving in together.

Later I asked myself many times whether I loved Julia because she was an actor. The mere thought that the same beautiful creature everyone was staring at would, once the applause ended, follow me back to my ghastly dorm and fall asleep cuddled up against me, that that voice would be whispering words in my ear, that those hands — ah, it can only sound banal to anybody else.

But believe me: As much as I loved Kate of Heilbronn, I loved Julia far more, who wanted nothing more than to be with me. With her everything felt easy and natural and effortless.

One time on the train — we were on my way to my parents’, and Julia was sitting across from me reading — I was struck by the notion that we didn’t know each other, a vision so terrible it actually left me with ice-cold hands. Without Julia everything was sad or at least incomplete. Even in the company of my friend C. or my brother, within an hour at the latest, I would be tormented by my longing for her.

Julia’s first season in A. began that September and so did my assistantship in B. People in B. were far less uptight than at the Dresden Technical University. I could have ducked out on Thursdays. Julia said, however, that she needed more time now and more sleep, because she would have to concentrate completely on her work.

A week without her was endless, I barely lasted two. I didn’t understand her change of heart. When she wrote me — neither of us had a telephone, and only emergency calls were allowed at both the theater and my lab — that she would be in rehearsal the next weekend as well and still had a script to learn, I took a train to A.

Julia had an evening rehearsal. I waited in the café across from the theater, missed her when she left, so that when I finally rang her doorbell she was already asleep — she was subletting a two-and-a-half-room apartment with no private bath. This was five days before her twenty-sixth birthday. I asked her where we should celebrate, in A. or B.? Julia said she wasn’t up to celebrating this close to her premiere. Of course I grabbed a train for A. anyway.

The doorkeeper let me in solely out of the goodness of her heart. When I entered the canteen, there I stood — a bag of presents in one hand, a bouquet in the other — facing about two dozen people discussing whether they would be traveling to Leipzig for a demonstration the next Monday, October 2.

It was after midnight when we finally left. I hurriedly arranged a little birthday table. Julia, already in her pajamas, said, “You look like you’re about to burst into tears.”

I was in fact pretty desperate. But I hoped the spell Julia was under would be broken in that moment by one of our magic charms — and knew that I wasn’t going to be able to go on like this.

On Wednesday, October 4, I participated in the meeting at the church in B., said something to the effect that in our country allegiance to the party meant more than doing good work — a ridiculous platitude, but it was met with lots of applause. Afterward two men asked me if I didn’t want to work with the New Forum in B. I should add that I was risking a great deal. My paper, “New Research on the Superductility of Aluminum — Zinc Alloys,” had earned me some provisional laurels, preparations for the first series of experiments were proceeding without a hitch, and Professor Walther from Martin Luther University in Halle had held out the prospect of a position.

The premiere of Sophocles’ Antigone was what is called a thundering success. I bore up under the endless premiere party without a peep, and was on my best behavior the whole time. It was not until the next morning when I told Julia about my statement at the church that she opened up.

To be admired by her was wonderful, but then she said that what I’d done would definitely please Ms. What’s-her-face — I’ve forgotten the name of her director. I said I had no desire to please Ms. What’s-her-face, to which Julia replied that I’d hardly have much of a chance in any case, since What’s-her-face was a lesbian.

If you think that with that the definitive word was spoken, you’re mistaken. I say this of course with no ultimate certainty, but precisely because the relationship between What’s-her-face and Julia was so ambiguous, it left me in a quandary.

Things were proceeding in B. just as elsewhere in the country, except that the demonstrations in B. were never mentioned on the radio — which left us with a sense of disappointment and futility.

Before the New Forum in B. got a copy machine — smuggled in from our sister city K. in West Germany — we had to type up our initial proclamation over and over using four sheets of carbon paper. Ute, who worked in the lab at the polyclinic, and I were the only ones who could touch-type. The two of us would often sit typing until midnight in the “hobby cellar” of a dilapidated villa. This was almost perfect busywork for me — I wasn’t alone and I didn’t have to think about anything.

It was probably our work ethic that convinced the New Forum’s “speakers council” that the copy machine would be in good hands with Ute and me. But beginning in early November when we had nothing more to fear and suddenly everybody had something they wanted to copy — we asked for twenty pfennigs a copy as a donation — we set up regular office hours, with Ute and me covering fifty-fifty.

Ute was in love with me from the start. On our trip to Coburg — we intended to spend our “welcome money” for copy machine cartridges — I told her about Julia and the fantastic summer we had had. But that made no difference whatever in her behavior.

When it becomes clear that you may touch the woman beside you whenever you want, yes, that she’s waiting for you to touch her, you finally do it when the opportunity arises. I was surprised by how passionate and simple and beautiful sex with her was. We had sex almost every day, and afterward everything was always just as before. At some point I asked myself if it was possible for me to love Ute. Thought it just for a moment, one brief instant, and it seemed absurd of course — I couldn’t leave Julia for Ute.

I made the trip to A. for Julia’s Shakespeare premiere on November 26. The theater was practically empty. All the same I congratulated Ms. What’s-her-face, who was quick to ask why my hands were so cold. “Are my hands really that cold?” I asked in amazement and held one hand up to my cheek, which sent What’s-her-face into peals of laughter. Julia’s expression took on a telling look.

In the middle of December what had to happen happened. Julia visited me in B. for the first time — someone had offered her a ride and she had grabbed the chance. The someone was What’s-her-face. Later Julia said she sensed right off that something was wrong with me. She hadn’t shown her face for three and a half months, and then there she was at my door with What’s-her-face. Was I supposed to burst with happiness? I made coffee, put some cake on the table, and wished What’s-her-face would go to hell.

What’s-her-face enthused about the demonstrations in Leipzig and how they had turned everything upside down—“not just for us in the theater, but in the whole town of A.” I asked who “us” was. “Well, all of us!” she cried, spreading her arms wide. “The whole theater!” Julia talked about solidarity among colleagues, about the incredible experience of being certain that they could depend on one another. “If they had dragged one of us from the stage, we all would have gone to jail.”

What was I supposed to tell them about? Our copy service?

While What’s-her-face talked, the thought of being left alone with Julia made me nervous. Julia was sitting on the sofa still wrapped in her coat, her hands in her pockets — I had opened the window because we were all smoking up a storm — and was presumably feeling much the same. The good-byes when What’s-her-face left were extremely cordial. She apologized for having robbed us of an hour and a half of our time together, and even gave me a hug too at the end.

Actually everything could have turned out all right, but when Julia remarked how happy she was that What’s-her-face and I were finally connected, that working with What’s-her-face meant a great deal to her, and that maybe I could understand now why she, Julia, hadn’t been able to visit me — I saw red.

Was this how things were going to be with us from now on? I asked. And while Julia stared at me in utter dismay, I shouted, “I can’t live like this!” I surprised myself with how angry and embittered I sounded. I wanted a decision. I wanted my Julia back. Either paradise or — all right — nothing. It all seems totally insane to me now, but at the time I thought I had suffered enough. Julia then made the remark that she had sensed something of the sort when she came through the door.

“I’ve been cheating on you,” I replied, and tried to explain myself to her. Her pulling back like this had driven me crazy, but she was my whole life, without her I would simply freeze to death, I wanted nothing more than to be with her, just like it was before. But she said nothing, as if hesitating to summon the effort.

Tears were running down Julia’s cheeks. We stood in the tiny entryway, listening to footsteps upstairs, to the click of a light switch, and to a very soft plop as one of her tears dripped on the floor.

She wasn’t blaming me, Julia said, she’d noticed herself that she had never been able to satisfy me sexually.

No, I shot back, that was nonsense.

We didn’t budge from the spot.

She wasn’t holding it against me, she said, some silly little slip that probably had nothing to do with love.

And then something happened that I still don’t understand even today. At that moment I thought of how I had wondered if I could live my life with Ute too. And instead of assuring Julia that the idea of my leaving her for someone else was absurd, I said that there’d been a smidgen of love involved.

Why did I lie? Because it was a lie — I swear, a lie!

Julia looked at me. “Well if that’s the case …,” she said. Her voice sounded strange. For the first time it sounded like the voice of a total stranger. She went back to the living room to get her purse. “If that’s the case …” were the last words I heard her speak.

On the way to the train station I showered her with declarations of love. I loved Julia, I loved only Julia and so never doubted that I could change her mind. I was certain that in the next instant we would embrace and kiss, that we would turn around and never be separated again. At the station, when Julia asked me for a cigarette, I thought the moment of saving grace, of awakening from the nightmare, had come.

Julia didn’t answer my letters. I traveled to A. to see productions she was in. She wouldn’t talk to me. She was sure I’d understand her someday, she said, thanked me for the flowers, and offered her hand. Her colleagues ignored me as if I were a stranger.

At first I thought Julia had put me on probation, but I didn’t hear from her either on New Year’s Eve or on January 13, my birthday. I started drinking, being alone was unbearable.

Almost everyone at the technical school had resigned their party membership. My senior adviser, Professor K., told everyone he could about the risk he had taken in preventing me from being discharged in early October. I spent most of my time in the office of the New Forum and until late into the night copied other people’s theses, advertising flyers, and various calls to arms. We asked that 10 percent of every bill be paid in Western D-marks. That was Ute’s idea, who headed up the business end of things. She was always there for me. I could also say she was at my beck and call, even though I was often mean to her. I couldn’t stand it when she treated me as if we were a couple.

We passed on two thousand marks a month to the New Forum, and kept the rest. That rest grew from week to week, so that every Saturday evening Ute slipped me several times the amount of my stipend.

But telling it this way leaves the wrong impression. At the time I was no more interested in money than I was in anything else. Moreover it only slowly dawned on us what it was we were actually up to. It was clear to Ute — although I didn’t give it a thought — that we were operating more or less illegally.

In the middle of March, the same week as parliamentary elections, she applied for a business license. We registered as a partnership under the civil code. As I said, I didn’t have to worry about any of it. I signed whatever she gave me to sign, and did my work — I didn’t want to have anything more than that to do with it. I lived in the expectation that at the first signal from Julia I would drop everything to follow her to wherever.

I gave up working on my dissertation. I was simply incapable of sitting there in my dorm and brooding. The reason I gave my parents was that all my advisers and mentors, including Professor Walther in Halle, had been given a leave of absence or fired.

Ute’s days at the polyclinic were numbered as well. We ran “Copy 2000” as a kind of hobby. I learned how to roll coins, carried the bag to the bank for Ute, and watched the numbers on our statements climb and climb. I made two more trips to A., but then decided never again to set foot in the town.

Because most people we had started with in the New Forum had wandered off into other political parties, no one except Ute and I knew who the machines — a second copier had been donated to us in December — actually belonged to. We moved them to a little shop at street level — Ute had arranged for an open-ended lease with People’s Solidarity starting July 1, 1990. Compared with the three copy machines we bought on credit, our old ones were already museum pieces.

From the start we were the top dogs in B. We never turned down a job and worked late into the night if necessary, whereas our competition got bogged down trying to make a killing in computers and other office equipment. We invested in binding machines.

Ute and I slept together almost every day, sometimes even had sex in the office as we waited for the copiers to spit out the rest of a run. In that regard we were made for each other. With Julia — maybe she was right about that — I’d always felt a little inhibited.

“We sure do a lot of screwing,” Ute once remarked. She said it the same way she might have said, “We sure do have a lot of business.” But she might have claimed just the opposite without it having sounded any different. Do you understand? I mean, for her the only important thing was that we were together. Without batting an eye Ute would have dropped everything on the spot to follow me through thick and thin. I’m not saying this out of vanity. It was the same with me, except for me it was Julia.

At the end of August, it was just growing light, Ute’s head lay on my chest and I was just about to doze off again, when she whispered: “I’m pregnant.” She hadn’t expected me to be happy about it. Fritz was born on February 28, 1991, he was named after Ute’s grandfather Friedrich. His middle, and last, name came from me, Friedrich Frank Reichert.

All the same Fritz was Ute’s child, hers alone. The boy didn’t change my life in any fundamental way. He helped reconcile me with my parents, who had long been upset with me for having given up on my dissertation. And it meant more work, although within a few weeks Ute was at my side again in the shop.

I soon avoided being alone with Fritz. In his mother’s presence, however, everything I said went in one ear and out the other. The older he grew, the more I irritated him — and at the same time the more devoted he was to his mother. Fritz turned on the charm for her in a way so unchildlike that it was almost worrisome.

Even before his birth we had hired employees. We used mainly students, who stood in line to get a job with us. But that’s taking me down the wrong track. It works perhaps as a kind of backstory. The ups and downs of our business are not the issue here. I was a really good boss, at least a better one than I am today — and I know what I’m saying. Back then people actually considered me a cool guy, and I probably was, too, when it came to business. I didn’t really want to be a success.

Do you understand? Nothing I did was done out of conviction. Nothing connected me with my work, it was just an accidental fit, with one thing leading to the other, as if in my worry and confusion I had landed in some parlor game.

Of course I could always have traveled to Berlin and rung Julia’s doorbell — she’d had a couple of minor roles at the Gorki Theater in 1991, but after that only jobs on off-off stages. But a visit seemed an inappropriate, random act — a far too simple solution somehow. I was hoping, if you want to put it that way, for fate to beckon — ultimately for Copy 2000 to go bankrupt. It sounds ridiculous now, but at the time I regarded Ute and myself as two people running a company, business partners who also happened to live together.

Yes, I did hope that we would have to fold. All the same I couldn’t bring myself to make mistakes on purpose. I wanted to lose out not to the competition but to circumstance. But evidently our responses were always the right ones.

In 1993—and by then there wasn’t a soul who hadn’t realized that there would be no economic miracle — we totally demoralized our rivals with our delivery service. But a year later, when we lost the bid for a copy shop at the Technical University, I figured that was the end. But then we started giving students and the unemployed a discount, kept our prices low — and what do you know, it wasn’t us but Technical Copy that went belly up.

I wish nowadays I still had that same effortless flair for regarding difficulties as a mathematical problem, an equation to be solved. I knew that we had to grow, not because we had done any market research, but because B. consists of three zones, the old city, the new city, the Technical University. Besides which, three is a good number, the best, if you ask me. Once you have three copy shops in a city like B. you’ve sucked up the air for everyone else. Nevertheless I was surprised each time my calculations worked out.

After my separation from Julia, contacts with friends, in fact even my relationship with my brother — two years younger than I, an orthopedist — were almost totally broken off. Everyone suddenly had too much to do, or they moved away or simply faded into the woodwork, just as I had done. I didn’t want to have to explain to anyone why I was living with Ute now instead of Julia.

Of course the pain subsided, I’d be lying if I were to claim anything different. But pain was still a constant companion, a shadow, sometimes a demon that could attack out of the blue. All it took was the fragrance of strawberries or for someone to speak Hungarian or just the sound of familiar music (I particularly had to beware of Brahms and Suzanne Vega). Often I had no idea what had lured the demon back. Summer months were the hardest, and strangely enough, autumn was my best time. But New Year’s Eve was ghastly. Someone would say, “just two hours till midnight,” and I would think: I’ve got two hours left to find Julia. And when it came down to counting minutes and finally seconds, I wanted to scream. What was I doing here in the middle of a meaningless life among strangers? Every year I was convinced that this would be my last New Year’s Eve, I wouldn’t be able to endure another. It took days, sometimes weeks, for me to calm down again. One year, it must have been in the midnineties, I lay wide awake on my back, beside Ute. Suddenly she asked me whether I still thought of Julia often. I barely had time to hide my face in my hands before I broke into sobs. It’s a mystery to me how Ute put up with my theatrics.

Another woman? And how was that supposed to happen? It was difficult, impossible actually, for me to fall in love in B. An affair with one of the students who worked for us was not what I was after — which probably explains why there were never any sparks. And otherwise? I could hardly take out lonely hearts ads, although I constantly read them, looking for one that would be a match with Julia.

But then I did in fact hear about her.

Ute believed that when it came to her circle of friends I got along best with Claudia, whom she had known since kindergarten and grade school in Döbeln. Claudia worked as a bookkeeper for a theater in Berlin — it’s not important which — and hung around, as Ute put it, with theater types. Ute must have said something to her about Julia. And so during a visit in Berlin in February 1997, I learned from Claudia that Julia had a child, a daughter. That upset me less than the fact that someone had spoken the name Julia in my presence and had called her (with a certain undertone — with Claudia there are almost always undertones) “your great love.”

Until the call in October 1999 that I mentioned previously, it was never clear to me from the few things that Claudia told me about her if Julia was a kind of secret between Claudia and me or if Claudia likewise kept Ute up to date. What I’m trying to say is that hearing Claudia speak Julia’s name had not been totally unexpected. But all the same it was like being awakened out of a profound stupor. “And your Julia too!”

So there I sat in my office chair, my right foot on the handle of the desk drawer, the tip of my shoe wedged in under the desktop, listening to Claudia chatter away while I gazed through the open Venetian blind out into the shop. Even when the place is bustling, at the beginning of the winter semester, for instance, our employees are still identifiable by their white T-shirts. To me the “Copy 2000” written across the breasts of female students always looked just a bit obscene. But it had been Ute’s idea, and no one ever complained. The red lettering has faded on the shirts of those who have been with us for a while, but glows like a signal on new hires. I counted four of our T-shirts, recounted, but couldn’t figure out who was missing. I tried to calm myself down. When Claudia mentioned Julia a second time, I couldn’t take it any longer. “Julia?” I asked, reaching for the file of designs for our new logo, with the 2000 dropped from our name.

“Well finally!” Claudia groaned. “I thought maybe your ear had fallen asleep.” This was followed by sentences that I could repeat here word for word, the last of which was: “She loves you more than ever, it’s that simple.”

And I — believed her.

Claudia asked how things were going with us. I told her about the problem of adjusting our software for the year 2000 and that we were considering changing the name of our company.

“Right,” Claudia said. “You might just as well call yourselves 1900”

At the end she asked, “So you guys will be coming?”

“We’ll be there,” I said and felt myself reentering the present. All of a sudden there was a stab of pain in my toes, and I removed my foot from the desk drawer handle. I sat up straight and put the receiver back on its hook. I was glad — yes, I was proud — to have held out all those years, and limped out into the shop.

That evening I arrived home at almost the same time as Ute. She was in high spirits because just before closing an order had come in from the school district, and right afterward there was a call from the municipal office in Gotha, which wasn’t even in our market area — meaning we had prospects of some substantial extra business.

I mentioned Claudia’s invitation, and Ute said, “Why’s she bothering you? She’s got my number.”

“Do you want to go?” Ute asked later.

“We’re probably not going to come up with any better plan,” I said. Ute had in fact tried to arrange something special, but Vienna was already fully booked, so was Prague.

“Then I’ll follow through on it,” Ute said, picking up the phone and wandering into the living room with a half-peeled orange.

My mood over the next two and a half months could best be rendered as one of “Hail and Farewell.” Unfortunately I can remember only the title of Goethe’s poem and our German teacher’s enthusiasm for it, but if called upon to describe how I felt, that was it exactly: hail and farewell.

I had just a little under a hundred thousand marks in my bank account, was driving a Mercedes SL that was almost paid for, and wasn’t married.

I cleaned out my desk, dealt with the backed-up mail, worked through all outstanding accounts, including a few I turned over to a collection agency, and shredded piles of paper. Among letters from my father I found some contract bids that I had completely forgotten about.

I turned over all the odds and ends from the autumn of ’89 to the city historical museum and tossed the receipt they gave me into a trash basket.

Two mornings I drove home to put things in order there too. Along with my passport and insurance policies I found a little red book published by Heyne: HOW TO SATISFY A WOMAN EVERY TIME … and have her beg for more! “It Really Works!” On the back was a picture of Naura Hayden — beautiful eyes, perfect teeth. “Vitamin C is ascorbic acid, and Nobel Prize winner Linus Pauling recommended a minimum daily dose of 3,000 mg. I take at least 15,000 mg per day, and have for many years,” Naura Hayden writes on page 74. Ute would probably have been puzzled that I owned such a book, but in fact it had nothing whatever to do with her.

I shoved documents into transparent files, packed it all into a Lidl shopping bag, and headed for the door. Like someone who dared not leave any traces, I looked all around. What in this apartment belonged to me, actually? There was nothing I hung my heart on, nothing I’d miss, with the exception of a handmade four-tiered Christmas pyramid from the town of Seiffen. It had been a present on my tenth birthday.

Ever since deciding on the Berlin option, as Ute called it, she had been eating nothing but veggies and fruit for supper — because Claudia had invited her to come along for a swim and the sauna. I reduced my supper to small sandwiches, gave up pastries, and when I ate out ordered steamed or boiled dishes with lots of rice. If the meal was fried herring, I removed the skin. Ute even went to a fitness studio for courses like “Fat Burners” and “Power Yoga” and took an adult education seminar in makeup — and ended up being talked into spending oodles of money for a mountain of cosmetics.

We gave away two big bags of pants, jackets, skirts, and sweaters to charity, and I finally tossed out all the old socks and underwear I had been in the habit of saving for polishing shoes. The weather was as fickle as in April. There was an early snow and a couple of gusty storms, and then it was back to springlike weather.

Those were crazy weeks. And meanwhile business was hopping as never before. It felt like life were casting off its waste products, losing fat, and building muscle instead.

The whole time Ute talked about Claudia and her new boyfriend Marco. Marco was in the film business and got along well with Dennis, Claudia’s son. Ute likewise knew that Claudia couldn’t sleep without earplugs, that she stuck big clumps of Ohropax in her ears every evening. And that Marco was a very jealous type but a good lover, and that he had a short, fat cock.

I asked Ute whether she gave out information of that sort about me. “No,” she said, but it sounded pretty flimsy. And not until I asked her a second time did she erupt with: “What do you take me for?”

Claudia thought of Marco as robust. Ute said she hoped I would never get that fat. Marco must have been making very good money at the time, otherwise they couldn’t have afforded their two-story penthouse plus terrace with a view across to Friedrichshain Park.

On TV they were constantly talking about the countdown. And at one point I almost gave myself away. Someone mentioned a cute numerical landmark, it was 666, I think. “Just 666 hours left here,” I said. But Ute didn’t pick up on it.

It wasn’t until Christmas that it dawned on me what sort of betrayal Claudia was planning. Or was she just toying with me? You’re sure to object that someone like me shouldn’t be pointing fingers. But I never made any false promises to Ute. She knew that she was not my great love. Whenever she tried to force me to express myself more clearly — sometimes it was about marriage, sometimes about another child — I would answer no every time.

Except for Julia there was nothing about Claudia that might have interested me. Yes, I found it difficult to put up with Claudia, who I assumed was anorexic. Not a word passed her lips that wasn’t too loud or accompanied by a gesture that would somehow set her black shoulder-length hair swaying. Her gestures seemed in fact to demand words be put to them. Above all, when she laughed you sensed something vulgar about her — not to mention the way she ran through men.

“That’s just how she is,” Ute said, adding how she actually admired Claudia even though that wouldn’t be a life for her.

“‘With candles five, a flame we’ve kept, now Father Christmas has overslept,’” Claudia recited the last time she called. And Christmas that year did in fact seem like a fifth Advent Sunday. I gave Ute a suitcase, and had bought one for myself as well. Our contribution to the festivities was to be the champagne, and I’d had the Aldi market reserve four cases for me.

On the morning of December 30 we both got on the scales. I had lost eleven pounds, and Ute a little under nine. It wasn’t even light yet when we drove off. That made my farewell easier.

No, I hadn’t given a thought to where and how I would find another job, and of course I realized what I was giving up. But that’s exactly what it was supposed to be: a sacrifice! A huge sacrifice, do you understand? I wanted to just say yes to Julia, no matter what might happen.

On the way we ate slices of apple and bell pepper, and only just before Berlin did we stop for a lavish breakfast at a Mövenpick. We drove up the Avus autobahn, then exited at Kaiserdamm and headed eastward — the best route to make you feel like you’ve arrived in Berlin.

Claudia welcomed us in a loud yellow sleeveless dress — as if it were the height of summer. After the greetings she shot me a look that seemed to say: We’re partners in crime. When she bent down to pull on her boots I saw that evidently the dress was the only thing touching her skin. Marco helped me load the Aldi champagne onto the elevator and stow it upstairs in an empty man-size refrigerator.

The rear courtyard apartment on Käthe-Niederkirchner Strasse where we were to spend the night was not even two hundred meters away. There was a break in the facades opposite, so that from the living room you could see across the vacant lot, where a bulldozer was at work, to Hufeland Strasse and a flower shop, above which Claudia and Dennis had once lived. While Claudia — after first sort of shaking off her coat rather than slipping out of it — strode from room to room turning up the radiators, I watched as the bulldozer below our window suddenly lowered its jaws and set to work.

The apartment belonged to one of Marco’s friends, who had fled to the Maldives. “Spotless,” Ute said when Claudia showed her the kitchen and bath. The bedclothes — which I first thought were silk — turned the bedroom into an Oriental chamber.

Fritz had stayed behind with Dennis. Ute and Claudia wanted to head off right away for a spa near Zoo Station. I escorted them to the bus stop in front of a movie house, where, when Ute stopped to look at posters, Claudia took advantage of the opportunity to whisper to me: “Take a little walk in the park. You just might hit it lucky.”

Then the bus pulled up, and Ute called out as if by way of farewell: “Those posters don’t tell you one damn thing!”

Instead of crossing to the park I walked back up the street we’d just come down, and stopped at a drugstore where an effusively friendly man talked me into a powder for my sweaty feet, a product that dated back to GDR days. On the next corner was a Vietnamese grocery, where I bought coffee, milk, bananas, and rolls, and in the Italian delicatessen next door I found some pastry, red wine, and mortadella. Finally I purchased some roses that were so sinfully expensive that they earned me the admiration of the salesclerk. While she was wrapping up the bouquet, I watched through the store window as the bulldozer piled its small mountain higher still. As I walked along the street with my shopping bags and roses, I experienced a kind of happiness when it struck me that I might be taken for a local — just as if Julia were waiting for me in the apartment on Käthe-Niederkirchner Strasse.

No sooner was I in the apartment than I ran back downstairs. A minute later and I was in Friedrichshain Park. It looked deserted, the café was closed. A few dogs were being walked, a jogger passed by now and then. I walked up and down along the path beside the pond, then climbed the somewhat higher hill on the right, from where I could see Karl Marx Allee and Strausberger Platz, switched to the lower hill, which was hardly higher than the illumined row of windows in Marco’s penthouse across the street. I suddenly realized I admired Marco and Claudia, felt a need to tell them that they were right to live such an extravagant life, that a person has to take risks. In that moment I wanted nothing so much as to drive a car with Berlin plates.

I descended the long flight of steps and walked back to our apartment, ate all the mortadella, and watched for a long while as the bulldozer built its own ramp to dig its way deeper, piece by piece.

That evening we invited Claudia and Marco to join us at a large Italian restaurant on a corner exactly halfway between our two apartments. The owner, Marco whispered, had had to flee Italy — he had once been a lefty activist. It annoyed me that Ute nodded as if she knew all about it. Claudia had pulled on a heavy sweater over her yellow dress and now divvied up the baguette of white bread with her long fingers. Without looking up, she gave her order, then started talking to us again, holding the menu over her shoulder until the waiter took it from her. We ate fish and drank carafe after carafe of wine. The owner strolled from table to table, kissed both of Claudia’s hands, and, laying an arm around Marco’s shoulder, smiled a frozen smile, as if posing for a photograph.

Ute suffered the whole evening from an almost pathological need to show her approval, used words like the “industry” and “normals,” and wanted to know where Marco got his inspiration from and if he didn’t need a creative pause now and then. Marco’s favorite word was “leverage.” Ufa had “leveraged” the series, he couldn’t “leverage” the movie all by himself, they’d all have to “leverage” together. The restaurant, our apartment, the park were “class locations” and only yesterday he had “green-lighted” another contract or — as he explained to me with a little bow to emphasize how antiquated the phrases had become — given it his okay, had cleared the way for the film. Marco of course knew all about the bulldozer. “Construction begins in 1999, for credit purposes.”

It was far too late when we picked up Fritz. Ute wanted to know what was the matter with me. I said her devotional pose, her stupid questions, had got on my nerves. Lying stretched out in bed, I was certain this would be our last night together.

When I got up to go to the toilet — several cherry bombs in the stairwell had wrenched me from a deep sleep — I could see the bulldozer, brightly illuminated as if onstage, its jaws raised and open wide. Although it was close to one o’clock, maybe a dozen people were scrambling around it, with several vehicles in the street flashing their blue lights.

It’s with considerable reluctance that I report what happened next. I was watching the goings-on with the bulldozer and, recalling Marco’s explanation, presumed it was some sort of police raid, when I noticed something moving in the only window with lights still on, kitty-corner across the street — a head was bobbing up and down in a regular motion. I didn’t want to believe it, but I knew right away what was going on. I fetched my glasses from our bedroom, where Ute was snoring lightly and the odor of fiber carpeting hung in the air. All I could see now was the man, half lying, half propped on an elbow, not that unlike the position of Michelangelo’s Adam. In the window adjacent, the silhouette of a naked woman appeared, but then took a few steps and vanished from my view. The man followed her, they met in the middle of the room, they embraced. Then they walked side by side toward the hallway, so that against the backlighting I could now see what slender legs — just in general what a beautiful body — the woman had. I missed the moment when they returned to the lit room, because I decided to likewise make my move to be closer to them. My hand was already on the door handle when I remembered that Fritz was asleep in there.

Back at my window, I saw the woman sitting on top of the man now; with one hand she brushed her long hair from her face and, leaning back slightly, braced herself with the other on his thigh. I followed her motion as he held her by the waist with both hands.

Her breasts appeared exaggeratedly large, like a Playboy caricature. I had to kneel down to see her face, which otherwise was hidden behind the window’s sash bars.

You may find it odd, but it was not until I realized this was not some video I was watching, that I felt a twinge of the heart. This was not a staged scene. What was happening over there was reality! Plus there was my own sense of humiliation at not being able to tear myself away from it.

After I had pleasured myself, I washed, returned to bed — but a few minutes later was standing at the window again. Now I could see her back, her long hair falling down it. She was bending back and forth, and those hands were still clasped around her waist. Deciding not to put myself through this, I began to inspect the video cassettes, row upon row. The titles, almost all in German, meant nothing to me. When I looked across again for the first time to check if they were still “doing it”—a phrase I couldn’t get out of my mind now — she was facing him again, but leaning forward with his hands on her breasts. I drank a glass of water in the kitchen and forced myself to go on sitting there at the table.

You can’t imagine how relieved I was when there was only one small light left on across the way. Although I couldn’t make anything out, I went on staring at the light until it was finally turned off.

The to-do around the bulldozer had quieted down, although the number of people had not noticeably diminished. Strangely drained of energy, I lay down in bed. But sleep was out of the question.

The whole circus began a little before seven — a half hour earlier and I would have welcomed it — just as I was finally dozing off. The doorbell rang several times, then came a knock at our apartment door and somebody shouting. Marco had said not to pay any attention to the telephone, but if the doorbell rang it might be a package.

When Ute returned to the bedroom, she asked me to please come with her — and it sounded as if she had found traces of my nocturnal adventures.

We were to vacate the place by 8:30—the bulldozer had uncovered a bomb in the courtyard, a five-hundred-pounder, as we would soon learn. Although I was hardly of a mind to get up, this news filled me with a childlike glee. While I drank my coffee, Fritz and I tried to persuade Ute to stay in the apartment, the worst that could happen here would be a couple of broken windowpanes. “You guys talk big,” she said, but we had trouble persuading her not to pack our bags.

One window was tipped open in the apartment from the night before. Either those two were already on their way or weren’t about to leave their bed. Out on the street lots of people were milling around with suitcases and blankets, as if a film about refugees was being shot. A radio reporter asked Ute how she’d be celebrating New Year’s Eve. A woman emerged from the building directly across the street with a tray, a thermos, and cups and served coffee to the reporter and two firefighters. In early May, she said, this street was a sea of pink blossoms. We’d have to come back in May sometime.

The front door to Marco’s building was ajar. We took the elevator up, rang the bell, and I thought I could hear footsteps in the apartment.

The neighbor’s door opened. An older man with a bag of garbage in each hand stepped out. Could he be of any help? Ute told him about the bomb, and that we were here much too early. At first I didn’t even notice the woman who appeared behind him in the dark entryway. She was standing at the threshold now. While her husband repeated Ute’s story, she observed us from deep-set eyes. Her mouth and nose were almost abnormally delicate, a good match for the gesture with which she now invited us in. No need to be bashful, the man said, and then asked if we lived in B. proper — he’d seen our license plates. He had studied in B. for a year, shortly after the war. They and their apartment gave off the odor of underclothes that have lain in the drawer too long, of a cleanliness that does without deodorant or perfume.

The man winced at the sound of creaking floorboards behind Marco’s door, but then went thumping down the stairs with the élan of a good skier plunging down a steep slope. His wife had already vanished into the darkness of their entryway as the locks on Marco’s door began clicking.

Marco looked dreadful, bloated, with reddened eyes and a grubby bathrobe gaping enough to reveal a strip of belly. He asked us in. We apologized and, under the pretext of fetching breakfast rolls, set out again at once. A stroll in the park might have been fairly pleasant had the place not seemed so bleak somehow. Ute and Fritz trotted reluctantly behind me up the big hill. We were the only strollers among the joggers and dog walkers. Ute remarked that our encounter with Claudia and Marco’s neighbors had made her realize that there were hardly any older people in the neighborhood.

We bought our rolls at the Vietnamese grocery. I was instinctively keeping an eye out for the woman from last night. I wanted to see her up close and hear her voice.

Over breakfast Marco said there were considerably more bombs in the sand around here than hagstones on a beach. He explained for us the system behind the bombing of Berlin. It was probably purely accidental that early on bombs landed in neighborhoods that had been the first to declare themselves “free of Jews.” Unfortunately accidental, he added. Here in Prenzlauerberg there had been hardly any bombing. I knew nothing about all that, had never heard his theory either, and hoped that Ute wouldn’t start in again with the story about her grandparents and Dresden.

Claudia tried hard to keep Fritz entertained while he waited for Dennis to finally get up. Ute said that for some reason she found the bomb depressing, which was followed by much too long a silence around the breakfast table.

I sensed that we were both just in the way at this point, and even assumed I knew what Claudia would most likely call us—“wet blankets.”

Marco asked about my work. I told him about our discounts and the kinds of binders we provided and how important service contracts were for us, which was another way of adding to our coffers. “That’s always a good thing,” Marco said. Claudia said that if our shop was in Berlin we’d definitely be making a small fortune. “Marco always has so much paper to push, right?” Marco nodded with a full mouth. Then Claudia told about how upscale things had become at Ufa, and that in the passageways linking sets there was enough free fruit and coffee to keep a modest eater like herself well nourished. She followed this with: “They fight tooth and nail to get Marco onboard.”

I asked who all they had invited. Claudia managed to insert Julia’s name so offhandedly among the others that I felt no need to react.

Ute said we had nothing planned and could lend a hand anytime today. There was the constant racket of fireworks outside, and at one point a boom so loud that Ute exclaimed: “The bomb!”

By the time we took off without Fritz around one o’clock, the whole bomb hoopla was over. No one barred us from returning to our apartment. I felt privileged to have a key to a Berlin apartment.

“We’re keeping the roses,” Ute said, put on some music, and wriggled out of her sweater and pants. She moved through these strange rooms with a sense of belonging that suddenly made me feel like her guest, as if in fact I were visiting a strange woman. Did I like her new bra, her new lingerie, Ute asked — it was really very comfortable.

She left the bathroom door open. I followed her. She smiled at me in the mirror and closed her eyes at the first touch. As I’ve said, when it comes to sex we were made for each other.

Ute held on to the windowsill, so that looking over her head I could see into the apartment from last night and, just by shifting a little to the left, the construction site. The bulldozer was now at the edge of the lot. The red-and-white barrier ribbon ran, oddly enough, right through the cab.

Later as we lay under the Oriental blanket, Ute kept running her fingers through my hair. I had already seen sleep’s first images when she said, “I’ve slept with Claudia.”

“You and Claudia have …”

“Yes,” Ute said. “Once and never again.” I could feel her warm breath on my neck, the tip of her nose was cold.

“When?” I asked.

“Before you came along.”

I sat up in bed.

“The really stupid part,” she said, “is that I never told you before.”

For a moment I hoped that her disclosure might change things between us. I wondered if I ought to take advantage of the opportunity, to jump up and shout: “Why did you do that? It’s over!”

“And why,” I asked, “are you confessing now?”

“Let’s leave it behind in this century. It’s over and done with, we won’t mention it ever again, okay?”

I’d have loved to ask lots of questions — how it came about, what Claudia had done, what her touch had felt like and so on.

I asked her whether Claudia really had nipples as big as I thought I’d seen yesterday in that low-cut dress.

“All you had to do was join us in the sauna,” Ute said. That settled that, as far as she was concerned.

We slept way too long, and it wasn’t until almost eight o’clock that we set out again. At first I thought the haze was smoke from fireworks, but it was genuine fog — you could barely see anything of Friedrichshain Park — weighing down on the city with a real sense of doomsday.

Claudia looked as if she had had no time to change. She was wearing a thin, very delicately knitted, almost fuzzy sweater that was not exactly opaque, plus an everyday knee-length skirt. In contrast Ute had put her hair up and looked downright sophisticated in her long skirt and plunging neckline. She’d find another man quick enough.

When she held a cup of coffee under my nose, I realized that Claudia had been keeping an eye on me the whole time. “So you’ll have stopped yawning by the time Julia arrives,” she whispered.

Everybody was waiting for the arrival of an actor whose name meant nothing to me — but I’d recognize him, Marco remarked, the moment I saw him, from television.

Claudia kept introducing me as the fellow who had been driven out of his apartment by a bomb that morning. In response to which I then had to tell the story in detail, and Marco, dressed in a ruffled white shirt and black suit, would then usually repeat his comparison with hagstones on the beach. Claudia gave a loud laugh, kissed Marco, and said, there was a whole “treatment” in that one image.

Was it the coffee or the alcohol or simply the fact that at any moment Julia would be standing at the apartment door with its three locks — at any rate, my palms were sweatier than they had been in ages.

I washed my face and hands, and as I was looking for a guest towel I heard the doorbell. I saw myself smiling in the mirror and stepped out into the hallway. There in front of me was the woman from last night. No doubt of it. Her hair was now in a braid that hung down to her breast on one side.

My greeting was perhaps a little too cheery. “Do we know each other?” she asked.

“Frank Reichert,” Claudia said, “let me introduce Sabine, my dearest colleague, and her husband, Matthias.” I almost burst into laughter. Handsome as her husband was with his shaved head, he was not the fellow from last night. Sabine actually blushed when I asked if they didn’t live in this neighborhood too. “No, in Hellersdorf.” It was a pleasant voice. Her neck sported a red spot just below her right ear, only half hidden by her turtleneck sweater.

“Be careful where your eyes wander,” Claudia hissed, and followed the two into the living room. I found a spot to stand where, in the course of the choreography of greetings, Sabine would have to pass by me again. Ute had been leaning in a bay window the whole time, talking with Renate, a matronly friend of Claudia’s whom we had met previously.

When Sabine was right in front of me again, I would have loved to whisper some double entendre in her ear. I didn’t recognize myself now. I was even itching to pick a fight with her husband, although he was clearly bigger and in better shape than I.

“Can it be,” I heard myself saying, “that I saw you around here yesterday?”

“Ah, so that’s why you’re acting this way!” I could have sworn that Sabine sounded disappointed. “We were in the Ore Mountains yesterday,” she said softly. “And where was it that you saw me?”

At that same moment Claudia thrust her arm under mine — sorry, but she had to kidnap me. Once in the hallway she closed the door behind us, and pointed in the direction of the kitchen.

“There,” she said and, crossing her arms, waited for me to follow instructions.

I was very calm as I walked toward the kitchen door and pushed it open.

“There you are,” Julia said with a smile, and got to her feet.

I had never pictured to myself how those ten years might have changed her, but I was truly startled. Nothing, nothing had changed at all. There before me stood the very same Julia who had deserted me ten years before.

We hugged, at first tentatively, then more tightly. She pressed against me, I could sense her flushed body.

“Did you run all the way here?” I asked.

“Well, I did hurry,” Julia said. We kissed, she wove her arms around my neck. “Here, of all places,” she whispered.

“Better here than not all,” I said. Everything was exactly the way I had dreamed it for ten long years.

I no longer know how we managed to sit down at the table. I held her hands in mine, and Julia explained that she had arrived so late because she had had to take her daughter, Alina, to Mecklenburg.

“And so what are you up to?” she asked, then laughed and gazed off to one side as if embarrassed by her own question.

“Run a copy service,” I said. “And you?”

“Another kind of copy service, but it doesn’t pay as well.”

Whenever our eyes met, we had to smile. I kissed her hands.

The curious thing was that although I had thought of Julia every day, I had never pictured the shape of her fingertips, the slightly reddened skin at the base of her nails, or the tiny scar on her left thumb.

“You can’t go on kissing and cuddling here like this!” Claudia called from the doorway. “So come on, let’s go. People are going to notice.”

We obediently stood up, I followed Julia and was almost over the threshold when Claudia’s arm blocked my path. “Always keep a proper distance,” she said, “and your head on your shoulders.”

“I need to be excused,” I said like a third-grader, pointing in the direction of the bathroom.

“Oh, really?” Claudia didn’t budge. She looked at the floor. When she raised her head again I expected to be chastised or given some new instructions. Claudia, however, let her arm fall.

“Thanks,” I said and moved past her.

Once in the bathroom I held my hands under lukewarm water and gazed in the mirror. There was a knock, and Claudia slipped through the door. She locked it, raised her skirt, and sat down on the toilet. I was just about to ask which was the guest towel as her stream hit the water.

“Everything okay?” she asked, plucking paper from the roll, dabbing herself dry, and letting her skirt fall as she stood up.

“Everything’s fine,” I said, and dried my hands on a long white towel.

At first I thought Claudia wanted to leave, and stepped aside. But now she laid her arms around my neck.

“Thank you,” I said. I was truly grateful to Claudia, and so I hugged her too — and could feel how her back, her shoulders, her whole body trembled under my touch. I felt like a bear. I’ve never embraced a woman that delicate. Did she nestle against me, or did I pull her closer? I felt her lips at my neck, I could hear her breathing, I heard my name. In my numbed state I heard sounds so intimate, so plaintive and lustful, that I lost control — or maybe I should say my bearings. My hands hitched her skirt up, groped at her butt, I thrust them between her legs. We kissed. Claudia was so light, so incredibly light.

Before I could even get my trouser button open, it had happened — Claudia bit into my shoulder, grabbed my hand, went rigid. It may sound a little eerie, but I could swear she stopped breathing. I didn’t dare make the slightest motion until Claudia awoke again and, as if wary of some injury, pushed my hand down and stepped back.

“Your turn will come later,” Claudia whispered, kissed me on the mouth, tugged at her sweater, adjusted her skirt, cast a glance with raised eyebrows at her reflection in the mirror, and unlocked the door.

I sat down on the toilet or, better, sank onto the lid and stared at the diamond pattern in the tiles at my feet. Claudia’s intrusion — or attack — hadn’t lasted five minutes. I could still feel her body against my chest, fuzz balls from her sweater were stuck to my left hand. I could probably have gone on sitting there like that if a man hadn’t burst in, but then beat such a hasty retreat that all I saw of him was a gray suit and a burgundy tie.

I washed my hands and face again, inspected the damp spot Claudia’s lips had left on my jacket, and then also discovered the little pile of folded towels in a wall inset and the basket for used ones below it. Determined to step firmly with head held high, I left the bathroom.

Ute was still carrying on a conversation with Renate. Claudia was sitting on the couch next to Julia and waved me over. “She looks totally different now,” Julia said, while I examined a photograph of Alina. “Where,” I asked, “did she get that hair from?”

“Obviously not from me!” Julia plucked the picture from my fingers and stored it in her wallet. I had to be careful, I no longer had myself under control. Claudia said that now that train service had been discontinued, it took almost a whole day to get to the village where Julia’s mother lived. I asked Julia if she had a car and if her parents had gotten divorced.

“My father died a year and a half ago,” Julia said, and smiled at me.

When Marco came around pouring red wine, I held an orphaned glass out to him and then drank it down at once.

Suddenly there was Fritz. He wedged himself in between me and the arm of the sofa.

“He’s older than Alina,” Julia said.

“By two years at the most,” I said. Julia laid a hand on my knee but then immediately took it away again.

Marco sat down across from us and talked and talked. Since he told it several times, the only story I remember is the one about the whiskey: It was in the garden of the villa that belonged to the same actor we all were waiting for. They were lying in lounge chairs drinking whiskey. “The carton it came in was beside my chaise,” Marco explained. “When I tried to put the bottle back, it didn’t fit, it stuck up a little. I tried three or four times, so I forced it down in, hard.” Marco made a motion as if screwing something into the floor. “When I take the whiskey out again the next evening, there’s something sticking to the bottle.” Marco pretended he had a bottle in his hands. He felt the bottom of the bottle with his fingertips and cried in triumph, “A squashed toad!” Claudia, who had listened the whole time on the edge of her seat, burst into a snort of laughter.

People were still laughing as a man in a gray suit sat down on the coffee table, raised his glass, and called out to Marco: “Here’s to your not being let go!” I took it for a joke, but Marco turned to stone and Claudia set her glass down. This did not prevent the tall guy from finishing off his wine in several quick swallows. His shirt collar stuck out from under his jacket, which drew your eyes to his pointy, bobbing Adam’s apple. Then, as if making a crucial move in a game of chess, he put his glass down among ours. With a smack of his lips he stood up and left the room.

Claudia’s friend Sabine, who probably wasn’t the woman from the night before after all, said she hadn’t been able to arrange for a taxi before three o’clock. She said that on a night like this money was no issue, but that she herself wouldn’t work tonight, not for all the world, because nothing could compare to a change of millennia. Julia asked what she would be paying the cabbie tonight, twice or three times the usual?

Somehow everything seemed to go off track. Later on Julia started making one weird remark after the other. It used to be, she declared, that we at least got something of an education in comparison with schools nowadays. At one point she mentioned her father, too, and it sounded as if financial difficulties had put him in his grave. Marco said that she should be glad that she could finally live in freedom, and Claudia’s colleague Sabine added that she wouldn’t give up her freedom for anything now.

“Which freedom do you mean?” Julia asked, which brought Marco to his feet. Shaking his head, he made for the buffet.

It wasn’t till Ute was standing in front of me that I realized Fritz had fallen asleep under my arm. Ute extended a hand to Julia. Since this required a slight bend of the knees, it looked as if she were curtsying to greet her. Claudia introduced her two good friends to each other.

There wasn’t time now to take Fritz back to our place. So I left him on the couch and helped Marco open the champagne. One after another the guests found their way up the narrow spiral staircase to the penthouse, where the door to the terrace stood open.

At midnight I toasted with Ute, I toasted with Julia. I toasted with Claudia, I toasted with last night’s doppelgänger and her husband, I even wished the tall guy in the gray suit a “Happy New Year!” Ute and I went back downstairs to wake up Fritz so he could watch the fireworks, or at least what could be seen of them in the haze.

After that I had to assist Marco and Dennis. Although we kept firing off several rockets at once, it soon got too cold or too boring for our audience out on the terrace. I wanted to go downstairs as well, where people were dancing now. Ute took Fritz back to our place.

Julia was dancing alone. Again and again our eyes met. When she left the room — Julia still had that same unique walk she’d always had — I took it as an invitation. She was waiting just outside the kitchen for me. I took her by the hand and opened a door at the end of the hallway — the master bedroom. It was cold and smelled, to put it politely, unaired. We embraced, we kissed, I stroked the back of her neck.

My life was suddenly like an equation that’s easily solved. What I was doing now seemed to be automatically derived from what I had always dreamed, as if I no longer had any need of my will, or my courage. I was caught up in the feeling of having come to the end, having achieved finality — and all was well.

“I didn’t know,” Julia whispered, “that you were married.”

“I’m not married,” I said and noticed the narrow band of light coming from the door and falling across the unmade bed and nightstand with two lumps of Ohropax on it.

“It’s the same thing, you live together.”

We held each other tight, two actors at a rehearsal, waiting for the director’s instructions. I even attempted to slide my hand inside Julia’s blouse, but quickly gave up.

“I’m leaving now,” Julia said. We kissed one more time and returned to the living room together.

It took a while for Julia to say her good-byes. Claudia saw her to the door.

When after a good while Ute had not yet returned, I was pretty sure she had decided to stay with Fritz.

Claudia asked me to dance. It didn’t take me long to get into the swing of things.

I couldn’t remember the last time I had danced.

Sabine, Claudia’s favorite colleague, didn’t budge from my side. Surprisingly, she danced in a lumbering sort of way, just kept repeating the same moves, no matter what the music. Claudia on the other hand was a wonderful dancer, she must have taken lessons. Marco was fairly drunk. He bad-mouthed the actor who had never showed, and soon vanished into the bedroom.

Once she started to dance Claudia evidently no longer saw herself as a hostess. She stopped seeing people to the door and helping them find their coats.

Each time a guest left, we nodded to each other as if counting the ones that remained.

By about four thirty the tall guy with the gray suit and pointy Adam’s apple was the only one left. He had moved in close to us as we danced, swinging his burgundy tie above his head like a lasso. Now he was watching us from an armchair — the tie was dangling from his pocket. It wasn’t hard to see what Claudia and I had on our minds.

Claudia then said the party was over, and turned off the music. I helped her gather up glasses. The tall man was holding his empty glass with both hands and grinning to himself. Suddenly he said, “I still get a peek.” We could barely make it out, he was slurring so heavily.

“You’ve had your peeks,” Claudia said.

He checked her over from head to toe, rocking his head and thrusting out his lower lip in approval.

“Clear out!” she said.

“Still wanna peek,” he muttered.

We laid into him — which is to say, by now Claudia was so angry that I hardly got a word in edgewise.

“I wanna fuck,” he blurted out. “And it’s you I wanna—”

The tip of Claudia’s shoe met his shin. He fell silent, bent forward, rubbed his leg, raised his head, and grinned. “Ouch, ouch,” he said. “Bad girl.”

Claudia gave another kick, but as if expecting it, he grabbed her foot. Claudia stumbled, he took hold of her other ankle, jumped up, and yanked her upside down as if trying to hang her by her feet.

I’ll never forget the look of that mug, the ogling, the grin. It was the most disgusting thing I’ve ever seen.

I punched him in the face, then landed one to his belly — all of it stuff I’ve only seen in the movies. We fell onto the sofa, Claudia’s legs between us. He wouldn’t let go of her. We slid to the floor. Was it panic, was it rage — I didn’t know how to go at his neck and head. I couldn’t start strangling him or knocking his teeth out or smashing his nose. So that it was actually a relief when he finally let go of Claudia’s ankles and we began to wrestle. Normally, if he hadn’t be so sloshed, I would have been no match for him. Claudia jumped around behind us and kicked him in the ribs, again and again, and with each kick he bellowed like an ox. Then Marco showed up.

The three of us expedited the tall guy out, stuffed him into the elevator, tossing his coat in with him, and pressed the button for the ground floor. Marco never even struck him, all he had to do was just haul back with his massive balled fist. Curses boomed from the descending elevator car. The neighbor’s door closed with a click.

Marco thanked me repeatedly. He looked more bloated than he had early that morning. He kept reaching under his pajama top to scratch himself.

We each drank half a glass of whiskey, and Marco did his routine again of how he had pressed the bottle into its carton.

Then the three of us waited for the elevator. Claudia gave me a good-bye peck on the cheek. Marco rode down with me and never stopped scratching for even a moment. He walked outside and then waved me out, as if I were in a hiding place some distance away. “The coast is clear,” he said. “Take care!”

I didn’t have a key and had to ring the doorbell. The front door immediately buzzed open. Ute came down the stairs to meet me. She was wearing a dress I’d never seen before. She looked as if she were going out somewhere. Candles had been lit in the living room, on the table were my roses, and two champagne glasses.

“I love you,” I said, and at that moment it felt like a greeting, the greeting of a man returning home. Ute made a face. She probably thought I was drunk. She had tried, she said, to call Claudia, but we had all apparently been too busy. Fritz had thrown up a couple of times, which was why she had stayed with him.

It wasn’t until I picked up the champagne glass that I realized my right hand hurt. It was swollen. Out of solidarity, Ute toasted with her left hand as well. She found some ice cubes in the fridge, and while I told her about the tall guy, she folded them into a dish towel that she wrapped around my hand.

In bed Ute said, “My hero.” She really meant it.

I was awakened by her caresses. She begged me not to be angry, she just ached for me so much. Still half asleep I raised my head. All the buildings outside the window were still there and still looked as they had in the previous millennium, a state of affairs I found all the more satisfactory because I believed I had played a certain role in that miracle.

“I love you,” I said, caressing her with the fingertips of my injured hand. Ute beamed like a child. By late afternoon we were on our way back to B.

In early March, Claudia made good on her promise in Erfurt, where she was attending a training course. We met in her hotel room during the noon break. Whenever an opportunity presents itself, we make good use of it. One time I traveled all the way to Warnemünde, only to turn around an hour later and race back home. Why do I do it? Why not? It’s beautiful, and it has nothing to do with Ute. It’s a game. I don’t mean the role-play scenes that Claudia comes up with, I mean the other life I live in those hours when I’m with her. Why should I forgo that happiness, the moments in which a moody, snippy, anorexic, and slightly vulgar female is transformed into a woman full of such intense tenderness and passion that I can imagine I’m the only man who knows her?

And at the same time, I’m happy with Ute. January 1, 2000, was the beginning of my love for her. We got married in 2001, and if things had turned out as we’d hoped, we would have had a second child.

Although Fritz will be turning sixteen in a few days, I don’t get the feeling he wants to move out or that he’s even rebelling. Just the opposite, we get along better and better with each passing year. And who knows, maybe someday he’ll take over the business. He already pitches in when we’re short on help, and doesn’t even mention money. My love for him and Ute hasn’t just reconciled me with my life, it has in fact made life as a whole precious and sweet for the first time.

But that indeed is my problem. I no longer have to worry about New Year’s Eve. I have other things to worry about.

In my euphoria of early 2000, I bought one hundred thousand D-marks’ worth of stocks. You know what happened then. All the same, every few days some flunky calls trying to soft-sell me into investing money with him. Normally I say: Sure, happy to, I’ve got three hundred euros in loose change that I can risk. But sometimes I simply lose it. I can show you the spot where my cell phone crashed against the wall like Luther’s inkwell up on the Wartburg.

I’d be quite content if I could recover just half of my old effortless flair, that knack for good luck that you need in business. Fear is not a good consultant. Given all my problems it’s a miracle I’ve been able to keep the same weight I had on that remarkable New Year’s Eve.

There’s nothing more to say. That’s my story. We’ve celebrated the New Year in Berlin three times now. Because Marco wanted it that way, Julia wasn’t invited back, or the tall troublemaker, of course. Ufa fired both him and Marco on the same day. Ever since Claudia separated from Marco and Dennis went off to study law at a Dutch university in Leiden — he’s interested in outer-space jurisprudence, or so he says — she visits us often. Because we’re the ones who throw the big parties now. I need them to get my mind on other things, to forget the business for at least a weekend. By now we really know how to have a good time. We don’t wait around for guests to leave, and we certainly don’t send anyone packing. But when it’s all over and it’s just us three, we dance into the dawn.

A Night at Boris’s

I need to preface my account of that evening, that night, by saying that Boris, who always spoke of himself as my oldest friend, is no longer alive. I don’t mention this here because Boris is dead. I would think of him no differently were he still alive, nor do I have to reproach myself for not having told him how much that evening, that night, means to me — quite apart from our confusion and embarrassment when we all finally went home.

It was truly the most extraordinary party I’ve ever been to, even if I did play only a marginal role.

“You can always get new stuff, except for an old friend,” Boris often said. And Susanne said: “Better no friends than one like him.” In her opinion Boris and I were friends purely out of habit.

What’s more, Boris never used to be my friend at all. He was one year ahead of me in school, and our morning route led us there from opposite directions. Our paths crossed during our army stint, we even spent a couple of leaves together — and immediately lost sight of each other upon discharge. It wasn’t until 1994, when Susanne and I moved in together in Berlin, that I saw Boris again. He was living on the fourth floor of the run-down building directly opposite ours on Esmarch Strasse. We had morning sun, his balcony — its balustrade, both summer and winter, topped by a tall, folded-up laundry rack — would catch a bit of evening sun from March or April on.

We ran into each other shortly after Christmas as we stood in line at the Extra supermarket waiting to use what turned out to be a defective bottle-return machine. Boris’s response was, or so I thought, a bit over-the-top, but he invited me to dinner — he’d cook. It was an odd situation when afterward we kept bumping into each other among the rows of shelving, not quite knowing what to say and mutely mustering each other’s shopping carts. At the time I thought that the bottle-return machine might well have contributed to his reaction too, since it smells just like our old neighborhood junk shop used to.

Once I had disclosed to Boris that we could see directly into his window, I sometimes saw him peering from his balcony over at us. If he spotted us, or thought he had — in winter the blinds move in the warm air coming from the radiators — he would start waving and calling across until I opened the window. Boris even claimed he and I had gone to the same kindergarten, Käthe Kollwitz kindergarten in Dresden-Klotzsche.

In flight before a plethora of construction sites and baseball caps, Susanne and I moved to the west side of the city in 1997. We made regular appearances, however, at Boris’s birthday parties. He would call months ahead and ask us to leave that special evening open for him.

There were, of course, a few things that didn’t speak in Boris’s favor. Injunctions such as: “Look me in the eye when we toast, or you’ll have seven years of bad sex!” or stupid clichés (“What I don’t know can’t hurt me”) earned Boris failing grades with Susanne. But above all it was her mistrust of a man who always has a new woman on his arm. I said that was a reason to be grateful to Boris, otherwise we’d never know that sort of life doesn’t make you any happier. But Susanne doesn’t see anything funny in things like that.

In the middle of May last year, three weeks before his forty-fourth birthday, Boris died of a stroke while swimming in Schwielow Lake. In the early nineties he had become a badminton instructor (“Shuttlecock coach,” Susanne called it) and “business was good.” He had leased an old glider hangar in Pankow, formerly East Berlin, which he later bought, and he knew all sorts of people. You seldom met the same person twice at his place. This was also true of his girlfriends, all of them terribly young and thin. He visited us only once or twice. The thing was, he loved to cook.

The last time we visited Boris was not for a birthday party but for what he called his “housewarming.”

Sacrificing two evenings for him inside of three months — it was now early September — was way too much for Susanne. Even though it was she who accepted the invitation on the phone — according to her, she’d had no choice. Boris had sounded so proud of his apartment that she couldn’t bring herself to do it.… The sole topic at his birthday party had been his new condo. He sent me an e-mail asking for my expert opinion of the girl who would be at his side — the judgments of an old friend counted a lot for him. He had often asked me for my “expert opinion,” so often that I read right past the word “girl,” instead of taking it as a warning or, at the least, an attempt to set the tone.

Boris had requested wine from the Saale-Unstrut region as a housewarming gift, and so Susanne and I carried one case each of Müller-Thurgau and Sylvaner up four flights of stairs. The elevator goes directly to the penthouse, which is now home to the people who used to own the entire building.

As Boris came down a few steps to greet us, his legs looked longer than usual and his silly pointy shoes much too big for the stairs.

Two other couples had already arrived. They were still holding packages and bouquets, plus wadded-up wrapping paper. Needless to say, we didn’t know them.

Boris told us to put the stuff on the coffee table and strode on ahead through the room, his heels rapping against the hardwood floor.

Except for a few new pieces of furniture — we made a point of admiring a long dining table and two large sand-colored “four-seaters”—the rooms were empty, in some even the baseboards were missing. Boris showed us what were to be his office and a guest room, and emphasized the southern exposure. The bath, kitchen, and bedroom — with boxes from the move still piled high — looked out onto the rear courtyard.

Boris railed at the ambulances that for no earthly reason, but with sirens howling just that much louder, raced up and down Greifswalder Strasse, but Marienburger Strasse was relatively quiet. Susanne had especially liked the big bathroom with its black-and-white tile floor. She said in her next life she’d play shuttlecock too — that way at least she’d make a go of things.

“It’s called badminton, bad-min-ton!” Boris barked and led the way back. Suddenly there she stood right before us, on the broad threshold between the entryway and the living room, her shoulders hunched forward, a stack of large white plates in her hands.

“This is Elvira,” Boris said, laying an arm around the girl’s shoulders. Elvira cast us all a fleeting glance, the corners of her mouth twitched. Susanne came to her assistance and carried almost the entire stack of plates to the table. Of all the women that Boris had introduced us to over the years, Elvira was the most diaphanous and the youngest.

As if trying to explain the dark rings under her eyes — he evidently noticed our uneasiness — he said that Elvira had spent the night on the train. Her mother had in fact recently moved south, to the Allgäu region. Elvira shook hands all around and vanished again into the kitchen without our having heard her utter one word.

As Boris filled our glasses, I was afraid Susanne would make some remark within his earshot about the age difference. But she just accepted her glass with a smile and nodded graciously when Boris excused himself to follow Elvira into the kitchen.

As always at the beginning of evenings at Boris’s we were now left to ourselves, which I found rather strenuous. With each successive year I had less and less interest in getting to know total strangers I would never see again.

The black-haired couple were Lore and Fred — she was a carpenter, he a structural design engineer with the plodding gait of a farmer. Pavel made his living giving piano lessons at the music school in Spandau and played keyboard with a band called the Wonderers, or something like that. The only reason Pavel played badminton was to please his redheaded girlfriend Ines, whom Boris had introduced to us as a colleague of mine — her latest plan being to actually write a book.

Lore and Fred had done work for Boris. Lore had built the black shelving for his CDs, five rows high and running the full length of the room. Fred had done the calculations for the extra steel beams needed to bear the weight of his library — Boris collected lexica of every sort, most of them foreign-language editions. In fact he read almost nothing but lexica and allegedly even took a few volumes with him on vacation.

Fred said he had never met such an interesting and multifaceted person as Boris. And Lore found his collection of CDs overwhelming — she hoped to borrow the whole lot over time. It made her very happy to think how at some point she could have much the same collection at her disposal — even though the CDs she burned wouldn’t look as fancy as Boris’s originals.

Shortly before dinner an ex-colleague of Boris’s named Charlotte — we’d met her at the birthday party in June — appeared. She was now teaching courses at Jopp, a women’s fitness studio. She was wearing the same lilac dress as before, and she’d also done her hair the same way — a ponytail that emphasized the high vault of her forehead.

Pavel, to whom Susanne took a liking — she later said his face was so striking it was as if he had pondered every note he ever played — busied himself inspecting CDs, but finished the task fairly quickly. He asked us how we knew Boris and Elvira. Instead of answering his question Susanne divulged that a few weeks earlier Boris had introduced us to a different woman — a remark to which no one had a follow-up. Although Charlotte, who was standing at the window smoking, did set her bracelets clinking softly and gave a telling nod. A moment later Boris entered and pretended not to notice our silence. Balancing a large tray at his belly, he followed Elvira, who filled plates with food and deposited one at each setting. Once they had circled the table, she started to head back with him to the kitchen. “Stay put,” Boris said somewhat angrily. “I can manage.”

I had sensed something wasn’t right between the two of them. But it wasn’t easy to watch Elvira wince before turning around with head held high and crying, “Dinner is served!” Most of the time I’m far too busy imagining what Susanne is thinking and how she will react. This time, however, I likewise found the situation beyond the pale. What was this child doing here with us? What was she doing at his side?

Oddly enough there were place cards — he got the idea, Boris claimed, after discovering Elvira’s calligraphic skills. Even Boris could barely conceal his own discomfort. For him, the perfect host, it was a major glitch to have opened only one bottle of red wine. As he set to work on the second, the cork broke, and he cursed much too loudly. Pavel took over the job, and Lore remarked that two months ago no one would have believed we’d ever be sitting here together like this so soon. In early July, Fred added, they had still been balancing their way on his beams. Pavel inserted a CD — tango music, but barely audible.

I sat directly across from Elvira, the perfect spot for observation, so to speak. She was wearing lipstick plus a little eye shadow. A narrow stripe of untanned skin was noticeable at the top of each arm.

In Boris’s presence you quickly get the sense that you’re witty and articulate, because he takes almost every remark as his cue for a story or at least replies with a burst of laughter that encourages you to continue.

That evening he evidently needed some encouragement himself, otherwise he would not have thanked Pavel so profusely for the music and uncorking the bottle of wine. Several times he asked, “Well, enjoying your food?” although everyone had already praised his cooking.

It was mainly Pavel’s questions that gradually helped Boris hit his stride. “There’s a story,” he suggested, “behind every square meter here.” By which, to be brief, he meant the hassles he’d had with drywallers, electricians, tile layers, painters. I had already been informed about a good half of these squabbles.

During the main course of fish — the supermarket kitty-corner had a fantastic fish counter — Boris described how over the last three weeks, because he had to be out of his old apartment, he had tried spurring the workers on with fifty-euro bills, but nothing helped. They hadn’t been paid by the general contractor, and so they simply stopped showing up for work. Boris, as I knew him, was a born storyteller — according to Susanne, a windbag. When he got to the part about the stolen window handles he’d had to replace, he gave a wide-sweeping gesture with one arm that signaled he was winding down again. He paid no more attention to Elvira than to Susanne and me, since we were not providing him any cues to pick up on.

Unlike Susanne I’m not uncomfortable in such surroundings. Susanne always claims I’m a harmony freak, and that what I see as arguments are really quite normal discussions. And I admit it — lately I like it better if people don’t argue. We, by which I mean our circle of friends, of acquaintances, used to strike a different tone with one another. Not that we were always of the same mind. Of course we each found various things to be good or important, but there was never anything fundamental, let alone personal, about it — even if someone believed in God or in the party and someone else didn’t. But that’s in the past, at the very latest since the Kosovo war or since Afghanistan. I thought there might be some improvement once everybody could see where the Iraq war has gotten us. Except for Susanne no one knows how I vote. And she just thinks I’ve got a screw loose. I don’t mean to say that friendships have been ruined over it, but they’re not like they once were. You first stop and think about what you will or won’t say.

Until we got up from the table and distributed ourselves over the four-seaters, nothing much happened worth telling about. I might say that over the course of the meal I got used to Elvira, yes, even found her pretty in some way, and that my eyes returned again and again to those narrow pale stripes at the top of her arms. Thus far I hadn’t heard her say a word, except for “Thanks a lot” and “More fish?”—phrases that betrayed her uncertainty as to whether to use formal or informal pronouns. Elvira had helped Boris serve and clear the table, something forbidden his guests. We were to amuse ourselves, which we managed only with difficulty without him.

Once we had transplanted ourselves to new seating arrangements, our general self-consciousness returned. It was as if we had taken seats to hear a lecture or see a movie. Pavel had selected the music — early Pink Floyd stuff that everybody knows, but that can leave you drowsy and down.

Susanne, however, had made a beeline to secure herself a spot near the window in the middle of the four-seater, but then slid over a little to let Pavel and Ines join her, and had sent me away again, so that when Elvira finally appeared with pretzel sticks, hazelnuts, and raisins, she had to end up beside her — unless Elvira went to the trouble of pushing another chair closer. And like a trap snapping shut, Susanne began to draw Elvira into conversation. I admire the way Susanne handles such situations, especially because she can make it all look quite coincidental.

At first Elvira sat up ramrod straight, holding a bundle of pretzel sticks in one hand and fixing her eyes on Susanne like a deaf-mute. Her face slowly took on life, and when she smiled she would close her light brown eyes as if reveling in a lovely dream. Soon they were facing each other, their knees almost touching.

It seemed to me that the rest of us were talking just so these two women could converse without interruption. Boris obliged us with another tile-laying story. He had come home about ten in the evening, only to discover what a mess had been made of the job, climbed into his car, and roused the tile layer from his bed, “to save what could be saved, while you could still pry the tiles loose!” And he flung his arm wide again. “It sounds crazy, but you’re better off doing it yourself.”

“Or don’t let them out of your sight for a minute,” Lore said. She and Fred smiled at each other — you might have taken them for brother and sister. Lore’s black hair was shorter than his and sprinkled with tiny icicles. His wiglike ponytail and his gap teeth gave him an antiquated look. (One of Susanne’s coworkers at her agency has actually hired Fred to play a role in a medieval pageant in Frankfurt on the Oder.)

As she spoke Susanne gazed straight ahead, balancing her wineglass on her knee with just two fingers. Elvira went on holding her bundle of stick pretzels clamped in her hand, without eating a one.

“It can happen,” Pavel said.

“Sure can,” Boris said. He wiped the sweat from his brow with his forearm, leaving the little hairs at his wrist pasted against the skin.

Once Elvira noticed that everyone else had fallen silent, she spoke even more softly. No one except Boris, who was sitting closest to her, knew why Susanne suddenly threw her head back and put her hand to her mouth.

“Can we laugh along with you?” Pavel asked.

“Of course, go ahead,” Boris said, and walked to the balcony door. He opened the Venetian blinds and pulled them up, but so out of whack that they drooped on the right like a fan. Elvira went on speaking softly.

“May I?” Pavel asked and held the bottle up. Elvira nodded. But she didn’t have a glass. There were several volunteers, including myself, who offered to fetch one from the kitchen. Lore won the contest. Pavel stood smiling in front of Elvira and Susanne.

“He wants to laugh along,” Boris said as he tried to adjust the blinds to horizontal. “You’ve finally managed it. Now everybody wants to lend an ear.”

“Oh leave her be!” Susanne exclaimed.

When Lore appeared with the wineglass, Pavel carefully lowered the neck of the bottle to the edge of the glass and poured. “I don’t drink red wine,” Elvira said, never budging. Pavel apologized, took the glass from her hand, and went back to the kitchen.

“So now you’ll all be treated to a fine story,” Boris said. “Something very special.”

“She did tell it so well,” Susanne said, as if that was the end of it.

Elvira seemed to be reconsidering her vanished glass. I was sure she would refuse to tell her story again on command. But then she said, “Well, okay,” laid her bundle of pretzel sticks on the table, and rubbed her hands together. “I’ll start over again.”

“Once more from the top,” Boris scoffed as he tipped the window open and then returned to his seat. “Everybody’s just wild to hear you tell it.”

“I thought,” Elvira said, “that if I’m going to live here I ought to do my part—”

“Hear, hear!” Boris shouted. “A very wise approach.”

Pavel offered another glass to Elvira, this time filled with our white wine, and when she didn’t react, set it down in front of her.

“So I made coffee, five or six times a day, because Boris just has one of those glass gizmos that you press the coffee down into—”

“An Alessi.”

“But no coffee machine, and the gizmo makes at most four cups. I used a good pound of Prodomo every two days. Their favorites were meatballs with onions and ham and eggs—”

“She means the workers,” Boris said.

“And cola, coffee and cola, always 1.5 liter bottles of cola. Most of them drank their coffee black. At first I thought East Berliners drank theirs with milk and sugar and West Berliners black, but suddenly the Easterners wanted black and Westerners blond and sweet. They were all friendly and polite, even the painters, who kept having to come back. Boris had them paint the hardwood doors—”

“I didn’t want to come home to a forest,” Boris said with a nod my way. “Am I right?”

“They did the job without a grumble.”

“There was nothing for them to grumble about; it’s in the contract.”

“When I asked if it bothered them, they all nodded. But they were always friendly.”

“No sooner do you look the other way,” Boris said, “than they disappear, and you have to make a hundred thousand calls to get them back again — hours on the phone.”

“They were always polite, and they carried those tin lunch-boxes, blue ones, red ones, just like I had as a kid in school.”

“So what are you trying to say?” Boris asked.

“I just wanted to say that everything here was always in an uproar, for one reason or another, and—”

“Just what do you mean by that?”

“Would you please cut it out!” Susanne cried. “Don’t pay any attention to him.” She selected a pretzel as carefully as if she were playing pick-up-sticks.

“Life here inside was pretty normal,” Elvira said, “until those guys showed up on the balcony.” There was a roughness to her voice, as if she ought to swallow or clear her throat every few moments. “It was the sound of the welding torch — all of a sudden I wanted to know what that noise outside was. At first I thought they’d gotten up here by climbing the trees, that they’d swung through the trees on ropes.”

Susanne burst into laughter.

“If any of you see any trees around here, let me know,” Boris said, turning toward the window. “That’s utterly absurd.”

“They weren’t just on the balcony, they were moving around on the scaffolding, like a crew busy reefing sails.”

“I thought,” Boris said, “that you were going to tell them — why don’t you go ahead and tell them?”

“I was busy with the guys here inside, making coffee and sandwiches, the whole nine yards—”

“The whole nine yards! The whole monkey business!” Boris said, stood up, and left.

Elvira watched him go in shock. Nobody said a word. Everyone’s attention was riveted on her, as if we were all waiting just to hear her speak.

“He really did remind me of a monkey,” she said, half defiant, half intimidated.

“Who?” Charlotte asked.

“The guy I let in — who was doing the metalwork. I couldn’t pretend I didn’t see him. If I’m making coffee and sandwiches, then the guys outside should get some too. I rapped on the window. There he squatted beside his welding torch as if it were a campfire. He didn’t even hear me open the door. It was a smell like a sardine can, only stronger. I had to shout for him to understand me. His mouth was hanging open — absolutely perfect complexion, hair like ropes, shiny ropes, just a few strands of gray, and pale blue eyes. And not an ounce of fat on his body. He was glistening with sweat. He held up both hands, he didn’t want to come inside. So I set his coffee down on the tiles, the milk and sugar beside it, and watched through the window as he picked up the spoon between his huge fingers and shoveled sugar into his cup, like he was playing with dollhouse china — but he did it so deftly, like a watchmaker. The cup vanished in his hand, and I thought, That’s not nearly enough for him.”

“Was he King Kong?” Fred asked, but no one laughed.

“He never started before three o’clock. The whole day other workers would be out on the scaffolding or in the apartment. They were there by six or six thirty in the morning. But he never showed up before three. Late afternoon and early evening I was always alone with him out on the balconies, this one here or the one in the guest room.”

“What sort of metalwork was he doing?” Susanne asked.

“The joints along the railings and the ones between the tiles and the wall.”

“And then he came inside.”

“Yes, the third day he came inside. I wasn’t prepared for it, I didn’t know what to do. He knocked on the balcony door and stepped in. Raising his shoulders high, he walked around inspecting the room as if it were a museum. Suddenly he stopped in his tracks and noticed the footprints he’d left behind. “Sorry,” he said. That was the first word I’d ever heard him speak. All I’d ever seen were gestures or him shaking his head. ‘Real nice,’ he then said. ‘Real nice, but if all you do is work and sleep you never get to see it.’”

Now Elvira picked up a pretzel stick too, but didn’t eat it, just held it like a pen between her fingers. Except for Boris’s puttering around in the kitchen, total silence reigned.

“The man was a giant. At first I thought maybe he stuttered, but he wasn’t a stutterer at all. But he kept blinking the whole time. And he didn’t budge from the spot. Then he asked to take a pee. The guest toilet wasn’t finished, so it had to be the bathroom. It felt strange to let him in there. As he came out he was drying his hands on his pants legs. He said: ‘I call it mange, it’s deep under the skin, y’know, mange is what I call it.’” His hands were an anthracite color, like the lead in a pencil. ‘Pipe in, water out, that’s all it takes,’ he said. I didn’t quite get what he meant. He went on leaving footprints behind and looking straight at me, as if I’d said something, but I couldn’t think of anything to say. I sat down with him at the kitchen table. He didn’t want a sandwich, just coffee and a cigarette. ‘Junos’—he meant the brand of cigarettes—‘I settled on them.’ And then he just kept looking around and saying things like: ‘Gotta cost a pretty penny too, but if all you do is work and sleep, don’t matter much.’ He talked about ‘Mercedes wages’ and ‘a whole day for a working stiff’ and ‘three weeks just for the rent? Don’t need to watch that pot boil.’”

“But he didn’t harm you, did he?” Pavel asked.

“I was afraid of that too,” Susanne said, giving Pavel a nod of approval.

“He told how he’d ‘headed for foreign parts right off,’ in ’90. Hadn’t done anything wrong, no arrests, but when he came back a few years later, his building had been sold and the account where he’d sent his rent was closed, and that was the only reason for his record, he said ‘record.’ But he’d taken time to do good work for us. ‘Corners,’ he said, ‘my corners get an A, customers care about corners.’ Passing the television, stereo, and VCR on his way out, he said: ‘VCR, gotta keep the economy hummin’, I bought me just five tapes and got the knack of it, but then gave it away, not my thing.’”

“Knows her master’s voice!” Boris shouted as he came in with a tray. “And now she wants to swing from vine to vine with him, living with him like Jane of the jungle. She’s thinking about getting a pad of her own, not some palace like this. End of story. Next topic!”

Boris did not set the tray with the teapot down easy. Susanne later said he slammed it on the table. I figured I was the only one who could calm him down, so I said there’d been no mention of that whatever, and that we wanted to hear Elvira finish her story.

But that just sent Boris over the edge. I’d never seen him like that before. We had probably all underestimated how much his new place meant to him, how he’d been working the whole time with no other goal in mind, and how hurt he was by Elvira’s turning down his offer. “It’s all for her, too,” he shouted. “For her, for nobody else! She doesn’t have to bad-mouth it like this!”

We sat there frozen in place, like schoolkids when the principal flies into a rage. I thought Elvira might get up to leave now, or that Boris would throw her out. The worst part was that our silence seemed likely to provoke something of the sort. I was about to say that I could understand what Elvira was getting at, but then Charlotte bent forward, stubbed out her cigarette, setting her bracelets clanking, and said, “I know what you mean. Something of the sort happened to me, too, back when Paul and I were still together. He always knew how to use the system, or so he claimed, and — without saying a word to me, of course — gave our address to an agency, in case they might need a location for commercials or stuff like that.”

I was so relieved somebody had said something that at first I wasn’t even really listening. Taken off guard by this turn of events, Boris stood there for a while, but then poured himself some tea, added plenty of rock sugar, stirred his cup noisily, and finally retreated to his seat. Charlotte held her ashtray in both hands like a precious antique and never looked up at us, as if her story demanded her full attention.

“So some guy called and asked if he could stop by, because they had something that might work. He was teed off that he first had to explain it all to me. But the next day he called again, he was just outside our building. So I had no choice but to let him in. The way he marched right in, the way he strode over the threshold, it was clear I’d made a mistake, I shouldn’t have done it. That actually did cross my mind then and there. But you never listen to your own inner voice. With a head stuffed full of doubts and scruples, you listen to your own voice least of all. We’re taught to be too polite. And so the guy shuffles his way through our eat-in kitchen, from the hall door to the window, from the window to the hall door, squats down as if trying to see if the table has been dusted, rounds the sofa, and is so intent on his own job he doesn’t answer a single one of my questions. And suddenly he says, ‘Okay, you win.’ I ask him what we’ve won. And he goes, ‘The film! They’ll be filming at your place here. This Monday, eight a.m.’ He tells me we need to find a hotel for three days — four stars would be okay, not exactly the Intercontinental, but a good hotel. And only then do I begin to catch on: We have to leave, we’re going to have to move out of our own apartment, for three days. What’s so bad about that? he asks. We’ll be living in a hotel and raking in three thousand marks besides. If he had a place like this he’d do it every week. Martha thought it was awesome, she couldn’t wait for the hotel, and Paul kept asking me if I knew of any other job where you could earn three thousand marks in three days. One did cross my mind, but I didn’t want to risk it — he’d have gone ballistic.”

Charlotte leaned back, the ashtray in her lap now. And we gazed at her as if our weal and woe depended on her going on. Boris, however, had stretched out his legs and was staring absentmindedly at the tips of his shoes while he stirred away at his cup.

“Not even Paul realized,” Charlotte continued, “what we’d gotten ourselves into. Not in our wildest dream did we think those no-parking signs on both sides of the street had anything to do with us. On Monday there they were, one van after another, twenty or thirty of them, some of them big jobs. The doorbell hadn’t even rung yet, and they were already outside our window, on a platform lift, spotlights and more spotlights. I knew it meant trouble. We had no idea they’d be wrapping the whole building. They spread cloths up and down the stairwell — walls, steps, railing, the whole shebang! Claimed they had to do it for insurance purposes. And so everything got draped, inside our place too. Or wait — no, first they photographed everything, even Martha’s room — I wondered why they were doing that, all they wanted was our eat-in kitchen.”

Charlotte bent forward, set down the ashtray, picked up her glass and drank. Her bracelets rattled. “Nice vintage,” she said, toasting Boris, who didn’t look up.

“It was enough of a bother,” she went on, “to have to go to a hotel after work. There’s no way you can have one rational thought in a room like that. Martha and I started squabbling because of her homework — she thought we were on vacation. And as we sat waiting for menus in the restaurant, and they didn’t come and didn’t come, I started sobbing. I’ve never had such an attack of homesickness. I really did feel like a hooker, and then we had to laugh at how absurd that was. And Paul said that I should show him a family that earns its money by sleeping. We could have gone home after two nights, but the guy who called us — the same one who’d marched in the door — said if we wanted to stay put, he’d have the apartment repainted for us, it was in the contract, even though it wasn’t necessary and they hadn’t made a mess — in their own advertising they mention a possible mess — but they’d do a total renovation, that way we’d arrive home with no stress involved and everything in its place. And, since he didn’t want to make the same mistake twice, Paul asked me if that’s what I wanted. And I said, yes. I did think about Martha, but Paul suggested we make a big surprise out of it for her, or whatever. We hadn’t even set down our bags at our building door and they swept down on us, our lovely neighbors, for not having told them anything about it. Well okay, I don’t even want to go into that. I just thought, Home at last — enough anticipation and excitement — all I wanted was to step inside at last. And then there we stand in our own four walls, and everything is exactly like before, just freshly painted. But it’s weird somehow. Paul notices it, I notice it, but we don’t mention it. We say, ‘Not bad,’ stuff like that, and walk around, and I’m thinking: Just like the guy checking out our apartment. And then suddenly Martha starts bawling, she’s standing at the door of her own room, and wails louder and louder. I look inside, no reason to be upset, I think, the photographs and posters are all hanging pretty much where they were before — except one poster has been torn down, and I ask who did that. But it was Martha herself. She had ripped it down, and the next one now too, one after the other, even though they were all hanging in the right place. I don’t know how to describe it.”

“Like burglars,” Susanne said.

“Not that anything was missing,” Charlotte said, pulling the ashtray closer and picking up her pack of cigarettes. “Just the other way around — everything hunky-dory, but that was just it, absolutely eerie, really.…”

“They touched everything, they picked up everything,” Pavel said.

“Something has happened,” Ines said, “but you can’t put your finger on it, nothing you can grab hold of, you can’t even see it, but it’s there.”

“Don’t remind me,” Pavel said as he leaned back, shaking his head and clasping his hands behind his neck.

“I know what you mean, Charlotte, I’ve been through it,” Ines said. “Our last vacation trip was a horror, just this past June, in Croatia—”

“Dalmatia,” Pavel said. “An utter horror. You tell it better.”

“There’s not much to tell. That’s the thing — you can’t get at it.” Ines stared straight ahead.

Elvira bent forward, trying to get a look at Ines at the far end of the four-seater.

“Well, give it a go,” Susanne said.

“The Kornati Islands,” Ines said, shaking her head. “We had heard about them in Zagreb. When we said we wanted to drive to Zadar, the first thing you heard was the Kornati Islands, from all sides, the Kornatis. And Roman, who booked our stay for us, even talked about how Oscar Wilde called the Kornati Islands a paradise. From our balcony we could see the sea, and to the left, a little hidden by trees and a sliver of land, you could sort of make out Zadar, two-thousand-year-old Zadar. We had read in our travel guide that Hitchcock had seen the most beautiful sunrise of his life in Zadar, or something like that, at any rate Hitchcock had been there, and after ’45, once the rubble had been cleared away — the Allies had bombarded, because of the Germans or the Italians — they discovered a Roman forum under all the debris. Zadar isn’t as spectacular as Split, no Palace of Diocletian, but the churches are lovelier, and on Saturdays there are several weddings in each of them, with musicians standing out in front and men swinging Croatian flags. I liked Zadar right off, if only because of Anja, our landlady. She had waited two hours for us in the supermarket parking lot. Anja rode ahead on her red Vespa, her white helmet leading the way. Pavel fell in love with her on the spot, with her big breasts and long black hair.”

“She was incredibly likable,” Pavel said.

“She must have had her three sons while she was still very young, the oldest is fourteen. I could tell right off that Anja had kids. She just radiates something.”

“She spoke German, really first-rate German.”

“She kept asking Pavel whether that’s how you put it — even though they understood each other anyway, Polish and Croatian are practically the same thing—”

“She said her husband could take us out to the Kornati Islands. And we thought, Why not? From the shore the islands look like a chain of mountains, a marvelous view.”

“The first thing you asked was whether she was coming along—”

“I did not,” Pavel said.

“But Anja didn’t want to come along. Whenever we met she would start in about the Kornati Islands, how her husband could take us out in his own boat. All her guests made the trip — and that put me off right away, I didn’t like the sound of it. And then here it came: Three hundred euros, that was the price for friends. Pavel immediately agreed. Three hundred! I said no. No is always my job. But that was including food and drink, and whatever else we might want. Besides which we’d be starting from here, practically at our front door, and we could pick the time. Then she described the steamers we’d otherwise have to take to the Kornatis, as if it was our duty to visit these stupid islands. I said no, half that, a hundred fifty, one hundred fifty was tops, that was all that was in our travel budget. Okay, Anja said, one hundred fifty euros. Haggling is so ugly.”

“But the apartment didn’t cost us a thing,” Pavel said. “We had it for ten days for free, all paid for by Roman’s outfit in Zagreb.”

“It costs thirty-five euros a head on a tourist steamer,” Ines said.

“Must be a living hell, though, we’d had a look at one. But as for her husband, and that’s the point, we’d never seen him, although he lived in the house next door. Anja came every day on her Vespa and cooked for us, and then took off again, never stayed on, never spent the night.”

“And how do you know that?” Ines laughed.

“Because her scooter was never there, she wouldn’t arrive till around eleven on her scooter—”

“Always at eleven? I never noticed it was always at eleven, but it doesn’t matter. At any rate we didn’t see Peter until we got to the dock. He stood there like a mast on his cutter, at least six foot eight, with rimless sunglasses, wraparounds …,” Ines brushed both temples. “A guy with a deadpan face, frozen like a reptile’s. You never knew if he was even looking at you. Plus his weird English.”

“‘Guuuhd morrnink,’” went Pavel. “‘Uoun hanntert feeffti, uoun hanntert feeffti yuurro, guuuhd morrnink, madd damm.’”

“I thought how even a hundred fifty was too much for this guy. But we were seated comfortably and were alone, and when he asked if we wanted music and we said no, that was fine too. The racket from his Kalypso—that was the boat’s name, Kalypso III—was pretty loud as it was. There was something mythical about it, chug-chugging along among islands with a man tall as a tree and silent as a grave. It always startled us when Peter would turn around to bellow his bits of tour-guide wisdom. We passed a church where there’s a pilgrimage every August, because it was supposed to have snowed there one August — that’s the only thing that registered. I envied people on these islands, spectacular homes, all with a view of the water, and I envied people in their sailboats, and even those on the excursion steamers. But the farther out we got the less there was to see, the islands got bleaker and bleaker, bleached crags, uninhabited rocks, with just property lines visible, separating somebody’s lot from somebody else’s, and here and there a kind of pattern, as if someone had passed over it with a trowel in a semicircle, a petrified arch, except you can’t see what’s below the opening. So we chugged along, farther and farther, and I asked — had to shout, of course — when we would finally get to the Kornati Islands, because to our right and left now was open sea, not a single island. I’d pictured the islands as a kind of jungle, Anja had talked about rare animals. ‘This is Kornati, all this are Kornati Islands!’ he yelled, and shook his head. He was laughing at us, making fun of us. A hundred fifty euros for that! We then entered a bay and tied up at dock with other boats like ours and a few steamers. We were supposed to visit a salt lake. Then we’d have lunch. Everybody was romping around at the salt lake — what a horror. The lake gets water only from rain or if storms flood it with high surf, though it’s a riddle to me how that could happen. We sat around with nothing to do, saw schoolgirls do their changing-into-swimsuits ritual, taking their time until all the boys were gawking at them, and watched tiny crabs and mussels with long spiral shells like baroque wigs. My good mood slowly returned — I knew we’d be heading back, that the worst was over. And the meal that Peter served up was really good, huge steaks, salad, bread, then fish he claimed had just been caught. To prove it he threw bread in the water — and just like that, a huge school of fish. Peter pointed to a net, as if all he had to do was scoop them up. It was really first-class, with linen napkins, starched and ironed linen napkins, and white wine, a whole canister. They were eating on the excursion steamers, too. The smell of fried fish drifted clear over to us. We watched the day-trippers hold the fish heads with backbones attached over the railing. Gulls dived in and ripped them right from their hands, people were screeching and gulls were screeching. What a madhouse! We were glad now we hadn’t ended up on one of those steamers. I asked Peter what he did professionally. ‘Scientist,’ he replied. ‘But not here, not here.’ He pointed off in some direction—”

“‘Far away,’ Peter said, ‘far away in the past,’” Pavel added.

“I didn’t want to risk asking any details, you never know what can of worms you’re opening up. But that one question alone was too much, or maybe it was the madness with the gulls or simply the alcohol. He’d been hitting the white wine hard. And grappa, there was also home-brewed grappa. Then suddenly we took off, a sharp turn around the bow of the steamer, gulls scattering every which way. Peter was now driving a lot faster than before, and not back home but toward the south. At first it was actually fun racing through the water and being tossed around by the waves. We pulled on our jackets and held on tight. The sinful part was how close he shot by past other boats. All we saw were shocked faces, and in the next moment enraged faces. He sped right for other boats like a kamikaze pilot, and only turned away at the last second—”

“I tried,” Pavel said, “to work my way forward to him—”

“I didn’t think that was such a good idea,” Ines interrupted. “And Peter, maybe because he saw Pavel coming in his rearview mirror, went into such a tight curve that I was sure Pavel would be thrown overboard.”

“I just bumped my head.”

“‘Just’ is good,” Susanne said.

“Yes, ‘just’ is good, because it could have turned out a lot worse,” Ines said. “So we hunkered down, with the Croatian flag behind us — and then suddenly it was over. At first I thought the motor had quit or we were out of gas, but Peter had just pulled the throttle back and was chugging along now in wide curves. I yelled at him, and Pavel yelled at him. I couldn’t think of anything better to say than ‘We want to live! We want to live!’ I don’t know how many times I shouted it. Peter just waved me off in disdain, real disdain, and snapped his thumb and middle finger and roared, ‘It’s like nothing, like nothing!’”

“No, ‘Life is nothing,’ is what he said. ‘Life is nothing!’” Pavel corrected her.

“He said, ‘It’s like nothing,’ and said it with a snap of his fingers.”

“Yes, he snapped them, but he said, ‘Life is nothing,’ because otherwise it might have meant his speeding was like nothing at all.”

“Who the hell cares?” Boris said. “At any rate he was a nut case. You should have demanded your money back, whether it was ‘like’ or ‘life.’”

“It was so unreal,” Ines said. “First the kamikaze bit, and then nothing, as if it was all in our heads. We putt-putted home, it took an eternity. From the water there’s nothing special about Zadar, not like Greifswald or Stralsund. At first I thought it was Anja waiting at the dock, at least there was someone there with a white helmet and a red motor scooter. But once she saw us, she was off in a cloud of dust. Well okay, and then came the moment that had me scared shitless — saying good-bye to Peter. I wanted to give him a piece of my mind. By now I was embarrassed at screaming, ‘We want to live!’ I wanted to tell him how outrageous it was to put people in that situation. Except I didn’t know how to say it in English. Pavel can never get his mouth pried open for stuff like that, it’s always up to me. We tied up, Peter jumped ashore, we groped our way forward. Peter was standing with one foot in the boat, the other on the dock, he held out his hand to me. I grabbed it, and I looked at him, directly into his bad eye — a ghastly dead eye, not even a glass eye, just a socket. I could smell the alcohol on him. Bracing me under my elbow, Peter pulled me up, and I jumped ashore.”

“That eye shocked me too—” Pavel said.

“We stood there like pillars of salt, watching as Peter cast off the line, jumped back in the boat, and started the engine. He waved at us and called out, ‘Ciao, ciao.’ He had put his sunglasses on again. But the most remarkable thing about the whole story is that somehow it came as a relief, I mean his eye—”

Boris burst into laughter.

“Not the way you think — sure, when I consider how he had no depth perception and was speeding like a bat out of hell, but I mean it was good that we at least had that eye, that there was something visibly wrong, some hint. Maybe it sounds perverse, but when I saw that sewn-up eye socket, I calmed down — it was a kind of explanation even if I haven’t a clue what was up with that eye — it could have been an accident, didn’t have to have anything to do with the war.”

“Wait a sec,” Pavel said. “The way you tell it, nobody’s going to understand it. Zadar was under siege for two years, bombarded, for two years. The Yugoslav army left its barracks and headed for the mountains, and then fired down at the town from up there — at everything, houses, churches, libraries, everything. And the people in town, they had nothing, at least to begin with, but nobody talks about that, or almost nobody. Roman told about running with his little brother on his back and not knowing if they would make it or not. And when he got home, his mother was washing windows. She had forbidden him to fight, even though she’d been on the front herself, as a doctor. And when he said that he didn’t want to have anything to do with this war, that he knew of no earthly reason why he should fight, she threw him out of the house. Even though she’d forbidden him to fight, understand?”

“And Anja?” Lore asked. “Was she still together with this Peter guy?”

“In some way, yes. At least she spoke of him as her husband. But she never spent the night with him. She came at eleven and then headed off somewhere.”

“How could you live with someone like that?” Susanne said.

“And what if someone said that about you?” Fred asked. Susanne leaned back and pretended that Fred had addressed his question to everybody.

“Sometimes you can’t help it,” Fred said. “Just as maybe your Peter couldn’t help it. Something happened to me once, nothing to do with war, of course, but it can happen so quickly — you tell a stupid joke, lose self-control, do something raunchy, that’s all it takes.” Fred paused as if he wasn’t sure whether to go on or not.

“We’d met at dance classes, in Dresden,” he then began. “I was seventeen, she was sixteen. Her parents liked me and even invited me to come along on outings with them; they had a car. In the late sixties that was still something special. But for her sake — her name was Ines too — I found excuses not to. I really loved Ines, and I think she loved me too. We hadn’t slept together yet. I always thought that was the last step, the one thing still lacking for us to be truly intimate with each other.”

Fred sat bent forward, letting his head hang and kneading his hands.

“It was the end of August, just before the school year started up again, and she was back from the Baltic with her parents. She had a great tan, and her hair was almost blond. She had written me several postcards, but brought them all back with her. Next year, she said, we would take off together, just her and me. I was happy, but I needed a little while to get used to Ines again, although I’d thought about her the entire time. When I told Ines that my parents would be gone for the weekend, she said she wanted to stay with me. And so Ines came over, and I suggested we ride our bikes out toward Moritzburg, past the harvested fields to the woodland ponds. Directly opposite the nudist camp was a small meadow with access to the lower pond. We were the only ones there. We undressed and went swimming. We didn’t stay in the water long, but when we came out we found four men sitting on the spot where we had laid our clothes — all of them in their late twenties, certainly not rowdy teenagers. Ines stayed in the water, and I got out. But they wouldn’t give me my clothes, they said my little Ines had to fetch them for me. They spoke very softly, almost as if they were friends of mine. They had removed our IDs and called me Friedrich the whole time. I didn’t know what we should do. Ines came out of the water then, and they made comments and cracked dirty jokes at every step she took, every gesture, and just in general, and at first only handed over her velour pullover, followed then by her bra and so on. And her towel was the last item. Then they left. They’d been sitting on my things, but otherwise hadn’t done anything with them. Our IDs were lying on top.” Fred’s fingernails had turned all white. “It doesn’t sound very dramatic, because they never laid a hand on us.…”

At first I thought Fred was fighting back tears. But then he raised his hands, as if to indicate there was nothing more to say. Eventually, however, he did go on, even speaking a little faster than before. “I’ve always wished I could surgically remove those minutes, like some infected lesion, cauterize them — or start speaking a different language. I don’t know, whatever. Of course Ines and I cursed them and made plans to go to the police, to take revenge. But once it had grown dark, Ines rode home. Maybe if we had spent the night together it would have saved our relationship. But maybe that was just no longer possible, at any rate it became less and less so from day to day. Just the way someone pronounced our names was all it took. The worst part was that it didn’t have to be any particular word. Just a random remark, and we would be back at that woodland pond. But for me it was enough to know and to see that Ines was thinking of it too. I later blamed myself for not having hurled myself at those men. It would have been better to have taken a beating or for us to have ridden home naked. Anything would have been better than what did happen. But I was paralyzed with fear. Above all we didn’t want things to get any worse. Fear — it’s so disgusting.”

Boris turned around to Elvira, maybe he was expecting some reaction from her, maybe he wanted to ask her something. Elvira’s head was resting on Susanne’s shoulder. Susanne could barely move a muscle but managed to carefully put a finger to her lips. When Boris offered to carry Elvira to bed, Susanne made a face. She evidently found it pleasant to have Elvira’s head on her shoulder, was even a little proud of it, I think.

Ines and Pavel said they needed to be going. Boris nodded, but neither of them got to their feet. Everyone else likewise went on sitting there and looking at Elvira. The thought crossed my mind that if we left now, we would never see Elvira again.

I would have liked to have said something about Fred’s story. I wanted to ask Boris if he remembered the brown water in those woodland ponds. I’d often gone swimming there myself. The bottom is very stony at that spot.

My recollection of that night at Boris’s turns hazy after Fred’s story, at least in terms of the contents and sequence of what was said. The mood, however, is just that much more present in my mind.

Fred, Lore, and Charlotte sat bent forward as if listening to a program on the radio. Now and then someone would reach out a hand for snacks or slices of baguette topped with tomatoes and cheese that Boris had brought in at some point.

A strange quiet had come over us. I’m intentionally avoiding the words “silence” or “hush,” even if — or so it seems to me — almost nothing was said for a long while, or if so only sotto voce. I was relieved that the strange tension that had descended over everything with Elvira’s showing up had now lifted. The stories had calmed Boris down as well. It bothered me that the storytelling had left me feeling good somehow.

I don’t know of course what actually kept Ines and Pavel there. But I’m sure that Susanne, too — even if Elvira’s head hadn’t been resting on her shoulder — would never have considered leaving now.

I may well make myself an object of mockery when I admit that it made me think of strip mines being phased out, and suddenly — nobody knows just how — all sorts of stuff starts sprouting, as if it were umpteen million years ago, as if it were nothing for nature to start all over again. That’s the feeling I had.

I didn’t tell any stories myself. Nothing ever happens to me that could be shaped into some kind of narrative. I’m not an entertaining sort of guy, sad to say — which used to distress me. I wondered if I should contribute something I’d heard on the radio a couple of weeks before, an incident that kept running through my mind. I’d probably recognize the woman’s voice. It was on Deutschlandfunk, an interview show plus classical music. The interviewee was an opera singer who had just given her farewell concert. I’ve forgotten her name, along with the whole interview really. Except for one question. The moderator wanted to know if it was possible to make new friends, real friends, friends for life, after the age of fifty. “Sure, why not?” the opera singer had exclaimed. The question had, as you could plainly hear, upset, almost outraged her. The moderator tried to explain her question, to which the singer then replied with a brusque, “No, I don’t believe a word of it!” In the silence that followed you could hear the rustling of paper until both began speaking at once, fell silent again, and the moderator said, “Please, please, it’s your turn!”

That’s when the singer told about a friend she had come to know eighteen months earlier in Chicago, an American originally from Germany, who had come to the States as a child in the late forties. I think his name was Rüdiger, at any rate a name no American can pronounce. This Rüdiger had come up to her in a coffee shop after hearing her speak with a German accent. He had invited her to join him the next day to visit the Chicago Board of Trade, where he worked. She described how the shouting began with the ring of the bell at nine on the dot and how much physical stamina it took just to stand for hours in the amphitheaters of the pits.

“You were going to tell us about a friendship,” the moderator said, breaking into the singer’s account. She, however, was undaunted and plowed ahead. “And later that afternoon it was this man of all people who told me that socialism was the only real solution, that one should help the poor and take something from the rich, that industries essential to human life should be nationalized, because state industries were still better than private monopolies. And then he asked me,” the singer said, “whether our way of life and the corrupt behavior that necessarily went with it wouldn’t drag the whole world into the abyss. At first,” the singer exclaimed, “I though he was joking, but he was in earnest, dead earnest. Nowadays I hate myself for thinking he was joking.”

“And so it was because of his views,” the moderator asked, “that you struck up a friendship with him?”

“He didn’t say anything,” the singer replied, “that we didn’t think and say here thirty or forty years ago, not one thing. He just hadn’t stopped saying it.”

There was another brief pause, then the moderator asked her next question. But the singer didn’t respond. Instead she asked, “Don’t you think there will always be wars as long as someone is making money off them?”

The moderator tried a different question, but the singer insisted: “Don’t you think that even here among us far too many people are making money off war?”

“That’s something I’m not prepared to discuss with you now,” the moderator said, and evidently signaled her director to play some music, so that all you heard was the singer’s next, “Don’t you think …” The music was followed by news, after which the interview continued without further incident.

I could have told about that. But it bore no relation to what had already been said. Besides which, recounting a radio show seemed a rather paltry contribution. I mention it, however, because I’ve asked myself a hundred times now what I would have done as the moderator. Probably have made the mistake of asking the singer about her American friend. Because what consequences should this Rüdiger have drawn from his views? Given up his job? Blown up the Board of Trade? Become a politician?

Mulling all this over, I fell asleep. I dreamed but no longer remember what about.

When I woke up, I winced — of course I found it unpleasant to have dozed off like that. But no one, not even Susanne, appeared to have noticed. Lore was saying, “And there it lay, wet, slimy, smelly.”

Boris, legs outstretched, head propped against the arm of his chair, had closed his eyes. Ines was lying on her back, her head in Pavel’s lap, her legs dangling over one arm of the four-seater. Charlotte was sitting on the rug with legs crossed, elbows on her knees, head propped in her hands, a half full ashtray in front of her. Only Lore and Susanne still seemed wide awake. I later had Susanne tell me the story of the huge fish, which Lore had read about somewhere. But by then Susanne was likewise getting things mixed up.

I then watched how Susanne, following the model of Ines and Pavel, bedded Elvira’s head in her lap without Elvira’s ever waking up.

I nodded off again and woke up again just as Pavel started telling about a friend who had become acquainted with a young woman early last year, a woman not only of noble birth, but rich too. Her parents had bought back their ancestral estate, between Berlin and the Märkische Schweiz, and whipped it back into shape — a Bauhaus castle, as Pavel put it, surrounded by a huge park. “We knew the park, we had taken walks there, it’s open to the public, with pavilions, ponds, meadows, and ancient trees. But whenever we got close to the house there would be signs, just barely taller than the grass, announcing, Private Property. You couldn’t help dreaming about living in a palace like that. So we were strolling around, and suddenly saw a woman sitting in the pavilion up ahead. She was reading, she didn’t even notice us. I could have approached closer, but I realized I was standing between two Private Property signs. I’m quite sure she wasn’t reading Goethe’s Elective Affinities, but no other book would have fit in so well. The most marvelous part was that the large meadow behind is on a low rise that blocks the view of what lies beyond it, so that it came to me that behind it must be the sea or at least a large lake, and the illusion didn’t shatter until you were just a few yards before the adjoining field. When I later learned who my friend’s new acquaintance was, I suddenly found myself believing in fate, but a fate that’s been jimmied out of whack, as if there’s been a mix-up, like dialing a wrong number, so to speak.…”

Ines smiled and said without opening her eyes, “I see, I see.”

“I just mean,” Pavel said, “that we belonged there, not Jürgen. His Elisabeth wasn’t even the woman in the pavilion. Jürgen took us along one time, but the two of them were already on the verge of crisis. I played for them, on a Thürmer piano, but my mind wasn’t on it, I kept observing myself doing the ‘pianist routine.’ From the third floor you could see not just the meadow with its pavilions, but the big field beyond it as well.”

Pavel removed his shoes by pushing against the heels. I watched the motions his toes made inside his burgundy socks. He made no attempt at all to hide their sweat-stained soles. Boris’s arms were dangling from the arm of the chair like flags in a dead calm. He was snoring softly. Susanne was asleep with one hand at Elvira’s waist, her right arm along the back of the chair, her head thrown back, her mouth slightly open. It had been a long time since I had watched her sleep.

I tried to imagine what lay ahead for Elvira and Boris. I decided I would say something this time — I was going to tell him I’d like to see Elvira again.

I woke up at six on the dot. I was cold, my neck and shoulders ached. Susanne was smiling at me. Elvira and Boris were no longer in the room, I didn’t see Charlotte either. Fred was lying on the rug, Lore beside me on the sofa. Ines was asleep in Pavel’s lap. The window ahead of me had been tipped ajar, the floor lamp turned off, the Venetian blinds opened. A fly was crawling along one slat. Outside, a truck — it was either empty or pulling a trailer — was rumbling along over the cobblestones.

It may sound odd, but when I awoke I had a sense of pride, as if falling asleep in a sitting position with other people around were some sort of accomplishment. I was content, content and happy, as if I’d been given a gift I’d wanted my whole life long.

Susanne had closed her eyes again. I’m fairly certain that I didn’t fall asleep again, and that what comes next was not a dream. I heard a helicopter, and then I spotted it between slats in the blinds. I slid down in my chair until I had the helicopter at the same level as the slat where the fly was crawling. The fly would move ahead just a bit, and then wait as if it needed to regain its strength. The helicopter, however, kept getting closer to it. I didn’t need to make any more adjustments in my position. They collided, and then — I swear — the fly swallowed the helicopter. I waited for it to reemerge behind the fly or below the slat, as the laws of perspective dictated — but it never did. The helicopter had vanished. And only then did I notice that its noise had stopped as well — total silence, only our breathing, even the fly never moved from its spot.

Except for that last clause about the fly, my “little novella”—that was my subtitle — was now written, and I gave it to Susanne to read. If it ever got published, she said, even an impartial reader, who knew nothing more than what I had shared with him, would see through the whole thing from the start. I could spare myself the novelistic conclusion. Reality, she remarked, works very differently than in my stories. I asked her if she thought I might not even need to add anything, if the story might not already have come to its conclusion? If I didn’t have a sense of that, she said, then I didn’t need to torment myself by writing stories, there’d be no point in it, period.

Some say, yes, you’re obligated to invent, it can’t be any good otherwise. But I don’t want to invent things. All that matters to me in this case is to be fair to Boris and that night. The subtitle was wrong, plain and simple. There are no novellas in everyday life. So I crossed out the subtitle, and will continue the way I planned from the start.

Although it was a Thursday, strangely enough no one seemed to be in a hurry. Boris, now in blue-and-white Adidas sweats, set the table and said that actually he hadn’t invited us for breakfast too. When I joined him in the kitchen, he signaled for me to close the door. Leaning against the kitchen window, he asked, “Well, what do you think of her?”

“Wonderful, absolutely wonderful,” I said.

“Except of course that she doesn’t look at all like me.”

“Why should she—”

“It wasn’t what I had in mind, I can tell you,” he interrupted, “for a girl like that to show up and say, ‘Hi, Dad!’ She doesn’t look at all like me. I’ve demanded a blood test. Which has really pissed her mother off, and her, too, of course. But I want the test. How we’ll take it from there is our business, but it needs to be clear-cut, don’t you think?”

Boris went on talking for a while. He also said that if Elvira absolutely didn’t want to live with him, he’d pay for a student pad of her own. The more he thought about it, the better he liked the idea of having a daughter.

I never explained to Boris about my — about our — misunderstanding. Perhaps he had intended it that way. That may well be. I congratulated him on having a daughter.

“We’ll see, we’ll see,” he said. “Awful name. I would never have named her Elvira. But that’s just like her, her mother, just like her!”

After his death Elvira took care of all the formalities. She had a funeral notice printed up and sent to everyone in his address book. There were about fifty people. We immediately recognized Elvira’s mother, Elvira is her spitting image.

I found it a little inadequate that there was nothing except some music. Susanne said I should have spoken, I was his only friend, after all. But in fact we didn’t know each other at all. I could have told them about that evening. But you don’t do that sort of thing extemporaneously, at least I can’t.

Last week we visited Elvira. She’s going to put the apartment up for rent and pay off the mortgage that way. On the dining table was an old dark red tin box. On top of it was a black-and-white photograph. It was of my kindergarten class on monkey bars. Except for two little girls, everyone had risked climbing higher than I had. The next group was waiting in the background. Between my shoulders and the sandals of my friend Lutz Janke, someone had penned in a line with an arrow, pointing to the head of a rather tall boy. I asked if I could have the photograph, a request I realized was presumptuous the moment I made it. But Elvira had evidently expected it and was happy I asked, at any rate she smiled and with no hesitation gave me the photo.

One More Story

“He wouldn’t even take the train if there were a nonstop flight from Budapest to Berlin on Sundays. That at least is what he said at the end of his interview with Katalin K., a Hungarian journalist, who had offered to help him buy his train ticket for Budapest — for Vienna-Budapest.”

Perhaps a style modeled on a police report would best suit this story, an impersonal tone, sentences without a first-person narrator. The attentive reader would know right off that the real reason for the trip did not necessarily correspond to the reason provided by our traveler (for whom a name is easily found). The phrase, “that at least is what he said”—with emphasis on the verb — would clearly indicate that fact.

It is always tempting to switch from the first-person to the third-person. This third person ends up coming off a little shabbily, and the experience writes itself. But that won’t work in this case, at least when it comes to the crucial turn of events — that is, when our traveler is sitting across from the woman, whose name could be Petra or Katja and whom (during their years together, or better, the years of his alliance with this Petra or Katja) he had called his wife. Or am I mistaken? Might it not possibly be more effective — at that critical juncture — to avoid any sort of commentary and to regard the first-person narrator strictly from the outside (that is, as our traveler) and thus subject him to the same scrutiny to which all other figures are exposed? I don’t know.

I will nevertheless attempt to speak of myself and of how life shows a tendency to imitate literature.

On that Sunday, April 25, 2004—the last day, that is, of the Budapest Book Fair, where Germany had been the featured guest country — I had been struck by the possibly fruitful idea (depending on my mood I’m inclined to read frightful for fruitful, and vice versa) of making the trip to Vienna to present Petra with the manuscript of my story “Incident in Petersburg,” in which the first-person narrator is mugged. That had in fact happened to me. I am convinced that the mugging could have occurred only because I had not been paying attention, because my mind had still been wandering in Vienna with Petra. I had flown from Vienna to St. Petersburg on the same day we had separated. In my story the “incident” became a kind of framework for my memories of Petra.

Of course I could have sent the story to her without commentary and waited to see what happened. But I thought it would be better — since Vienna was suddenly so close — to tell Petra face to face that for once, apart from a change of names (Petra or Katja), I had invented nothing.

I called her from Budapest — the same number, the same ring tone as back then — and left a message on her answering machine. When I returned to the hotel, I found a note with a check mark on the line “Please return call,” above which stood the familiar number — which once again was answered only by a machine. I gave the date, time, and place of arrival, 12:20 p.m., West Station, and my time of departure, 3:45 p.m. I asked if it would be all right with her for us to meet at one o’clock, “just for an hour or so,” and promised to pay for her lunch. I proposed we meet at the Museum Quarter, and concluded by saying my cell phone number was still the same. If Petra didn’t appear, I planned to visit the Museum Quarter, which had first opened shortly after our separation.

Just buying my round-trip ticket on Friday made me feel like I was giving myself a present, treating myself to a luxury — even though it was a second-class ticket for which I had to fork over a mere thirty-four euros. It was strange to plan a trip on my own, to travel at no one’s invitation, and pay for the ticket out of my own pocket.

Sunday-morning rain summarizes the view that Budapest offers me at the level of a car window. The images blur together, turning gray as the asphalt, which looks bubbly somehow. The radio startles me, sniveling, “and all the bells were tolling,” the driver turns around and nods to me. “Am Tag, als Conny Cramer starb, und alle Glocken klangen, am Tag, als Conny Cramer starb, und alle Freunde weinten um ihn, das war ein schwerer Tag.…” I get it now — a German song, especially for me.

The car belongs to the hotel, the meter hasn’t been turned on. As we pull up at Keleti pu., the sense I’m being well taken care of leaves me downright euphoric. I would never call the Keleti pu. East Station. The Keleti pu. — the last time I stood there was in the summer of 1989. Vacation trips to Budapest began and ended at the Keleti pu., marked the start and finish of hitchhiking tours to Bulgaria — a train station almost as familiar to me as the Neustädter in Dresden.

The driver and I say good-bye with a handshake. I have plenty of time and no baggage except a shoulder bag with a half-liter bottle of water, a book by István Örkény, my notebook, which I always carry with me and never use, the blue folder with the manuscript of “Incident in Petersburg,” my wallet, and my passport. “I’m going to Vienna,” I whisper as I climb the stairs to the main entrance and, once at the top, turn around as if I’m about to say good-bye for good. “I’m going to Vienna.” A blue Michelin Man waves to me from a rooftop, blue is also the color of the Trabant in a row of parked cars, more than half of them made in Germany. And all the while I’m looking around — my hand pressed to my shoulder bag — there’s not a beggar in sight, no one wants anything from me, not even a wino stumbles by. As far back as May 1979, the first time I left from here, loaded down with books from the GDR Cultural Center and S. Fischer pocketbooks from a shop on Váci-utca, I dreamed that I was a writer on his way to Vienna. For twenty-five years that had meant something very different. Or I could also say that twenty-five years ago it still had a very real meaning.

Vienna is not even listed on the posted schedule. But instead Dortmund — which never had a chance in its 3–0 loss to Leverkusen yesterday, and today Bremen has to beat Bochum in an away game, otherwise that blows any chance of the UEFA Cup too. I don’t want to think about that and so buy a newspaper. You know what a train trip will be like within the first fifteen minutes, usually within a minute or two.

The train to Dortmund via Vienna is ready for boarding. I don’t have a seat reservation. I’m choosy and inspect the cars both outside and in. When I finally find one without compartments, most seats are occupied. The unoccupied ones are either on the aisle, or the upholstery glistens with a fresh grease spot, or they’re right next to the smoking section. There’s always some reason why a seat is unoccupied or still available. I return to one where the heater has an especially loud rumble. The train fills up. I’m not someone people like to sit down next to. That’s not a recent insight, but it still hurts even if I do breathe a sigh of relief whenever, after hesitating briefly, someone moves on.

I’m amazed at how soundlessly we pull out. But it isn’t us at all, it’s the Budapest — Moscow train. Or is it just switching tracks? I don’t see anyone at the windows.

I unpack the blue folder with my “Incident in Petersburg” story, slip my cell phone into my breast pocket along with my ballpoint, and pick up my copy of One-Minute Stories, which had lain on my lap on the plane and on my nightstand in the hotel. I tug at the dark red ribbon marker, open to page 18, and as our train lurches punctually at 9:35, begin to read the story entitled “The Bow.”

Even though as a train pulls out I usually panic at the thought that I’ve left my bag on the platform, I love riding trains. Just as you walk twice as fast on moving sidewalks at airports, I have the feeling I’m accomplishing more on a train than at home. In addition to all the reading and writing you get done, by successfully managing a change of place you easily triple the value of your daily output. And so I start to read, but am interrupted at once by bites of conscience, since I need to look through “Incident in Petersburg” and collect my thoughts about what I’m going to say to Petra three hours from now.

Beside me, on the other side of the aisle, is a French family. The parents smile, we exchange nods, the children are urged to say bonjour, which, however, neither the boy (curly hair) nor the girl (straight hair) does.

Green landscape outside and gardeners’ yellow containers, walls of seven narrow concrete slabs. Home supplies — Praktiker, OBI, hp — Nissan (by next Sunday, Hungary will be in the EU), the Danube, low shores, new huge buildings, with observatories on the roofs, circus-tent roofs — of course they only look that way. Then blocks of apartments — best guess, Khrushchev era — green again, small houses. The sympathy people extend to young families. They scatter stuffed animals, comics, and a book by James Ellroy on each of their four seats and set off in the direction of the dining car just as we stop in Kelenföld. Then Shell, Honda, Plus, Kaiser’s billboards lining the road. The buildings on the far side merging into the green. Perfect travel weather, IKEA, Stella Artois, Baumax.

I slip the ribbon marker back in, close One-Minute Stories, open the blue folder. I don’t know what to tell Petra. I’ve been under way for sixteen minutes now. “Sixteen”: Who was it that said “sixteen” so urgently? Suddenly I have the word “sixteen” in my ears but as if spoken by a foreigner, “sixteen” and “all the bells are tolling.”

I read my story, this is work, no longer Sunday, no more freedom, no more independence. I’ve deliberately kept the tone unliterary, as if I myself have had to write up the police report that never got written.

“Saint Petersburg, December 1, 2000. I was in the city to join my translator Ada Beresina in presenting the Russian edition of 33 Moments of Happiness at the Goethe-Institut and the university. For me it was a dream come true, because as I liked to boast during that week, my book was returning to its city and to the language of most of its characters. I was living in the Pension Turgenev on a side street off Upper Nevsky, not far from the Moika Hotel. I had exchanged money in a currency shop located below street level in an apartment house across from my own building, and so still had my passport. With wallet and passport in the inside breast pocket of my jacket and my little backpack slung over my shoulder, I strolled along the Neva, watched floes of ice passing in the water and thought of Vienna.…

“At the Marble Palace I left the Neva and crossed the Field of Mars, heading in the direction of the Nevsky. Standing around the Flame for the Unknown Soldier were several people I first took for soldiers. As I approached a young man said something to me. His body language was somehow servile — his gaze shifty, his face and hands grimy. He asked me the time. It was shortly after noon. He then asked me for money, he was hungry. I pulled out my wallet, gave him ten rubles, and moved on. Keeping to the right of the monument as I walked away, I noticed he called something over to the young men warming themselves at the Flame for the Unknown Soldier. In the next moment the pack was after me, half of them children. They were pleading, their hands clasped together as if in prayer, shouting, ‘Kushat, kushat!’—eat, eat. I didn’t try to run away. After all, it was broad daylight, in the middle of St. Petersburg. Or maybe I didn’t think that, maybe I was just embarrassed. Make a run for it? I probably guessed it would have been no use. Even as some high-pitched voices went on whining their ‘Kushat, kushat!’ I could hear other low voices calling out to one another, agreeing on tactics. It was only then that I realized the situation I was in, and at the same time didn’t want to believe it. I stopped in my tracks. Barely a moment later they had the better of me. The strongest of them had jumped me from behind and now held me in a clinch, pinning my arms to my body.…

“I bellowed like I’ve never bellowed before. I bellowed like an ox, twisting, tossing back and forth like a wild boar, like a bear attacked by a pack of dogs. They were truly everywhere. Tucking my body, I held tight to my backpack. All that my wrenching back and forth accomplished, however, was that my glasses fell off, and I thought: All I need! When I looked up my eyes met those of a woman hurrying toward me. Her shame and my shame — there’s nothing more to say. A hand was thrust down into the breast pocket of my jacket, inching bit by bit for my wallet and passport. My jacket was buttoned, my coat, too, but no matter how loud I screamed and twisted and turned, the hand thrust forward, farther and farther, it wouldn’t have taken much and …”

The conductor is wearing a round cap. Uniforms without billed caps can’t be taken quite seriously. He smiles, lips like Belmondo’s, I smile and hand him my ticket, which he signs off on. We’re moving through Tatabanya now, an eagle painted on a rock face, some sort of hoist frame on a hill topped by massive ruins. The Danube on the other side almost makes up for it.

“Suddenly they let go of me, one after the other, I heard somebody cursing, the whole pack made themselves scarce. I got to my feet. Walking toward me was a man in a fur cap, a full net shopping bag in each hand. I reached for my wallet, checked to make sure I wasn’t bleeding, and picked up my glasses. I was all right.”

Here the real story begins, but the narrative flow starts to meander, since some explanations are needed for the reader to follow the miraculous turn that the incident is now supposed to take for me.

I had bellowed myself hoarse and at first could manage only a whisper, so my rescuer barely understood my thank-you, but traced his gloved forefinger along the vertical slit a knife had left on the right side of my coat. I asked him his name. “Gilles,” he said, “I’m French.” “Gilles?” I croaked in bewilderment.

Watteau’s Gilles was the favorite painting of my deceased friend Helmar, to whom 33 Moments is dedicated. The Russian edition is the only one in which his first name appears rather than just his initials. This is required information for anyone to understand why I was so thunderstruck by the name Gilles. On the day of my book’s publication, I had been rescued in the middle of St. Petersburg by a Frenchman named Gilles, almost as if Helmar … But of course I didn’t actually believe that.

Gilles insisted we look for a policeman. We found one outside the GAI station (the “State Auto Inspection,” as the traffic police are called in Russia) next to the Marble Palace. We shoe-horned ourselves into a GAI Lada and drove around a bit, but the kids, much to my great relief, had vanished into thin air. What would we have done with them anyway? The only items missing were a little dictionary and a lighter taken from an outside pocket of my backpack. They hadn’t punched me or kicked me or pulled my hair. A gutsy Gilles had sufficed to drive them off. When I spotted the Russian Museum through the window of the Lada, I realized that what had happened to me was something I had already described. “Have you ever seen anything like it, in the middle of the street, and kids right behind, two of them, and another, on a line with them, across the way, watching doorways, and then another, just ahead, along the railing … Müller-Fritsch lay half on his back, half on his side, against the canal railing.”

A few hours later as I was walking, escorted by a translator and an interpreter, through the pedestrian passage under the Nevsky that would take us from Sadko in the direction of Gostinny Dvor, I tossed some coins in the cap of a one-legged beggar, all the loose change I had in my pocket. I still recall how in some little nook of my heart I regarded this gesture — made more by way of overcoming my own inertia than of performing any sort of sacrifice — as an act of propitiation that would guard me from similar attacks in the future.

The beggar, however, called after me, in a tone of voice that didn’t sound like a blessing. When I turned around he was already swinging his one good leg between his crutches. I still assumed this was purely accidental. But once he set to work hopping up the stairs of the underpass after me, there could be no doubt. I barely had time to pull the door of the taxi shut, and there was the rubber tip of his crutch pounding against the windowpane. “We’ll walk,” Ada said — the cabbie had demanded an outrageous fare. “We’ll pay!” I cried, never taking my eyes off the rubber tip banging at the fogged-over window. At last the driver maneuvered toward the middle of the street. At the same moment I was convinced that — since this too resembled a scene in the book — I myself would now have to experience everything I had described in 33 Moments of Happiness. St. Petersburg was demanding its tribute for my stories. How could I ever have thought I would get away with it, and go unpunished for writing anything I wanted to write?

No sooner had we come to a stop at the end of a long line of traffic waiting for a light than Ada screamed. Flames were shooting out of the car to our left, its motor was burning. We ducked, I waited for the explosion. During those seconds I ran through the book in my mind. But nowhere had my fantasy gone so far as to set a car ablaze. It wasn’t my fault, this fire had nothing to do with me — I was overcome with relief. The taxi pulled away, and when we stopped again we were at least thirty or forty meters from the burning car.

You might take them for paratroopers if it weren’t for the “Border Guard” printed on their chests. I know what I have to do. Without a word the border guard assigned to me extends his hand for my passport, shifts his weight forward, and — with an imperceptible flick of the wrist of someone playing trumps — hands my passport back to me, as if he weren’t the right official, as if he didn’t even need to look at it. And now it’s the French family’s turn. “Bonjour,” the children say, the parents smile — it’s printed on the backs of the border guards as well, yellow on blue, “Border Guard.”

But what’s become of the customs agents?

In Györ there is a long freight train waiting on a siding, with cars labeled, “We’re doing the driving for Audi” or “We’re doing the driving for VW,” plus logos, brown and rusty as the cars themselves. A water tower in the background, UFO on its shaft. Customs really ought to be here by now.

I’ll tell Petra that in my story “Incident in Petersburg” my fear of having to pay for what I had written is the mirror image of my desire to live with a poet, and that I confused my love for her poems with my love for her, just as she confused love …

The first time I saw you reading your poems, I will say, I fell … But then I’ve told her a hundred times now how when she read her poems her face took on an entirely different look, like that of a young girl, and that when, between poems, she talked about the situation out of which the next poem had arisen — both the organizers and the public loved her for these stories — you believed she had just awoken and was shaking off a dream. And I was certain that everyone who saw and heard her had to fall in love with her. And yet I won’t confess to her this time either that I dreamed of being the intimate “you” in her poems. I didn’t want dedications — dedications are like thirteen-year-olds who smoke. You’ll see, I’ll say, rebutting each of her objections, I haven’t written anything that will hurt you. No, I won’t say that. What I’ve written is that everyone will want to move into your apartment, with its old hardwood floors that would do any museum proud, they’ll want to go strolling with you in Schönbrunn.

In my “Incident in Petersburg,” the reminiscences awakened by the burning car are followed by a depiction of the scene that took place only twenty-four hours before. I was on the phone with my father, and while searching for pencil and paper to write down his telephone number in the rehab clinic, I wandered into Petra’s room with its wide floorboards and old windowpanes (“can’t find those anywhere but Vienna”). Petra looked up, reproachfully, angrily, because I had torn her away from her poem or because I still had on her bathrobe, which was much too small for me. I looked just as reproachfully back at her, because she needed to understand that I had to find a pencil quick, and because she managed to run around in nothing but baggy pants, sweat pants, gym pants, jogging pants — clothes even a lousy soap-opera scriptwriter can come up with if he wants to denigrate a character. Only someone aware of the increasingly long intervals between our meetings would understand these mutual reproaches. Petra and I were just no match for all the running around, the earning-your-daily-bread reading tours, not to mention the constant back-and-forth between Berlin and Vienna.

Why shouldn’t I be able to write about this? What if a few people guess whom I mean by Petra or Katja? Take the statement that it’s better to buy a chicken in Vienna than Berlin, since chickens in Vienna still have their claws on, and the claws tell you if a chicken has actually scratched around in a chicken yard — do I have to approve of such statements, even if they’re yours? I don’t claim you’re to blame for my mugging. Of course, a person can always be a little to blame somehow.

Silence. As if someone has pulled the plug, the heater stops rumbling, all noises cease, the train starts to roll again, almost soundlessly, a few hundred meters, puts on the brakes — Hegyeshalom. Pansies in concrete buckets. Hegyeshalom, border station. Hegyeshalom! I close my eyes, picture myself at the end of the world, and finally I get it: There are no customs agents at Hegyeshalom anymore.

“It would probably be good for both of us,” Petra said, “if we don’t see each other for a while.” That was the end, the separation, I understood at once. And I also understood how pointless it was to protest. She made our farewell so easy! No arguments, no recriminations, just this “don’t see each other for a while.” How drunk I was with this unexpected freedom, and how stunned that it was all over between us.

Our stop in Hegyeshalom — there are no customs agents now — lasts three minutes. The heater rumbles on again, the train pulls out, rolls over the border. The free son of a free country, I feel nothing, my soul does not soar in jubilation.

An hour later the EC 24 pulls into Vienna West Station, on time, platform 7. With a blue folder and an empty bottle in my shoulder bag, I wait until others have boarded. I wait until the platform is almost deserted. I know what it looks like when Petra — or would it be better to call her Katja after all — hurries toward me with long strides, breaks into a run for the last few yards, and raises her shoulders just before she hugs me.

At ten to one, I walk through the entrance building of the Museum Quarter, a passage that reminds me of hospitals and barracks and worse. Abandon all hope. As for what I’m going to say to Katja, I’m even less sure now than I was when I started out. Besides, I still have that song from the taxi running through my head—“And all the bells are scolding.… It was a lovely day.…” I know, it’s not “scolding,” or “lovely” either, but I can’t help it.

In fact I feel ridiculous with my blue folder in my bag. Yes, I feel like an infant — as if I’m overtaxing my abilities to choose a destination myself, as if I can maintain my composure only if I’ve been invited, asked to give a performance, with follow-up questions. I’m standing in the middle of the courtyard of the Museum Quarter. I have no idea what there is to see here. My cell phone buzzes a message. For a brief moment I hope I’ll be able to escape my meeting with Petra or Katja. T-Mobile bids me welcome to Austria.

When I look up I see Katja in the middle of the entrance. We smile and look to one side or at the ground, then our eyes meet again. She has short hair, her hands are in her coat pockets, she has gained weight. We kiss each other on the cheeks, like old friends. “Servus, my dear,” she says. “You look tired.”

Katja climbs a set of steps ahead of me, I follow and watch the hem of her coat above the hollows of her knees, her calves, the red spots on her heels left by her old-fashioned pumps. “Here?” she asks, as if I had made a suggestion. I nod. El Museo, it’s almost empty, a kind of IKEA restaurant. Katja opens her coat, I reach to help her out of it. Katja is pregnant. She smiles. I congratulate her. I am seething with jealousy, there is no love in me. We sit down.

I want to ask her who the father is. I bend down and extract the blue folder from my bag. I feel like a subpoena server who is not about to be derailed by sociability.

“So why are you in Budapest?”

The waitress and waiter look like brother and sister filling in for their parents on Sunday. They are both pudgy in the same sort of way, she’s a blond, his hair is black, his round head reminds me of a mole.

I hear myself say Esterházy.

“Oh, you mean Péter?” she says with a smile and lays a hand on her belly. So they know each other. I should have known. Of course they know each other. He’s probably had her give him a massage. There is no love in me.

I hear myself say Kertész, I hear myself say Konrád and Nadás, when I actually ought to be dropping very different names, but I’m boasting, boasting nonstop, I’m insufferable. I’m digging a hole to jump into.

Katja is paging through the menu, I follow the movements of her eyes. I try to signal the waitress, but she’s busy clearing tables. The mole appears. I point to Katja. She’d like an apple juice, an apple juice and water, no, nothing to eat, really nothing. I order a seafood salad, a white wine, and water. “Effervescent white, perhaps?” the mole asks with a smug Viennese lilt.

“It’s very good,” Katja said. Okay then, for all I care, effervescent white.

Once we’ve ordered we gaze at each other as if everything has already been said and we can leave now. I say that Vienna was suddenly just around the corner.

Yes, Katja says, Budapest is a just stone’s throw away.

The mole arrives. I have to make another selection. This time I order the skewer of prawns for sixteen euros, the most expensive item on the menu.

Katja has now leaned back, one hand on the table. Her fingers move, she’s actually drumming the tabletop. I make some remark, and it feels like I’m squeezing the last glob out of a tube of toothpaste.

Katja splays her fingers and examines her nails. For a moment it seems absurd to be this close to Katja and not be allowed to touch her.

“Are you two married?” I ask.

“For over a year now,” she says. I would love to ask if she already knew him while we were together.

“Excuse me,” she says, gets up and heads for the toilet. Two men observe her rear end. One of them turns around to me, our eyes meet.

Katja and I make small talk. She sips at her apple juice, I drink my effervescent white and say it’s fine, a good recommendation. In Budapest, I say, the exchange rate is now 1 to 250, and can stay that way as far as I’m concerned. I say that in Café Eckermann an espresso — a really very good espresso with milk and mineral water — costs 240 forints.

A half hour later I wave the mole over. “It will be right out,” he says. “Right out.”

“I’m not an impatient guy,” I say, “but I don’t understand why just a skewer …” Except for the two men the restaurant is empty. I finish my effervescent white, reach for my glass of water.

“And?” the traveler asks, laying his left hand on the blue folder. “What are you working on right now?”

“Just translations,” she says.

“And your new volume of poetry, when’s it due out?”

She shrugs.

He sips at his water.

“I’m not writing,” Katja says. “I haven’t written for three years now.” And after a pause: “Maybe I did something wrong, and this is my punishment.” Suddenly Katja looks like she’s about to read one of her poems.

“What are you supposed to have done wrong?” he asks.

“I don’t know,” she says. “Are you afraid I’ll write something about us?”

“To be honest …” Our traveler smiles. Or is it more the face of a whiny little boy? And then it happens, maybe out of embarrassment, maybe out of weakness, maybe because he’s putting all his trust in the power of confession. He admits that he boarded the train because of two stories, because of “Official Report” by Imre Kertész and “Life and Literature” by Péter Esterházy, which both describe a train trip from Budapest to Vienna — that is to say, in the case of Kertész, in the direction of Vienna. He admits that the fruitful idea of traveling two or three hours to Vienna arose out of the hope of assisting his own imagination and providing direction to the unflagging impetus of his creative spirit (motus animi continuus), of affording it an opportunity to soar in jubilation. Just as Esterházy alludes to Kertész’s story, he wanted to allude to both stories and produce something like a comparative drama of railroad stations. Each sentence of his models seemed to him as significant as an antiphon in a liturgy, so that, or so he believed, he needed only to insert, sentence by sentence, his own observations and memories in order to experience something of the world as it is today, of the changes of the last few years, yes, something about his own generation as well. For Kertész had elevated (or better: bumped up, boosted) the story of his customs experience to an interpretation of life itself. (Please, do take the time to read the reason why a customs agent confiscated his passport on April 16, 1991, ordering him to leave the train at the border station in Hegyeshalom.) He likewise wanted to confront this customs agent, to invoke within himself and as if in a vision — damn literature! — the official report of Imre Kertész. I close my eyes, our traveler wanted to write, and see myself at the end of the world and finally comprehend: It’s this Hegyeshalom! For decades the Hegyeshalom of Imre Kertész, this wretched filthy Podunk, was seen as the symbolic way out—in hoc signo vinces. Hegyeshalom! I can still see him pointing to the crest of Svábhegy from his apartment balcony only yesterday evening. I still see him, he wanted to write, see his big, hunched, heavy figure, the anti — Michael Kolhaas, who does not seek his truth, because his truth has found him. I saw his sentences, each one by itself — big, hunched, heavy sentences — swaying inexorably toward the final naked insight.…

But the customs agents never showed up. Our stop in Hegyeshalom lasted three minutes. The train pulled out, rolled over the border, and he, the free son of a free country, experienced nothing, his soul did not soar in jubilation.

“Did you want to find out,” Katja asks our traveler, “how deep the fear still sits?”

“But without customs agents—”

“You should have taken the train to Prague,” Katja says, “from Dresden to Prague.”

“Maybe,” he says. “But I’m here now.”

“So you didn’t want to see me at all.”

“Sure I did, of course, I wouldn’t have made the trip if it weren’t for you.”

“No,” Katja says, “I was just the pretext.”

He looks at her. He lays his hand on hers. “I’m not sure, Katja — on my honor, I’m genuinely not sure.”

“You’re disappointed — no customs agents, no story.”

“Yes,” he says.

“No customs agent to demand you hand over your story.”

He nods and leans back for the first time. “I even had the title,” he says.

Katja smiles at him.

“‘One More Story,’” he whispers and looks like a little boy again.

“Well then just write a different story, leave out the customs agent.”

With the gesture of a magician forced to take the stage at the most inauspicious moment, I remove the blue folder from the table and let it vanish into my bag.

“Do you have to go?”

“No,” I say, and think: There is love in her. Then I get up and walk over to the counter. I wouldn’t want those prawns now, even if they did show up. Accepting prawns after an hour’s wait would be an act of self-abasement. “I’ll pay for the effervescent white,” I say, “two waters, and an apple juice.” The mole immediately starts punching up the numbers. The waitress calls out, “Cancel the order, the whole thing,” and says that the gentleman — to wit, me — doesn’t need to pay for the drinks and that she’s sorry, very sorry. I ask why even after an hour they were incapable of serving a skewer of prawns.

She says they had searched themselves silly but simply couldn’t find the prawns.

“Maybe you’re sold out,” I say, as if it were in my interest to find a better excuse. “Not only is the seafood sold out, but also the prawns, prawns being after all a form of seafood.”

“Yes,” the waitress says. “That may well be, the gentleman is probably right.”

Katja asks me if I can’t stay a little longer, we could go for a walk.

“I’ve got a date this evening,” I say. I smile, despite myself.

“Ah,” Katja exclaims. “I can guess.”

“Yes,” I say, “I ran into Katalin again.”

“I would like to have met her,” Katja says.

She accompanies me to the subway entrance. I push her bike. As we stand there at the top of the stairs, I ask when the happy day is.

In August, Katja says, a boy. Leaning forward, we hug, but our tummies touch anyway.

I forget to validate my metro ticket. At the West Station I try to give it to the fellow selling the homeless people’s newspaper, but he declines.

I buy some Leberkäse, oven-baked, 1.60 euros per hundred grams. It weighs a little more, so with bun and mustard, it comes to 2.90 euros.

Across from me at the entrance to the betting office, are two televisions — Michael Schumacher has just won his fourth Grand Prix in a row, exactly ten years after Senna’s death. I buy another half-liter bottle of water. My shoulder bag now weighs exactly what it did when I left Budapest.

I’m on my way back to Budapest. I’m on my way to Budapest. Isn’t that an act of independence and freedom — not leaving home, not returning home, but simply being under way?

I’m sitting on the right, facing the front of the train. I’m relieved and I’m discouraged. The Örkény is lying on my lap. I pull the little ribbon out, the book opens to page 18. I begin to read the one-minute story titled “The Bow.” I’m tired. The Hungarian border guard comes through the train. They do their job quickly. Because the seats block my view of the passports of the travelers ahead of me, I have the impression the border guards are shaking hands with the passengers.

“Must go back Austria,” says a border guard — beard and pointy nose — to a mop of gray hair one row ahead. “Go back!”

The mop of gray hair speaks softly, the border guard loudly. “Buy visa! No multi, Hungary fly, Budapest, go by train out, finish! Must go back. Really go back. Next train go back Austria.”

The border guard — beard and pointy nose — makes sweeping gestures with his arms, his hand is the airplane on which the mop of gray hair flew to Budapest several days before. The mop of gray hair intends, as I understand it, to fly home tomorrow too. He took a little side trip to Vienna, and now they won’t let him back in. “No multi visa. Must go back!”

The mop of gray hair stands up. A trim older gentleman in a pastel pink shirt. He is told to follow the border guard. He’s ready to follow him, but the border guard plucks at the man’s sleeve and mimics pulling on a coat. The mop of gray hair needs to take his baggage and jacket along. But he doesn’t have any baggage or a jacket, just the Vienna guidebook in his hand. Moving toward the front of the train, the border guard and the mop of gray hair vanish from the car.

A hush falls over the car, the train pulls out, the train stops, the train starts picking up speed, we’re departing on time, Hegyeshalom, 4:45 p.m. On the other track a milk train, its cars are red and white, with windows you can still pull down — the merry mood of the children, mothers, grandfathers makes it look as if the train has stopped for a picnic.

We’re moving past the long platform, and then, for a brief moment, I spot two border guards and right afterward, there where the platform makes a dip so you can cross the tracks, stands the mop of gray hair, with his pink shirt and a Vienna travel guide in his hand, and right behind him at an angle, but in fact shoulder to shoulder, a border guard. The mop of gray hair stares at the train where he was sitting just now, as if trying to see what awaits him on the other side. You can’t tell whether the border guard is holding him by his upper arm or not.

In Györ, with its modest but heavily rusted station sign, the border guard — the beard and pointy nose who tracked down the mop of gray hair — gets off and walks down the platform. He’s dragging a bright shiny blue suitcase behind him. He waves to someone, he shouts, he laughs.

Our traveler — he’s past being assigned a name now — presses his head to the window, but all he can see is the border guard disappearing from view. He asks himself why he even wants to see the person the border guard is hailing. He has no real interest in the border guard, any more than he has an interest in the man in the pink shirt. The man in the pink shirt will have some difficulties to deal with, maybe he’ll have to postpone his flight. Then again, maybe the border guards in Hegyeshalom will help him.

Because their job isn’t really travelers with Vienna guide books in hand — no, they’re just bunglers, maybe even morons. The guards are there for other people, the ones we don’t see, who aren’t sitting on the train, who can only dream of sitting on a train like this, alone with a Vienna guide book, who perhaps have far more dreams of sitting on a train than our traveler ever did, although he’s always dreamed of sitting on a train like this one.

The train departs from Györ. “We do the driving for Audi,” “We do the driving for VW.” The UFO on the shaft. The same conductor with the round cap from the trip to Vienna. He smiles when I pull out the envelope, with no ticket inside, Vonnattal Európaba apparently means “By train to Europe.” In addition to the Eiffel Tower and two red London telephone booths, there are also pictures of the Hungarian Parliament and Schönbrunn Castle. He signs off on my ticket again, where all the information is in both Hungarian and German.

From the empty seat next to him our traveler picks up a leaflet entitled “Your Trip Plan,” with an ad on the cover that proclaims: “April 23rd … World Day of the Book … Grand Sweepstakes.” The pages of an open book, the two center ones reprehensibly folded inward to form a pink heart. He leafs through the accordion-fold brochure until he finally finds the end station for the EC 25 from Dortmund. He reads: Budapest Keleti pu., Arrival: 6:28 p.m. After 128 kilometers or one hour and twenty minutes our traveler will be in Budapest. From Keleti pu. there’s a train at 7:10 p.m. for Kraków Glówny, which arrives shortly after six o’clock the next morning, and at 7:15 there’s one to Istanbul via Szolnok, Bucharest, Sofia, and Thessaloniki. This one arrives a day and a half later at 8:45 a.m. at Istanbul Sirkeci. Our traveler is amazed that the timetable gives thirteen minutes from Kelenföld to Budapest — Keleti pu., although the distance is listed as zero kilometers. But he doesn’t let it upset him. On the contrary, the inconsistency pleases him. And all the bells are scolding. It was a lovely day.

Our traveler, until now neither happy nor sad, halfway, so to speak, between a lost story and a secret rendezvous, is experiencing a feeling about as illogical as the timetable. But he surrenders himself to the indomitable rise of jubilation in his soul, as if he has in fact crossed a border, escaped some ignominious fate, arrived at some grand decision. Our traveler is full of love, so that he cannot possibly read and closes the book by Örkény, shuts his eyes, and like some spoiled but content house pet cuddles his temple against the headrest.