Self's Punishment

1 A milestone in jurisprudence

After a long, golden Indian summer, winter started abruptly. I can’t remember a colder November.

I wasn’t working much then. The investigation in the Sergej Mencke affair advanced at a crawl. The insurance company was hemming and hawing about sending me to America. The meeting with the ballet director had taken place on the sidelines of a rehearsal, and had taught me about Indian dance, which was being rehearsed, but otherwise only revealed that some people liked Sergej, others didn’t, and the ballet director belonged to the latter category. For two weeks I was plagued by rheumatism so that I wasn’t fit for anything except getting through the bare necessities. Beyond that I went on plenty of walks, frequented the sauna and the cinema, finished reading Green Henry – I’d laid it aside in the summer – and listened to Turbo’s winter coat grow. One Saturday I bumped into Judith at the market. She was no longer working at RCW, was living off her unemployment money, and helping out at the women’s bookshop Xanthippe. We promised to get together, but neither of us made the first move. With Eberhard I re-enacted the matches of the world chess championship. As we were sitting over the last game, Brigitte called from Rio. There was a buzzing and crackling in the line; I could barely make her out. I think she said she was missing me. I didn’t know what to do with that.

December began with unexpected days of sultry wind. On 2nd December the Federal Constitutional Court pronounced as unconstitutional the direct emissions data gathering introduced by statute in Baden-Württemberg and the Rhineland-Palatinate.

It censured the violation of constitutional rights of business data privacy and establishment and practice of a commercial enterprise, but eventually the statute was annulled for lack of legislative authority. The well-known columnist of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung celebrated the decision as a milestone in jurisprudence because, at last, data privacy had broken free of the shackles of mere civil rights protection and was elevated to the rank of entrepreneurial rights. Only now was the true grandeur of the court’s judgment regarding data protection revealed.

I wondered what would become of Grimm’s lucrative sideline. Would the RCW continue to pay him a fee, for keeping quiet? I also wondered whether Judith would read the news from Karlsruhe, and what would go through her head as she did. This decision half a year earlier would have meant that Mischkey and the RCW wouldn’t have locked horns.

That same day there was a letter from San Francisco in the mail. Vera Müller was a former resident of Mannheim, had emigrated to the USA in 1936, and had taught European literature at various Californian colleges. She’d been retired for some years now and out of a sense of nostalgia read the Mannheimer Morgen. She’d been surprised not to hear anything back about her first letter to Mischkey. She’d responded to the advertisement because the fate of her Jewish friend in the Third Reich was sadly interwoven with the RCW. She thought it a period of recent history that should be more widely researched and published, and she was willing to broker contact with Frau Hirsch. But she didn’t want to cause her friend any unnecessary excitement and would only establish contact if the research project was both academically sound and fruitful from the aspect of coming to terms with the past. She asked for assurances on this score.

It was the letter of an educated lady, rendered in lovely, old-fashioned German, and written in sloping, austere handwriting. Sometimes in the summer I see elderly American tourists in Heidelberg with a blue tint in their white hair, bright-pink frames on their spectacles, and garish make-up on their wrinkled skin. This willingness to present oneself as a caricature had always struck me as an expression of cultural despair. Reading Vera Müller’s letter I could suddenly imagine such a lady being interesting and fascinating, and I recognized the wise weariness of completely forgotten peoples in that cultural despair. I wrote to her saying I’d try to visit her soon.

I called the Heidelberg Union Insurance company. I made it clear that without the trip to America all I could do was write a final report and prepare an invoice. An hour later the clerk in charge called to give me the go-ahead.

So, I was back on the Mischkey case. I didn’t know what there was left for me to find out. But there it was, this trail that had vanished and had now re-emerged. And with the green light from the Heidelberg Union Insurance I could pursue it so effortlessly that I didn’t have to think too deeply about the why and wherefore.

It was three o’clock in the afternoon and I figured out from my diary that it was 9 a.m. in Pittsburgh. I’d discovered from the ballet director that Sergej Mencke’s friends were at the Pittsburgh State Ballet, and International Information divulged its telephone number. The girl from the exchange was jovial. ‘You want to give the little lady from Flashdance a call?’ I didn’t know the film. ‘Is the movie worth seeing? Should I take a look?’ She’d seen it three times. With my dreadful English the long-distance call to Pittsburgh was a torture. At least I found out from the ballet’s secretary that both dancers would be in Pittsburgh throughout December.

I came to an understanding with my travel agency that I’d receive an invoice for a Lufthansa flight Frankfurt-Pittsburgh, but would actually be booked on a cheap flight from Brussels to San Francisco with a stopover in New York and a side trip to Pittsburgh. At the beginning of December there wasn’t much going on over the Atlantic. I got a flight for Thursday morning.

Towards evening I gave Vera Müller a call in San Francisco. I told her I’d written, but that rather suddenly a convenient opportunity had arisen to come to the USA, and I’d be in San Francisco by the weekend. She said she’d announce my visit to Frau Hirsch; she herself was out of town over the weekend but would be glad to see me on Monday. I noted down Frau Hirsch’s address: 410 Connecticut Street, Potrero Hill.

2 A crackle, and the picture appeared

From the old films I had visions in my mind of ships steaming into New York, past the Statue of Liberty and on past the skyscrapers, and I’d imagined seeing the same, not from the deck of a liner, but through the small window on my left. However, the airport was way out of the city, it was cold and dirty, and I was glad when I’d transferred and was sitting in the plane to San Francisco. The rows of seats were so squashed together that it was only bearable to be in them with the seat reclined. During the meal you had to put your seat-back up; presumably the airline only served a meal so that you would be happy afterwards when you could recline again.

I arrived at midnight. A cab took me into the city via an eight-lane motorway, and to a hotel. I was feeling wretched after the storm the airplane had flown through. The porter who’d carried my suitcase to the room turned on the television; there was a crackle, and the picture appeared. A man was talking with obscene pushiness. I realized later he was a preacher.

The next morning the porter called me a cab, and I stepped out into the street. The window of my room looked out onto the wall of a neighbouring building, and in the room the morning had been grey and quiet. Now the colours and noises of the city exploded around me, beneath a clear, blue sky. The drive over the hills of the town, on streets that led upwards and swooped down again straight as an arrow, the smacking jolts of the cab’s worn-out suspension when we crossed a junction, the views of skyscrapers, bridges, and a large bay made me feel dizzy.

The house was situated in a peaceful street. Like all the houses it was made of wood. Steps led to the front door. Up I went and rang the bell. An old man opened the door. ‘Mr Hirsch?’

‘My husband’s been dead for six years,’ she said in rusty German. ‘You needn’t apologize, I’m often taken for a man and I’m used to it. You’re the German Vera was telling me about, right?’

Perhaps it was the confusion or the flight or the cab ride – I must have fainted and came to when the old woman threw a glass of water at my face.

‘You’re lucky you didn’t fall down the steps. When you’re ready, come and I’ll give you a whisky.’

The whisky burned inside me. The room was musty and smelt of age, of old flesh and old food. The same smell had suffused my grandparents’ house, I suddenly recalled, and just as suddenly I was seized by the fear of growing old that I’m continuously suppressing.

The woman was perched opposite, and scrutinizing me. Shafts of sunlight shone through the blinds onto her. She was completely bald. ‘You want to talk to me about Weinstein, my husband. Vera thinks it’s important that what happened is told. But it’s not a good story. My husband tried to forget it.’

I didn’t realize straight away who Karl Weinstein was. But as she started to talk I remembered. She didn’t realize she was not only telling his story but also touching upon my own past.

She spoke in an oddly monotonous voice. Weinstein had been professor of organic chemistry in Breslau until 1933. In 1941, when he was put in a concentration camp, his former assistant Tyberg put in a request for him to be sent to the RCW laboratories, which was granted. Weinstein was even quite pleased that he could work in his field again and that he was working with someone who appreciated him as a scientist, addressed him as Professor, and politely said goodbye in the evening when he was taken back to the camp along with the other forced labourers of the Works. ‘My husband didn’t cope well with life, nor was he very brave. He had no idea, or didn’t want to know, what was happening around him and what was coming for him, too.’

‘Were you with Weinstein at this time?’

‘I met Karl on the transport to Auschwitz in nineteen forty-one. And then again only after the war. I’m Flemish, you know, and could hide in Brussels to begin with, until they caught me. I was a beautiful woman. They conducted medical experiments on my scalp. I think that saved my life. But in nineteen fortyfive I was old and bald. I was twenty-three.’

One day they’d come to Weinstein, someone from the Works and someone from the SS. They’d told him how he must testify before the police, the prosecutor, and the judge. It was a matter of sabotage, a manuscript that he’d supposedly found in Tyberg’s desk, a conversation between Tyberg and a co-worker that he’d supposedly overheard.

I could picture Weinstein, as he was led into my office, in his prisoner’s clothes, and gave his testimony.

‘He hadn’t wanted to at first. It was all false and Tyberg hadn’t been bad to him. But they showed him they would crush him. They didn’t even promise him his life, only that he could survive a little longer. Can you imagine that? Then my husband was transferred and simply forgotten in the other camp. We’d arranged where we would meet should the whole thing ever be over. In Brussels on the Grand Place. I came there simply by chance in the spring of nineteen forty-six, not thinking of him any more. He’d been waiting there for me since the summer of nineteen forty-five. He recognized me immediately although I’d become this bald, old lady. Quite irresistible!’ She laughed.

I couldn’t bring myself to tell her that I was the one Weinstein had delivered his testimony to. I also couldn’t tell her why it was so important to me. But I had to know. And so I asked, ‘Are you certain that the testimony your husband gave was false?’

‘I don’t understand. I’ve told you what he told me.’ Her face turned cold. ‘Get out,’ she said, ‘get out.’

3 Do not disturb

I walked down the hill and came to the docks and warehouses by the bay. Far and wide I could see neither cab nor bus, nor subway station. I wasn’t even sure if San Francisco had a subway. I set off in the direction of the skyscrapers. The street didn’t have a name, just a number. In front of me a heavy, black Cadillac was crawling along. Every few steps it drew to a standstill, a black man in a pink silk suit got out, trampled a beer or coke can flat, and dropped it into a large blue plastic sack. A few hundred metres ahead I saw a store. As I came closer I saw it was barred like a fortress. I went in looking for a sandwich and a packet of Sweet Afton. The goods were behind grating and the checkout reminded me of a counter at the bank. I didn’t get a sandwich and no one knew what Sweet Afton was, and I felt guilty even though I hadn’t done anything. As I was leaving the store with a carton of Chesterfields, a freight train rattled past me in the middle of the street.

On the piers I came across a car rental and rented a Chevrolet. I was taken by the one-piece front seating. It reminded me of the Horch on whose front seat I was initiated into love by the wife of my Latin teacher. Together with the car I got a town plan with the 49 Mile Drive highlighted. I followed it without trouble, thanks to the signs everywhere. By the cliffs I found a restaurant. At the entrance I had to edge forward in a line before being led to a seat by the window. Mist was curling over the Pacific. The show captivated me, as though, beyond the rents in the fog, Japan’s coast would come into view any second. I ate a tuna steak, potato in aluminum foil, and iceberg lettuce salad. The beer was called Anchor Steam and tasted almost like a smoked beer in the Bamberg Schlenkerla. The waitress was attentive, kept refilling my coffee cup without my having to ask, enquired after my health and where I was from. She knew Germany, too; she’d visited her boyfriend at the US base in Baumholder once.

After the meal I stretched my legs, clambered around on the cliffs, and suddenly saw before me, more beautiful than I remembered it from films, the Golden Gate Bridge. I took off my coat, folded it, put it on a rock, and sat on it. The coast fell away steeply, beneath me bright sailing boats were crisscrossing, and a freight ship ploughed its gentle path.

I had planned to live at peace with my past. Guilt, atonement, enthusiasm and blindness, pride and anger, morality and resignation – I’d brought it all together in an elaborate balance. The past had become abstract. Now reality had caught up with me and was threatening that balance. Of course I’d let myself be manipulated as a prosecutor, I’d learned that much after 1945. One may question whether there is better manipulation and worse. Nevertheless, I didn’t think it was the same thing to be guilty of having served a putative great, bad cause, or to be used by someone as a pawn on the chessboard of a small, shabby intrigue I didn’t yet understand.

The stuff Frau Hirsch had told me, what did it amount to exactly? Tyberg and Dohmke, whom I’d investigated, had been convicted purely on the strength of Weinstein’s false testimony. By any standard, even the National Socialist one, the judgment was a miscarriage of justice and my investigation was wrong. I’d been taken in by a plot made to trap Tyberg and Dohmke. My memory of it started to come back. In Tyberg’s desk hidden documents had been found that revealed a promising plan, essential to the war effort, initially pursued by Tyberg and his research group, then apparently abandoned. The accused repeatedly stressed to me and to the court that they couldn’t have followed two promising paths of research at the same time. They had only put the other one on a backburner, to return to later. The whole thing was under the strictest secrecy and their discovery had been so exciting that they’d safeguarded it with the jealousy of the scientist. That had been the only reason for the cache in the desk. That might have got them off, but Weinstein reported a conversation between Dohmke and Tyberg in which both agreed to suppress the discovery to bring about a quick end to the war, even at the price of a German defeat. And now this conversation had never actually taken place.

The sabotage story had unleashed outrage at the time. The second charge of racial defilement hadn’t convinced me, even then: my investigation hadn’t produced any evidence that Tyberg had had intercourse with a Jewish forced labourer. He was sentenced to death on that account, too. I pondered who from the SS and who from the economic side back then could have set up the conspiracy.

There was a constant flow of traffic over the Golden Gate Bridge. Where did everyone want to get to? I drove to the approach, parked my car beneath the monument to the architect, and walked to the middle of the bridge. I was the only pedestrian. I gazed down onto the metallic gleaming Pacific. Behind me limousines whizzed by with a callous regularity. A cold wind blew round the suspension cables. I was freezing.

With some trouble I found the hotel again. It soon turned dark. I asked the porter where I could get a bottle of sambuca. He sent me along to a liquor store two streets away. I scanned the shelves in vain. The proprietor regretted he didn’t have sambuca, but he did have something similar, wouldn’t I like to try Southern Comfort? He packed the bottle in a brown paper bag for me, and twisted the paper shut round the neck. On the way back to the hotel I bought a hamburger. With my trench coat, the brown paper bag in one hand, and the burger in the other I felt like an extra in a second-rate American cop film.

Back in the hotel room I lay down on the bed and switched on the TV. My toothbrush glass was wrapped in cellophane, I tore it off and poured myself a shot. Southern Comfort really doesn’t bear the slightest resemblance to sambuca. Still, it tasted pleasant and trickled quite naturally down my throat. Nor did the football on TV have the least bit in common with our football. But I understood the principle and followed the match with increasing excitement.

After a while I applauded when my team had made decent headway with the ball. Finally I must have whooped when my team won, because there came a knocking through the wall. I tried to get up and thump back, but the bed kept tipping up at the side I was trying to get out of. It wasn’t that important. Main thing was that topping up the glass still went smoothly. I left the last gulp in the bottle for the flight back.

In the middle of the night I woke up. Now I felt drunk. I was lying fully clothed on the bed, the TV was spitting out images. When I switched it off, my head imploded. I managed to take off my jacket before falling asleep again.

When I woke up, for a brief moment I didn’t know where I was. My room was cleaned and tidied, the ashtray empty, and the toothbrush glass back in cellophane. My watch said half past two. I sat on the toilet for a long time, clutching my head. When I washed my hands I avoided looking in the mirror. I found a packet of aspirin in my toilet bag, and twenty minutes later the headache was gone. But with every movement the brain fluid slapped hard against the walls of my skull, and my stomach was crying out for food while telling me it wouldn’t keep it down. At home I’d have made a camomile tea, but I didn’t know the American word, nor where I’d find it, nor how I’d boil the water.

I took a shower, first hot, then cold. In the hotel’s Tea Room I got a black coffee and toast. I took a few steps out onto the street. The way led me to the liquor store. It was still open. I didn’t begrudge the Southern Comfort the previous night, I’m not one to nurse a grudge. To make this clear I bought another bottle. The proprietor said: ‘Better than any of your sambuca, hey?’ I didn’t want to contradict him.

This time I intended to get drunk systematically. I got undressed, hung the ‘Do not disturb’ sign outside my door and my suit over the clothes stand. I stuffed my worn undershirt into a plastic bag provided for the purpose and left it out in the corridor. I added my shoes and hoped that I’d find everything in a decent state the next morning. I locked the door from the inside, drew the curtains, turned on the TV, slipped into my pyjamas, poured my first glass, placed bottle and ashtray within reach on the bedside table, laid my cigarettes and folder of matches next to them, and myself in bed. Red River was on TV. I pulled the covers up to my chin, smoked, and drank.

After a while the images of the courtroom I’d appeared in, of the hangings I’d had to attend, of green and grey and black uniforms, and of my wife in her League of German Girls outfit began to fade. I could no longer hear the echo of boots in long corridors, no Führer’s speeches on the People’s Receiver, no sirens. John Wayne was drinking whisky, I was drinking Southern Comfort, and as he set off to tidy things up I was with him all the way.

By the following midday, the return to sobriety had become a ritual. At the same time it was clear the drinking was over. I drove to the Golden Gate Park and walked for two hours. In the evening I found Perry’s, an Italian restaurant I felt almost as comfortable in as the Kleiner Rosengarten. I slept deeply and dreamlessly, and on Monday morning I discovered the American breakfast. At nine o’clock I gave Vera Müller a call. She would expect me for lunch.

At half past twelve I was standing in front of her house on Telegraph Hill with a bouquet of yellow roses. She wasn’t the blue-rinsed caricature I’d envisaged. She was around my age and if I had aged as a man as she had as a woman, I’d have had reason to be content. She was tall, slim, angular, wore her grey hair piled high, over her jeans a Russian smock, her spectacles were hanging from a chain, and there was a mocking expression hovering round her grey eyes and thin mouth. She wore two wedding rings on her left hand.

‘Yes, I’m a widow.’ She had noticed my glance. ‘My husband died three years ago. You remind me of him.’ She led me into the sitting room through the windows of which I could see Alcatraz. ‘Do you take Pastis as an aperitif? Help yourself, I’ll just pop the pizza into the oven.’

When she returned I had poured two glasses. ‘I had to confess something to you. I’m not a historian from Hamburg, I’m a private detective from Mannheim. The man whose advertisement you answered, not a Hamburg historian either, was murdered and I’m trying to find out why.’

‘Do you already know by whom?’

‘Yes and no.’ I told my story.

‘Did you mention your connection to the Tyberg affair to Frau Hirsch?’

‘No, I didn’t dare.’

‘You really do remind me of my husband. He was a journalist, a famous raging reporter, but each time he wrote a piece, he was afraid. It’s good, by the way, you didn’t tell her. It would have upset her too much, because of her relationship with Karl. Did you know, he had an amazing career again, in Stanford? Sarah never adapted to that world. She stayed with him because she thought she owed it to him for his having waited so long. And at the same time he only lived with her out of a sense of loyalty. The two of them never married.’

She led me out onto the kitchen balcony and fetched the pizza. ‘One thing I do like about growing older is that principles develop holes. I never thought I’d be able to eat with an old Nazi prosecutor without choking on my pizza. Are you still a Nazi?’

I choked on my pizza.

‘All right, all right. You don’t look like one to me. Do you sometimes have problems with your past?’

‘At least two bottles of Southern Comfort’s worth.’ I told her how the weekend had been spent.

At six o’clock we were still sitting together. She told me about her start in America. At the Olympic Games in Berlin she’d met her husband and moved with him to Los Angeles. ‘Do you know what I found most difficult? Wearing my bathing suit in the sauna.’

Then she had to leave for her night shift with the help line. I went back to Perry’s and merely took a six-pack of beer to bed with me. The next morning I wrote Vera Müller a postcard over breakfast, settled the bill, and drove to the airport. In the evening I was in Pittsburgh. There was snow on the ground.

4 Demolishing Sergej

The cabs that took me to the hotel in the evening and to the ballet the next morning were every bit as yellow as those in San Francisco. It was nine, the ensemble was already in the midst of a rehearsal, at ten they took a break and I was directed to the Mannheimers. They were standing in tights and leotards next to the radiators, yoghurt in hand.

When I introduced myself and the subject of my visit, they could hardly believe I’d come all this way just for them.

‘Did you know about Sergej?’ Hanne turned to Joschka. ‘Hey, I mean, I feel just devastated.’

Joschka was startled, too. ‘If we can help Sergej in any way… I’ll have a word with the boss. It should be fine for us to start again at eleven o’clock. That way we can sit down together in the canteen and talk.’

The canteen was empty. Through the window I looked onto a park with tall, bare trees. Mothers were out with their children, Eskimos in padded overalls, romping around in the snow.

‘All right, I mean, it’s really important for me to share what I know about Sergej,’ she said. ‘I’d find it, like, absolutely awful, if someone thought… if someone got the wrong… Sergej, he’s so incredibly sensitive. And he’s so vulnerable, not at all macho. You see, that’s why he couldn’t have done it for starters, he was always terribly afraid of injuries.’

Joschka wasn’t so sure. He stirred the contents of his Styrofoam cup with a little plastic stick, contemplatively. ‘Herr Self, I don’t think Sergej maimed himself either. I just can’t imagine anyone doing that. But if anyone… You know, Sergej was always having crackpot ideas.’

‘How can you say such mean stuff?’ Hanne interrupted him. ‘I thought you were his friend. No way, that makes me, like, really sad.’

Joschka placed his hand on her arm. ‘But, Hanne, don’t you remember the evening we were entertaining the dancers from Ghana? He told us how, when he was a boy scout, he deliberately cut his hand with the potato peeler to get out of kitchen duty. We all laughed about it, you too.’

‘But you got it completely wrong. He only pretended he’d cut himself and wrapped a large bandage around it. If you’re going to, like, distort the truth like that… I mean, really, Joschka…’

Joschka didn’t appear convinced, but didn’t want to quarrel with Hanne. I inquired about the shape, and mood, Sergej was in during the last few months of the season.

‘Exactly,’ said Hanne. ‘That doesn’t fit with your strange suspicion either. He believed completely in himself, he absolutely wanted to add flamenco to his repertoire, and tried to get a scholarship to Madrid.’

‘But, Hanne, he didn’t get the scholarship, that’s the thing.’

‘But don’t you get it, the fact he applied for it, that had so much power somehow. And his relationship, that was finally going well in the summer with his German professor. You know, Sergej, he isn’t gay, but he can also love men. He’s absolutely fantastic that way, I think. And not just something brief, sexual, but like, really deep. It’s impossible not to like him. He’s so…’

‘Sweet?’ I suggested.

‘Yeah, sweet. Do you actually know him, Herr Self?’

‘Uh, could you tell me who the German professor is you mentioned?’

‘Was it really German, not law?’ Joschka frowned.

‘Oh, crap, you’re demolishing Sergej. He was a Germanist, such a cuddly guy. But his name… I don’t know if I should tell you.’

‘Hanne, the two of them hardly made a secret of it considering how they carried on round town. It’s Fritz Kirchenberg from Heidelberg. Maybe it’s a good idea for you to talk to him.’

I asked them about Sergej’s qualities as a dancer. Hanne answered first.

‘But that’s beside the point. Even if you’re not a good dancer you don’t have to hack your leg off. I’m not even going to discuss it. And I’m still convinced you’re wrong.’

‘I don’t have any concrete opinion as yet, Frau Fischer,’ I said to Hanne. ‘And I’d like to point out that Herr Mencke hasn’t lost his leg, merely broken it.’

‘I don’t know what sort of knowledge you have of ballet, Herr Self,’ said Joschka. ‘At the end of the day, it’s the same with us as it is everywhere else. There are the stars, and the ones who will be stars one day, and then there’s the solid middle rank of the ones who’ve let go of their daydreams of glory but don’t have to worry about earning a living. And then there are the rest – the ones who have to live in constant fear of whether there’ll be a next engagement, for whom it’s certainly over when they start to get older. Sergej belongs to the third group.’

Hanne didn’t contradict. She let her defiant expression show how completely out of order she felt this conversation was. ‘I thought you wanted to find out something about Sergej, the person. You men have nothing in your heads beyond careers, really.’

‘How did Herr Mencke envisage his future?’

‘On the side he’d always done ballroom dancing and he told me once he’d like to start a dance school, a perfectly conventional one, for fifteen- and sixteen-year-olds.’

‘That also proves he couldn’t have done anything to himself. Think it through, Joschka. How’s he supposed to become a dance teacher minus a leg?’

‘Did you also know about his dancing school plans, Frau Fischer?’

‘Sergej played around with lots of ideas. He’s so brilliantly creative and has an incredible imagination. He could also imagine doing something completely different, breeding sheep in Provence, or something.’

They had to get back to rehearsal. They gave me their telephone numbers in case other questions came to me, asked whether I had plans for the evening, and promised to set aside a complimentary ticket for me at the door. I watched them go. Joschka moved with concentration and there was a spring in his step, Hanne trod lightly, as though walking on air. Admittedly, she’d talked, like, a lot of nonsense, but she walked with conviction, and I’d have liked to watch her dance that evening. But Pittsburgh was far too cold. I had a car take me to the airport, flew to New York, and got a return flight that same evening to Frankfurt. I think I’m too old for America.

5 So whose goose are you cooking?

Over brunch in Café Gmeiner I drew up a programme for the rest of the week. Outside, the snow was falling in thick flakes. I’d have to root out the scoutmaster of the troop Mencke had belonged to, and speak to Professor Kirchenberg. And I wanted to talk to the judge who’d sentenced Tyberg and Dohmke to death. I had to know whether the sentence had been influenced from above.

Judge Beufer had been elevated to the Appellate Court in Karlsruhe after the war. At the main post office I found his name in the Karlsruhe telephone directory. His voice sounded astonishingly young, and he remembered my name. ‘Master Self,’ he crooned in his Swabian accent. ‘Whatever became of him?’ He was willing to have me round for a talk that afternoon.

He lived in Durlach in a house on the hillside with a view of Karlsruhe. I could see the large gas tower with its welcoming inscription ‘Karlsruhe’. Judge Beufer opened the door in person. He had a soldier’s upright posture, was wearing a grey suit, beneath it a white shirt and a red tie with a silver tie pin. The collar of his shirt had become too large for the old, scraggy neck. Beufer was bald and his face had a heavy downward pull, bags under the eyes, jowls, chin. We’d always joked about his sticking-out ears in the public prosecutor’s office. They were more impressive than ever. He looked ill. He must be well over eighty.

‘So, he’s become a private detective. Isn’t he ashamed? He was a good lawyer, after all, a sharp prosecutor. I expected to see him back with us when the worst of it was over.’

We sat in his study and sipped sherry. He still read the New Legal Weekly. ‘Master Self hasn’t simply come to pay his old judge a visit.’ His little piggy eyes were twinkling shrewdly.

‘Do you remember the case of Tyberg and Dohmke? End of nineteen forty-three, beginning of forty-four. I was leading the investigation, Södelknecht was the prosecutor. And you were presiding over court.’

‘Tyberg and Dohmke…’ He spoke the names softly to himself a few times. ‘Yes, of course. They were sentenced to death and Dohmke was executed. Tyberg escaped. He went a long way, that man. And was a true gentleman, or is he still alive? Bumped into him once at a reception in Solitude, joked about old times. He certainly understood we all had to do our duty back then.’

‘What I’d like to know – was the court given signals from above regarding the outcome, or was it a perfectly normal trial?’

‘Why does that interest him? Whose goose is he cooking, that Master Self?’

The question was bound to come. I told him about a coincidental connection to Frau Müller and my meeting with Frau Hirsch. ‘I simply want to know what happened back then, and what role I played.’

‘To reopen the trial, what the lady told you is nowhere near enough. If Weinstein were still alive… but he isn’t. I don’t believe it anyway. A lawyer has his gut feeling, and the more clearly I remember, the more certain I am the verdict was right.’

‘And were there signals from above? I’m sure you won’t misunderstand me, Herr Beufer. We both know that German judges knew how to preserve their independence even under extraordinary conditions. Nevertheless, now and then some interested party would try to exert influence, and I’d like to know whether there was an interested party in this trial.’

‘Oh, Self, why won’t he let sleeping dogs lie? But if it’s essential for his peace of mind… Weismüller called me a few times back then, the former general director. His focus was to clear it out of the way and stop people gossiping about RCW. Perhaps the sentencing of Tyberg and Dohmke met with his approval, simply for that reason. Nothing clears up a case quite so effectively as a quick hanging. Whether there were other reasons he wanted the sentence… No idea, I don’t think so, though.’

‘That was it?’

‘Weismüller also had some business with Södelknecht. Tyberg’s defence counsel had brought forward someone from the RCW as a witness who talked himself blue in the face on the witness stand, and Weismüller intervened on his behalf. Hang on, that man also went a long way, yes, Korten is the name, the current general director. There we have them, the whole merry crew of general directors.’ He laughed.

How could I have forgotten? I had been glad not to have to bring my friend and brother-in-law into it myself, but then the defence had hauled him in. I’d been glad because Korten had worked so closely together with Tyberg that his participation in the trial could have cast suspicion on him, or damaged his career at least. ‘Was it known at court then that Korten and I are brothers-in-law?’

‘My word. I’d never have thought it. But you advised your brother-in-law badly. He spoke out so strongly for Tyberg that Södelknecht almost arrested him on the spot at the hearing. Very decent, too decent. It didn’t help Tyberg one bit. It smells just a little fishy when a witness for the defence has nothing to say about the deed and only spouts friendly platitudes about the accused.’

There was nothing left to ask Beufer. I drank the second sherry he poured me, and chatted about colleagues we’d both known. Then I took my leave.

‘Master Self, now he’s off to follow that sniffing nose again. The quest for justice won’t let go of him, eh? Will he show his face again at old Beufer’s? Be delighted.’

On top of my car were ten centimetres of fresh snow. I swept it off, was glad to make it safely down the hill, onto the autobahn. And once I was on that, I drove north in the wake of a snowplough. It had turned dark. The car radio reported traffic jams and played hits from the sixties.

6 Potatoes, cabbage, and hot black pudding

In the thick snow I missed the turn-off to Mannheim at the Walldorf intersection. Then the snowplough drove into a parking lot, and I was lost. I made it as far as the Hardtwald service area.

At the stand-up snack bar I waited with my coffee for the driving snow to stop. I stared into the swirling flakes. All at once pictures from the past came vividly alive.

It was on an evening in August or September, 1943. Klara and I had to leave our apartment in Werderstrasse, and had just completed the move to Bahnhofstrasse. Korten was over for dinner. There were potatoes, cabbage, and hot black pudding. He enthused about our new apartment, praised Klara for the meal, and this annoyed me, because he knew what a pitiful cook Klärchen was and it couldn’t have escaped him that the potatoes were over-salted and the cabbage burnt. Then Klara left us men with our cigars for a bit of male conversation.

At that time the Tyberg and Dohmke file had just reached my desk. I wasn’t convinced by the results of the police investigation. Tyberg was from a good family, had volunteered for the front, and it was only against his will, as his research work was essential to the war effort, that he’d been left behind at the RCW. I couldn’t picture him as a saboteur.

‘You know Tyberg, don’t you? What do you think of him?’

‘A man beyond reproach. We were all horrified that he and Dohmke were arrested at work, without anyone knowing why. Member of the national German hockey team in nineteen thirty-six, winner of the Professor Demel Medal, a gifted chemist, esteemed colleague and respected superior – no, I really don’t understand what you people at the police and prosecutors are thinking.’

I explained to him that an arrest wasn’t a conviction and that in a German court no one was sentenced unless the necessary evidence was at hand. This was an old theme of ours from our student days. Korten had come across a book at a bookstall about famous miscarriages of justice and argued for nights on end with me whether human justice can avoid miscarriages. That was my contention, Korten’s position being the opposite, that one has to accept they occur.

A winter evening during our student days in Berlin came to my mind. Klara and I were tobogganing on the Kreuzberg, and were expected back at the Korten household for supper. Klara was seventeen, I’d encountered her and overlooked her, thousands of times, as Ferdinand’s little sister. I’d only taken the brat tobogganing with me because she’d begged so. Actually, I was hoping to meet Pauline on the toboggan run, help her up after a fall or protect her from the ghastly Kreuzberg street urchins. Was Pauline there? At any rate, all of a sudden I only had eyes for Klara. She was wearing a fur jacket and a bright scarf, and her blonde curls were flying, and snowflakes melting upon her glowing cheeks. On the way home we kissed for the first time. Klara had to persuade me into going up to supper. I didn’t know how to behave towards her in front of her parents and brother. When I left later she found some pretext to bring me to the front door and gave me a secret kiss.

I caught myself smiling out of the window. In the parking lot a military convoy stopped, also unable to make headway in the snow. My car was swathed in another thick layer. At the counter I fetched a coffee refill and a sandwich. I took up my place at the window again.

Korten and I had also come round to talking about Weinstein that time. An irreproachable man as the accused and a Jew as the prosecution witness – I wondered whether I shouldn’t drop the investigation. I couldn’t tell Korten about Weinstein’s significance, nor could I let the opportunity of learning something about Weinstein slip by.

‘What do you actually think about using Jews at the Works?’

‘You know, Gerd, that we’ve always thought differently about the Jewish question. I’ve never had any truck with anti-Semitism. I find it difficult having forced labourers in the plant, but whether they’re Jews or Frenchmen or Germans is all the same. In our laboratory we have Professor Weinstein working with us and it’s a crying shame that the man can’t be behind a lectern or in his own laboratory. His service to us is invaluable, and if you go by his appearance and cast of mind, you couldn’t find anyone more German. A professor of the old school, up until nineteen thirty-three he had a chair in organic chemistry at Breslau. Everything that Tyberg is as a chemist he owes, as his pupil and assistant, to Weinstein. The loveable, scatter-brained academic type.’

‘And if I were to tell you that he’s the one accusing Tyberg?’

‘My God, Gerd. And with Weinstein so fond of his student Tyberg… I really don’t know what to say.’

A snowplough made its way to the parking lot. The driver got down and came into the snack bar. I asked him how I could get to Mannheim.

‘A colleague has just set off for the Heidelberg intersection. Get going quickly before the lane is blocked again.’

It was seven. At a quarter to eight I was at the Heidelberg intersection and at nine in Mannheim. I had to stretch my legs and revelled in the deep snow. I’d have liked to have driven a troika through Mannheim.

7 What exactly are you investigating now?

At eight I awoke, but I didn’t manage to get up. It had all been too much, the night flight from New York, the trip to Karlsruhe, the discussion with Beufer, the memories, and the odyssey along the snow-covered autobahn.

At eleven Philipp called. ‘Wow, caught you at last? Where have you been gadding off to? Your dissertation is ready.’

‘Dissertation?’ I didn’t know what he was talking about.

‘Door-induced fractures. A contribution to the morphology of auto-aggression. You did commission it.’

‘Oh, yes. And now there’s a scientific treatise? When can I have it?’

‘Anytime. Just come by the hospital and pick it up.’

I got up and made some coffee. The sky was still heavy with snow. Turbo came in from the balcony, powdered white.

My refrigerator was empty and I went shopping. It’s nice that they go easier than they used to on sprinkling salt in towns. Instead of wading through brown slush, I walked on crunchy, tightly packed fresh snow. Children were building snowmen and having snowball fights. In the bakery at the Wasserturm I bumped into Judith.

‘Isn’t it a splendid day?’ Her eyes were sparkling. ‘Before, when I still had to go to work, the snow always irritated me. Clear the windshield, car doesn’t start, drive slowly, get stuck. I was really missing out on something!’

‘Come on,’ I said, ‘let’s have a winter walk to the Kleiner Rosengarten. You’re invited.’

This time she didn’t say no. I felt somewhat old-fashioned next to her; she in her padded jacket, trousers, and high boots that are probably a spin-off of space technology, me in my overcoat and galoshes. On the way I told her about my investigations in the Mencke case and the snow in Pittsburgh. She also asked straight away whether I’d seen the little lady from Flashdance. I was getting curious about the film.

Giovanni was wide-eyed. When Judith had gone to the restroom he came up to our table. ‘Old lady notsa good? New lady better? Next time you getta Italian lady from me, then you have peace.’

‘German man don’t needa the peace, need lotsa, lotsa, ladies.’

‘Then it’s lotsa good food you need.’ He recommended the steak pizzaiola preceded by the chicken soup. ‘The chef slaughtered the chicken himself this morning.’ I ordered the same for Judith and a bottle of Chianti Classico to go with it.

‘I was in America for another reason, Judith. The Mischkey case won’t leave me in peace. I haven’t made any progress. But the trip confronted me with my own past.’

She listened attentively to my report.

‘What exactly are you investigating now? And why?’

‘I don’t know. I’d like to talk with Tyberg, if he’s still alive.’

‘Oh, he’s alive all right. I often wrote letters to him, sent him business reports or birthday presents. He lives on Lake Maggiore, in Monti sopra Locarno.’

‘Then I’d also like to speak to Korten again.’

‘And what does he have to do with Peter’s death?’

‘I don’t know, Judith. What wouldn’t I give to be able to get to the bottom of it? At least Mischkey has got me working on the past. Have you had any further thoughts about the murder?’

She’d considered taking the story to the press. ‘I find it simply unbearable for the whole thing to end like this.’

‘Do you mean not knowing? It won’t improve by going to the press.’

‘No. I believe the RCW hasn’t really paid. Regardless of the way things went with old Schmalz, it does fall under their responsibility somehow. And besides, perhaps we’ll discover more if the press stirs up a hornets’ nest.’

Giovanni brought the steaks. We ate for a while in a silence. I couldn’t warm to the idea of going to the press. After all, I had been commissioned by the RCW to find Mischkey, at least the RCW had paid me for it. All that Judith knew and could go to the papers with she knew from me. My professional loyalty was at stake. I was annoyed I’d accepted Korten’s money. Otherwise I’d be free now.

I explained my concern to her. ‘I need to consider whether I can change my spots, but I’d prefer you to wait.’

‘All right then. I was perfectly happy back then not to have to foot your bill, but I should have known straight away it would come at a price.’

We were finished with dinner. Giovanni brought two sambucas. ‘With the compliments of the house.’ Judith told me about her life as an unemployed person. To begin with she had enjoyed the freedom, but slowly the problems began. She couldn’t expect the Unemployment Office to find her another comparable job. She’d have to get going herself. At the same time she wasn’t sure if she wanted to embark on a life as an executive assistant again.

‘Do you know Tyberg personally? I last saw him forty years ago and I don’t know if I’d recognize him again.’

‘Yes, at the RCW centenary, I was assigned as his Girl Friday, to look after him. Why?’

‘Would you like to come with me if I visit him in Locarno? I’d like that.’

‘So you really want to know. How do you propose to make contact with him?’

I pondered.

‘Leave it to me,’ she said. ‘I’ll set it up somehow. When do we go?’

‘How soon could you organize a meeting with Tyberg?’

‘Sunday? Monday? I can’t say. Maybe he’s in the Bahamas.’

‘Set the date for as soon as possible.’

8 On the Scheffel Terrace

Professor Kirchenberg was willing to see me straight away when he heard it had to do with Sergej. ‘The poor boy, and you want to help him. Then come round right now. I’m in the Palais Boisserée all afternoon.’

From the press coverage of a trial involving the German department, I knew it was housed in the Palais Boisserée. The professors considered themselves rightful descendants of the early princely residents. When rebellious students had profaned the palais, an example had been made of them with the help of the law.

Kirchenberg was particularly princely in his professorial manner. He had thinning hair, contact lenses, a gorged, pink face, and, in spite of his tendency to corpulence, he moved with a light-footed elegance. As a greeting he clasped my hand in both of his. ‘Isn’t it simply shocking what has befallen Sergej?’

I replied with my queries about Sergej’s state of mind, career plans, finances.

He leaned back in his armchair. ‘Serjoscha has been shaped by his difficult youth. The years between eight and fourteen in Roth, a bigoted garrison town in Franken, were sheer martyrdom for the child. A father who could only live out his homoeroticism in military power postures, a mother as busy as a bee, good-hearted, utterly weak-willed. And the tramp, tramp, tramp,’ he drummed his knuckles on the desktop, ‘of soldiers marching in and out every day. Listen hard.’ With one hand he made a gesture commanding my silence, with the other he kept up the drumming. Slowly the hand grew still. Kirchenberg sighed. ‘It’s only with me that he’s been able to work through those years.’

When I broached the suspicion of self-mutilation, Kirchenberg was beside himself. ‘That’s so laughable, it’s ridiculous. Sergej has a very loving relationship with his body, almost narcissistic. Amid all the prejudices doing the rounds about us gays, surely this much at least is understood, that we take better care of our bodies than the average heterosexual. We are our body, Herr Self.’

‘Was Sergej Mencke really gay, then?’

‘Such prejudice in your questions,’ said Kirchenberg, almost pityingly. ‘You’ve never sat on the Scheffel Terrace reading Stefan George. Do it sometime. Then perhaps you’ll feel that homoeroticism isn’t a question of being, but rather of becoming. Sergej isn’t, he’s becoming.’

I took my leave from Professor Kirchenberg and passed Mischkey’s apartment on the way to the castle. And I did spend a little time on the Scheffel Terrace. I was cold. Or was I becoming cold? There was no becoming going on, perhaps I couldn’t expect it without Stefan George.

In Café Gundel their special Christmas cookies, embossed with local sights, were on display already. I purchased a bagful, intending to surprise Judith with them on the journey to Locarno.

Back in the office everything ran like clockwork. From Information I obtained the telephone number of the Catholic priest’s office in Roth; the chaplain was only too happy to interrupt his sermon preparation to inform me that the leader of the Catholic Scout troop in Roth since time immemorial had been Joseph Maria Jungbluth, senior teacher. I reached Senior Teacher Jungbluth immediately thereafter. He said he’d be glad to meet me the next day in the early afternoon to talk about little Siegfried.

Judith had fixed a date with Tyberg for Sunday afternoon, and we decided to travel on Saturday. ‘Tyberg looks forward to meeting you.’

9 And then there were three

Mannheim to Nürnberg on the new autobahn should take two hours. The Schwabach/Roth exit comes thirty kilometres before Nürnberg. One day Roth will lie on the Augsburg- Nürnberg autobahn. I won’t be around then.

Fresh snow had fallen in the night. On the journey I had the choice of two open lanes, a well-worn one on the right and a narrow one for overtaking. Passing a truck was a lurching adventure. Three and a half hours later, I arrived. In Roth there are a couple of half-timbered houses, a few sandstone buildings, the Evangelical and the Catholic churches, pubs that have adapted themselves to military needs, and lots of barracks. Not even a local patriot could describe Roth as the Pearl of Franken. It was just before one and I picked an inn. In the Roter Hirsch, which had resisted the trend for fast food and had even retained its old furnishings, the proprietor did the cooking himself. I asked the waitress for a typically Bavarian dish. She didn’t understand my request. ‘Bavarian? We’re in Franken.’ So I asked her to recommend a typical dish from Franken. ‘Everything,’ she said. ‘Our entire menu is Frankish. Including the coffee.’ Helpful breed of folk here. Pot luck. I ordered Saure Zipfel with fried potatoes, and a dark beer.

Saure Zipfel are bratwurst, but they’re not fried, they’re heated up in a stock of vinegar, onions, and spices. And they taste like it, too. The fried potatoes were deliciously crispy. The waitress softened enough to point out the way to Allersberger Strasse where Senior Teacher Jungbluth lived.

Jungbluth opened the door in civilian clothes. In my mind’s eye I’d pictured him in long socks, knee-length brown trousers, blue neckerchief, and a wide-brimmed scout’s hat. He couldn’t recall the scout camp at which the young Mencke wore a real or pretend bandage to shirk washing-up duty. But he remembered other incidents.

‘Siegfried liked getting out of chores. In school, as well, where he was in my class in the first and second year. You know, he was a frightened child – and a cringing one. I don’t understand much about medicine, beyond first aid, of course, which I need as senior teacher and scoutmaster. But I would think you need a certain level of courage for self-mutilation, and I can’t imagine Siegfried having that courage. Now his father, on the other hand, he’s made of different stuff.’

He was showing me to the door when he remembered something else. ‘Would you like to see some photos?’ The pictures in the album were of various combinations of scouts, tents, campfires, bicycles. I saw children singing, laughing, and fooling around, but I could also see in their eyes that the snapshots were engineered by Senior Teacher Jungbluth. ‘That’s Siegfried.’ He pointed to a rather frail blond boy with a reticent look on his face. A few photos later I came across him again. ‘What’s wrong with his leg?’ His left leg was in plaster. ‘Right,’ said Senior Teacher Jungbluth. ‘An unpleasant story. For six months the accident insurance tried to stick me with negligence. But Siegfried just had a careless fall when we were in the stalagmite caves in Pottenstein, and broke his leg. I can’t be everywhere at once.’ He looked at me seeking agreement. I was glad to concur.

On the way home, I took stock. Not much remained to be done on the Sergej Mencke case. I still wanted to take a look at Philipp’s young scholar’s thesis, and I’d saved my visit to Sergej in the hospital for last. I was tired of them all, the senior teachers, the army captains, the gay German professors, the whole ballet scene, and Sergej too, even before I’d seen him. Had I grown weary of my profession? In the Mischkey case I’d already let my professional standards drop, and as for my distaste for the Mencke case, it wouldn’t have been there before. Should I call it quits? Did I want to live beyond eighty anyway? I could get my life insurance paid out, that would feed me for twelve years. I decided to talk to my tax adviser and insurance agent in the new year.

I drove westwards, into the setting sun. As far as my eye could see the snow gleamed in a rosy hue. The sky was tinted the blue of pale porcelain. In the Franken villages and small towns I drove past, smoke unfurled from the chimneys. The homely light in the windows rekindled old desires for security. Homesick for Nowhere.

Philipp was still on duty when I looked him up in the station at seven. ‘Willy is dead,’ he greeted me dejectedly. ‘The idiot. To die of a burst appendix these days is just ridiculous. I don’t understand why he didn’t call me; he must have been in terrible pain.’

‘You know, Philipp, I’ve often had the impression in the years since Hilde’s death that he didn’t actually have the will to live.’

‘These silly husbands and widowers. If he’d just said the word, I know women who’d make him forget any number of Hildes. What’s become of your Brigitte, by the way?’

‘She’s running around in Rio. When’s the funeral?’

‘A week from today. Two p.m. at the main cemetery in Ludwigshafen. I had to see to it all. There’s no one else. Would a red sandstone gravestone with a screech owl on it meet with your approval? We’ll pool resources, you, Eberhard, and me, so that he gets planted decently.’

‘Have you thought of the announcements? And we’ll have to inform the dean of his old faculty. Could your secretary do that?’

‘That’s fine. I wish I could join you to have a bite to eat. But I can’t get away. Don’t forget the dissertation.’

And then there were three. No more Doppelkopf. I went home and opened a can of sardines. I wanted to try empty sardine cans on my Christmas tree this year and had to start collecting them. It was almost too late to get enough together before Christmas. Should I invite Philipp and Eberhard next Friday for a funeral feast of sardines in oil?

‘Door-Induced Fractures’ was fifty pages long. The system underlying the work emerged as a combination of doors and breaks. The introduction contained a diagram, the horizontal of which depicted the various fracture-inducing doors, and the vertical the door-induced fractures. Most of the 196 squares contained figures revealing how often the corresponding constellation had cropped up at the city hospital in the last twenty years.

I looked for the line ‘car door’ and the column ‘tibia fracture’. At the point they met I found the number 2 and afterwards in the text the respective case histories. Although all names had been removed I recognized Sergej’s in one. The other dated back to 1972. A nervous cavalier, while helping his lady into the car, had shut the door too swiftly. The study could only cite one case of self-mutilation. A failed goldsmith had hoped to gain heaps of gold with his insured, and broken, right thumb. In the furnace cellar he had placed his right hand in the frame of the iron door and slammed it shut with his left. The affair only came apart because, with the insurance money already paid, he had bragged about his coup. He told the police that as a child he’d attached his wobbly milk-teeth to the door handle with a thread and pulled them out. That’s what had given him the idea.

The decision to call Frau Mencke and enquire about young Siegfried’s methods of tooth extraction was one I put on ice.

Yesterday I’d been too tired to stay up to watch Flashdance, borrowed from the video rental on Seckenheimer Strasse. Now I slid in the cassette. Afterwards I danced under the shower. Why hadn’t I stayed longer in Pittsburgh?

10 Stop thief

In Basle Judith and I took our first break. We drove off the autobahn into town and parked on Münster-Platz. It was covered in snow and was free of aggravating Christmas decorations. We walked a few steps to Café Spielmann, found a table by the window, and had a view over the Rhine and the bridge with the small chapel in the middle.

‘Now tell me in detail how you set this up with Tyberg,’ I asked Judith over a bowl of muesli, which was particularly delicious here, with lots of cream and without an overabundance of oat flakes.

‘During the centenary when I was assigned to him he invited me to look him up if I was ever in Locarno. I mentioned this and said I had to chauffeur my elderly uncle,’ she placed a soothing hand on mine, ‘to look for a holiday home there. I added that he knew this elderly uncle from the war years.’ Judith was proud of her diplomatic move. I was concerned.

‘Won’t Tyberg throw me out on the spot when he recognizes me as the former Nazi prosecutor? Wouldn’t it have been better to have told him straight out?’

‘I did consider it, but then perhaps he wouldn’t even have let the former Nazi prosecutor over his threshold.’

‘And why elderly uncle, actually, and not elderly friend?’

‘That smacks of lover. I think Tyberg was interested in me as a woman, and perhaps he wouldn’t see me if he thought I was firmly attached to someone else, especially if I brought this someone with me. You are a sensitive private detective.’

‘Yes. I’m perfectly willing to face up to the responsibility of having been Tyberg’s prosecutor. But should I confess to him in one fell swoop that I’m your lover, not your uncle?’

‘Are you asking me?’ She said it abruptly yet playfully, and got out her knitting as though settling down to a longer discussion.

I lit a cigarette. ‘You’ve interested me as a woman time and again, and now I wonder whether I was just an old dodderer to you, avuncular and sexless.’

‘What are you after now? “You’ve interested me as a woman time and again.” If you were interested in me in the past then leave it. If you’re interested in the present then say so. You always prefer taking responsibility for the past rather than for the present.’ Knit two, purl two.

‘I don’t have a problem saying I’m interested in you, Judith.’

‘Listen, Gerd, of course I see you as a man, and I like you as a man. It never went far enough for me to make the first move. And certainly not in the past few weeks. But what sort of agonized first move is this, or isn’t it one? “I don’t have a problem saying I’m interested in you” when you obviously have an enormous problem just squeezing that roundabout, cautious sentence out. Come on, let’s get going.’ She wrapped the started pullover sleeve round the needles and wound more wool round it.

My mind went blank. I felt humiliated. We didn’t exchange a word all the way to Olten.

Judith had found Dvořák’s Cello Concerto on the radio and was knitting.

What had actually humiliated me? Judith had only hit me around the head with what I’d felt myself in recent months: the lack of clarity in my feelings towards her. But she’d done it so unkindly by quoting myself back at me that I felt exposed and skewered. I told her so near Zofingen.

She let her knitting sink to her lap and stared out in front of her at the road for a long while.

‘When I was an executive assistant I so often encountered men who wanted something from me, but didn’t put themselves on the line. They’d like to have something going with me, but at the same time they’d pretend they didn’t. They’d arrange things so they could immediately retreat without getting really involved. It seemed to me that was the lie of the land with you, as well. You make the first move, but perhaps it isn’t really one, a gesture that costs you nothing and has no risk attached. You talk about humiliation… I didn’t want to humiliate you. Oh, shit, why are the only little wounds you notice your own?’ She turned her head away. It sounded as if she was crying. But I couldn’t see.

By Lucerne it was getting dark. When we reached Wassen I didn’t want to drive any further. The autobahn was cleared, but it had started snowing. I knew the Hotel des Alpes from earlier Adriatic expeditions. There, still, in Reception was the cage with the Indian mynah bird. When it saw us, it squawked, ‘Stop thief, stop thief.’

At dinner we had the creamy Zürcher Geschnetzeltes and diced roast potatoes. During the drive we had started to argue about whether success inevitably leads an artist to despise his audience. Röschen had once told me about a concert of Serge Gainsbourg’s in Paris where the more contemptuously Gainsbourg treated the audience, the more appreciatively they applauded. Since then this question has preoccupied me, and expanded in my mind into the larger problem of whether one can grow old without despising people either. Judith put up a lengthy resistance to this argument about the link between artistic success and scorn of others. Over the third glass of Fendant she gave in. ‘You’re right, Beethoven went deaf, after all. Deafness is the perfect expression of contempt for one’s environment.’

In my monastic single room I slept a sound, deep sleep. We set off early for Locarno. When we drove out of the Gotthard tunnel, winter was over.

11 Suite in B minor

We arrived toward midday, took rooms in a hotel by the lake, and lunched in the glassed-in veranda, looking out at the colourful boats. The sun beat warmly through the panes. I was nervous thinking about tea at Tyberg’s house. From Locarno a blue cable car goes up to Monti. At the halfway point, where the ascending cabin meets the descending one, there’s a station, Madonna del Sasso, a famous pilgrimage church, not beautiful to look at, but in a beautiful location. We walked that far on the Way of the Cross, strewn with large round pebbles. And then we took the cable car to save ourselves the rest of the climb.

We followed the curving street to Tyberg’s house on the small square with the post office. We were standing in front of a wall at least three metres high that came down to the street, with cast-iron railings running along it. The pavilion on the corner, and the trees and bushes behind the railings, underscored the elevated situation of the house and garden. We rang the bell, opened the heavy door, went up the steps to the front garden, and there facing us was a simple, red-painted, two-level house. Next to the entrance we saw a garden table and chairs, like the ones in beer-gardens. The table was awash with books and manuscripts. Tyberg unwrapped himself from a camel-hair blanket and came towards us, tall, with a slightly bent forward gait, a full head of white hair, a neat, short-trimmed grey beard, and bushy eyebrows. He was wearing a pair of half-spectacles, over the top of which he was now looking at us with curious brown eyes.

‘Dear Frau Buchendorff, lovely that you thought of me. And this is your good uncle. You are also welcome to Villa Sempreverde. We’ve met before, your niece tells me. No, wait,’ he deflected me as I was about to start talking, ‘I’ll work it out on my own. I’m working on my memoirs at the moment,’ he indicated the table, ‘and like to practise jogging my memory.’

He led us through the house to the back garden. ‘Shall we walk a little? The butler will make tea.’

The garden path followed the mountain upwards. Tyberg enquired after Judith’s health, her plans, her work at the RCW. He had a quiet, pleasant manner of putting his questions, and showing his interest to Judith by small observations. Nonetheless I was amazed at how openly Judith, albeit not mentioning my name or role in it all, recounted her departure from the RCW. And just as amazed at Tyberg’s reaction. He was neither sceptical regarding Judith’s picture of events, nor enraged by any of the participants, from Mischkey to Korten, nor did he express condolence or regret. He simply registered Judith’s account attentively.

With tea the butler brought us pastries. We sat in a large chamber with a grand piano that Tyberg referred to as the music room. Discussion had turned to the economic situation. Judith juggled with capital and labour, input and output, the balance of trade, and the gross national product. Tyberg and I connected over the notion of the Balkanization of the Federal Republic of Germany. He agreed so swiftly that to begin with I feared he’d misunderstood me and thought I meant there were too many Turks. But his mind, too, was on the decrease in the number of trains and in their punctuality, and how the post office worked less and continuously less reliably, and the police were getting more shameless by the day.

‘Yes,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘Also there are so many regulations that not even the bureaucrats themselves take them seriously any more, instead they apply them either rigidly or sloppily entirely by whim, and sometimes don’t apply them at all. I often wonder what sort of industrial society is going to grow out of all this. Post-democratic feudal bureaucracy?’

I love discussions like this. Unfortunately, although he may read a book now and again, Philipp’s sole interest is women, and Eberhard’s horizon doesn’t go beyond the sixty-four squares. Willy had thought in grand evolutionary perspectives and toyed with the idea that the world, or what humans leave of it, will be taken over by birds in the next millennium.

Tyberg scrutinized me for a long time. ‘Of course. Being Frau Buchendorff’s uncle doesn’t mean you have to be called Buchendorff. You are the retired public prosecutor Doctor Self.’

‘Not retired, dropped out in nineteen forty-five.’

‘Made to drop out, I bet,’ said Tyberg.

I didn’t want to explain myself. Judith noticed and jumped in. ‘Just leaving doesn’t mean much. Most of them went back. Uncle Gerd didn’t, not because he couldn’t, but because he no longer wanted to.’

Tyberg continued to look at me probingly. I felt ill at ease. What do you say to someone sitting opposite you whom you almost sent to the gallows due to an erroneous investigation? Tyberg wanted to know more. ‘So you didn’t want to remain a public prosecutor after nineteen forty-five. That’s interesting. What were your reasons?’

‘When I tried to explain it to Judith once she found my reasons to be more aesthetic than moral. I was disgusted by the attitude of my colleagues during and after their re-employment, the lack of any awareness of their own guilt. All right, I could have got involved again if I’d had a different attitude and kept the guilt in mind. But I’d have felt like an outsider, and so I preferred to stay properly outside.’

‘The longer you sit there facing me, the clearer I see you as the young prosecutor. Of course you’ve changed. But there’s still that sparkle in your eyes, more mischievous now, and that cleft in your chin was already a dimple back then. What were you thinking of, to wipe the floor with Dohmke and me like that? I’ve just been working on the trial in my memoirs.’

‘The trial came up again for me recently, as well. That’s why I’m glad to be able to talk to you. In San Francisco I met the partner of the late prosecution witness Professor Weinstein and discovered his testimony was false. Someone from the Works and an SS officer put pressure on him. Do you have any idea, or do you even know who could have had an interest in your and Dohmke’s disappearance? I hate to have been used as the tool of unknown interests.’

Tyberg rang a bell, the butler appeared, tidied up, and served sherry. Tyberg sat there, frowning, staring into space. ‘I started pondering this in prison while I was awaiting trial, and to this day I have found no answer. Time and again I’ve thought of Weismüller. That was also the reason I didn’t want to return to RCW immediately after the war. But I’ve no confirmation for this notion. I’ve also been preoccupied for a long time by how Weinstein could have given that testimony. That he made it to my desk, found the manuscript in the drawer, misinterpreted it, and reported me, I found devastating enough. But his testimony about a conversation between Dohmke and myself that never took place was even more devastating. I wondered if it was all for a few advantages at the camp. Now I hear he was forced. It must have been terrible for him. Did his partner know and tell you that he tried to contact me after the war, and I refused? I was too hurt and he must have been too proud to tell me in his letter about the pressure he’d been under.’

‘What happened to your research at the RCW, Herr Tyberg?’

‘Korten kept going with it. It was the result anyway of close cooperation between Korten, Dohmke, and myself. The three of us had also made the decision together that we would only pursue the one path to begin with, and put the other on the backburner. The whole thing was our baby, you see, that we jealously hatched and tended and didn’t let anyone near. We didn’t even let Weinstein into our confidence although he was an important part of our team, scientifically almost on equal footing. But you wanted to know what happened to our research. Since the oil crisis I wonder sometimes if it won’t become highly topical again all of a sudden. Fuel synthesis. We’d gone at it a different way from Bergius, Tropsch, and Fischer because from the outset we attributed great significance to the cost factor. Korten continued the development of our process with great dedication, and readied it for production. That work was, quite rightly, the basis of his swift ascent in the RCW even though after the end of the war the process itself was no longer of importance. Korten, I believe, had it patented, though, as the Dohmke-Korten-Tyberg process.’

‘I don’t know if you realize how dreadful I feel that Dohmke was hanged; and equally how happy I am that you managed to escape. It’s mere curiosity, of course, but would you mind telling me how you did it?’

‘That’s sort of a long story. I want to tell you, but… you will stay for dinner, won’t you? How about afterwards? I’ll just let them know so the butler can prepare the food and make a fire. And until then… Do you play an instrument, Herr Self?’

‘The flute, but I haven’t had any time to play all summer and autumn.’

He stood up, fetched a flute case from the Biedermeier cupboard and had me open it. ‘Do you think you can play this?’ It was a Buffet. I put it together and played a few scales. It had a wonderfully soft, yet clear tone, jubilant in the high reaches, in spite of my bad intonation after the long break. ‘Do you like Bach? How about the Suite in B minor?’

We played until dinner, after the Suite in B minor, Mozart’s Concerto in D major. He played the piano confidently and with great expression. I had to bluff my way through some of the fast passages. At the end of the pieces Judith laid her knitting aside and clapped.

We ate duck with chestnut stuffing, dumplings, and red cabbage. The wine was new to me, a fruity Merlot from Tessin. By the fire, Tyberg asked us to keep his story to ourselves. It would be made public soon, but until then discretion would be appreciated. ‘I was in Bruchsal Penitentiary, in the death cell waiting for my execution.’ He described the cell, the everyday routine on death row, knocking on the wall to communicate with Dohmke in the neighbouring cell, the morning Dohmke was taken away. ‘A few days later I was also taken, in the middle of the night. Two members of the SS were demanding my transfer to a concentration camp. And then I realized one of the SS officers was Korten.’ That same night he had been taken over the border beyond Lörrach by Korten and the other SS man. On the other side two gentlemen from Hoffmann La Roche were waiting for him. ‘The next morning I was drinking chocolate and eating croissants, as though it were the middle of peacetime.’

He could tell a good story. Judith and I listened, captivated. Korten. Again and again he filled me with amazement, or even admiration. ‘But why couldn’t this be made public?’

‘Korten is more modest than he appears. He emphatically asked me to hush up his role in my escape. I’ve always respected that, not only as a modest, but also as a wise gesture. The deed wouldn’t have sat well with the image of a top industrialist that he was fashioning then. It was only this summer that I revealed the secret. Korten’s standing is universally recognized these days, and I think he’ll be happy if the story appears in the portrait that Die Zeit wants to do next spring when he turns seventy. That’s why I told the reporter who was here doing research for the portrait some months ago.’

He put another log on the fire. It was eleven o’clock.

‘One other question, Frau Buchendorff, before the evening’s over. Would you care to work for me? Since I’ve been writing my memoirs I’ve been looking for someone to conduct research for me in the RCW archive, in other archives and in libraries, someone who’ll read things over with a critical eye, who’ll get used to my handwriting and type the final manuscript. I’d be happy if you could start on the first of January. You would be based mostly in Mannheim, and be here for an occasional week or two. The pay wouldn’t be worse than before. Think it over until tomorrow afternoon, give me a call, and if you say yes, we can discuss details tomorrow.’

He escorted us to the garden gate. The butler was waiting with the Jaguar to take us back to the hotel. Judith and Tyberg said goodbye with a kiss to the left and right cheek. When I shook his hand he smiled at me and winked. ‘Will we meet again, Uncle Gerd?’

12 Champagne and sardines on my own

At breakfast Judith asked what I thought of Tyberg’s proposal.

‘I liked him,’ I began.

‘I’m sure you did. You were quite a number, you two. When the prosecutor and his victim adjourned for chamber music, I couldn’t believe my ears. It’s all very well that you like him, so do I, but what do you think of his proposal?’

‘Accept it, Judith. I don’t believe a better thing could come along for you.’

‘And that I interest him as a woman doesn’t make the job difficult?’

‘But that can happen in any workplace, you’ll be able to deal with it. And Tyberg is a gentleman, he won’t grope you under your skirt during dictation.’

‘What will I do when he’s finished with his memoirs?’

‘I’ll come back to that in a minute.’ I stood, went over to the breakfast buffet, and, as a finale, helped myself to a crisp-bread with honey. Well, well, I thought. What kind of security is she after? Back at the table I said, ‘He’ll find you something. That should be the last of your worries.’

‘I’ll think it over again on a walk along the lake. Shall we meet for lunch?’

I knew how things would unfold. She’d accept the job, call Tyberg at four, and discuss details with him into the evening. I decided to look for my holiday home, left Judith a message wishing her luck in her negotiations with Tyberg, and drove off along the lake to Brissago, where I was transported by boat to Isola Bella and ate lunch. Afterwards I turned towards the mountains and drove in a wide sweep that took me down by Ascona to the lake once more. There was an abundance of holiday homes, that I could see. But then to reduce my life expectancy so drastically to be able to buy one from my life insurance, no, that didn’t appeal to me. Perhaps Tyberg would invite me to stay for the next vacation anyway.

When darkness fell I was back in Locarno, strolling through the festively decorated town. I was looking for sardine cans for my Christmas tree. In a delicatessen beneath the arcades I came across some Portuguese vintage sardines. I took two recent tins, one from last year in glowing greens and reds, the other from two years ago in simple white with gold lettering.

Back at the hotel reception a message was waiting from Tyberg. He’d like to have me picked up for dinner. Instead of calling him and having myself picked up I went to the hotel sauna, spent three pleasant hours there, and lay down in bed. Before falling asleep I wrote Tyberg a short letter, thanking him.

At eleven-thirty Judith knocked at my door. I opened up. She complimented me on my nightshirt, and we agreed on a departure time of eight o’clock.

‘Are you content with your decision?’ I asked.

‘Yes. The work on the memoirs will last two years, and Tyberg has already been giving some thought to afterwards.’

‘Wonderful. Then sleep well.’

I’d forgotten to open the window and was awakened by my dream. I was sleeping with Judith who, however, was the daughter I’d never had and was wearing a ridiculous red hula skirt. When I opened a can of sardines for the two of us, Tyberg came out, growing bigger and bigger, until he filled the whole room. I felt stifled and woke up.

I couldn’t go back to sleep and was glad when it was time for breakfast, even gladder when we were on the road at last. Beyond the Gotthard tunnel, winter began again, and it took us seven hours to reach Mannheim. I’d actually intended to visit Sergej that day, in hospital after a repeat operation, but I wasn’t up to it now. I invited Judith in for some champagne to celebrate her new job, but she had a headache.

So I had champagne and sardines on my own.

13 Can’t you see how Sergej is suffering?

Sergej Mencke was lying in a double room in the Oststadt Hospital on the garden side. The other bed was currently unoccupied. His leg was suspended from a kind of pulley and held in place at the correct slant by a metal frame and screw system. He’d spent the last three months, with the exception of a few weeks, in hospital and looked correspondingly miserable. Nonetheless I could clearly see that he was a handsome man. Light, blond hair, a longish, English face with a prominent chin, dark eyes, and a vulnerable, arrogant cast to the lips. Unfortunately his voice was petulant, maybe just as a result of the past months.

‘Wouldn’t it have been right to come and see me first, instead of bothering my entire social world?’

So he was one of those. A whiner. ‘And what would you have told me?’

‘That your suspicions are pure fantasy, they’re the product of a sick brain. Can you imagine mutilating your own leg like this?’

‘Oh, Herr Mencke.’ I pulled the chair to his bed. ‘There’s a lot I wouldn’t do myself. I could never cut open my thumb to avoid washing up. And what I, as a ballet dancer without a future, would do to make a million, I really couldn’t say.’

‘That silly story from scout camp. Where did you dredge that one up from?’

‘From bothering your social world. What was the story with the thumb again?’

‘That was a completely normal accident. I was carving tent pegs with my pocket knife. Yes, I know what you want to say. I’ve told the story differently, but only because it’s such a nice one, and my youth doesn’t provide many stories. And as for my future as a ballet dancer… Listen. You don’t exactly give the impression of a particularly rosy future yourself, but you wouldn’t go breaking a limb because of it.’

‘Tell me, Herr Mencke, how did you plan to finance the dance school you’ve talked about so often?’

‘Frederik was going to support me, Fritz Kirchenberg, I mean. He has stacks of money. If I’d wanted to cheat the insurance company I’d have thought up something a little cleverer.’

‘The car door isn’t that silly. But what would have been cleverer?’

‘I have no desire to discuss it with you. I only said if I’d wanted to cheat the insurance people.’

‘Would you be willing to undergo a psychiatric examination? That would really facilitate the insurance company’s decision.’

‘Absolutely not. I’m not going to have them tag me as mad. If they don’t pay up right away, I’m going to a lawyer.’

‘If you go to trial you won’t be able to avoid a psychiatric examination.’

‘Let’s wait and see.’

The nurse came in carrying a little dish with brightly coloured tablets. ‘The two red ones now, the yellow one before and the blue one after your meal. How are we today?’

Sergej had tears in his eyes as he looked at the nurse. ‘I can’t go on, Katrin. Nothing but pain and no dancing ever again. And now this gentleman from the insurance company wants to make me out to be a cheat.’

Nurse Katrin laid her hand on his forehead and glowered at me. ‘Can’t you see how Sergej is suffering? You should be ashamed of yourself! Leave him in peace. It’s always the same with insurance companies; first they make you pay through the nose and then they torture you because they don’t want to cough up.’

I couldn’t add anything to this conversation and fled. Over lunch I noted down keywords for my report to the Heidelberg Union Insurance. My conclusion was neither that of deliberate self-mutilation, nor mere accident. I could only gather together the points that spoke for one or the other. Should the insurance not wish to pay they wouldn’t have a bad case.

As I was crossing the street, a car spattered me from head to toe in slushy snow. I was already in a foul mood when I reached my office and the work on the report made me all the more morose. By the evening I’d laboriously dictated two cassettes that I took round to Tattersallstrasse to be typed up. On the way home it struck me I’d wanted to ask Frau Mencke about little Siegfried’s tooth-extraction methods. But now I couldn’t care less.

14 Matthew 6, verse 26

It was a small huddle of mourners that gathered at the Ludwigshafen Cemetery at 2 p.m. on Friday. Eberhard, Philipp, the vice-dean of the Heidelberg faculty for the sciences, Willy’s cleaning lady, and myself. The vice-dean had prepared a speech, which, due to the low turnout, he delivered gracelessly. We discovered that Willy had been an internationally recognized authority in the field of screech owl research. And this with heart and soul: in the war, as an adjunct lecturer at Hamburg at the time, he had rescued the entire family of distraught screech owls from the burning aviary in Hagenbeck Zoo. The minister spoke about Matthew 6, verse 26, about all the birds beneath the heavens. Beneath blue heavens and on crunchy snow we walked from the chapel to the grave. Philipp and I were first behind the coffin. He whispered to me, ‘I must show you the photo sometime. I came across it when I was tidying up. Willy and the rescued owls, with singed hair, or feathers respectively, six pairs of eyes looking exhaustedly but happily into the camera. It warmed my aching heart.’

Then we stood by the deep hole. It’s like eenie, meenie, minie, mo. According to age, Eberhard is next, and then it’s my turn. For a long time now when someone I’m fond of dies, I’ve stopped thinking, ‘Oh, if only I’d done this or that more often.’ And when a contemporary dies it’s as though he’s just gone on ahead, even if I can’t say where to. The minister recited the Lord’s Prayer and we all joined in; even Philipp, the most hard-boiled atheist I know, said it aloud. Then each of us cast a small shovelful of earth into the grave, and the minister shook our hands, one by one. A young guy, but convinced, and convincing. Philipp had to return to work straight away.

‘You will come by this evening for a funeral meal, won’t you?’ Yesterday in town I’d bought another twelve little sardine cans and laid the tiny fish in a Escabeche marinade. To go with it there’d be white bread and Rioja. We settled on eight o’clock.

Philipp strode off like a Fury, Eberhard did the honours with the vice-dean, and the cleaning lady, still emitting heartrending sobs, was led gently on the arm of the minister to the exit. I had time and slowly wandered along the cemetery paths. If Klara had been buried here I’d have wanted to visit her now, and commune a bit.

‘Herr Self!’ I turned around and recognized Frau Schmalz, complete with small trowel and watering can. ‘I’m just on my way to the family grave, where Heinrich’s urn is at rest now, too. It’s looking nice, the grave. Will you come and see?’ She looked at me shyly from her narrow, careworn face. She was wearing an old-fashioned black winter coat, black button-up boots, a black fur hat over her grey hair pinned in a bun, and was carrying an imitation-leather handbag that made one wince with pity. In my generation there are female figures, the sight of whom rouses in me a belief in all the pronouncements of all the prophets of the women’s lib movement. Not that I’ve ever read them.

‘Are you still living in the old compound at the Works?’ I asked her on the way.

‘No, I had to get out, it’s all torn down. The Works found me somewhere on Pfingstweide. The apartment’s fine and everything, very modern, but you know, it is hard after so many years. It takes me a full hour to get to the grave of my Heinrich. Later today my son, thank God, will pick me up in his car.’

We were standing in front of the family grave. It was heaped high with snow. The ribbon from the wreath bequeathed by the Works, and long since decomposed, was fixed to a cane and rose up like a standard by the gravestone. Widow Schmalz put down the watering can and let the trowel drop. ‘I can’t do anything today with this load of snow.’ We stood there, both thinking of old Schmalz. ‘These days I hardly get to see my little Richard either. I live too far out. What do you think, is it right that the Works… Oh God, now that Heinrich’s no longer around I’m always thinking such things. He never let me, never let anybody question the Works.’

‘How much warning did you have that you had to leave?’

‘A good six months. They wrote to us. But then everything went so quickly.’

‘Didn’t Korten make a point of talking to your husband four weeks before your move, so that it wouldn’t be too hard on you?’

‘Did he? He never told me about it. He did have a close relationship with the general, you know. From the war, when the SS assigned him to the Works. Since then it was right what they said at the funeral, the Works was his life. He didn’t get much out of it, but I was never allowed to say that either. Whether SS officer or security officer, the fight goes on, he used to say.’

‘What became of his workshop?’

‘He set it up with such love. And he really cared for those vans and trucks. Then it was all got rid of very quickly during the demolition, my son could scarcely retrieve a thing. I think they scrapped it all. I didn’t think that was right either. Oh, God.’ She bit her lips and made a face as though she’d committed a mortal sin. ‘Forgive me, I didn’t mean to say anything bad about the Works.’ She grasped my arm appeasingly. She held on tightly for a while, staring at the grave. Thoughtfully, she continued, ‘But perhaps at the end Heinrich himself didn’t think it was right the way the Works was treating us. On his deathbed he wanted to say something to the general about the garage and the vans. I couldn’t understand him properly.’

‘You’ll permit an old man a question, Frau Schmalz. Were you happy in your marriage with Heinrich?’

She gathered up the watering can and trowel. ‘That’s the sort of thing people ask nowadays. I never thought about it. He was my husband.’

We walked to the parking lot. Young Schmalz was pulling in. He was happy to see me. ‘The good doctor… met Mum at Dad’s grave.’ I told him about my friend’s funeral.

‘I’m grieved to hear that. Painful, taking leave of a friend. I’ve been there too. I remain grateful for your help with our little Richard. And one day my wife and I would like to have that coffee with you. Mum can come along, too. Any particular cake your favourite?’

‘My absolute favourite is sweet damson shortcake.’ I didn’t say it to be mean. It really is my favourite cake.

Schmalz handled it well. ‘Ah, plum with floury-butter crumble. My wife can bake it like no other woman. Coffee maybe in the quiet lull between the impending holiday and New Year?’

I said yes. We’d telephone regarding the exact date.

The evening with Philipp and Eberhard was one of melancholic gaiety. We remembered our last Doppelkopf evening with Willy. We’d joked then about what would come of our games circle if one of us were to die. ‘No,’ said Eberhard, ‘we’re not going to look for someone new to make up the four. From now on it’s Skat.’

‘And then chess, and the last one will meet himself twice a year to play solitaire,’ said Philipp.

‘It’s all very well for you to laugh, you’re the youngest.’

‘It’s nothing to laugh about. Solitaire? I’d rather be dead.’

15 And the race is on

Ever since I moved from Berlin to Heidelberg I’ve been buying my Christmas trees at the Tiefburg in Handschuhsheim. It’s been a long time since they were any different from those elsewhere. But I like the small square in front of the ruined castle with its moat. The tram used to turn around here on squealing tracks; this was the end of the line and Klärchen and I often set off on our walks on the Heiligenberg from here. These days Handschuhsheim has turned trendy and everyone who thinks of themselves as having a modicum of cultural and intellectual flair gathers at the weekly market. The day will come when the only authentic neighbourhoods are places like the suburban slums of the sixties.

I’m particularly fond of silver firs. But so far as my sardine cans went, I felt a Douglas spruce would be more appropriate. I found a beautiful, evenly grown, ceiling-height, bushy tree. Stretching from the right-hand corner on the passenger side to the back left-hand corner, it fitted in neatly over the reclined front seat and the folded-down back seat of my Opel. I found a space in the parking garage by the town hall. I’d made a little list for my Christmas shopping.

All hell was loose on the main street. I battled my way through to Welsch the jeweller and bought earrings for Babs. It’ll never happen, but I’d like to have a beer with Welsch one day. He has the same taste as me. For Röschen and Georg, from the selection at one of those all-pervading gift shops, I chose two of those disposable watches, currently modern among our postmodern youth, made of see-through plastic with a quartz movement and a heat-sealed face. Then I was exhausted. In Café Schafheutle I bumped into Thomas with his wife and three puberty-ridden daughters.

‘Isn’t a security man supposed to make a gift of sons to his Works?’

‘In the security field there’s an increasingly attractive range of jobs for women. For our course we’re estimating around thirty per cent female participants. Incidentally the conference of Ministers of Culture and Education is going to support us as a pilot project, and so the technical college has decided to establish a separate department for internal security. That means I can introduce myself today as the designated founding dean. I’m leaving the RCW on the first of January.’

I congratulated the right honourable dean on his office, the honour, the prestige, and the title. ‘What’s Danckelmann going to do without you?’

‘It will be difficult for him in the next few years until he retires. But I would like the department to provide consultation too, so he can buy advice from us. You’ll remember the curriculum you wanted to send me, Herr Self?’

Evidently Thomas already felt emancipated from RCW and was adapting to his new role. He invited me to join them at their table where the daughters were giggling and the mother was blinking nervously. I looked at my watch, excused myself, and dashed off to Café Scheu.

Then I embarked on round two of checking off my list. What do you give a virile man in his late fifties? A set of tiger-print underwear? Royal jelly? The erotic stories of Anaïs Nin? Finally I bought Philipp a cocktail shaker for his boat bar. Then revulsion for the Christmas din and commercialism swamped me. I was filled with immense discontent with the crowds and with myself. It would take me hours to shake it off at home. Why on earth had I launched myself into the Christmas mêlée? Why did I make the same mistake every year? Haven’t I learned anything in my life? What is the point of the whole thing?

The Opel smelled pleasantly of fir forest. When I’d fought my way through the traffic to the autobahn I heaved a sigh of relief. I shoved in a tape, fished out from way down the pile, as I’d heard the others too often on the journey to and from Locarno. But no music came.

A telephone was picked up, the dialling tone sounded, a number was dialled, and the recipient’s phone rang. He answered. It was Korten.

‘Hello, Herr Korten. Mischkey here. I’m warning you. If your people don’t leave me alone your past is going to explode around your ears. I won’t be pressured like this any longer, and I certainly won’t be beaten up again.’

‘I’d imagined you’d be more intelligent from Self’s report. First you break into our system and now you threaten blackmail. I have nothing to say.’ Actually Korten should have hung up that very second. But the second came and went, and Mischkey talked on.

‘The times are over, Herr Korten, where all it takes is an SS contact and an SS uniform to move people from here to there, to Switzerland and to the gallows.’ Mischkey hung up. I heard him take a deep gulp of air, then the click of the tape recorder. Music began. ‘And the race is on and it looks like heartache and the winner loses all.’

I turned off the player and pulled over to the hard shoulder. The tape from Mischkey’s Citroën. I had simply forgotten it.

16 Anything for one’s career?

I couldn’t sleep that night. At six o’clock I gave up and busied myself setting up and decorating my Christmas tree. I’d listened to Mischkey’s tape over and over. On Saturday I’d been in no state to think and order my thoughts.

I put the thirty empty sardine cans that I had accumulated into the sink of water. They shouldn’t still smell of fish on the Christmas tree. I looked at them, my elbows on the edge of the sink, as they sank to the bottom. The lids of some of them had been torn off as they were opened. I’d stick them back on.

Was it Korten, then, who’d made Weinstein discover the hidden documents in Tyberg’s desk and report him? I should have thought of it when Tyberg told us that only he, Dohmke, and Korten knew about the stash. No, Weinstein hadn’t come across them by accident as Tyberg supposed. They’d ordered him to find the documents in the desk. That was what Frau Hirsch had said. And perhaps Weinstein had never even seen the documents; the important thing was the statement, not the find.

When it started growing light outside I went out onto the balcony and fitted the Christmas tree to the stand. I had to saw and use the hatchet. Its top was too high. I trimmed it in such a way that the tip could be reattached to the trunk with a needle. Then I moved the tree to its place in the sitting room.

Why? Anything for one’s career? Yes. Korten couldn’t have made such a mark if Tyberg and Dohmke had still been around. Tyberg had spoken of the years following the trial as the basis for his ascendancy. And Tyberg’s liberation had been Korten’s reinsurance. It had certainly paid off. When Tyberg became general director of the RCW Korten was catapulted to dizzying heights.

The plot – with me as the dupe. Set up and executed by my friend and brother-in-law. And I’d been happy not to have to drag him into the trial. He’d used me with contemptuous calculation. I thought back to the conversation after our move to Bahnhofstrasse. I also thought of the last conversations we’d had, in the Blue Salon and on the terrace of his house. Me, the sweetheart.

My cigarettes had run out. That hadn’t happened to me in years. I pulled on my winter coat and galoshes, pocketed the St Christopher that I’d taken from Mischkey’s car and only remembered yesterday, walked to the train station, then dropped by to see Judith. It was mid-morning now. She came to the front door in a dressing gown.

‘What’s the matter with you, Gerd?’ She looked at me aghast. ‘Come on up, I’ve just put some coffee on.’

‘Do I look that bad? No, I won’t come up, I’m in the middle of decorating my tree. Wanted to bring you the St Christopher. I needn’t tell you where it’s from, I’d completely forgotten it, and I just found it again.’

She took the St Christopher and supported herself against the doorpost. She was fighting back tears.

‘Tell me something, Judith, do you remember if Peter went away for two or three days in the weeks in between the War Cemetery and his death?’

‘What?’ She hadn’t been listening, and I repeated my question. ‘Away? Yes, how do you know?’

‘Do you know where to?’

‘South, he said. To recover because it had all been too much for him. Why do you ask?’

‘I’m wondering whether he went to Tyberg pretending to be a journalist from Die Zeit.’

‘You mean looking for material to use against the RCW?’ She considered this. ‘I wouldn’t put it past him. But according to what Tyberg said about the visit, there wasn’t anything to unearth.’ Shivering, she pulled the dressing gown more tightly around her. ‘Are you sure you won’t have a coffee?’

‘You’ll be hearing from me, Judith.’ I walked home.

It all fitted together. A despairing Mischkey had attempted to use Tyberg’s grand aria about decency and resistance for his own ends against Korten. Intuitively he had recognized the dissonances better than all of us, the connection to the SS, the rescue of Tyberg, not that of Dohmke. He didn’t realize how close to the truth he was and how threatening that must have sounded to Korten. Not just sounded – was really, thanks to his dogged research.

Why hadn’t I thought of it? If it was so easy to save Tyberg, why, then, hadn’t Korten rescued both of them two days earlier while Dohmke was still alive? One was sufficient as reinsurance and Tyberg, the head of the research group, was more interesting than his co-worker Dohmke.

I removed my galoshes and clapped them against each other until all the snow had dropped off. The stairwell smelled of Sauerbraten. Yesterday I hadn’t bought anything else to eat and I could only make myself two fried eggs. The third egg I whisked over Turbo’s food. He’d been driven to distraction in recent days by the sardine odour in the apartment.

The SS man who’d helped Korten to liberate Tyberg had been Schmalz. Together with Schmalz Korten had exerted pressure on Weinstein. Schmalz had killed Mischkey for Korten.

I rinsed the sardine cans clean with hot water and dried them off. Where the lids were missing, I glued them back on. I chose green wool to hang them and threaded it through the curl of the rolled-back lid, or through the ring-pull, or around the hinge where an open lid was attached to its can. As soon as a can was ready I looked for its proper place on the tree; the big ones lower down, the small ones higher up.

I couldn’t fool myself. I didn’t give a damn about my Christmas tree. Why had Korten allowed his accessory Weinstein to survive? I suppose he hadn’t had any influence over the SS, only over Schmalz, the SS officer in the Works, whom he’d seduced and conquered. He couldn’t steer things so that Weinstein would be killed back in the concentration camp. But he could safely assume it. And after the war? Even if Korten were to discover that Weinstein had survived the camp, he could count on the fact that anyone who’d had to play a role such as Weinstein’s would prefer not to go public.

Now the final words made sense, too, the ones the widow Schmalz repeated from her husband’s deathbed. He must have tried to warn his lord and master about the trail he himself hadn’t been able to remove, given his physical state. How well Korten had known how to make this man depend on him! The young academic from a good home, the SS officer from a modest background, great challenges and tasks, two men in the service of the Works, each in his place. I could imagine the course of things between them. Who knew better than I how convincing and winning Korten could be?

The Christmas tree was ready. Thirty sardine cans were hanging, thirty white candles were erect. One of the vertically hanging sardine cans was oval and reminded me of the garland of light you get in depictions of the Virgin Mary. I went to the basement, found the cardboard box with Klärchen’s Christmas tree decorations and in amongst them the small, willowy Madonna in a blue cloak. She fitted into the can.

17 I knew what I had to do

The next night I couldn’t sleep either. Sometimes I dozed off and dreamed of Dohmke’s hanging and Korten’s performance in court, my leap into the Rhine that I didn’t resurface from in my dream, Judith in her dressing gown, fighting back her tears at the doorpost, old, square-set, stout Schmalz climbing down from the statue pedestal in the Heidelberg Bismarckgarten and coming toward me, the tennis match with Mischkey, at which a small boy with Korten’s face and an SS uniform threw us the balls, my interrogation of Weinstein, and again and again Korten laughing at me, saying, ‘Self, you sweetheart, you sweetheart, you sweetheart…’

At five I made a cup of camomile tea and tried to read, but my thoughts wouldn’t leave me alone. They kept circling. How could Korten have done it? Why had I been blind enough to let myself be used by him? What should happen now? Was Korten afraid? Did I owe anyone anything? Was there anyone I could tell everything to? Nägelsbach? Tyberg? Judith? Should I go to the media? What was I to do with my guilt?

For a long time the thoughts circled in my mind, faster and faster. As they were accelerating into craziness, they flew apart and formed themselves into a completely new picture. I knew what I had to do.

At nine o’clock I called Frau Schlemihl. Korten had left on vacation at the weekend to his house in Brittany where he and his wife spent Christmas every year. I found the card he’d sent me last Christmas. It showed a magnificent estate of grey stone with a slanting roof and red shutters, the crossbars of which formed an inverted Z. Next to it was a high windmill, and beyond it stretched the sea. I checked the timetable and found a train that would get me in to Paris-Est at five o’clock in the afternoon. I’d have to hurry. I prepared a fresh litter-tray for Turbo, shook an abundant amount of cat food into his dish, and packed my travel bag. I ran to the station, changed money, and bought a ticket, second class. The train was full. Noisy soldiers on home-leave over Christmas, students, late businessmen.

The snow of the last weeks had thawed completely. Dirty greenish-brown countryside whipped by. The sky was grey, and sometimes the sun was visible as a faded disk behind the clouds. I thought about why Korten had feared Mischkey’s disclosures. He could, indeed, be prosecuted for Dohmke’s murder, which was not subject to a statute of limitations. And even if he went free due to lack of evidence, his comfortable life and the legend he’d become would be destroyed.

There was a car rental in the Gare de l’Est and I took a standard-class car, one of those where every make looks much the same as every other. I left the car at the rental and went out into the hectic evening pulse of the city. In front of the station was an enormous Christmas tree that exuded about as much Christmas spirit as the Eiffel Tower. It was half past five, I was hungry. Most of the restaurants were still closed. I found a brasserie I liked the look of that was bustling in spite of what time it was. I was shown to a small table by the headwaiter and found myself in a row of five other uncommonly early diners. They were all eating Sauerkraut with boiled pork and sausages and I chose the same. And with it a half-bottle of Alsace Riesling. In the twinkling of an eye, a steaming plate, a bottle in a cooler with condensation on its sides, and a basket of white bread were in front of me. When I’m in the mood I like the atmosphere of brasseries, beer-cellars, and pubs. Not today. I finished quickly. At the nearest hotel I took a room and asked to be woken in four hours.

I slept like a stone. When I was roused at eleven by the ringing of the phone I didn’t know where I was. I hadn’t opened the shutters and the noise of the traffic from the boulevard only made a muffled echo in my room. I showered, brushed my teeth, shaved, and paid. On the way to the Gare de l’Est I drank a double espresso. I had a further five poured into my thermos flask. My Sweet Afton were running out. I bought a carton of Chesterfield once again.

I had reckoned on six hours for the journey to Trefeuntec. But it took an hour just to get out of Paris and onto the highway to Rennes. There was little traffic, and the driving was monotonous. It was only then that it struck me how mild it was. A green Christmas means a cold Easter. Every so often I’d pass a toll booth and never knew if I should be paying or getting a ticket. Once I pulled off the road to fill up and was astounded by the price of petrol. The lights of the villages were growing sparser. I wondered whether it was because of the late hour or because the country was emptier. To begin with I was happy to have a radio in the car. But then there was only one clear station and after I’d heard the song about the angel walking through the room for the third time, I switched it off. Sometimes the road surface would change and the tyres would sing a new song. At three, just after Rennes, I almost fell asleep, or at least I was hallucinating that there were people running all over the highway. I opened the window, drove to the next rest area, drained my thermos flask, and did ten sit-ups.

As the journey continued, my thoughts turned to Korten’s performance at the trial. He had been playing for high stakes. His statement mustn’t save Dohmke and Tyberg, yet it had to sound as though that was just what he wanted, without seriously damaging him in the process. Södelknecht had almost had him arrested. How had Korten felt then? Secure and superior because he knew how to pull the wool over everybody’s eyes? No, he wouldn’t have suffered any twinges of conscience. From my colleagues in the law I knew that there were two means of dealing with the past: cynicism, and a feeling of having always been right and only doing one’s duty. In retrospect had the Tyberg affair served the greater glory of the RCW for Korten?

When the houses of Carhaix-Plouguer were behind me, I looked in the rear-view mirror and saw the first streak of dawn. Another seventy kilometres to Trefeuntec. In Plonévez-Porzay the bar and the bakery were already open and I ate two croissants along with my milky coffee. At a quarter to eight I reached the bay of Trefeuntec. I drove the car onto the beach, still wet and firm from the tide. Beneath a grey sky the grey sea rolled in. It crashed against the high coast to the right and left of the bay with dirty white crests. It was even milder than Paris in spite of the strong westerly wind that drove the clouds before it. Shrieking gulls were swept aloft on its current before they dropped in a plummeting dive to the water.

I began the search for Korten’s house. I drove a little inland and came to a field-track on the craggy northerly coast. With its bays and cliffs rising from the shore it stretched as far as the eye could see. In the distance I could make out a silhouette, it could be anything under the sun, from a water tower to the large windmill. I left the car behind a wind-buffeted hut and made for the tower.

Before I saw Korten, his two dachshunds saw me. They rollicked towards me, yapping. Then he emerged from a dip. We weren’t far from one another but between us was a bay that we each headed round. Along the narrow path that ran along the cliff top, we walked towards one another.

18 Old friends like you and me

‘You look terrible, my dear Self. A few days’ rest here will do you a world of good. I hadn’t expected you yet. Let’s walk a bit. Helga’s preparing breakfast for nine. She’ll be glad to see you.’ Korten linked his arm through mine and prepared to continue. He was wearing a light loden coat and looked relaxed.

‘I know everything,’ I said, stepping away.

Korten looked at me enquiringly. He understood immediately.

‘It’s not easy for you, Gerd. It wasn’t easy for me either, and I was happy not to have to burden anyone with it.’

I stared at him speechlessly. He stepped up to me once more, took my arm, and nudged me along the path. ‘You think it had to do with my career. No, in the whole mess of those last years of the war what mattered most was sorting out real responsibility and making clean decisions. Things wouldn’t have gone well for our research group. Dohmke consigning himself to the sidelines that way – I was sorry back then. But so many people, better people, lost their lives. Mischkey had his choice too, and dug himself deeper and deeper into trouble.’ He stood still and grabbed my shoulders. ‘You have to understand, Gerd. The Works needed me to be the way I became in those difficult years. I always had great respect for old Schmalz. He was simple but he could understand these tricky connections.’

‘You must be crazy. You murdered two men and you talk about it as though… as though…’

‘Oh, those are big words. Did I murder them? Or was it the judge or the hangman? Old Schmalz? And who headed the investigation against Tyberg and Dohmke? Who set the trap for Mischkey and let it snap shut? We’re all entangled in it, all of us, and we have to recognize that and bear it, and do our duty.’

I broke loose from his hold. ‘Entangled? Perhaps we all are, but you pulled the strings!’ I was shouting into his placid face.

He stood still, too. ‘That’s just child’s stuff – “he did it, he did it.” And even when we were children we never really believed it; we knew perfectly well that we were all involved when a teacher was being goaded, or one of our classmates bullied, or the other side in the game was being fouled.’ He spoke with utter concentration, patiently, didactically, and my head was dazed and confused. It was true, that’s how my sense of guilt had eroded, year by year.

Korten was still talking. ‘But, please – I did it. If that’s what you need – yes, I did it. What do you think would have happened had Mischkey gone to the press? That sort of thing doesn’t end with an old boss being replaced by a new one, and everything goes on as before. I needn’t tell you the play his story would have got in the USA, and England and France, or talk about what it would do when we’re fighting our competition inch by inch, or about how many jobs would be destroyed, and what unemployment means today. The RCW is a large, heavy ship going at breakneck speed through the drift-ice despite its bulk and if the captain leaves and the steering is loose, it will run aground and be wrecked. That’s why I say yes, I did it.’

‘Murder?’

‘Could I have bribed him? The risk was too high. And don’t tell me that no risk is too high when it’s about saving a life. It’s not true. Think of road deaths, accidents in the workplace, police who shoot to kill. Think of the fight against terrorism: the police have shot as many people by accident as the terrorists have intentionally – is that a reason to give up?’

‘And Dohmke?’ I suddenly felt empty inside. I could see us standing there, talking, as though a film were running without a soundtrack. Beneath the grey clouds, a craggy coastline, a mist of dirty spray, a narrow path and the fields beyond, and two older men in heated discussion – hands gesticulating, mouths moving – but the scene is mute. I wished I wasn’t there.

‘Dohmke? Actually I don’t have to comment on that. The years between nineteen thirty-three and nineteen forty-five are supposed to remain a blank – that’s the foundation on which our state is built. Fine, we had to – still have to – produce some theatre with trials and verdicts. But in nineteen forty-five there was no Night of the Long Knives, and that would have been the only chance of retribution. Then the foundation was set. You’re not satisfied? Okay then, Dohmke couldn’t be trusted; he was unpredictable, a talented chemist maybe, but an amateur in everything else. He wouldn’t have lasted two minutes at the front.’

We walked on. He hadn’t needed to link arms with me again; when he continued I’d stuck by his side.

‘Fate may talk that way, Ferdinand, but not you. Steamships that set a course, solid foundations, entanglements in which we’re all mere puppets – you can tell me all about the powers and forces in life but none of it alters the fact that you, Ferdinand Korten, and only you-’

‘Fate?’ Now he was furious. ‘We are our own fate, and I don’t offload anything on powers and forces. You’re the one who never sees things through to the end, nor leaves them well and truly alone. Get Dohmke and Mischkey in a mess, yes, but when what inevitably happens next does, you find your scruples and you don’t want to have seen it or done it. My God, Gerd, grow up at last.’

He stumped on. The path had narrowed and I walked behind him, cliffs to the left, a wall to the right. Beyond it, the fields.

‘Why did you come?’ He turned round. ‘To see whether I’d kill you, too? Push you over?’ Fifty metres below the sea seethed. He laughed, as though it were a joke. Then he read it in my eyes before I said the words.

‘I’ve come to kill you.’

‘To bring them back to life?’ he mocked. ‘Because you… because the perpetrator wants to play judge? Do you feel innocent and exploited? What would you have been without me, without my sister and my parents, before nineteen fortyfive, and all my help afterwards? Jump yourself if you can’t deal with it.’

His voice cracked. I stared at him. Then that grin came to his face, the one I’d known, and liked, since we were young. It had charmed me into shared escapades and out of fatal situations, understanding, winning, superior.

‘Hey, Gerd, this is crazy. Two old friends like you and me

… Come on, let’s have breakfast. I can smell the coffee already.’ He whistled to the dogs.

‘No, Ferdinand.’

He looked at me with an expression of utter incredulity as I shoved against his chest with both hands. He lost his balance and plummeted down, his coat billowing. I didn’t hear a cry. He thudded against a rock before the sea took him with it.

19 A package from Rio

The dogs followed me to the car and frolicked alongside, yapping, until I turned off the field-track, onto the road. My whole body was trembling and yet I felt lighter than I had in a long time. On the road a tractor came towards me. The farmer stared at me. Had he been high enough to see me as I pushed Korten to his death? I hadn’t even thought about witnesses. I looked back; another tractor was ploughing its furrows in a field and two children were out on bikes. I drove west. At Point-du-Raz I considered staying – an anonymous Christmas abroad. But I couldn’t find a hotel, and the cliff line looked just like Trefeuntec. I was going home. At Quimper I came to a police roadblock. I could tell myself a thousand times that it was an unlikely spot to be searching for Korten’s murderer, but I was scared as I waited in the queue for the police to wave me on.

In Paris I made the eleven o’clock night train. It was empty and I had no trouble getting a sleeping car. On Christmas Day towards eight o’clock I was back in my apartment. Turbo greeted me sulkily. Frau Weiland had laid my Christmas mail on the desk. Along with all the commercial Christmas greetings I found a Christmas card from Vera Müller, an invitation from Korten to spend New Year’s Eve with him and Helga in Brittany, and from Brigitte a package from Rio with an Indian tunic. I took it as a nightshirt, and went to bed. At half past eleven the telephone rang.

‘Merry Christmas, Gerd. Where are you hiding?’

‘Brigitte! Merry Christmas.’ I was happy, but I could hardly see for weariness and exhaustion.

‘You grouch, aren’t you pleased? I’m back.’

I made an effort. ‘You’re kidding. That’s really great. Since when?’

‘I arrived yesterday morning and I’ve been trying to reach you ever since. Where have you been hiding?’ There was reproach in her voice.

‘I didn’t want to be here on Christmas Eve. I felt very claustrophobic.’

‘Would you like to eat Tafelspitz with us? It’s already on the stove.’

‘Yes… who else is coming?’

‘I’ve brought Manu with me. I can’t wait to see you.’ She blew a kiss down the telephone.

‘Me too.’ I returned the kiss.

I lay in bed, and felt my way back to the present. To my world in which fate doesn’t control steamships or puppets, where no foundations are laid and no history gets made.

The Christmas edition of the Süddeutsche lay on the bed. It gave an annual balance sheet of toxic incidents in the chemical industry. I soon laid the paper aside.

The world wasn’t a better place for Korten’s death. What had I done? Come to terms with my past? Wiped my hands of it?

I arrived far too late for lunch.

20 Come with the Wind!

Christmas Day brought no news of Korten’s death, nor did the next. Sometimes I was fearful. Whenever the doorbell rang, I was frightened and assumed the police had arrived to storm the apartment. When I was relaxing happily in Brigitte’s arms, alive with her sweet kisses, occasionally I wondered anxiously if this might be our last time together. At times I imagined the scene with Herzog, telling him everything. Or would I prefer to give my statement in front of Nägelsbach?

Most of the time I was easy in myself, fatalistic, and enjoyed the last days of the year, including coffee and plum-with-flourybutter-crumble-cake at the younger Schmalzes’. I liked little Manuel. He tried valiantly to speak German, accepted my morning presence in the bathroom without jealousy, and hoped staunchly for snow. To begin with the three of us went on our expeditions together, visiting the fairytale park on Königstuhl and the planetarium. Then he and I set out on our own. He liked going to the cinema as much as I did. When we came out of Witness we both had to fight back tears. In Splash he didn’t understand why the mermaid loved the guy although he was so mean to her – I didn’t tell him that’s always the way. In the Kleiner Rosengarten he figured out the game Giovanni and I played, and played along. There was no teaching him a sensible German sentence after that. On the way back from ice skating he took my hand and said, ‘You always with us when I come back?’

Brigitte and Juan had decided Manuel should go to high school in Mannheim, starting next autumn. Would I be in prison next autumn? And if not – would Brigitte and I stay together?

‘I don’t know yet, Manuel. But we’ll certainly go to the cinema together.’

The days passed without Korten hitting the headlines, either dead or missing. There were moments when I wished things would come to an end, no matter how. Then once again I was grateful for the time gained. On the 27th Philipp called. He complained he hadn’t caught a glimpse of my Christmas tree yet this year. ‘And where have you been these last few days?’

That’s when I got the idea about a party. ‘I have something to celebrate,’ I said. ‘Come round on New Year’s Eve, I’m having a party.’

‘Should I bring you round a squeezable little Taiwanese something?’

‘No need, Brigitte is back.’

‘A-ha, Come with the Wind! But may I bring a little something for me to the party?’

Brigitte had followed the phone call. ‘Party? What party?’

‘We’re celebrating New Year’s Eve with your friends and mine. Who would you like to invite?’

On Saturday afternoon I dropped by to see Judith. I caught her in the midst of packing. She was planning to travel to Locarno on Sunday. Tyberg wanted to introduce her to Tessin society in Ascona on New Year’s Eve. ‘It’s nice of you to come round, Gerd, but I’m in a terrible rush. Is it important, can’t it wait? I’ll be back at the end of January.’ She indicated the open suitcases, and the packed ones, two large moving cartons, and a wild confusion of clothes. I recognized the silk blouse that she’d worn when she’d shown me to Firner’s office. The button was still missing. ‘I can tell you the truth about Mischkey’s death now.’

She sat down on a suitcase and lit a cigarette. ‘Yes?’

She listened without interrupting. When I’d finished she asked: ‘And what happens to Korten now?’

It was the question I had dreaded. I had racked my brains over whether I should only go to Judith once Korten’s death was public knowledge. But I mustn’t make my actions dependent upon Korten’s murder, and without it there was no reason to hush up the solving of the case any longer. ‘I’ll try to put him on the spot. He’ll be back from Brittany at the beginning of January.’

‘Oh, Gerd, you can’t believe that Korten will break down in mid-sentence and confess?’

I didn’t answer. I was reluctant to enter into a discussion about what should happen to Korten.

Judith took another cigarette from the pack and rolled it between the fingertips of both hands. She looked sad, worn out by all the to-ing and fro-ing that had accompanied Peter’s murder, also aggravated, as if she wanted finally, finally, to put the whole thing behind her. ‘I’ll talk to Tyberg. You don’t mind, do you?’

That night I dreamed that Herzog was interrogating me. ‘Why didn’t you go to the police?’

‘What could the police have done?’

‘Oh, we have impressive possibilities these days. Come on, I’ll show you.’ Through long corridors, via many stairs, we came to a room that I recognized from castles of the Middle Ages, with pincers, irons, masks, chains, whips, straps, and needles. A hellfire was burning in the grate. Herzog pointed to the rack. ‘We’d have made Korten talk on that. Why didn’t you trust the police? Now you’ll have to go on it yourself.’ I didn’t struggle and was strapped to it. When I couldn’t move, panic surged through me. I must have cried out before I woke. Brigitte had switched on the bedside lamp and turned to me with concern.

‘Everything’s fine, Gerd. No one’s hurting you.’

I kicked myself free of the sheets that were stifling me. ‘My God, what a dream.’

‘Tell me, then you’ll feel better.’

I didn’t want to and she was hurt. ‘I keep noticing, Gerd, that something’s wrong with you. Sometimes you’re hardly there.’

I snuggled into her arms. ‘It’ll pass, Brigitte. It has nothing to do with you. Have patience with an old man.’

It was only on New Year’s Eve that Korten’s death was reported. A tragic accident at his holiday home in Brittany on the morning of Christmas Eve had caused him to fall from the cliffs into the sea while out walking. The information gathered by the press and radio for Korten’s seventieth birthday was now used for obituaries and eulogies. With Korten an epoch had ended, the epoch of the great men of Germany’s era of reconstruction. The funeral was to take place at the beginning of January, attended by the president, the chancellor, the economics minister, as well as the complete cabinet of Rhineland-Palatinate. Scarcely anything better could have happened for his son’s career. As his brother-in-law I’d be invited, but I wouldn’t go. Nor would I send condolences to his wife.

I didn’t envy him his glory. Nor did I forgive him. Murder means never having to say you forgive.

21 I’m sorry, Herr Self

Babs, Röschen, and Georg arrived at seven. Brigitte and I had just been putting the finishing touches to the party preparations, had lit the Christmas tree candles, and were sitting on the sofa with Manuel.

‘Here she is, then!’ Babs looked at Brigitte with kindly curiosity and gave her a kiss.

‘Hats off, Uncle Gerd,’ said Röschen. ‘And the Christmas tree looks really cool.’

I gave them their presents.

‘But Gerd,’ said Babs reproachfully, ‘I thought we’d decided against Christmas presents this year,’ and took out her package. ‘This is from the three of us.’

Babs and Röschen had knitted a wine-red sweater to which Georg had attached, at the appropriate spot, an electric circuit with eight lamps in the shape of a heart. When I pulled on the sweater the lamps started to flash to the rhythm of my heartbeat.

Then Herr and Frau Nägelsbach arrived. He was wearing a black suit, complete with stiff wing-collar and bow tie, a pincenez on his nose, and was the spitting image of Karl Kraus. She was wearing a fin-de-siècle dress. ‘Hedda Gabler?’ I greeted her cautiously. She gave a curtsy and joined the ladies. He looked at the Christmas tree with disapproval. ‘Bourgeois nonsense.’

The doorbell didn’t stop ringing. Eberhard arrived with a little suitcase. ‘I’ve come with a few magic tricks.’ Philipp brought Füruzan, a feisty, voluptuous Turkish nurse. ‘Fuzzy can belly-dance!’ Hadwig, a friend of Brigitte’s, had her fourteen-year-old son Jan with her, who immediately took charge of Manuel.

Everyone streamed into the kitchen for the cold buffet. Dusty Springfield’s ‘I Close My Eyes and Count to Ten’ played unnoticed in the living room. Philipp had put on Hits of the 1960s.

My study was empty. The telephone rang. I shut the door behind me. Only muffled jollity from the party reached my ears. All my friends were here – who could be calling?

‘Uncle Gerd?’ It was Tyberg. ‘A Happy New Year! Judith told me and I read the newspaper. It appears you’ve solved the Korten case.’

‘Hello, Herr Tyberg. All the best to you for the New Year, too. Will you still write the chapter about the trial?’

‘I’ll show it to you when you come to visit. Springtime is very nice at Lake Maggiore.’

‘I’ll be there. Until then.’

Tyberg had understood. It helped to have a secret ally who wouldn’t call me to account.

The door burst open and my guests were asking for me. ‘Where are you hiding, Gerd? Füruzan is going to do a belly dance for us.’

We cleared the dance floor and Philipp screwed a red lightbulb into the lamp. Füruzan entered from the bathroom in a veil and sequined bikini. Manuel and Jan’s eyes popped out of their heads. The music began, supplicating and slow, and Füruzan’s first movements were of a gentle, languorous fluidity. Then the tempo of the music increased and with it the rhythm of the dance. Röschen started to clap, everyone joined in. Füruzan discarded the veil, and let a tassel attached to her belly button circle wildly. The floor shook. When the music died away Füruzan ended with a triumphant pose and flung herself into Philipp’s arms.

‘This is the love of the Turks,’ Philipp laughed.

‘Laugh all you like. I’ll get you. You don’t play around with Turkish women,’ she said, looking him haughtily in the eye.

I brought her my dressing gown.

‘Stop,’ called Eberhard as the audience was ready to disperse. ‘I invite you to the breathtaking show by the great magician Ebus Erus Hardabakus.’ And he made rings spin and link together and come apart again, and yellow scarves turn to red; he conjured up coins and made them disappear again, and Manuel was allowed to check that everything was above board. The trick with the white mouse went wrong. At the sight of it, Turbo leapt onto the table, knocked over the top hat it had supposedly disappeared into, chased it round the apartment, and playfully broke its neck behind the fridge before any of us could intervene. In response Eberhard wanted to break Turbo’s neck, but luckily Röschen stopped him.

It was Jan’s turn. He recited ‘The Feet in the Fire’ by Conrad Ferdinand Meyer. Next to me sat an anxious Hadwig, silently mouthing the poem with him. ‘Mine is the revenge, saith the Lord,’ thundered Jan at the end.

‘Fill your glasses and plates and come back,’ called Babs. ‘It’s on with the show.’ She whispered with Röschen and Georg and the three of them pushed tables and chairs to the side and the dance floor became a small stage. Charades. Babs puffed out her cheeks and blew, and Röschen and Georg ran off.

‘Gone with the Wind,’ called Nägelsbach.

Then Georg and Röschen slapped one another until Babs stepped between them, took their hands, and joined them together. ‘Kemal Atatürk in War and Peace!’

‘Too Turkish, Fuzzy,’ said Philipp and patted her thigh. ‘But isn’t she clever?’

It was half past eleven and I went to check there was plenty of champagne on ice. In the living room Röschen and Georg had taken over the stereo and were feeding old records onto the turntable: Tom Waits was singing ‘Waltzing Matilda’, and Philipp tried to waltz Babs down the narrow corridor. The children were playing tag with the cat. In the bathroom Füruzan was showering away the sweat of her belly dance. Brigitte came through to the kitchen and gave me a kiss. ‘A lovely party.’

I almost didn’t hear the doorbell. I pressed the buzzer for the front door, but then saw the green silhouette through the frosted glass of the apartment door and knew the visitor was already upstairs. I opened up. In front of me stood Herzog in uniform.

‘I’m sorry, Herr Self…’

So this was the end. They say it happens just before you’re hanged, but now the pictures of the past weeks went shooting through my mind, as if in a film. Korten’s last look, my arrival in Mannheim on Christmas morning, Manuel’s hand in mine, the nights with Brigitte, our happy group round the Christmas tree. I wanted to say something. I couldn’t make a sound.

Herzog went ahead of me into the apartment. I heard the music being turned down. But our friends kept laughing and chattering cheerfully. When I had control of myself again, and went into the sitting room, Herzog had a glass of wine in his hand, and Röschen, a little tipsy, was fiddling with the buttons on his uniform.

‘I was just on my way home, Herr Self, when the complaint about your party came through on the radio. I took it upon myself to look in on you.’

‘Hurry up,’ called Brigitte, ‘two minutes to go.’ Enough time to distribute the champagne glasses and pop the corks.

Now we’re standing on the balcony, Philipp and Eberhard let off the fireworks, from all the churches comes the ringing of bells, we clink glasses.

‘Happy New Year.’