The Reader

CHAPTER ONE

I SPENT THE summer after the trial in the reading room of the university library. I arrived as the reading room opened and left when it closed. On weekends I studied at home. I studied so uninterruptedly, so obsessively, that the feelings and thoughts that had been deadened by the trial remained deadened. I avoided contacts. I moved away from home and rented a room. I brushed off the few acquaintances who spoke to me in the reading room or on my occasional visits to the movies.

The winter semester I was much the same way. Nonetheless, I was asked if I would like to spend the Christmas vacation with a group of students at a ski lodge. Surprised, I accepted.

I wasn’t a good skier, but I liked to ski and was fast and kept up with the good ones. Sometimes when I was on slopes that were beyond my ability, I risked falls and broken bones. I did this consciously. The other risk I was taking, and to which I succumbed, was one to which I was oblivious.

I was never cold. While the others skied in sweaters and jackets, I skied in a shirt. The others shook their heads and teased me about it, but I didn’t take their worries seriously. I simply didn’t feel cold. When I began to cough, I blamed it on the Austrian cigarettes. When I started to feel feverish, I enjoyed it. I felt weak and light at the same time, and all my senses were pleasingly muffled, cottony, padded. I floated.

Then I came down with a high fever and was taken to the hospital. By the time I left, the numbness was gone. All the questions and fears, accusations and self-accusations, all the horror and pain that had erupted during the trial and been immediately deadened were back, and back for good. I don’t know what the doctors diagnose when someone isn’t freezing even though he should be freezing. My own diagnosis is that the numbness had to overwhelm my body before it would let go of me, before I could let go of it.

When I had finished my studies and began my training, it was the summer of the student upheavals. I was interested in history and sociology, and while clerking with a judge I was still in the university often enough to know what was going on. Knowing what was going on did not mean taking part-university and university reforms were no more interesting to me than the Vietcong and the Americans. As for the third and real theme of the student movement, coming to grips with the Nazi past, I felt so removed from the other students that I had no desire to agitate and demonstrate with them.

Sometimes I think that dealing with the Nazi past was not the reason for the generational conflict that drove the student movement, but merely the form it took. Parental expectations, from which every generation must free itself, were nullified by the fact that these parents had failed to measure up during the Third Reich, or after it ended. How could those who had committed Nazi crimes or watched them happen or looked away while they were happening or tolerated the criminals among them after 1945 or even accepted them-how could they have anything to say to their children? But on the other hand, the Nazi past was an issue even for children who couldn’t accuse their parents of anything, or didn’t want to. For them, coming to grips with the Nazi past was not merely the form taken by a generational conflict, it was the issue itself.

Whatever validity the concept of collective guilt may or may not have, morally and legally-for my generation of students it was a lived reality. It did not just apply to what had happened in the Third Reich. The fact that Jewish gravestones were being defaced with swastikas, that so many old Nazis had made careers in the courts, the administration, and the universities, that the Federal Republic did not recognize the State of Israel for many years, that emigration and resistance were handed down as traditions less often than a life of conformity-all this filled us with shame, even when we could point at the guilty parties. Pointing at the guilty parties did not free us from shame, but at least it overcame the suffering we went through on account of it. It converted the passive suffering of shame into energy, activity, aggression. And coming to grips with our parents’ guilt took a great deal of energy.

I had no one to point at. Certainly not my parents, because I had nothing to accuse them of. The zeal for letting in the daylight, with which, as a member of the concentration camps seminar, I had condemned my father to shame, had passed, and it embarrassed me. But what other people in my social environment had done, and their guilt, were in any case a lot less bad than what Hanna had done. I had to point at Hanna. But the finger I pointed at her turned back to me. I had loved her. Not only had I loved her, I had chosen her. I tried to tell myself that I had known nothing of what she had done when I chose her. I tried to talk myself into the state of innocence in which children love their parents. But love of our parents is the only love for which we are not responsible.

And perhaps we are responsible even for the love we feel for our parents. I envied other students back then who had dissociated themselves from their parents and thus from the entire generation of perpetrators, voyeurs, and the willfully blind, accommodators and accepters, thereby overcoming perhaps not their shame, but at least their suffering because of the shame. But what gave rise to the swaggering self-righteousness I so often encountered among these students? How could one feel guilt and shame, and at the same time parade one’s self-righteousness? Was their dissociation of themselves from their parents mere rhetoric: sounds and noise that were supposed to drown out the fact that their love for their parents made them irrevocably complicit in their crimes?

These thoughts did not come until later, and even later they brought no comfort. How could it be a comfort that the pain I went through because of my love for Hanna was, in a way, the fate of my generation, a German fate, and that it was only more difficult for me to evade, more difficult for me to manage than for others. All the same, it would have been good for me back then to be able to feel I was part of my generation.

CHAPTER TWO

I MARRIED WHILE I was still clerking. Gertrud and I had met at the ski lodge, and when the others left at the end of vacation, she stayed behind until I was released from the hospital and she could take me home. She was also studying law; we studied together, passed our exams together, and began our clerking together. We got married when Gertrud got pregnant.

I did not tell her about Hanna. Who, I thought, wants to know about the other’s earlier relationships, if he or she is not the fulfillment of their promise? Gertrud was smart, efficient, and loyal, and if our life had involved running a farm with lots of farmhands and maids, lots of children, lots of work, and no time for each other, it would have been fulfilling and happy. But our life was a three-room apartment in a modern building on the edge of the city, our daughter Julia and Gertrud’s and my work as legal clerks. I could never stop comparing the way it was with Gertrud and the way it had been with Hanna; again and again, Gertrud and I would hold each other, and I would feel that something was wrong, that she was wrong, that she moved wrong and felt wrong, smelled wrong and tasted wrong. I thought I would get over it. I hoped it would go away. I wanted to be free of Hanna. But I never got over the feeling that something was wrong.

We got divorced when Julia was five. Neither of us could keep things going; we parted without bitterness and retained our loyalty to each other. It tormented me that we were denying Julia the sense of warmth and safety she obviously craved. When Gertrud and I were open and warm with each other, Julia swam in it like a fish in water. She was in her element. When she sensed tension between us, she ran from one to the other to assure us that we were good and she loved us. She longed for a little brother and probably would have been happy with more siblings. For a long time, she didn’t understand what divorce meant; when I came to visit, she wanted me to stay, and when she came to visit me, she wanted Gertrud to come too. When it was time to go, and she watched me from the window, and I had to get into the car under her sad gaze, it broke my heart. And I had the feeling that what we were denying her was not only her wish, but her right. We had cheated her of her rights by getting divorced, and the fact that we did it together didn’t halve the guilt.

I tried to approach my later relationships better, and to get into them more deeply. I admitted to myself that a woman had to move and feel a bit like Hanna, smell and taste a bit like her for things to be good between us. I told them about Hanna. And I told them more about myself than I had told Gertrud; they had to be able to make sense of whatever they might find disconcerting in my behavior and moods. But the women didn’t want to hear that much. I remember Helen, an American literary critic who stroked my back silently and soothingly as I talked, and continued to stroke me just as silently and soothingly after I’d stopped speaking. Gesina, a psychoanalyst, thought I needed to work through my relationship with my mother. Did it not strike me that my mother hardly appeared in my story at all? Hilke, a dentist, kept asking about the time before we met, but immediately forgot whatever I told her. So I stopped talking about it. There’s no need to talk, because the truth of what one says lies in what one does.

CHAPTER THREE

A S I WAS taking my second state exam, the professor who had given the concentration camps seminar died. Gertrud came across the obituary in the newspaper. The funeral was at the mountain cemetery. Did I want to go?

I didn’t. The burial was on a Thursday afternoon, and on both Thursday and Friday morning I had to take written exams. Also, the professor and I had never been particularly close. And I didn’t like funerals. And I didn’t want to be reminded of the trial.

But it was already too late. The memory had been awakened, and when I came out of the exam on Thursday, it was as if I had an appointment with the past that I couldn’t miss. I did something I never did otherwise: I took the streetcar. This in itself was an encounter with the past, like returning to a place that once was familiar but has changed its appearance. When Hanna worked for the streetcar company, there were long streetcars made up of two or three carriages, platforms at the front and back, running boards along the platforms that you could jump onto when the streetcar had pulled away from the stop, and a cord running through the cars that the conductor rang to signal departure. In summer there were streetcars with open platforms. The conductor sold, punched, and inspected tickets, called out the stations, signaled departures, kept an eye on the children who pushed their way onto the platforms, fought with passengers who jumped off and on, and denied further entry if the car was full. There were cheerful, witty, serious, grouchy, and coarse conductors, and the temperament or mood of the conductor often defined the atmosphere in the car. How stupid of me that after the failed surprise on the ride to Schwetzingen, I had been afraid to waylay Hanna and see what she was like as a conductor.

I got onto the conductor-less streetcar and rode to the mountain cemetery. It was a cold autumn day with a cloudless, hazy sky and a yellow sun that no longer gave off any heat, the kind you can look at directly without hurting your eyes. I had to search awhile before finding the grave where the funeral ceremony was being held. I walked beneath tall, bare trees, between old gravestones. Occasionally I met a cemetery gardener or an old woman with a watering can and gardening shears. It was absolutely still, and from a distance I could hear the hymn being sung at the professor’s grave.

I stopped a little way off and studied the small group of mourners. Some of them were clearly eccentrics and misfits. In the eulogies for the professor, there were hints that he himself had withdrawn from the pressures of society and thus lost contact with it, remaining a loner and thereby becoming something of an oddball himself.

I recognized a former member of the concentration camps seminar. He had taken his exams before me, had become a practicing attorney, and then opened a pub; he was dressed in a long red coat. He came to speak to me when everything was over and I was making my way to the cemetery gate. “We were in the same seminar-don’t you remember?”

“I do.” We shook hands.

“I was always at the trial on Wednesdays, and sometimes I gave you a lift.” He laughed. “You were there every day, every day and every week. Can you say why, now?” He looked at me, good-natured and ready to pounce, and I remembered that I had noticed this look even in the seminar.

“I was very interested in the trial.”

“You were very interested in the trial?” He laughed again. “The trial, or the defendant you were always staring at? The only one who was reasonably good-looking. We all used to wonder what was going on between you and her, but none of us dared ask. We were so terribly sensitive and considerate back then. Do you remember…” He recalled another member of the seminar, who stuttered or lisped and held forth incessantly, most of it nonsense, and to whom we listened as though his words were gold. He went on to talk about other members of the seminar, what they were like back then and what they were doing now. He talked and talked. But I knew he would get back to me eventually and ask: “So-what was going on between you and the defendant?” And I didn’t know what to answer, how to betray, confess, parry.

Then we were at the entrance to the cemetery, and he asked. A streetcar was just pulling away from the stop and I called out, “Bye,” and ran off as though I could jump onto the running board, ran alongside the streetcar beating the flat of my hand against the door, and something happened that I wouldn’t have believed possible, hadn’t even hoped for. The streetcar stopped, the door opened, and I got on.

CHAPTER FOUR

A FTER MY state exam, I had to decide on a profession within the law. I gave myself a little time; Gertrud, who immediately began working in the judiciary, had her hands full, and we were happy that I could remain at home and take care of Julia. Once Gertrud had got over all the difficulties of getting started and Julia was in kindergarten, I had to make a decision.

I had a hard time of it. I didn’t see myself in any of the roles I had seen lawyers play at Hanna’s trial. Prosecution seemed to me as grotesque a simplification as defense, and judging was the most grotesque oversimplification of all. Nor could I see myself as an administrative official; I had worked at a local government office during my training, and found its rooms, corridors, smells, and employees gray, sterile, and dreary.

That did not leave many legal careers, and I don’t know what I would have done if a professor of legal history had not offered me a research job. Gertrud said it was an evasion, an escape from the challenges and responsibilities of life, and she was right. I escaped and was relieved that I could do so. After all, it wasn’t forever, I told both her and myself; I was young enough to enter any solid branch of the legal profession after a few years of legal history. But it was forever; the first escape was followed by a second, when I moved from the university to a research institution, seeking and finding a niche in which I could pursue my interest in legal history, in which I needed no one and disturbed no one.

Now escape involves not just running away, but arriving somewhere. And the past I arrived in as a legal historian was no less alive than the present. It is also not true, as outsiders might assume, that one can merely observe the richness of life in the past, whereas one can participate in the present. Doing history means building bridges between the past and the present, observing both banks of the river, taking an active part on both sides. One of my areas of research was law in the Third Reich, and here it is particularly obvious how the past and present come together in a single reality. Here, escape is not a preoccupation with the past, but a determined focus on the present and the future that is blind to the legacy of the past which brands us and with which we must live.

In saying this, I do not mean to conceal how gratifying it was to plunge into different stretches of the past that were not so urgently connected to the present. I felt it for the first time when I was working on the legal codes and drafts of the Enlightenment. They were based on the belief that a good order is intrinsic to the world, and that therefore the world can be brought into good order. To see how legal provisions were created paragraph by paragraph out of this belief as solemn guardians of this good order, and worked into laws that strove for beauty and by their very beauty for truth, made me happy. For a long time I believed that there was progress in the history of law, a development towards greater beauty and truth, rationality and humanity, despite terrible setbacks and retreats. Once it became clear to me that this belief was a chimera, I began playing with a different image of the course of legal history. In this one it still has a purpose, but the goal it finally attains, after countless disruptions, confusions, and delusions, is the beginning, its own original starting point, which once reached must be set off from again.

I reread the Odyssey at that time, which I had first read in school and remembered as the story of a homecoming. But it is not the story of a homecoming. How could the Greeks, who knew that one never enters the same river twice, believe in homecoming? Odysseus does not return home to stay, but to set off again. The Odyssey is the story of motion both purposeful and purposeless, successful and futile. What else is the history of law?

CHAPTER FIVE

I BEGAN WITH the Odyssey. I read it after Gertrud and I had separated. There were many nights when I couldn’t sleep for more than a few hours; I would lie awake, and when I switched on the light and picked up a book, my eyes closed, and when I put the book down and turned off the light, I was wide awake again. So I read aloud, and my eyes didn’t close. And because in all my confused half-waking thoughts that swirled in tormenting circles of memories and dreams around my marriage and my daughter and my life, it was always Hanna who predominated, I read to Hanna. I read to Hanna on tape.

It was several months before I sent off the tapes. At first I didn’t want to send just bits of it, so I waited until I had recorded all of the Odyssey. Then I began to wonder if Hanna would find the Odyssey sufficiently interesting, so I recorded what I read next after the Odyssey, stories by Schnitzler and Chekhov. Then I put off calling the court that had convicted Hanna to find out where she was serving her sentence. Finally I had everything together, Hanna’s address in a prison near the city where she had been tried and convicted, a cassette player, and the cassettes, numbered from Chekhov to Schnitzler to Homer. And so finally I sent off the package with the machine and the tapes.

Recently I found the notebook in which I entered what I recorded for Hanna over the years. The first twelve titles were obviously all entered at the same time; at first I probably just read, and then realized that if I didn’t keep notes I would not remember what I had already recorded. Next to the subsequent titles there is sometimes a date, sometimes none, but even without dates I know that I sent Hanna the first package in the eighth year of her imprisonment, and the last in the eighteenth. In the eighteenth, her plea for clemency was granted.

In general I read to Hanna the things I wanted to read myself at any given moment. With the Odyssey, I found at first that it was hard to take in as much when I read aloud as when I read silently to myself. But that changed. The disadvantage of reading aloud remained the fact that it took longer. But books read aloud also stayed long in my memory. Even today, I can remember things in them absolutely clearly.

But I also read books I already knew and loved. So Hanna got to hear a great deal of Keller and Fontane, Heine and Mörike. For a long time I didn’t dare to read poetry, but eventually I really enjoyed it, and I learned many of the poems I read by heart. I can still say them today.

Taken together, the titles in the notebook testify to a great and fundamental confidence in bourgeois culture. I do not ever remember asking myself whether I should go beyond Kafka, Frisch, Johnson, Bachmann, and Lenz, and read experimental literature, literature in which I did not recognize the story or like any of the characters. To me it was obvious that experimental literature was experimenting with the reader, and Hanna didn’t need that and neither did I.

When I began writing myself, I read these pieces aloud to her as well. I waited until I had dictated my handwritten text, and revised the typewritten version, and had the feeling that now it was finished. When I read it aloud, I could tell if the feeling was right or not. And if not, I could revise it and record a new version over the old. But I didn’t like doing that. I wanted to have my reading be the culmination. Hanna became the court before which once again I concentrated all my energies, all my creativity, all my critical imagination. After that, I could send the manuscript to the publisher.

I never made a personal remark on the tapes, never asked after Hanna, never told her anything about myself. I read out the title, the name of the author, and the text. When the text was finished, I waited a moment, closed the book, and pressed the Stop button.

CHAPTER SIX

I N THE FOURTH year of our word-driven, wordless contact, a note arrived. “Kid, the last story was especially nice. Thank you. Hanna.”

It was lined paper, torn out of a notebook, and cut smooth. The message was right up at the top, and filled three lines. It was written in blue smudged ballpoint pen. Hanna had been pressing hard on the pen; the letters went through to the other side. She had also written the address with a great deal of pressure; the imprint was legible on the bottom and top halves of the paper, which was folded in the middle.

At first glance, one might have taken it for a child’s handwriting. But what is clumsy and awkward in children’s handwriting was forceful here. You could see the resistance Hanna had had to overcome to make the lines into letters and the letters into words. A child’s hand will wander off this way and that, and has to be kept on track. Hanna’s hand didn’t want to go anywhere and had to be forced. The lines that formed the letters started again each time on the upstroke, the downstroke, and before the curves and loops. And each letter was a victory over a fresh struggle, and had a new slant or slope, and often the wrong height or width.

I read the note and was filled with joy and jubilation. “She can write, she can write!” In these years I had read everything I could lay my hands on to do with illiteracy. I knew about the helplessness in everyday activities, finding one’s way or finding an address or choosing a meal in a restaurant, about how illiterates anxiously stick to prescribed patterns and familiar routines, about how much energy it takes to conceal one’s inability to read and write, energy lost to actual living. Illiteracy is dependence. By finding the courage to learn to read and write, Hanna had advanced from dependence to independence, a step towards liberation.

Then I looked at Hanna’s handwriting and saw how much energy and struggle the writing had cost her. I was proud of her. At the same time, I was sorry for her, sorry for her delayed and failed life, sorry for the delays and failures of life in general. I thought that if the right time gets missed, if one has refused or been refused something for too long, it’s too late, even if it is finally tackled with energy and received with joy. Or is there no such thing as “too late”? Is there only “late,” and is “late” always better than “never”? I don’t know.

After the first note came a steady stream of others. They were always only a few lines, a thank you, a wish to hear more of a particular author or to hear no more, a comment on an author or a poem or a story or a character in a novel, an observation about prison. “The forsythia is already in flower in the yard” or “I like the fact that there have been so many storms this summer” or “From my window I can see the birds flocking to fly south”-often it was Hanna’s note that first made me pay attention to the forsythia, the summer storms, or the flocks of birds. Her remarks about literature often landed astonishingly on the mark. “Schnitzler barks, Stefan Zweig is a dead dog” or “Keller needs a woman” or “Goethe’s poems are like tiny paintings in beautiful frames” or “Lenz must write on a typewriter.” Because she knew nothing about the authors, she assumed they were contemporaries, unless something indicated this was obviously impossible. I was astonished at how much older literature can actually be read as if it were contemporary; to anyone ignorant of history, it would be easy to see ways of life in earlier times simply as ways of life in foreign countries.

I never wrote to Hanna. But I kept reading to her. When I spent a year in America, I sent cassettes from there. When I was on vacation or was particularly busy, it might take longer for me to finish the next cassette; I never established a definite rhythm, but sent cassettes sometimes every week or two weeks, and sometimes only every three or four weeks. I didn’t worry that Hanna might not need my cassettes now that she had learned to read by herself. She could read as well. Reading aloud was my way of speaking to her, with her.

I kept all her notes. The handwriting changed. At first she forced the letters into the same slant and the right height and width. Once she had managed that, she became lighter and more confident. Her handwriting never became fluid, but it acquired something of the severe beauty that characterizes the writing of old people who have written little in their lives.

CHAPTER SEVEN

A T THE TIME I never thought about the fact that Hanna would be released one day. The exchange of notes and cassettes was so normal and familiar, and Hanna was both close and removed in such an easy way, that I could have continued the situation indefinitely. That was comfortable and selfish, I know.

Then came the letter from the prison warden.

For years you and Frau Schmitz have corresponded with each other. This is the only contact Frau Schmitz has with the outside world, and so I am turning to you, although I do not know how close your relationship is, and whether you are a relative or a friend.

Next year Frau Schmitz will again make an appeal for clemency, and I expect the parole board to grant the appeal. She will then be released quite shortly-after eighteen years in prison. Of course we can find or try to find her an apartment and a job; a job will be difficult at her age, even though she is in excellent health and has shown great skill in our sewing shop. But rather than us taking care of her, it would be better for relatives or friends to do so, to have the released prisoner live nearby, and keep her company and give her support. You cannot imagine how lonely and helpless one can be on the outside after eighteen years in prison.

Frau Schmitz can take care of herself quite well, and manages on her own. It would be enough if you could find her a small apartment and a job, visit her, and invite her to your house occasionally during the first weeks and months and make sure she knows about the programs offered by the local congregation, adult education, family support groups, and so on.

It is not easy, after eighteen years, to go into the city for the first time, go shopping, deal with the authorities, go to a restaurant. Doing it with someone else helps.

I have noticed that you do not visit Frau Schmitz. If you did, I would not have written to you, but would have asked to talk to you during one of your visits. Now it seems as if you will have to visit her before she is released. Please come and see me at that opportunity.

The letter closed with sincere greetings which I did not think referred to me, but to the fact that the warden was sincere about the issue. I had heard of her; her institution was considered extraordinary, and her opinion on questions of penal reform carried weight. I liked her letter.

But I did not like what was coming my way. Of course I would have to see about a job and an apartment, and I did. Friends who neither used nor rented out the apartment attached to their house agreed to let it to Hanna at a low rent. The Greek tailor who occasionally altered my clothes was willing to employ Hanna; his sister, who ran the tailoring business with him, wanted to return to Greece. And long before Hanna could have used them, I looked into the social services and educational programs run by churches and secular organizations. But I put off the visit to Hanna.

Precisely because she was both close and removed in such an easy way, I didn’t want to visit her. I had the feeling she could only be what she was to me at an actual distance. I was afraid that the small, light, safe world of notes and cassettes was too artificial and too vulnerable to withstand actual closeness. How could we meet face to face without everything that had happened between us coming to the surface?

So the year passed without me going to the prison. For a long time I heard nothing from the warden; a letter in which I described the housing and job situation for Hanna went unanswered. She was probably expecting to talk to me when I visited Hanna. She had no way to know that I was not only putting off this visit, but avoiding it. Finally, however, the decision came down to pardon and release Hanna, and the warden called me. Could I come now? Hanna was getting out in a week.

CHAPTER EIGHT

I WENT THE next Sunday. It was my first visit to a prison. I was searched at the entrance, and a number of doors were unlocked and locked along the way. But the building was new and bright, and in the inner area the doors were open, allowing the women to move about freely. At the end of a corridor a door opened to the outside, onto a little lawn with lots of people and trees and benches. I looked around, searching. The guard who had brought me pointed to a nearby bench in the shade of a chestnut tree.

Hanna? The woman on the bench was Hanna? Gray hair, a face with deep furrows on brow and cheeks and around the mouth, and a heavy body. She was wearing a light blue dress that was too tight and stretched across her breasts, stomach, and thighs. Her hands lay in her lap holding a book. She wasn’t reading it. Over the top of her half-glasses, she was watching a woman throwing bread crumbs to a couple of sparrows. Then she realized that she was being watched, and turned her face to me.

I saw the expectation in her face, saw it light up with joy when she recognized me, watched her eyes scan my face as I approached, saw them seek, inquire, then look uncertain and hurt, and saw the light go out of her face. When I reached her, she smiled a friendly, weary smile. “You’ve grown up, kid.” I sat down beside her and she took my hand.

In the past, I had particularly loved her smell. She always smelled fresh, freshly washed or of fresh laundry or fresh sweat or freshly loved. Sometimes she used perfume, I don’t know which one, and its smell, too, was more fresh than anything else. Under these fresh smells was another, heavy, dark, sharp smell. Often I would sniff at her like a curious animal, starting with her throat and shoulders, which smelled freshly washed, soaking up the fresh smell of sweat between her breasts mixed in her armpits with the other smell, then finding this heavy dark smell almost pure around her waist and stomach and between her legs with a fruity tinge that excited me; I would also sniff at her legs and feet-her thighs, where the heavy smell disappeared, the hollows of her knees again with that light, fresh smell of sweat, and her feet, which smelled of soap or leather or tiredness. Her back and arms had no special smell; they smelled of nothing and yet they smelled of her, and the palms of her hands smelled of the day and of work-the ink of the tickets, the metal of the ticket puncher, onions or fish or frying fat, soapsuds or the heat of the iron. When they are freshly washed, hands betray none of this. But soap only covers the smells, and after a time they return, faint, blending into a single scent of the day and work, a scent of work and day’s end, of evening, of coming home and being at home.

I sat next to Hanna and smelled an old woman. I don’t know what makes up this smell, which I recognize from grandmothers and elderly aunts, and which hangs in the rooms and halls of old-age homes like a curse. Hanna was too young for it.

I moved closer. I had seen that I had disappointed her before, and I wanted to do better, make up for it.

“I’m glad you’re getting out.”

“You are?”

“Yes, and I’m glad you’ll be nearby.” I told her about the apartment and the job I had found for her, about the cultural and social programs available in that part of the city, about the public library. “Do you read a lot?”

“A little. Being read to is nicer.” She looked at me. “That’s over now, isn’t it?”

“Why should it be over?” But I couldn’t see myself talking into cassettes for her or meeting her to read aloud. “I was so glad and so proud of you when you learned to read. And what nice letters you wrote me!” That was true; I had admired her and been glad, because she was reading and she wrote to me. But I could feel how little my admiration and happiness were worth compared to what learning to read and write must have cost Hanna, how meager they must have been if they could not even get me to answer her, visit her, talk to her. I had granted Hanna a small niche, certainly an important niche, one from which I gained something and for which I did something, but not a place in my life.

But why should I have given her a place in my life? I reacted indignantly against my own bad conscience at the thought that I had reduced her to a niche. “Didn’t you ever think about the things that were discussed at the trial, before the trial? I mean, didn’t you ever think about them when we were together, when I was reading to you?”

“Does that bother you very much?” But she didn’t wait for an answer. “I always had the feeling that no one understood me anyway, that no one knew who I was and what made me do this or that. And you know, when no one understands you, then no one can call you to account. Not even the court could call me to account. But the dead can. They understand. They don’t even have to have been there, but if they were, they understand even better. Here in prison they were with me a lot. They came every night, whether I wanted them or not. Before the trial I could still chase them away when they wanted to come.”

She waited to see if I had anything to say, but I couldn’t think of anything. At first, I wanted to say that I wasn’t able to chase anything away. But it wasn’t true. You can chase someone away by setting them in a niche.

“Are you married?”

“I was. Gertrud and I have been divorced for many years and our daughter is at boarding school; I hope she won’t stay there for the last years of school, and will move in with me.” Now I waited to see if she would say or ask anything. But she was silent. “I’ll pick you up next week, all right?”

“All right.”

“Quietly, or can there be a little noise and hoopla?”

“Quietly.”

“Okay, I’ll pick you up quietly, with no music or champagne.”

I stood up, and she stood up. We looked at each other. The bell had rung twice, and the other women had already gone inside. Once again her eyes scanned my face. I took her in my arms, but she didn’t feel right.

“Take care, kid.”

“You too.”

So we said goodbye, even before we had to separate inside.

CHAPTER NINE

T HE FOLLOWING week was particularly busy. I don’t remember whether I was under actual pressure to finish the lecture I was working on, or only under self-inflicted pressure to work and succeed.

The idea I had had when I began working on the lecture was no good. When I began to revise it, where I expected to find meaning and consistency, I encountered one non sequitur after another. Instead of accepting this, I kept searching, harassed, obsessed, anxious, as though reality itself could fail along with my concept of it, and I was ready to twist or exaggerate or play down my own findings. I got into a state of strange disquiet; I could go to sleep if I went to bed late, but a few hours later I would be wide awake, until I decided to get up and continue reading or writing.

I also did what needed to be done to prepare for Hanna’s release. I furnished her apartment with furniture from IKEA and some old pieces, advised the Greek tailor that Hanna would be coming in, and brought my information about social services and educational programs up to date. I bought groceries, put books on the bookshelves, and hung pictures. I had a gardener come to tidy up the little garden surrounding the terrace outside the living room. I did all this with unnatural haste and doggedness; it was all too much for me.

But it was just enough to prevent me from thinking about my visit to Hanna. Only occasionally, when I was driving my car, or when I was in Hanna’s apartment, did thoughts of it get the upper hand and trigger memories. I saw her on the bench, her eyes fixed on me, saw her at the swimming pool, her face turned to me, and again had the feeling that I had betrayed her and owed her something. And again I rebelled against this feeling; I accused her, and found it both shabby and too easy, the way she had wriggled out of her guilt. Allowing no one but the dead to demand an accounting, reducing guilt and atonement to insomnia and bad feelings-where did that leave the living? But what I meant was not the living, it was me. Did I not have my own accounting to demand of her? What about me?

On the afternoon before I was due to pick her up, I called the prison. First I spoke to the warden.

“I’m a bit nervous. You know, normally people aren’t released after such long sentences before spending a few hours or days outside. Frau Schmitz refused this. It won’t be easy for her.”

Then I spoke to Hanna.

“Think about what we should do tomorrow. Whether you want to go straight home, or whether we might go to the woods or the river.”

“I’ll think about it. You’re still a big planner, aren’t you?”

That annoyed me. It annoyed me the way it did when girlfriends told me I wasn’t spontaneous enough, that I operated too much through my head and not enough through my heart.

She could tell by my silence that I was annoyed, and laughed. “Don’t be cross, kid. I didn’t mean anything by it.”

I had met Hanna again on the benches as an old woman. She had looked like an old woman and smelled like an old woman. I hadn’t noticed her voice at all. Her voice had stayed young.

CHAPTER TEN

N EXT MORNING, Hanna was dead. She had hanged herself at daybreak.

When I arrived, I was taken to the warden. I saw her for the first time-a small, thin woman with dark blond hair and glasses. She seemed insignificant until she began to speak, with force and warmth and a severe gaze and energetic use of both hands and arms. She asked me about my telephone conversation of the night before and the meeting the previous week. Had I picked up any signals, had it made me fear for her? I said no. Indeed, I had had no suspicions or fears that I had ignored.

“How did you get to know each other?”

“We lived in the same neighborhood.”

She looked at me searchingly, and I saw that I would have to say more.

“We lived in the same neighborhood and we got to know each other and became friends. When I was a young student, I was at the trial that convicted her.”

“Why did you send Frau Schmitz cassettes?”

I was silent.

“You knew that she was illiterate, didn’t you? How did you know?”

I shrugged my shoulders. I didn’t see what business the story of Hanna and me was of hers. Tears were filling my chest and throat, and I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to speak. I didn’t want to cry in front of her.

She must have seen how I was feeling. “Come with me, I’ll show you Frau Schmitz’s cell.” She went ahead, but kept turning around to tell me things or explain them to me. Here is where there had been a terrorist attack, here was the sewing shop where Hanna had worked, this is where Hanna once held a sit-down strike until cuts in library funding were reinstated, this was the way to the library. She stopped in front of the cell. “Frau Schmitz didn’t pack. You’ll see her cell the way she lived in it.”

Bed, closet, table, chair, a shelf on the wall over the table, a sink and toilet in the corner behind the door. Glass bricks instead of window glass. The table was bare. The shelf held books, an alarm clock, a stuffed bear, two mugs, instant coffee, tea tins, the cassette machine, and on two lower shelves, the cassettes I had made.

“They aren’t all here.”

The warden had followed my glance. “Frau Schmitz always lent some tapes to the aid society for blind prisoners.”

I went over to the bookshelf. Primo Levi, Elie Wiesel, Tadeusz Borowski, Jean Améry-the literature of the victims, next to the autobiography of Rudolf Hess, Hannah Arendt’s report on Eichmann in Jerusalem, and scholarly literature on the camps.

“Did Hanna read these?”

“Well, at least she ordered them with care. Several years ago I had to get her a general concentrationcamp bibliography, and then one or two years ago she asked me to suggest some books on women in the camps, both prisoners and guards; I wrote to the Institute for Contemporary History, and they sent a specialized bibliography. As soon as Frau Schmitz learned to read, she began to read about the concentration camps.”

Above the bed hung many small pictures and slips of paper. I knelt on the bed and read. There were quotations, poems, little articles, even recipes that Hanna had written down or cut out like pictures from newspapers and magazines. “Spring lets its blue banner flutter through the air again,” “Cloud shadows fly across the fields”-the poems were all full of delight in nature, and yearning for it, and the pictures showed woods bright with spring, meadows spangled with flowers, autumn foliage and single trees, a pasture by a stream, a cherry tree with ripe red cherries, an autumnal chestnut flamed in yellow and orange. A newspaper photograph showed an older man and a younger man, both in dark suits, shaking hands. In the young one, bowing to the older one, I recognized myself. I was graduating from school, and was getting a prize from the principal at the ceremony. That was a long time after Hanna had left the city. Had Hanna, who could not read, subscribed to the local paper in which my photo appeared? In any case she must have gone to some trouble to find out about the photo and get a copy. And had she had it with her during the trial? I felt the tears again in my chest and throat.

“She learned to read with you. She borrowed the books you read on tape out of the library, and followed what she heard, word by word and sentence by sentence. The tape machine couldn’t handle all that constant switching on and off, and rewinding and fast-forwarding. It kept breaking down and having to be repaired, and because that required permission, I finally found out what Frau Schmitz was doing. She didn’t want to tell me at first; when she also began to write, and asked me for a writing manual, she didn’t try to hide it any longer. She was also just proud that she had succeeded, and wanted to share her happiness.”

As she spoke, I had continued to kneel, my eyes on the pictures and notes, fighting back tears. When I turned around and sat down on the bed, she said, “She so hoped you would write. You were the only one she got mail from, and when the mail was distributed and she said ‘No letter for me?’ she wasn’t talking about the packages the tapes came in. Why did you never write?”

I still said nothing. I could not have spoken; all I could have done was to stammer and weep.

She went to the shelf, picked up a tea tin, sat down next to me, and took a folded sheet of paper from her suit pocket. “She left a letter for me, a sort of will. I’ll read the part that concerns you.” She unfolded the sheet of paper. “There is still money in the lavender tea tin. Give it to Michael Berg; he should send it, along with the 7,000 marks in the bank, to the daughter who survived the fire in the church with her mother. She should decide what to do with it. And tell him I say hello to him.”

So she had not left any message for me. Did she intend to hurt me? Or punish me? Or was her soul so tired that she could only do and write what was absolutely necessary? “What was she like all those years?” I waited until I could go on. “And how was she these last few days?”

“For years and years she lived here the way you would live in a convent. As if she had moved here of her own accord and voluntarily subjected herself to our system, as if the rather monotonous work was a sort of meditation. She was greatly respected by the other women, to whom she was friendly but reserved. More than that, she had authority, she was asked for her advice when there were problems, and if she intervened in an argument, her decision was accepted. Then a few years ago she gave up. She had always taken care of herself personally, she was slender despite her strong build, and meticulously clean. But now she began to eat a lot and seldom washed; she got fat and smelled. She didn’t seem unhappy or dissatisfied. In fact it was as though the retreat to the convent was no longer enough, as though life in the convent was still too sociable and talkative, and she had to retreat even further, into a lonely cell safe from all eyes, where looks, clothing, and smell meant nothing. No, it would be wrong to say that she had given up. She redefined her place in a way that was right for her, but no longer impressed the other women.”

“And the last days?”

“She was the way she always was.”

“Can I see her?”

She nodded, but remained seated. “Can the world become so unbearable to someone after years of loneliness? Is it better to kill yourself than to return to the world from the convent, from the hermitage?” She turned to me. “Frau Schmitz didn’t write anything about why she was going to kill herself. And you won’t say what there was between you that might have led to Frau Schmitz’s killing herself at the end of the night before you were due to pick her up.” She folded the piece of paper, put it away, stood up, and smoothed her skirt. “Her death is a blow to me, you see, and at the moment I’m very angry, at Frau Schmitz, and at you. But let’s go.”

She led the way again, this time silently. Hanna lay in the infirmary in a small cubicle. We could just fit between the wall and the stretcher. The warden pulled back the sheet.

A cloth had been tied around Hanna’s head to hold up her chin until the onset of rigor mortis. Her face was neither particularly peaceful nor particularly agonized. It looked rigid and dead. As I looked and looked, the living face became visible in the dead, the young in the old. This is what must happen to old married couples, I thought: the young man is preserved in the old one for her, the beauty and grace of the young woman stay fresh in the old one for him. Why had I not seen this reflection a week ago?

I must not cry. After a time, when the warden looked at me questioningly, I nodded, and she spread the sheet over Hanna’s face again.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

I T WAS AUTUMN before I could carry out Hanna’s instructions. The daughter lived in New York, and I used a meeting in Boston as the occasion to bring her the money: a bank check plus the tea tin with the cash. I had written to her, introduced myself as a legal historian, and mentioned the trial. I told her I would be grateful for a chance to talk to her. She invited me to tea.

I took the train from Boston to New York. The woods were a triumphal parade of brown, yellow, orange, tawny red, and chestnut, and the flaming glowing scarlet of the maples. It made me think of the autumn pictures in Hanna’s cell. When the rhythm of the wheels and the rocking of the car tired me, I dreamed of Hanna and myself in a house in the autumn-blazed hills that were lining our route. Hanna was older than when I had met her and younger than when I had met her again, older than me, more attractive than in earlier years, more relaxed in her movements with age, more at home in her own body. I saw her getting out of the car and picking up shopping bags, saw her going through the garden into the house, saw her set down the bags and go upstairs ahead of me. My longing for Hanna became so strong that it hurt. I struggled against the longing, argued that it went against Hanna’s and my reality, the reality of our ages, the reality of our circumstances. How could Hanna, who spoke no English, live in America? And she couldn’t drive a car either.

I woke up and knew that Hanna was dead. I also knew that my desire had fixed on her without her being its object. It was the desire to come home.

The daughter lived in New York on a street near Central Park. The street was lined on both sides with old row houses of dark sandstone, with stoops of the same sandstone leading up to the front door on the first floor. This created an effect of severity-house after house with almost identical façades, stoop after stoop, trees only recently planted at regular intervals along the sidewalk, with a few yellowing leaves on thin twigs.

The daughter served tea by large windows looking out on the vest-pocket backyard gardens, some green and colorful and some merely collections of trash. As soon as we had sat down, the tea had been poured, and the sugar added and stirred, she switched from the English in which she had welcomed me, to German. “What brings you here?” The question was neither friendly nor unfriendly; her tone was absolutely matter-of-fact. Everything about her was matter-of-fact: her manner, her gestures, her dress. Her face was oddly ageless, the way faces look after being lifted. But perhaps it had set because of her early sufferings; I tried and failed to remember her face as it had been during the trial.

I told her about Hanna’s death and her last wishes.

“Why me?”

“I suppose because you are the only survivor.”

“And how am I supposed to deal with it?”

“However you think fit.”

“And grant Frau Schmitz her absolution?”

At first I wanted to protest, but Hanna was indeed asking a great deal. Her years of imprisonment were not merely to be the required atonement: Hanna wanted to give them her own meaning, and she wanted this giving of meaning to be recognized. I said as much.

She shook her head. I didn’t know if this meant she was refusing to accept my interpretation or refusing to grant Hanna the recognition.

“Could you not recognize it without granting her absolution?”

She laughed. “You like her, don’t you? What was your relationship?”

I hesitated a moment. “I read aloud to her. It started when I was fifteen and continued while she was in prison.”

“How did you…”

“I sent her tapes. Frau Schmitz was illiterate almost all her life; she only learned to read and write in prison.”

“Why did you do all this?”

“When I was fifteen, we had a relationship.”

“You mean you slept together?”

“Yes.”

“That woman was truly brutal… did you ever get over the fact that you were only fifteen when she… No, you said yourself that you began reading to her again when she was in prison. Did you ever get married?”

I nodded.

“And the marriage was short and unhappy, and you never married again, and the child, if there is one, is in boarding school.”

“That’s true of thousands of people, it doesn’t take a Frau Schmitz.”

“Did you ever feel, when you had contact with her in those last years, that she knew what she had done to you?”

I shrugged my shoulders. “In any case, she knew what she had done to people in the camp and on the march. She didn’t just tell me that, she dealt with it intensively during her last years in prison.” I told her what the warden had said.

She stood up and took long strides up and down the room. “How much money is it?”

I went to the coat closet, where I had left my bag, and returned with the check and the tea tin. “Here.”

She looked at the check and put it on the table. She opened the tin, emptied it, closed it again, and held it in her hand, her eyes riveted on it. “When I was a little girl, I had a tea tin for my treasures. Not like this, although these sorts of tea tins already existed, but one with Cyrillic letters, not one with a top you push in, but one you snap shut. I brought it with me to the camp, but then one day it was stolen from me.”

“What was in it?”

“What you’d expect. A piece of hair from our poodle. Tickets to the operas my father took me to, a ring I won somewhere or found in a package-the tin wasn’t stolen for what was in it. The tin itself, and what could be done with it, were worth a lot in the camp.” She put the tin down on top of the check. “Do you have a suggestion for what to do with the money? Using it for something to do with the Holocaust would really seem like an absolution to me, and that is something I neither wish nor care to grant.”

“For illiterates who want to learn to read and write. There must be nonprofit organizations, foundations, societies you could give the money to.”

“I’m sure there are.” She thought about it.

“Are there corresponding Jewish organizations?”

“You can depend on it, if there are organizations for something, then there are Jewish organizations for it. Illiteracy, it has to be admitted, is hardly a Jewish problem.” She pushed the check and the money back to me. “Let’s do it this way. You find out what kind of relevant Jewish organizations there are, here or in Germany, and you pay the money to the account of the organization that seems most plausible to you.” She laughed. “If the recognition is so important, you can do it in the name of Hanna Schmitz.” She picked up the tin again. “I’ll keep the tin.”

CHAPTER TWELVE

A LL THIS happened ten years ago. In the first few years after Hanna’s death, I was tormented by the old questions of whether I had denied and betrayed her, whether I owed her something, whether I was guilty for having loved her. Sometimes I asked myself if I was responsible for her death. And sometimes I was in a rage at her and at what she had done to me. Until finally the rage faded and the questions ceased to matter. Whatever I had done or not done, whatever she had done or not to me-it was the path my life had taken.

Soon after her death, I decided to write the story of me and Hanna. Since then I’ve done it many times in my head, each time a little differently, each time with new images, and new strands of action and thought. Thus there are many different stories in addition to the one I have written. The guarantee that the written one is the right one lies in the fact that I wrote it and not the other versions. The written version wanted to be written, the many others did not.

At first I wanted to write our story in order to be free of it. But the memories wouldn’t come back for that. Then I realized our story was slipping away from me and I wanted to recapture it by writing, but that didn’t coax up the memories either. For the last few years I’ve left our story alone. I’ve made peace with it. And it came back, detail by detail and in such a fully rounded fashion, with its own direction and its own sense of completion, that it no longer makes me sad. What a sad story, I thought for so long. Not that I now think it was happy. But I think it is true, and thus the question of whether it is sad or happy has no meaning whatever.

At any rate, that’s what I think when I just happen to think about it. But if something hurts me, the hurts I suffered back then come back to me, and when I feel guilty, the feelings of guilt return; if I yearn for something today, or feel homesick, I feel the yearnings and homesickness from back then. The tectonic layers of our lives rest so tightly one on top of the other that we always come up against earlier events in later ones, not as matter that has been fully formed and pushed aside, but absolutely present and alive. I understand this. Nevertheless, I sometimes find it hard to bear. Maybe I did write our story to be free of it, even if I never can be.

As soon as I returned from New York, I donated Hanna’s money in her name to the Jewish League Against Illiteracy. I received a short, computer-generated letter in which the Jewish League thanked Ms. Hanna Schmitz for her donation. With the letter in my pocket, I drove to the cemetery, to Hanna’s grave. It was the first and only time I stood there.