Self's Murder (20 page)

“Was that his German lawyer?”

He nodded and said casually, “Yes, back then we Germans still held together.”

Y
es, that’s how they were. For them the Third Reich, war, defeat, rebuilding, and the economic miracle were simply different circumstances under which they could conduct the same business: multiplying the money they owned or managed. It was true when they said that they hadn’t been Nazis, that they had nothing against Jews, that they had stood firmly on constitutional ground. Everything for them was ground on which they stood and which made their enterprises bigger, richer, and more powerful. And yet they did this with the feeling that nothing else mattered. What good were governments, systems, ideas, people’s happiness or pain if the economy wasn’t flourishing? When there was no work and no bread?

Korten had been like that. Korten, my friend, brother-in-law, and enemy. That was how he had devoted himself to the Rhineland Chemical Works during the war and how after the war he had turned it into what it is today. For Korten, as for so many others, power and the success of the enterprise had become synonymous with his own power and success. What he took out of the enterprise for himself, he took with the certainty that he was serving what was vital: the Rhineland Chemical Works, the economy, the people. Until he fell from a cliff in Trefeuntec. Until I pushed him off that cliff.

I never regretted it. There have been times when I thought I ought to, because it was neither legally nor morally correct. But remorse never set in. Perhaps the other, older, harder morals that existed before those of today still prevail in our hearts.

It is only in one’s dreams that an unmastered, unmasterable remnant remains. That night I dreamed that Korten and I were having an elegant meal at a table beneath a large old tree with overhanging branches. I don’t remember what we talked about. It was a casual, friendly conversation. I enjoyed it because I knew we couldn’t really expect to chat so warmly and easily after what had happened at Trefeuntec. Then I noticed how gloomy it was. At first I thought it was the dense foliage, but then I saw that the sky was stormy and dark, and I heard the wind rustling through the leaves. We talked as if everything was fine until the wind started tearing at us, rip ping away the tablecloth along with the plates and glasses, finally carrying off Korten on the chair on which he was sit ting: a mighty, enthroned Korten, his deep laughter echoing. I ran after him, trying to catch him, ran with outstretched arms, ran without the slightest hope of grabbing hold of him or his chair, ran so fast that my feet barely touched the ground. As I ran, Korten went on laughing. I knew he was laughing at me, but I didn’t know why, until I noticed that I had run beyond the edge of the cliff on which we had been sitting beneath the tree, that I was running on air, the sea far below me. My running came to an end, and I fell.

S
uddenly summer was here: not just the odd warm day or mild evening, but a heat as oppressive in the shade as in the sun, a heat that didn’t let me sleep at night but made me count the hours struck by the bell of the Heilig-Geist church. I was relieved when it grew light, though I knew that the morning was not fresh and the new day would turn out as hot as the day before. I got up and had some of the tea I’d made the night before and put in the refrigerator. Sometimes the scrapes and wounds that Turbo brought back from his nightly adventures were so bad that I had to tend them with iodine. He, too, is growing old. I wonder, does he still win his battles?

It was so hot that everything was less important, less pressing. As if it were not really true, just possible. As if one first had to find out what it was all about, and for that it was too hot.

But I don’t want to blame the heat. I didn’t know what else I could still do to shed light on Schuler’s death. Perhaps there wasn’t anything to shed light on and never had been. Had I taken a wrong turn? In a sense, this idea had its good side. If he had been attacked, it wasn’t as if I’d have been any less responsible than I first thought. Just the opposite, in fact. Only if Schuler’s bad condition had been triggered by someone else on that fatal day, would his life have been in my hands. In fact, if he only had a hangover, or had been affected by the weather, his accident could have occurred at any time.

The hot weeks ended with a series of days in which the heat exploded in powerful evening storms. By five o’clock the sky would cloud over, and by six it was as dark as if nighttime had come. The wind rose and whipped the dust through the streets, ripping from the trees branches that the heat had turned dry and brittle. With the first storms the children remained outside, yelping beneath the raindrops, overjoyed when the rain started pouring down like a waterfall, wetting them through and through. But this soon bored them. I sat by the door of my office and watched the water washing in waves over the empty sidewalk, gurgling in a pool over the gutter because the drain couldn’t handle it fast enough. When the storm was over I was the first to go outside, breathing in the fresh air on my way home or to Brigitte’s. During the storm the sun had set. But the sky was clear again, a pale blue glowing violet in the twilight before it turned a darker violet, dark blue, dark gray, black.

I savored the summer. I savored the heat and the law of lassitude with which it blanketed everything and beneath which I felt free and at ease. I savored the storms, and also the moderate temperatures of the following weeks. Brigitte and I were looking for an apartment, and when I insisted on one with a view of the Rhine or the Neckar she knew that I wasn’t out to sabotage our search. I always would have liked to have a house by the sea, or if not by the sea then by a lake. But Mannheim isn’t by the sea or by a lake. The Rhine and Neckar flow through it.

“We’ll find a really good apartment, Gerhard.”

Everything was fine but not fine. The stories life writes demand endings, and as long as a story doesn’t have an ending, it keeps everyone who participates in it in check. It doesn’t have to be a happy ending. The good don’t have to be rewarded and the bad punished. But the threads of fate cannot be left dangling: they have to be woven into the story’s tapestry. Only when that is done can we leave the story behind us. Only then are we free to begin something new.

No, the story that had started at the beginning of the year in the snow was not yet over. Even if I’d have liked to make peace with Schuler, who’d maybe had one glass too many or been affected by the weather. I didn’t know all the threads that were still waiting to be woven into the carpet, and I knew even less what the carpet’s pattern was or how I could find out. But all I had to do was wait. Stories strive toward their ends, and don’t leave you alone until they reach them.

W
hen the leaves began to turn I got a letter from Georg. He sent me a manuscript that was scheduled to be published in a law journal. “Laban’s children”—Georg had turned his research on Laban’s heirs into an article. Did I have any suggestions?

He made it clear from the start of the article that Laban did not in fact have any children. No natural children, and no disciples, either. While other professors guard their circle of students like mother hens, Laban saw to it that his students would stand on their own feet as soon as possible and follow their own paths. Georg suspected that an early passion for a colleague’s wife, one that was perhaps reciprocated but that remained unfulfilled, had marked him in a way that kept him from close bonds with students and from deep relationships with women.

But he
did
have children. He was as close to his sister’s two children as he might have been had they been his own. He particularly favored his nephew, Walter Brock, who had also become a lawyer and judge.

Walter Brock. Georg described his path from Breslau to Leipzig, his career from district court judge to judge of the regional high court, the insults, the humiliations, and finally the firing with which his career came to an end in 1933. He described his marriage; his children, Heinrich and Ursula; his and his wife’s suicides after their apartment was ransacked during Kristallnacht. He described how Heinrich had escaped to London at the eleventh hour, and how Ursula hadn’t managed to get out in time and so had gone into hiding when the deportations began. She had disappeared. Laban, who died in 1918, had tenderly loved little Ursula, who was born in 1911.

There was no need for me to double-check, but I took Ursula Brock’s passport out of my filing cabinet and saw that her date of birth was October 10, 1911. Then I studied her passport photograph. She had had bobbed dark hair and a dimple in her left cheek, and she looked at me attentively with happy, somewhat startled eyes.

I found Georg at the courthouse. “I’ve got Ursula Brock’s passport.”

“You’ve got what?”

“Ursula Brock, Laban’s great-niece. I’ve got her passport. I just read your article, and—”

“I’ve got a case at two. Can I drop by afterward?”

“Sure, I’ll be at the office.”

He came by and wouldn’t take coffee, tea, or mineral water.

“Where is it?”

He studied the initial pages with the photograph and the entries and leafed through the rest of the pages slowly and carefully, as if he might be able to elicit hidden information from them.

“Where did you get this?” he asked.

I told him about Adolf Schuler, his archive, and his visit. “He gave me an attaché case that had … that had this passport in it—after which he got into his car, drove off, crashed into a tree, and died.”

“This means that after she went into hiding she sought help in Schwetzingen. Did she find help? Did Weller and Welker get her a new passport? Did they keep this old one for after the war?” He shook his head slowly and sadly. “But she didn’t make it.”

“In your article you wrote that as a Jew she was expelled from the university in 1936. Do you know what she studied?”

“All kinds of things. Her parents were very indulgent and didn’t push her. In the end it was Slavonic studies.” He looked at me entreatingly. “Do you need the passport? Can I have it? I’ve got a picture of Walter Brock and his wife with the small children, and one of Heinrich in London, but I haven’t got a picture of Ursula as an adult.”

He took an envelope out of his briefcase and laid out a series of photographs on my desk. A married couple standing in front of a carefully pruned hedge, the man wearing a suit with a stiff collar beneath his chin and a walking stick in his left hand, the woman in a long dress down to the ground, with a strap in her right hand that harnessed Heinrich around shoulders and chest, like a horse’s bridle. Heinrich was wearing a sailor suit and cap, and Ursula, bigger than her brother and not in a harness, was standing next to her father. She was wearing a summer dress and a wide sun hat. “Don’t move,” the photographer had just called out, and they all were standing still, unblinking. Another picture showed a young man in front of the Tower Bridge, which had just been raised to let a ship pass through.

“Heinrich in London?” I asked.

Georg nodded.

“And this is the house in Breslau in which Laban was born, this is his villa in Strasbourg, this is a postcard of the main building of the Wilhelm University under construction, and—”

“Who’s that?” I asked, pulling out a photograph from beneath the postcards. I recognized the large head, the receding hairline, the large ears, and the protruding eyes. I had seen him the first time through a foggy windshield on the Hirschhorner Höhe and for the last time quite close up when we drove from the hospital to the Luisenpark. I had also seen him when we got out of the car and walked into the park. But Samarin’s head had never made as much of an impression on me as when we sat next to each other on the backseat; he looking stoically before him while I peered at him from the side.

“That’s Laban. Haven’t you seen him before?”

S
o I drove yet again to the retirement home in Emmertsgrund. The first yellow and red leaves were glowing in the green of the mountains. In some of the fields fires were burning, and at one point the fire stretched all the way to the autobahn. I opened the window to see if it still smelled the way it used to, but only wind came roaring through the open window.

The door to old Herr Weller’s apartment stood open, and the place had been emptied. I went inside and looked out the window at the cement factory from the spot where he and I had sat across from each other and talked. Two cleaning ladies came in and began to mop the floor without paying any attention to me. I wondered why the walls weren’t being painted first. When I asked them what had happened to Weller, they didn’t understand.

In the main office I was told that he had died of a stroke the week before. I’ve never been interested in medicine, nor will I ever be. I imagined old Herr Weller’s brain at work, driven, sly, evil, propelled by bleating laughter like a stuttering engine. Until the engine suddenly stalled. I was told when and where he would be buried. I could still make it if I hurried. I suddenly remembered Adolf Schuler’s funeral. It had slipped my mind, and again I felt as if I’d failed to hold on to him and stop him from getting into the car and driving into a tree.

Old Herr Weller had enjoyed talking to me and would have wanted to talk more—to explain how things were during the war, that the great-niece of his silent partner would have died if he and old Herr Welker hadn’t taken her in and given her a new identity; that she’d been insane to have a damn brat on top of everything, as he’d have put it. That he and Welker had done more than enough, raising the brat after she died. The brat’s real identity? What use would that have been to Gregor Samarin if they’d informed him of his real identity? That would just have given him big ideas. Furthermore, the Brocks lived in Leipzig. Wouldn’t the brat have had a better time of it as Gregor Samarin in the West than he would growing up in a Communist orphanage?