was short, rotund and surprised us a bit with an angelic smile. His German was as minimal as the funeral director had suggested, but in his own tongue he chattered almost without drawing breath. After lengthy confusion and much sign language it was clear that he feared he was being accused of purloining the coarse cotton bag in which the three books had arrived.
As for the books themselves, we learned a goodly amount. Grigor had some talent for drawing. His cubicle had samples of his work pinned up on the wall. Some of these I chose not to examine too closely, since it was clear that the little man found his artistic inspiration in his work with the deceased. If the anatomical sketches seemed to mimic the cold Renaissance objectivity of da Vinci, Grigor’s memento mori portraits were serene and almost affectionate.
“Keepsakes, ja, ja,” he had understood and rummaged through a fat portfolio. One drawing I found very poignant, a toy carousel which had been placed in the coffin of a child. The pencil strokes were quite faint in Grigor’s work, but in this case he had given the merry-go-round dabs of jewel-like colour. I could see that Reiß found it heart-rending, too.
“Lessinger, ja, ja.”
He showed us three drawings he had made. The first had the very sketchy outlines of a book, but he had devoted care to the cover which featured a cross, its arms of equal length. I gave a slight shudder when I saw that Grigor had used a red felt-tip pen to fill a scarlet field surrounding a white cross. The Swiss coat of arms. I had a slim volume of similar appearance at home, after all, about the size of a normal ring-binder as the Transylvanian confirmed with precise gestures.
Grigor mimed the suggestion that the line of text embossed on the cover below the white cross might be a telephone number. But he merely hinted in his drawing at what could be as easily letters as numbers. Reiß gazed at a spot on the ceiling in dismay.
My pretence of intense interest in subsequent revelations must have been convincing for Rudiger Reiß. The second cover was emblazoned with the standard of the Third Reich, the eagle’s wings outstretched, a swastika in the wreath grasped by the talons of the stylised bird of prey. I prevaricated with regard to the size of this book, suggesting it might be small, maybe pocket-sized. Grigor disagreed. It was square-ish, and almost as big as a vinyl record album.
Of course it was.
I made no effort to clarify the matter of the illustration on the cover of the third book, leaving Reiß thinking that it was a representation of the Virgin Mary. If memory served it was in reality a Black Madonna, the dusky Miriam of Magdala. I hadn’t bothered to take a look at my three books for weeks. While Rudiger Reiß struggled to understand Grigor, who was, we thought, trying to declare how fervent was his personal embrace of Eastern Orthodox Christianity, I wracked my brain in an effort to recall just how and when the three books had come into my possession. That was an easier task than speculating as to why three books burned with the remains of Herr Lessinger had covers which appeared to be faithful facsimiles of those cached in my flat.
“Why did Grigor make drawings of the three books, though? The sentimentality of that child’s carousel I can understand. But… old books?”
Rudiger Reiß nodded, and made an effort to frame the question in a way that the Transylvanian could perhaps comprehend.
Suddenly Grigor beamed broadly. He bent over his sketch pad and drew the quick portrait of a man with a bald head and a full beard, using a marker to give the fringe of the beard an orange tint.
“Draw for he!” said Grigor.
Early March, mid-March, late March. Three months ago. On the first Saturday of the month there had been drinks after the Bookshop closed for the day to celebrate Herr Lessinger’s birthday. I had made a point of being there, shuffling out of my warmest quilted winter coat to reveal the kind of mini-dress (it was tweed, and the hold-up stockings were very, very long) which gave Elsa Brundt apoplexy. Knowing that the end was coming (the closure of the bookshop) and that no future birthday of his would be observed on the premises, Ludwig-Viktor Lessinger had splashed out on a premium champagne (Veuve or Dom, one or the other). At the time he had hinted that in a couple of weeks he would be going into hospital. For observation, he assured the staff.
Beware the Ides of March.
By the end of the month some of us had became aware that the prognosis was gloomy, that Herr Lessinger had weeks at most to live. But my only visit to the clinic had been before that terrible news came.
“Check those three books out for me, Theodora. I’ll let you know when I want you to bring them to me in this depressing place.”
But no such summons ever came. And after learning that his condition ruled out any hope of survival I never went to visit him again. I knew it was cowardice. At the end of April, when there were the first new leaves on the trees, I had summoned up my courage. I had a friend ink a simulated tattoo, Ex Libris Lessinger, so positioned that even a very unwell old man might be momentarily cheered by the sight. And, although he had not asked for them, I had the three books in the bag ready to deliver. But I got cold feet at the last minute.
The tattoo hasn’t altogether faded even today, although it is now little more than a shadowy smudge on my mons veneris.
“What are you thinking, Thea?” Rudiger Reiß asked after a while.
That I liked his after-shave, Dior’s Eau Sauvage. I had accepted his offer to drive me back to where I lived.
“About asparagus,” I said.
“Asparagus?”
“Yeah, easier to think about asparagus than about the significance of books with the Swiss flag, the Nazi symbol and the Madonna on their covers. And about who else might have been as interested as we were and just a bit quicker off the mark!”
At the open-air market there was organically grown asparagus, the grand cru. I bought enough for four. The ham from a neighbouring stall was presumed to come from pigs who had been deliriously happy prior entering the slaughter-house. Rudiger Reiß seemed quite happy to accept my invitation to supper.
“I am moderately intelligent. I am very opinionated and tend to provoke in a variety of ways. But I am such a good cook that even Bea is prepared to put up with me. She’ll like you.”
Bea Schell needed to be explained. Dirk Seehof’s fiancée often disliked any fourth person invited to my table. Granted, the pierced punk who was also a sensitive poet and had been in raptures after a dinner at the beginning of the Spargelzeit had been odd. He quoted Proust, who claimed that asparagus ‘transforms my chamber-pot into a flask of perfume’, and was the kind of person the fastidious Bea would usually cross the street to avoid. The anarcho-rastafarian albino musician had proved a tedious table companion, his efforts to disguise his thoroughly middle-class origins pathetic. Then there was the graffiti artist, Zachary. His grunge-erotic work would permanently embellish one of the walls of my flat. The lingering acetone whiff of his colour sprays had spoiled the delicate aroma of the loup de mer on that occasion. And then there had been the film student whose sole topic of conversation was pornography. I found some of his work really great. Bea did not. She suspected that if I had been asked nicely to appear before his camera I might have said yes. Which was quite perceptive of her.
Bea assumed that all of these occasional guests had not only shared my table but also my bed, including the jolly lesbian who had entertained us with stories of the adventures of her ‘dykes on bikes’ sisterhood. That evening we had enjoyed baked oysters. But Bea Schell was quite wrong. Bea knows me quite well, but only up to a point. My sex escapades were mostly at his place, where I would be the one delivering the exit line. Dirk had been an exception.
“To Bea you will appear normal and unthreatening. She will be reassured!”
As we reached the fifth floor and while I fumbled to find my key (Rudiger Reiß carried the shopping) I wondered where I had stashed those three damn books.