I see. You should have seen our Games. The Olympiad to beat them all. There was a torch relay for the Olympic flame. They had invented a new electronic system for the fencers to tell them when a point had been scored.’
I searched for daylight on every floor, but all I saw were hallways lined with closed doors. The higher we climbed, the more ominous the atmosphere became. Not a bad smell exactly, just the stale air of unused rooms. Once this house had been built in preparation for a life, enough life to fill ten rooms, a kitchen, and a ballroom. The staircase had borne the weight of a young master of the house as he carried his bride upstairs. Children had slid down the banister. But the decades wore on, bringing evenings when someone climbed the stairs never to come down alive. A room was kept dark, a hush descended on one floor and then the next, till silence reached the bottom stair. This house had been empty for a long time; I could feel it. Sometimes a house never recovers from such a blow, a fresh coat of paint can only give it the air of a jilted lover who feels all the more disconsolate for having dolled herself up. It’s better left as it is, with its cracks and smears, the greasy imprint of a hand that reached out in haste on the way from the dinner table to the ballroom, the loose handle of a slammed door. The wallpaper on the attic floor was in tatters. Had a cat been locked away up there? A child? The heat was stifling.
‘Has von Bötticher lived here all his life?’
‘No.’ Heinz put my suitcase down in front of a small door and sorted through his bunch of keys. ‘He hails from Köningsberg. After the war he moved to Frankfurt, and then he came here. But these are matters that do not concern you.’
The room was more pleasant than I had expected, sunny with a small balcony. Olive-green wallpaper, a high three-quarter bed, a small paraffin heater, and a desk with an inkpot. The sound of birds cooing was very close. Heinz opened the doors to the balcony and two pigeons made a U-turn in mid-air.
‘I have other things to attend to,’ he said, backing out of the room. ‘There is nothing more I can do for you at present. My wife will bring you something to eat later. You’ll find water at the end of the hall if you wish to freshen up.’
He clattered down the stairs, leaving me behind with the birds. I started to unpack my suitcase. The linen cupboard was lined with dust and I sacrificed a sock to clean it out. I had to fill this room with my sorry caseful of possessions and fast, or things here would never turn out for the best. I flicked away a dried-up fly that had strayed witlessly onto the bedside table and perished there. War and Peace took its place. I put my fencing bag in the corner, hung my coat on the hook. The letter was at the bottom of my case, sealed in a large envelope made of stiff cardboard. Nothing but the name of the addressee on the front: Herr Egon von Bötticher, a name like a clip around the ear. I stepped into the sunlight, but the cardboard was giving nothing away.
I considered it, of course I did. If I had read the letter that day, perhaps things might have been different. But I knew from experience that the discovery is never worth all the trouble. The speculative excitement buzzing around your brain as you steam open an envelope soon fizzles out when you clap eyes on its contents. A handful of statements about someone else’s humdrum existence, what good are they to anyone? And then there’s the ordeal of resealing the envelope, the problem of torn edges, the anxiety and the shame. I laid the letter aside.
Muffled expletives drifted up from the garden. The shadow of a man edged across the lawn with what looked to be a ball on a leash, a ball that was refusing to roll. This turned out to be Heinz, with the biggest rabbit I had ever seen. I took a closer look—yes, it really was a rabbit. Its ears were enormous, as were its feet. It seemed incapable of steady progress and settled for the odd jump, backward or sideways. Heinz’s patience was clearly wearing thin and after taking a good look around, he gave the creature an almighty kick. Just as I was beginning to wonder whether anything in this house was normal, amenable or even remotely friendly, there was a knock at the door. I opened it and we both got a shock, the woman in the hall and I. No, it wasn’t her—her nose was wider than my aunt’s and her eyes were blue. But if she hadn’t been carrying a tray laden with food, I would have happily fallen into her arms. No matter what kind of woman she would turn out to be, at that moment I decided I liked her.
‘Hello dear, I’m Leni.’
She kicked the door shut behind her and put the tray down on the desk. I saw sausage rolls and dumplings sprinkled with icing sugar, but I didn’t dare touch anything. Leni took a chair and sat down at the window, leaning on her sturdy knees. She heaved a deep sigh.
‘So, here you are stuffed away in the attic like an old rag.’
‘It’s a nice room.’
‘Come now, it reeks of pigeon shit. The air up here’s enough to make you ill.’
‘I hadn’t noticed.’
‘Well, you’d better tuck in before you do.’
Her whole body shook when she laughed—cheeks, breasts, belly, the flesh on her forearms exposed by her rolled-up sleeves. If she hadn’t been sitting on them, her buttocks would likely have laughed along too. I started to eat.
‘The master’s an odd ’un, all right,’ she said bluntly. ‘No need to look at me like that. Like you haven’t already twigged. We’d been out of work for six seasons when he bought Raeren. We’d always worked at Lambertz, the biscuit factory. When we were laid off, we hoped Philips would open a factory in these parts. Rumours had been doing the rounds for five years but Heinz said there was no point in waiting any longer. Since then we’ve been in service with von Bötticher. An odd ’un, and no mistake.’
She stood up and began to whisper. ‘Have you seen his cheek? Taken knocks from all sides, he has. That scar is from two wounds, you know. One from the war and the other from them goings on he’s involved in. Take a good look next time you see him, he’s in a sorry state. Not to mention that leg of his!’
I burst out laughing and she looked at me as if she had been served a meal she hadn’t ordered. ‘You must admit, he’s not a pretty sight.’
‘I have a letter for him, from my father. Could you make sure he gets it?’
She frowned as she took hold of the envelope. ‘Quite a size. What’s it say?’
I shrugged. She placed the envelope back on the desk.
‘Wait a bit, that’s my advice. The letter your father sent a while back fairly upset him. He wasn’t himself for a time. One minute he was strutting around all pleased with himself, the next he was flying into a rage over nothing. Then came the telegram announcing your arrival, and that left him in a bit of a tizz, too. I don’t need to know the details. His bad temper’s his own business, even if Heinzi and I are the ones who bear the brunt of it. If you want to get off on the right foot, I’d keep this to yourself for now.’
Her voice changed key in these final sentences, took a dive from high to low, and I realized it was more than just her appearance that made me feel at home with this woman. She spoke the indignant Frankish border dialect I knew so well. If anything were to happen to me at Raeren, I knew I would cling to her like a lost child. Together we stared at the strokes of my father’s pen, the careless hand in which a doctor scrawls his suspicions on a letter of referral, as if illegibility might soften the blow.
-
3
My father loved to jot things down. He always had a pencil or two concealed about his person to scribble notes in the margins of the day. Nothing but twin primes?! on the bill from the baker. Argumentum ad misericordiam in the newspaper. Flushing half a tank will suffice on the lavatory cistern. ‘Just a sec’ was a pet phrase of his, often uttered as he leaped to his feet and his mood brightened. Many of my father’s discoveries were preceded by the words ‘Just a sec’. He would set about repairing the radio and end up reinventing the ear trumpet. Or he would find a new Bryozoa fossil on Mount Saint Peter, one that on closer inspection turned out to be half of a fossil he knew well. A practitioner of non-monotonic logic, his corrections were primarily directed at himself, cacographic messages that steadily filled the house. An addendum