I was sixty-nine years old, the son of twins, I came from a town where such terrible things had happened that nobody used its old name anymore, a Frenchwoman had turned me into a cripple, and last but not least, I was the father of innumerable children; I wasn’t so easily surprised any longer. But I didn’t want to give her the impression that I was going to abandon her now, and so I said, “Of course I am.”
Alfonsa looked at me from the corner of her eye, walking silently by my side. I felt sorry for her; she was so young, so inexperienced.
We stopped before the convent’s main entrance. I tried to sound as sensitive as possible. “We have to tell the others.”
And there, after months of waiting, I saw her smile, not smirk, for the first and only time. A pitying, honest, unlovely smile that I’d rather not have seen. “I already have.” She crouched down and took my hands. “We’ll definitely find a nice place for you.”
“For me?”
“There are a couple of good nursing homes in Bavaria.”
I pulled my hands away. “I’ve lived at Saint Helena for almost forty years!”
“You can’t stay here. How could the sisters tolerate a man in their midst who’d gotten one of them pregnant?”
“I don’t know,” I said, detecting a sulky tone in my voice I didn’t like. “But that’s my child as well.”
“Julius,” even considering it was her, she spoke with disturbingly little emotion, “do you want to raise this child? Do you want to change its diapers? Feed it? Do homework with it?”
“No.”
“Neither do I,” said Alfonsa, sitting down on the step before the door, leaning back, supporting herself with her elbows, and looking at the sky. Suddenly she didn’t seem so young and inexperienced anymore. “I might have, once. But if I’ve learned anything, it’s that I’m not really cut out to be a mother.”
“Abortion?” I asked.
“Adoption,” she replied.
All of a sudden I felt very old and slow. “You’re going to give it away, just like that?”
“Him. I’m going to give him away,” she said. “We’re having a son.”
“A son,” I said, more to myself than to her.
Alfonsa stood and brushed the dust from her cloak.
“Wait,” I said. “Maybe there’s another way.”
She looked at me in silence.
“Do you know,” I asked, “what a Most Beloved Possession is?”
On April 5, 1983—as I lay in my new, distinctly more humble room at the Zwirglstein, staring up at the plasterboard ceiling, and began, for the first time in decades, to scratch my elbow — our son was born. The infirmary at Saint Helena was white like apple blossoms. The little scarlet head of our son formed the only contrast — a drop of blood in the snow. One of the wrinkles on his forehead was so deep, it was as if he’d been brooding for nine long months over when and how he’d finally be able to give that imprisoning belly the slip. Because of that thoughtful crease, Alfonsa named him Albert. Her cheeks were red, but they were no match for his — flushed as a putto’s in a painting. And Albert, our Albert, didn’t scream at all, because he had no reason to. After all, he was there with his mother, in the safest place in the world.
PART IX. On Mothers and Fathers
Alfonsa
Albert walked slowly toward Alfonsa, and as he approached her told himself that he was approaching the woman who’d brought him into the world; he attempted to see that woman in her, to find some evidence of it in her gaze, but as hard as he tried, he couldn’t manage it. Before him stood Sister Alfonsa.
He stopped short before stepping on her shadow on the floor; he groped for words; he couldn’t find them.
Alfonsa moved to the elevators and pressed the button. “I want you to meet somebody.”
Albert didn’t move.
“We’re almost there,” she said.
“How come?” He looked upward. “Who lives here?”
“You’ll see.”
Now he stepped onto her shadow, and said, “Fred isn’t doing well.” He ran off, so that she wouldn’t notice his tears, toward the exit.
“He isn’t your father,” Alfonsa called after him, drawing the attention of the old couple at the kiosk, who were watching them now from over their trail map.
Albert stopped and pretended he was scratching his forehead, so as to wipe the tears away unnoticed.
The elevator doors opened with a bright pling.
“Come on,” said Alfonsa. “I even have a handkerchief for you.”
The elevator was small for the two of them. Albert refused Alfonsa’s handkerchief and pressed himself into one corner and focused on a pale yellow leaf on the floor, with a tear in its side that resembled a gaping beak. He struggled not to think about the fact that Alfonsa was the woman he’d been searching for all his life.
“Will this,” he said, and had to clear his throat, “will this take long?”
“Fred will be able to hold on without you for a few more minutes.”
“He needs me.”
“Actually, I believe it’s the other way around.”
Albert stepped on the leaf on the floor and ground it beneath his heel. “I never saw him as my father.”
“Just because you never addressed him as Father doesn’t mean you didn’t see him that way.”
Albert didn’t know how to respond to that.
They left the elevator on the third floor and walked through a rectangular glass tunnel that connected the building’s two sections.
Albert said, “Wait a minute,” reached into his pocket, took the makeup compact, opened it, and showed her the hair: “Is that yours?”
“I don’t know. I never knew.”
Albert looked at it for a moment. Then he snapped the compact shut, and tossed it into a trash bin.
An Old Man
They stepped into a common room painted in warm colors, where a few patients lingered, reading newspapers, playing Scrabble, and following a TV program about the fall of the Berlin Wall. The place smelled like vanilla tea.
Alfonsa knocked at the door of room 341, and without waiting for a response, walked in, gesturing for Albert to follow.
Hardly any light penetrated the drawn curtains, and it took a moment before Albert’s eyes adjusted. The first thing he saw was a framed picture hanging on an otherwise empty wall. It was a black-and-white aerial photograph of Königsdorf, showing the farmhouses huddling close to the church.
On the opposite side of the room there stood a hospital bed, in which a man lay whom Albert had never seen before. A tube connected his left arm to an IV bag. In the dimness it was hard to tell his age, but it was clear that the bulk of this man’s life was now behind him. His body seemed as delicate as a child’s, and sank into the pillow and mattress; shimmering silver hair grew from his scalp, his skin was the light-gray color of dirty snow. His deep-set milk-white eyes scanned the room: “Who’s there?”
“It’s me.” Alfonsa opened a window slightly, settled herself on a stool beside the man, and took his hand. “It helps if you touch him while you’re talking,” she said to Albert.