She woke up, and her gaze, blinking carefully, flitted over me, to the bottle on the table, and back to me again. “What time is it?” She burped, and a haze of alcohol wafted over to me. I ruled out a stroke, too.
“A quarter past six. You have-”
“Don't think you can hoodwink me like that. You haven't been here since six!” She burped again. “So I won't let you charge me from six. You can go fix my TV now. It's over there on the left.” Her hand pointed to the terrace, seized the bottle on the way back, and poured a glass.
I remained seated.
“What're you waiting for?” She downed the glass.
“Your TV can't be repaired. Here, I've brought you a new one.”
“But mine is…” Her voice became whiny.
“OK then, I'll take your set back to the shop with me. I'll leave you this one here anyway.”
“I don't want that thing.” She pointed at the 129-mark television as if it had a disease.
“Then give it to your daughter.”
Surprise livened her glance for an instant. She asked me in a normal voice to bring her a bottle from the refrigerator. Then she sighed and closed her eyes. “My daughter…”
I went to the kitchen to get the gin. When I came back onto the terrace, she was asleep again. I took a tour of the house and found a room on the second floor that I guessed had once been Leo's. On the corkboard above the desk were several photos of her. But the closet, the bureau, the desk drawers, and the bookshelves revealed as good as nothing about the room's former occupant. She had played with stuffed animals, had worn Betty-Barclay clothes, and read Hermann Hesse. If the drawings on the wall that were signed L. S. were hers, she definitely had a knack for sketching. She had been a fan of an Italian pop star who was smiling from a poster on the wall and whose records stood on the shelf. I was at a loss. I sat down at her desk and studied the photos more carefully. With the opening at knee height, the desk had been built as if each minute a young girl spent sitting there was a minute wasted. As if the idea was to keep girls from learning the basics of reading, writing, and arithmetic. I have my doubts: Is this really the way to solve the issue of women's emancipation?
I took along Leo's photo album, a thick volume with a linen cover that documented her life from the cradle to her first day at school, the school dances, class excursions, her matriculation party, all the way to university. Why are girls so eager to keep photo albums? They also like showing them, and therein lies a hidden mystery, a matriarchal magic. When I was a young man I always viewed the invitation “Would you like to see my pictures?” as a signal to flee. With my wife, Klara, I either didn't pick up this signal or felt that I couldn't keep fleeing forever and had to stand my ground.
I descended the winding staircase without aim or plan, sauntered through the large living room, and stopped in front of a shelf unit filled with videos. Frau Salger was snoring outside on the terrace. For a moment I was tempted to steal The Wild Bunch, a Peckinpah movie I love that can't be found anywhere on video. It was six thirty and it began to rain.
I went out onto the terrace, rolled up the awning, and sat down across from Frau Salger again. The rain was light. It gathered in the hollows of her eyes and ran down her cheeks like tears. Waving her right hand erratically, she tried to shoo away the drops. It didn't work, and she opened her eyes. “What's going on?” Her look was vacant, reeled, and then fled back behind her closed lids. “Why am I wet? It's not supposed to rain over here.”
“Frau Salger, when did you last see your daughter?”
“My daughter?” Her voice became whiny again. “I don't have a daughter anymore.”
“Since when don't you have a daughter?”
“Go ask her father that.”
“Where can I find your husband?”
She looked at me slyly through narrowed eyes. “You're trying to con me, aren't you? I don't have a husband anymore either.”
I made a new attempt. “Would you like to have your daughter back?” When she didn't answer I became more generous. “Would you like to have your daughter and your husband back?”
She looked at me and for an instant her eyes were awake and clear before they became rigid and stared through me. “My husband's dead.”
“But your daughter is alive, Frau Salger, and needs help. Doesn't that interest you?”
“It's been ages since my daughter needed any help. What she needed was a good spanking. But my prick of a husband…my limp prick of a husband…my…”
“How long has it been since you've heard from Leo?”
“Leave me alone. Everyone's left me all alone. First he went, then she did. Why don't you go, too?”
The rain had become heavy, and our hair stuck to our heads. I tried again.
“When did she go?”
“Right after he went. And that's just what the other guy had been waiting for. I guess she wanted to…”
“What?”
She didn't answer. She'd fallen asleep in midsentence. I gave up, rolled the awning back down, and listened for a while to her snoring and the rain rustling on the sailcloth. I left her the TV set.
20 Stopping up holes
“If you want some insider information about the comings and goings of the Bonn political scene, then go talk to Breuer. He's your age, has been living in Bonn since 1948, writes for various small newspapers, and used to do Interfactional, a TV show with politicians about the first to cross party lines. He brought together backbenchers from all the parties and talked politics with them as if they were interested in politics or knew anything about it. We all had a good laugh, but the party leaders saw to it that the show was canceled. Breuer's a clever and funny guy.” I got this lead from Tietzke, an old Mannheim friend who used to write for the Heidelberger Tageblatt and was now at the Rhein-Neckar-Zeitung. I gave Breuer a call. He agreed to meet me early in the morning the following day.
So I stayed over in Bonn. I found a quiet hotel behind the trees and the pond around Poppelsdorf Castle. From there it wasn't too far to Breuer's office. Before going to bed I called Brigitte. The strange sounds of a strange city, the strange room, the strange bed-I did feel homesick.
The following morning Breuer greeted me with bubbling loquacity. “The name's Self, right? You're from Mannheim? An old friend of Tietzke's? Who'd have thought the Heidel-berger Tageblatt would have folded, just like that! With every passing day I find myself thinking more and more…Ah, well, it's the same old story. Come in, come in!”
The walls of his office were lined with books, the view through the large window was of backyards with old trees and beyond them two tall smokestacks. His desk by the window was covered in papers, a small green triangle was blinking insistently on the screen of a word processor, and water was hissing in the coffeemaker. Breuer offered me an armchair, sat on the swivel chair at his desk, reached under the seat and pulled a lever, and he and the seat went down with a clang. Now we sat facing each other at the same height.
“Shoot! Tietzke says I've got to help you any way I can. I'm ready and willing. The ball's in your court. Are you a detective?”
“Yes, and I'm working on a case that involves a young woman by the name of Salger, whose deceased father must have been a big shot here in Bonn. That's if being the undersecretary in one of the ministries means being a big shot. Does the name Salger mean anything to you?”
He'd been watching me attentively, but now was looking out the window, lost in thought. He massaged his left earlobe with his left hand.
“When I look out the window…Do you know why I like those two smokestacks over there? They're harbingers from another world. Perhaps not a better one, but a world that's more complete, where, unlike here in Bonn, you don't just have officials, politicians, journalists, lobbyists, professors, and students, but people who work, who build something- machines, cars, ships, whatever-who establish, run, and ruin banks and companies, who paint pictures and make movies, who're poor, panhandle, commit crimes. Can you imagine a crime of passion being committed here in Bonn? Passion for a woman, for money, even for becoming the next chancellor? No, you can't imagine that, and believe you me, neither can I.”