When I opened, he stood there skulking like a salesman, his face both defiant and dispirited. He looked to be about fifty, not too tall and not too short, not fat and not thin, his cheeks covered in spider veins and his hair sparse. He was wearing pants of some dark synthetic fabric, light gray loafers, a light blue shirt with dark blue edging on the pocket, and an open parka. His parka was the same beige color as his car.
“So it was you,” I said.
“Me?”
“Who was shadowing me yesterday.”
He nodded. “That maneuver of yours near Schwetzingen wasn’t bad, but I knew where you were heading. You went off the autobahn just like that? Over the shoulder and onto a dirt road?” He spoke with magnanimous amiability. “What about the blue Mercedes? Did it follow you onto the dirt road?”
I didn’t want to let on that I had no idea what he was talking about, but he saw that right away.
“Are you telling me you didn’t notice him? As for me, you only noticed yesterday.”
“I’d be happy enough not to notice you today, either. What do you want?”
He looked hurt. “Why are you talking to me like that? I didn’t do anything to you. I just wanted-”
“Well?”
“You are… I am…”
I waited.
“You are my father.”
I’m not the fastest person and never have been, and with the passing years I haven’t gotten any faster. More often than not my emotions are slow to react, and I might notice only at noon that someone had offended me in the morning, or I might realize in the evening that someone had said something nice to me at lunch that would have pleased me. I don’t have a son. And yet I didn’t burst out laughing or slam the door in his face, but invited him into my living room and had him sit on one sofa while I sat on the other.
“You don’t believe me?” he said, and then nodded. “I see you don’t believe me. We don’t even exist for you.”
“We? How many more children do I have?”
“There’s no need to make fun of me.” He told me that he had seen his file after the fall of the Berlin Wall and had discovered that he had been adopted, and that his real mother was Klara Self from Berlin.
“What file was this?”
“My cadre file.”
“Cadre…?”
“I worked for the Stasi-the East German secret services-and am proud of it. I investigated serious crimes, and I’ll have you know that our total of solved cases was higher than you here in the West could ever hope for. Things weren’t all bad in East Germany, and I won’t have it or me painted black.”
I motioned to him to calm down. “When were you born?”
“March ninth, 1942. Your fascist Wehrmacht was attacking the Soviet Union.”
I did my arithmetic. March 9, 1942, I was living at the hotel in Heidelberg, behind me the Poland Campaign, getting wounded in action, and the field hospital. I had finished my law degree and begun working at the public prosecutor’s office. I had not yet found an apartment, so Klara was staying with her parents in Berlin. Or was she traveling with her girlfriend Gigi through Italy? Or was she somewhere in hiding so she could give birth to a child? I would have liked to have had children. But not a child born on March 9, 1942. From May to August 1941, I was in Warthegau and had been with Klara only a single night.
I shook my head. “I’m sorry, but-”
“I knew it. I knew you’d shake your head and say, ‘I’m sorry, I don’t want to have anything to do with you.’ You could talk about us as brothers and sisters. That you could do, but you could never act like we were. There you shake your head and raise your hands.” He shook his head and raised his hands, the way he imagined us doing. He was trying to sound derisive but in fact sounded despondent.
I shouldn’t have told him that I was sorry. I was not sorry that I wasn’t his father. Furthermore, my apology provoked more accusations, which again triggered my apology reflex. I was on the point of apologizing for all the rigors the West did and did not unleash upon the East.
“I’m not coming empty-handed. You didn’t notice the blue Mercedes when you were driving to Schwetzingen, and I imagine you didn’t notice it this morning, either.” He saw the interest in my face. “You want to know more. Well, I’ll tell you more. The Mercedes came after the old man gave you the attaché case and got into his car. It pulled up, and during the brouhaha the man sitting next to the driver got out and went snooping, first around your office and then around the old man’s car. I needn’t tell you what he was looking for.”
“Do you know who these men were?”
“All I know is that the Mercedes’s number plates were from Berlin. But I’ll find out. As it is, you and I are in the same line of business, and soon you’ll be… soon enough you’ll be…” He fell silent.
He actually was thinking of taking over my business, from father to son. Not right away, but after a period of transition in which we would operate as “Detective Agency: Gerhard Self & Son.” I did not propose “Gerhard Self & Klara Self’s Son.” I didn’t explain to him that he might possibly be the son of my deceased wife, but that he was most definitely no son of mine. I didn’t want to confide in him, talking about my marriage, opening up about myself, compromising Klara. In later years our marriage had been empty. But in those early days, when I had started at the Heidelberg public prosecutor’s office and Klara was soon to follow me to Heidelberg, our marriage was young and, I thought, full of magic, promising lasting happiness. It did affect me that there might have been someone else with whom Klara had had a relationship and a child, someone who didn’t even love her enough to insist she divorce me and marry him. Or did he die on the battlefield? I recalled an officer she knew, about whom she initially spoke a lot but then stopped mentioning, an officer who fell outside Moscow. I searched the face of the man before me for that officer’s features but found no trace of them.
“What is your name?”
“Karl-Heinz Ulbrich, with a hyphen. The Ulbrich without a T.”
“Where do you live?”
“At the Kolpinghaus. Its address is R 7-isn’t that crazy? That sounds like… like a cigarette brand name, not a street.” He shook his head in disbelief.
I forbore explaining the Mannheim street system. I also didn’t ask him whether he wasn’t ashamed as an old Communist to be staying at the Kolpinghaus.
As if all this wasn’t bad enough, Turbo returned from one of his forays over the rooftops, jumped from the windowsill onto the sofa, and rubbed against Karl-Heinz Ulbrich’s legs on his way to the kitchen. Karl-Heinz said “puss-puss,” his eyes following Turbo with satisfaction. He looked at me triumphantly, as if he’d always known that animals in the West were friendlier than people and that this had now been proven. Luckily he didn’t say this out loud.
He got up. “I guess I’d better go. But I’ll be back.”
Without waiting for a good-bye, he walked through the hall to the door, opened it, and from outside carefully closed it again.
15 Without confession there is no absolution
I called Strasbourg. I couldn’t get hold of Georg-though after he’d been there just a day he wouldn’t have had much to report. So I had to make do with what Schuler had told me.
The silent partner from Strasbourg whose first or last name bore the initial C, L, or Z seemed to spark little interest in Welker or Samarin. As I sat opposite them making my report, Samarin looked visibly bored, while Welker seemed to be trying to suppress his impatience.
I’d said all I had to say. “I’ve picked up the Strasbourg lead and can either follow it or drop it. I do get the impression, however, that you’ve lost interest in the silent partner.”
Welker assured me that the silent partner was as important to him as ever. “Let me write you another check. Strasbourg won’t be a cheap venture.”