“Here’s to you!”
We drank.
“Are you the archivist of Weller and Welker?”
“What makes you say that?”
“The official at the state archives talks of you as if you are colleagues.”
“Well…” He burped. “I wouldn’t say I was a colleague, exactly, nor could you call this a real archive. Old Herr Welker was interested in the history of his bank and asked me to put all the old files in order. We knew each other from school, old Herr Welker and I, and were like friends. He sold me this house for next to nothing, and I tutored his son and his grandchildren, and whenever we could help each other out we did so. His cellar was full of old things, as was his attic. No one had the slightest idea what was there or knew where anything was. Nobody ended up doing anything with it.”
“What about you?”
“What about me? When Old Herr Welker had the storage area renovated, he had lights, ventilation, and heating installed in the cellar. So here are all the old things, and I’m still busy sorting it all out. Well-perhaps you could say that I’m the bank’s archivist.”
“And every year you acquire more old files. It sounds like a Sisyphean task.”
“That it is.” He headed back to the refrigerator, took out two beers, and gave me one. Then he looked me in the eye. “I used to be a teacher, and all my life had to listen to my pupils’ clever or silly lies, their excuses, their explanations, their little dodges. This place is a mess. My niece keeps telling me that, and I know it myself. I can’t smell a thing: no good smells, no bad smells, no flowers, no perfumes. I can’t tell if the food is burning on the stove or the clothes on the ironing board. I can’t even tell if I stink. And yet”-he took the cap off his head and ran his fingers over his bald pate-“I’m no fool. Are you going to tell me who you really are and what it is you really want?”
7 C, L, or Z
Once a teacher always a teacher, and for a good teacher we all remain pupils, no matter how old we might be. I told him who I was and what I was looking for. Perhaps I did this because of our age; the older I get, the readier I am to assume that people as old as I am will be on my side. And I did want to know what he might have to say.
“The silent partner… That’s an old story. Bertram’s right,” he told me. “His silent share was about half a million, about as large as that of both families, and stopped the bank from having to declare bankruptcy. We don’t know his name, and the Welkers and Wellers I’ve known in my time and who are now dead didn’t know, either. I’m not saying we knew nothing about him. He sent letters from Strasbourg and so must have lived there. He was in the legal profession, perhaps a company attorney or a lawyer, or maybe even a professor. When the syndicates came up in the 1880s Weller and Welker took an interest in them, and he clarified for them how to set one up legally, and what the legal aspects would be. In 1887, he thought about moving to Heidelberg; there’s a letter in which he seeks information concerning a house or apartment. But in lieu of a legible signature, we have only an initial-a C, L, or Z-and it’s unclear whether it stood for a first name or a surname, because though he seemed to be on the friendliest terms with both Weller and Welker, in those days one could be the best of friends with someone and still address him by his surname.”
“There can’t have been that many men in the legal profession in Strasbourg. A hundred? Two hundred? What do you think?” I cut in.
“Let’s say there were six hundred in all during the period in question. With those initials I’d say there’d be at most a hundred, half of whom can be eliminated since they did not live there the entire time. To follow up on the remaining fifty would be a lot of work, but it’s doable. Old Herr Welker didn’t think it was worth pursuing, which was my view, too. As for Bertram not being able to write the history of the bank without the silent partner’s name, that’s nonsense. One thing I’d like to know is why he didn’t come to me with his request, but to you?” Schuler was working himself into a rage. “In fact, why doesn’t anyone ever come to me? I sit in my cellar and nobody comes to me. Am I a mole, a rat, a wood louse?”
“You’re a badger. Look at your burrow: caves, tunnels, entries and exits buried in a mountain of files.”
“A badger!” He slapped his thighs. “A badger! Follow me; I’ll show you my other burrow.”
He hurried out into the garden, waving dismissively when I pointed out that he had left the kitchen door ajar. He pulled the garden gate open and started his car. It was a BMW-Isetta, a model from the 1950s in which the front wheels are farther apart than the back wheels, and the front of the car is also the door, which claps open with the steering wheel-the kind of vehicle for which you need a driver’s license not for a car, but for a motorbike. I sat down next to him and we went chugging off.
The old warehouse was not far from the Schlossplatz. It was an elongated three-story building with offices and apartments whose former function was no longer evident. In the eighteenth century the Wellers, when they were still sales and freight expeditors, had had their Palatine center here, with a countinghouse, stables, lofts, and a two-level cellar. Schuler had stored the boxes with the unexamined material in the lower cellar, while in the upper cellar the material he had already been through lined the shelves on the walls. There was again that sour, musty smell. At the same time the aroma of the glue Schuler used for his scrapbooks hung pleasantly in the air. There was bright daylight in the upper cellar. The lawn outside was so low-lying that there was space for a large window. This was where Schuler worked, and he had me sit at the table. I saw the abundance of files as an irredeemable jumble, but Schuler knew exactly what was where, reached for everything with ease, untied one bundle of files after another, and spread out his finds before me.
“Herr Schuler!”
“Here, for instance, we have-”
“Herr Schuler!”
He put the files down.
“You don’t have to prove to me that what you said was true. I believe you.”
“Then why doesn’t he believe me? Why didn’t he tell me anything, why didn’t he ask me?” Schuler was again talking himself into a rage, waving his hands and arms about and sending out waves of the odor of sweat.
I tried to calm him down. “The bank is going through a crisis. Welker’s lost his wife and has had to send his children away-you can’t expect him to be thinking files and archives. He only sent me looking for the silent partner because he happened to meet me.”
“You really think so?” He sounded doubting and hopeful.
I nodded. “I bet all of this is very difficult for him. He doesn’t strike me as particularly hardy.”
Schuler thought it over. “It’s true-late children are the delicate ones, and because they come along late in life they get fussed over all the more. When Bertram was born in 1958, his parents were over forty. He was a sweet boy, talented, somewhat dreamy, and quite spoiled. A child of Germany ’s boom years, if you know what I mean. But you’re right: it can’t be easy for him without Stephanie and the children-and it was only a few years back that his parents died in a car crash.” He shook his head. “Here you have a man who had everything you could wish for in life, and then…”
8 Women!
That evening I cooked some polenta with pork medallions and an olive-anchovy sauce for Brigitte and Manu. We sat at the large table in my kitchen.
“A man has a wife and two children, and together with his wife a whole lot of money. One day husband and wife go hiking in the mountains. He comes back alone.”