“You’re right about that.”
“Sometimes it was better to get a little something and make it abroad than to lose everything,” I added.
“Why are we old poops beating about the bush?” Herr Weller said. “The nephew’s son emigrated to England and wasn’t able to take anything out of Germany, so we saw to it that our London connections made sure he didn’t have to start up there empty-handed.”
“That must have cost the nephew a pretty penny.”
“The only thing that’s free is death.”
I nodded. “So in your archives there must be a document from 1937 or 1938 in which the nephew relinquishes all rights and claims to the silent partnership. I can understand your preferring to keep that under wraps.”
“I’m sure an old poop like you can understand. But today everyone likes dragging things like that out into the light and making a big song and dance about it. Because they don’t understand how things were back then.”
“Not that it’s easy to understand.”
He grew increasingly animated. “Not easy to understand? It wasn’t nice, it wasn’t pleasant! But what is so hard to understand about the old game, one side having what the other side wants? It’s the game of games. It’s what keeps finance, the economy, and politics going.”
“But-”
“But me no buts!” He banged his hand down on the arm rest. “See to your business and let others see to theirs. A bank has to keep its money together.”
“Did the nephew’s son get in touch after the war?”
“With us?”
I didn’t answer, but waited.
“He stayed in London after the war.”
I continued to wait.
“He refused to set foot on German soil ever again.”
I continued waiting, and he laughed.
“What a hardheaded old poop you are!” he said.
I’d had enough of him. “The expression isn’t old poop, it’s old pop!”
“Ha!” Again he banged his hand down on the armrest. “Wouldn’t you love it if things were still popping for you? But they’re not! You should at least be happy you can still poop.” He laughed his bleating goat’s laugh.
“And?”
“His lawyer made it clear to him that he wouldn’t get anything out of us. The inflation after World War I, Black Friday, the currency reform after World War II-even the biggest pile can be reduced to a few mouse droppings. And it’s not as if he hadn’t been well provided for. Not to mention the danger we exposed ourselves to; we could have ended up in a concentration camp.”
“Was that his German lawyer?”
He nodded and said casually, “Yes, back then we Germans still held together.”
11 Remorse?
Yes, that’s how they were. For them the Third Reich, war, defeat, rebuilding, and the economic miracle were simply different circumstances under which they could conduct the same business: multiplying the money they owned or managed. It was true when they said that they hadn’t been Nazis, that they had nothing against Jews, that they had stood firmly on constitutional ground. Everything for them was ground on which they stood and which made their enterprises bigger, richer, and more powerful. And yet they did this with the feeling that nothing else mattered. What good were governments, systems, ideas, people’s happiness or pain if the economy wasn’t flourishing? When there was no work and no bread?
Korten had been like that. Korten, my friend, brother-in-law, and enemy. That was how he had devoted himself to the Rhineland Chemical Works during the war and how after the war he had turned it into what it is today. For Korten, as for so many others, power and the success of the enterprise had become synonymous with his own power and success. What he took out of the enterprise for himself, he took with the certainty that he was serving what was vitaclass="underline" the Rhineland Chemical Works, the economy, the people. Until he fell from a cliff in Trefeuntec. Until I pushed him off that cliff.
I never regretted it. There have been times when I thought I ought to, because it was neither legally nor morally correct. But remorse never set in. Perhaps the other, older, harder morals that existed before those of today still prevail in our hearts.
It is only in one’s dreams that an unmastered, unmasterable remnant remains. That night I dreamed that Korten and I were having an elegant meal at a table beneath a large old tree with overhanging branches. I don’t remember what we talked about. It was a casual, friendly conversation. I enjoyed it because I knew we couldn’t really expect to chat so warmly and easily after what had happened at Trefeuntec. Then I noticed how gloomy it was. At first I thought it was the dense foliage, but then I saw that the sky was stormy and dark, and I heard the wind rustling through the leaves. We talked as if everything was fine until the wind started tearing at us, rip ping away the tablecloth along with the plates and glasses, finally carrying off Korten on the chair on which he was sit ting: a mighty, enthroned Korten, his deep laughter echoing. I ran after him, trying to catch him, ran with outstretched arms, ran without the slightest hope of grabbing hold of him or his chair, ran so fast that my feet barely touched the ground. As I ran, Korten went on laughing. I knew he was laughing at me, but I didn’t know why, until I noticed that I had run beyond the edge of the cliff on which we had been sitting beneath the tree, that I was running on air, the sea far below me. My running came to an end, and I fell.
12 Summer
Suddenly summer was here: not just the odd warm day or mild evening, but a heat as oppressive in the shade as in the sun, a heat that didn’t let me sleep at night but made me count the hours struck by the bell of the Heilig-Geist church. I was relieved when it grew light, though I knew that the morning was not fresh and the new day would turn out as hot as the day before. I got up and had some of the tea I’d made the night before and put in the refrigerator. Sometimes the scrapes and wounds that Turbo brought back from his nightly adventures were so bad that I had to tend them with iodine. He, too, is growing old. I wonder, does he still win his battles?
It was so hot that everything was less important, less pressing. As if it were not really true, just possible. As if one first had to find out what it was all about, and for that it was too hot.
But I don’t want to blame the heat. I didn’t know what else I could still do to shed light on Schuler’s death. Perhaps there wasn’t anything to shed light on and never had been. Had I taken a wrong turn? In a sense, this idea had its good side. If he had been attacked, it wasn’t as if I’d have been any less responsible than I first thought. Just the opposite, in fact. Only if Schuler’s bad condition had been triggered by someone else on that fatal day, would his life have been in my hands. In fact, if he only had a hangover, or had been affected by the weather, his accident could have occurred at any time.
The hot weeks ended with a series of days in which the heat exploded in powerful evening storms. By five o’clock the sky would cloud over, and by six it was as dark as if nighttime had come. The wind rose and whipped the dust through the streets, ripping from the trees branches that the heat had turned dry and brittle. With the first storms the children remained outside, yelping beneath the raindrops, overjoyed when the rain started pouring down like a waterfall, wetting them through and through. But this soon bored them. I sat by the door of my office and watched the water washing in waves over the empty sidewalk, gurgling in a pool over the gutter because the drain couldn’t handle it fast enough. When the storm was over I was the first to go outside, breathing in the fresh air on my way home or to Brigitte’s. During the storm the sun had set. But the sky was clear again, a pale blue glowing violet in the twilight before it turned a darker violet, dark blue, dark gray, black.