We walked on. After a while she put an arm through mine. ‘In the old days, if something bad happened, I always had the feeling it would all be okay again. Life, I mean. Even after my divorce. Now I know nothing will ever be the same again. Do you recognize that?’
I nodded.
‘Listen, it really would be best if I go on walking here on my own for a bit. You needn’t look so worried, I won’t do anything silly.’
From Rheinkaistrasse I looked back. She hadn’t moved. She was looking over to the RCW at the levelled ground of the old factory. The wind blew an empty cement sack over the street.
Part Three
1 A milestone in jurisprudence
After a long, golden Indian summer, winter started abruptly. I can’t remember a colder November.
I wasn’t working much then. The investigation in the Sergej Mencke affair advanced at a crawl. The insurance company was hemming and hawing about sending me to America. The meeting with the ballet director had taken place on the sidelines of a rehearsal, and had taught me about Indian dance, which was being rehearsed, but otherwise only revealed that some people liked Sergej, others didn’t, and the ballet director belonged to the latter category. For two weeks I was plagued by rheumatism so that I wasn’t fit for anything except getting through the bare necessities. Beyond that I went on plenty of walks, frequented the sauna and the cinema, finished reading Green Henry – I’d laid it aside in the summer – and listened to Turbo’s winter coat grow. One Saturday I bumped into Judith at the market. She was no longer working at RCW, was living off her unemployment money, and helping out at the women’s bookshop Xanthippe. We promised to get together, but neither of us made the first move. With Eberhard I re-enacted the matches of the world chess championship. As we were sitting over the last game, Brigitte called from Rio. There was a buzzing and crackling in the line; I could barely make her out. I think she said she was missing me. I didn’t know what to do with that.
December began with unexpected days of sultry wind. On 2nd December the Federal Constitutional Court pronounced as unconstitutional the direct emissions data gathering introduced by statute in Baden-Wurttemberg and the Rhineland-Palatinate.
It censured the violation of constitutional rights of business data privacy and establishment and practice of a commercial enterprise, but eventually the statute was annulled for lack of legislative authority. The well-known columnist of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung celebrated the decision as a milestone in jurisprudence because, at last, data privacy had broken free of the shackles of mere civil rights protection and was elevated to the rank of entrepreneurial rights. Only now was the true grandeur of the court’s judgment regarding data protection revealed.
I wondered what would become of Grimm’s lucrative sideline. Would the RCW continue to pay him a fee, for keeping quiet? I also wondered whether Judith would read the news from Karlsruhe, and what would go through her head as she did. This decision half a year earlier would have meant that Mischkey and the RCW wouldn’t have locked horns.
That same day there was a letter from San Francisco in the mail. Vera Muller was a former resident of Mannheim, had emigrated to the USA in 1936, and had taught European literature at various Californian colleges. She’d been retired for some years now and out of a sense of nostalgia read the Mannheimer Morgen. She’d been surprised not to hear anything back about her first letter to Mischkey. She’d responded to the advertisement because the fate of her Jewish friend in the Third Reich was sadly interwoven with the RCW. She thought it a period of recent history that should be more widely researched and published, and she was willing to broker contact with Frau Hirsch. But she didn’t want to cause her friend any unnecessary excitement and would only establish contact if the research project was both academically sound and fruitful from the aspect of coming to terms with the past. She asked for assurances on this score.
It was the letter of an educated lady, rendered in lovely, old-fashioned German, and written in sloping, austere handwriting. Sometimes in the summer I see elderly American tourists in Heidelberg with a blue tint in their white hair, bright-pink frames on their spectacles, and garish make-up on their wrinkled skin. This willingness to present oneself as a caricature had always struck me as an expression of cultural despair. Reading Vera Muller’s letter I could suddenly imagine such a lady being interesting and fascinating, and I recognized the wise weariness of completely forgotten peoples in that cultural despair. I wrote to her saying I’d try to visit her soon.
I called the Heidelberg Union Insurance company. I made it clear that without the trip to America all I could do was write a final report and prepare an invoice. An hour later the clerk in charge called to give me the go- ahead.
So, I was back on the Mischkey case. I didn’t know what there was left for me to find out. But there it was, this trail that had vanished and had now re-emerged. And with the green light from the Heidelberg Union Insurance I could pursue it so effortlessly that I didn’t have to think too deeply about the why and wherefore.
It was three o’clock in the afternoon and I figured out from my diary that it was 9 a.m. in Pittsburgh. I’d discovered from the ballet director that Sergej Mencke’s friends were at the Pittsburgh State Ballet, and International Information divulged its telephone number. The girl from the exchange was jovial. ‘You want to give the little lady from Flashdance a call?’ I didn’t know the film. ‘Is the movie worth seeing? Should I take a look?’ She’d seen it three times. With my dreadful English the long-distance call to Pittsburgh was a torture. At least I found out from the ballet’s secretary that both dancers would be in Pittsburgh throughout December.
I came to an understanding with my travel agency that I’d receive an invoice for a Lufthansa flight Frankfurt- Pittsburgh, but would actually be booked on a cheap flight from Brussels to San Francisco with a stopover in New York and a side trip to Pittsburgh. At the beginning of December there wasn’t much going on over the Atlantic. I got a flight for Thursday morning.
Towards evening I gave Vera Muller a call in San Francisco. I told her I’d written, but that rather suddenly a convenient opportunity had arisen to come to the USA, and I’d be in San Francisco by the weekend. She said she’d announce my visit to Frau Hirsch; she herself was out of town over the weekend but would be glad to see me on Monday. I noted down Frau Hirsch’s address: 410 Connecticut Street, Potrero Hill.
2 A crackle, and the picture appeared
From the old films I had visions in my mind of ships steaming into New York, past the Statue of Liberty and on past the skyscrapers, and I’d imagined seeing the same, not from the deck of a liner, but through the small window on my left. However, the airport was way out of the city, it was cold and dirty, and I was glad when I’d transferred and was sitting in the plane to San Francisco. The rows of seats were so squashed together that it was only bearable to be in them with the seat reclined. During the meal you had to put your seat-back up; presumably the airline only served a meal so that you would be happy afterwards when you could recline again.
I arrived at midnight. A cab took me into the city via an eight-lane motorway, and to a hotel. I was feeling wretched after the storm the airplane had flown through. The porter who’d carried my suitcase to the room turned on the television; there was a crackle, and the picture appeared. A man was talking with obscene pushiness. I realized later he was a preacher.
The next morning the porter called me a cab, and I stepped out into the street. The window of my room looked out onto the wall of a neighbouring building, and in the room the morning had been grey and quiet. Now the colours and noises of the city exploded around me, beneath a clear, blue sky. The drive over the hills of the town, on streets that led upwards and swooped down again straight as an arrow, the smacking jolts of the cab’s
