Sail of Stone

“Is that what it’s called in German too?” asked Winter. “Is there an expression like that?”

“No idea.”

Angela was originally from Germany, old East Germany actually, die sogenannte DDR, Leipzig, an old, devastated center of culture according to her father, and that was why he took his wife and their only child at the time, a son, and moved to Berlin, East Berlin. Soon after, he had seen the wall, die Mauer, rise up against the free sky; that was in 1961. Surgeon Gunther Hoffmann had seen this from one of the large windows at the hospital that had ended up in the shadow of the wall; the lower floors were already dark in the early afternoon.

The next year they had made it across, hidden in the chassis of two VW Beetles. Gunther Hoffmann had been sure that his wife and son would manage; the arrangement was based on that. He came later, when it was dangerous but possible.

He tried to live in West Berlin but felt that the city pushed him away with its gaudy Western neon lights. This wasn’t his country. These were not his fellow citizens. He wasn’t even the cousin from the country. In the light of the advertising signs, even black Leipzig began to glow like some sort of memory of loss. It was an insane thought.

Doctor Hoffmann felt like a stranger in both of his homelands, and he suffered the consequences. He spoke with his wife and son again. They journeyed north across the sea.

He removed the final n in his last name and became Hoffman. He saw it as yet another consequence. A new era of life.

He got a job at Sahlgrenska Hospital in Gothenburg and found peace. His daughter Angela was born in 1967, in the summer.

“Known as the Summer of Love,” Angela had said once, in the beginning, and explained to the free-form jazz nut Winter what had happened in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco in the summer of 1967-the flowers; the people just hanging around, which still seemed to have been something special to experience; the music: the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Peanut Butter Conspiracy. She had bought records from that time; it was her year, after all. Erik had laughed at Airplane but listened to the twin guitarists in Quicksilver Messenger Service on the live album Happy Trails with some interest. “These guys could have been something on the jazz scene,” he had said. “They sure can play.” She had put on “Eight Miles High” by the Byrds once, and Erik had flown out of the easy chair during Roger McGuinn’s intro: “But that’s Coltrane!” Later she had found that he was correct. In an interview she’d read in Mojo, McGuinn had said that he had been looking for John Coltrane’s particular atonal tenor sax in that guitar solo. The guy could play.

She got up and turned on a floor lamp near the opposite wall. The light was warm.

He was going to call Steve Macdonald soon.

He needed to say something to Angela first.

“I had a visitor from my past today,” he said.

“That sounds ominous,” she said.

“An old girlfriend.”

“I don’t know if I want to hear this,” she said.

“With emphasis on ‘old,’” he said.

“Well, what did she want?”

Her tone was not exactly warm, not like the light from the lamp.

He explained.

“He hasn’t been gone for that long,” said Angela.

“No.”

“But I would probably have gotten worried myself,” she said.

“Mmhmm.”

“What can you really do?” she asked.

“We can put out a missing person notice and issue a description of course, internationally. Interpol, as usual.”

“Are you going to do it, then?”

“She wanted to wait a day or two.”

“She? Does ‘she’ have a name?”

“Johanna.”

Angela didn’t say anything. He could tell she was thinking. He wasn’t sure what she was thinking.

“Johanna Osvald,” he said.

“Okay, okay,” she said.

She got up and took her cup out into the kitchen without saying anything.

He followed her. She was standing at the sink and looked like she didn’t know why.

“I haven’t actually seen her in twenty years,” he said.

“That’s too bad,” she said.

“Please, Angela,” he said.

She dropped the coffee cup on the counter. It bounced off the steel but didn’t break. It spun on the counter.

I will have to try to get out of this. Help her to get out of it too.

“Do you think I should call Steve?” he asked.

Angela turned around.

“What can he do?” she said. “And you said yourself that she wanted to wait.”

We’ll release it, he thought. Her dad will contact her in the morning. The letter to the “Osvald Family” is some kind of joke from the past. Maybe they’ve gotten some letters since the war, more of them. You never know.

He looked at the cup.

“It should have broken into a thousand pieces,” she said.

“Have the countertops gotten softer or have the coffee cups gotten harder?” he said.

Aneta Djanali drove to Anette’s former apartment before seven. Maybe she would have been named Anette herself if her parents had gotten it right. Was it Anette you were trying for? she had asked her mother once. Her mother had smiled in her African manner, a manner that Aneta had never really understood.

Her mother came from Koudougou, not so far from the capital. She could dance the hagra, alone when there really should have been a group of women singing and dancing to the tira flutes. It was wedding music, a wedding dance. Maybe that was why her mother had danced it. Aneta! We’re waiting for your wedding!

Aneta had records with hagra music; she could hardly keep moving with it. It was in her body, as it had been in her mother’s. She had a koso at home, the double-skinned drum, and the dried calabash filled with sand, the niabara, and the finger rings that were struck against each other in an eternal rhythm, boyo.

The houses shone in the remaining light of dusk. It had rained during the hour before dawn, and puddles had formed in the uneven asphalt. She saw women and children on the way to day-care centers or schools. She didn’t see any men. A delivery van went through a crossing on its way to a shopping center she couldn’t see.

She had a hunch.

She parked illegally on the cross street directly opposite the entrance. Her car was as anonymous as everything else before the morning begins in earnest.

The elevator mirror was missing. Despite that, she made a motion to fix her hair.

There was a smell in the stairwell from some kitchen or another.

The nameplate was still on the door.

She pushed down the door handle and the door slid open toward her. She could suddenly feel her pulse.

She opened the door a little more and saw a shadow. Then darkness.

7