I went to Schwetzingen and knocked on the doors of Schuler’s neighbors, asking them for his niece’s address, until one of them sent me to the Werkstrasse, beyond the railroad tracks.

There the garden gate stood open, and a note on the door said Frau Schubert would be right back. I waited. In the yard across the street some garden gnomes were being given a bath in a zinc tub, plunged into the water dirty sad, emerging happy and clean.

Frau Schubert came riding up on her bicycle.

“Oh, hello! I’ll make us some coffee,” she called out.

I helped her carry her groceries inside. The deliveryman for whom she had left the note on the door appeared, and I carried in the cases of beer, lemonade, and soft drinks that he unloaded at the gate. By the time I finished, the coffee was ready.

Frau Schubert struck me as being a little embarrassed.

“I didn’t remember your name,” she said, “so I couldn’t send you a death notice. Is that why you dropped by? The burial will be next week, on Tuesday.”

I promised her that I would attend, and she invited me to the reception after the service. I told her that I had lent her uncle some books that I needed, and she offered to drive me to his house so I could look for them. As we drove there, she told me about the offer she had gotten for her uncle’s library.

“Imagine. Fifteen thousand marks!”

“Are you his sole heir?” I asked.

“He didn’t have any children, and my cousin died a few years ago in a hang-gliding accident. I’m inheriting his house, though it will need so much work that I’d be very happy to get fifteen thousand for the books.”

I can’t tell what old books are worth, but as I looked around Schuler’s house I saw that he had amassed a rather unusual library. On the one hand, he had collected books about the area between Edingen and Waghäusel, and on the other, books about railways and banks in Baden. I couldn’t imagine that there would be anything published on these topics that wouldn’t be here. Most of the publications were small pamphlets, but there were also thick linen-and leather-bound volumes among them, at times whole series of works from the nineteenth century. About the channeling of the Rhine and the stabilization of its meadows by Major Tulla, the viaducts and tunnels of the railroad of the Odenwald Range, or the river police on the Rhine and the Neckar, from their founding until today. I resisted the temptation to claim as one of the books I’d lent Schuler a volume concerning the details of the construction of the Bismarck Tower on the Heiligenberg.

The cabinet above the sink in the bathroom was packed with medicines: pills for heart and blood pressure, insomnia, headaches, constipation, and diarrhea; pills for strengthening the prostate and calming the vegetative nervous system; ointments for varicose veins and rheumatism; corn plasters and corn scrapers. Many medicines were duplicated, and many had expired. Some of the tubes had dried out, and some of the pills that had once been white were now yellow. I ignored the scrapers, plasters, and ointments, the constipation and diarrhea pills, and the strengthening and invigorating medicines. But I took with me the tranquilizers, the sleeping pills, and the heart and blood-pressure pills-seven in all. The cabinet was still full enough for their absence not to be noticed.

Frau Schubert had opened all the windows and the spring air battled with Schuler’s smell. The kitchen no longer stank of rotting food but of lemony detergent. A sparkling cleanliness had settled in.

“You didn’t find your books?” Frau Schubert said, seeing me come out of the study empty-handed.

“I gave up. Your uncle had too many books.”

She nodded sympathetically, but also with some pride.

“Just like with his medicines,” I added. “He simply had too many. I had to use the bathroom, and noticed it was filled with them.”

“He couldn’t bring himself to throw anything away. And also, he liked those old medicines, the ones that came in little bottles. With his gouty fingers he couldn’t open the new plastic or aluminum packets. I always had to take out the pills and put them in little bottles for him.” She wiped a tear from her eye.

“Who was his doctor?”

“Dr. Armbrust in Luisenstrasse.”

As we walked to the front door we passed the wall where Schuler had hung his photographs. One was of him as a young man with a broad grin standing next to his Isetta, his hand resting on the car like a general’s resting on his map table. We looked at the photographs until Frau Schubert began crying again.

I called Philipp from the phone booth in the Hebelstrasse, the one Welker had not wanted to use. “It’s Dr. Armbrust in the Luisenstrasse in Schwetzingen.”

“Oh, come on, Gerhard.” It was clear I was getting on his nerves. But he gave in. “Okay, I’ll call him right away.”

When I called Philipp back a little while later, he told me that Dr. Armbrust was on vacation for three weeks. “Will you get off my back now?”

“Can’t you call him at home?” I asked. “Who knows whether he’s gone anywhere.”

“You mean-”

“Right away. Yes, call him now.”

Philipp sighed, but he found the number. “Stay on the line; I’ll call him on my cell phone.”

Dr. Armbrust wasn’t at home, either. His housekeeper explained that he’d be traveling till the last day of his vacation.

Ulbrich came by on Sunday afternoon. He no longer held my refusal to be his father against me. I once read somewhere that East Germans have a taste for the finer things in life, so on Saturday I had baked an apple pie. He ate a piece with pleasure and asked for some chocolate sprinkles for the whipped cream I had made so he could turn his cup of coffee into a cappuccino. Turbo let Ulbrich cuddle him, and I can’t imagine things having been any cozier back in the old Socialist days.

I had selected some photographs of Klara for him to look at. There are five albums on my shelf: one with pictures of Klara as a baby and little girl with her brother and parents; one with Klara as a beautiful tennis and ski debutante, one devoted to our engagement, marriage, and honeymoon; and one to our last months in Berlin and our first years in Heidelberg. All these albums make me sad. The one that makes me saddest is the last album, of the postwar period and the fifties and sixties. Klara, who had dreamed of a sparkling life at the side of a public prosecutor with a glittering career, and in these dreams had herself glittered and sparkled, had had to readjust her sights to a scrimping reality and had become increasingly bitter. Back then I had held her bitterness and reproaches against her. I simply could no longer be a public prosecutor, first because I was no longer wanted on account of my past in the Third Reich, but also because I resisted, body and soul, acting with my colleagues as if we had no past, even if we were expected to. So I had become a private investigator. Couldn’t she accept that? Couldn’t she love me as I was? I have come to realize that love can be as much a matter of the expression, the laughter, the wit, the intelligence, or the other one’s caring as it can be a matter of his standing in the world and his circumstances. Would she have been a happy mother? After giving birth to Karl-Heinz Ulbrich, she could no longer have children; during his birth something must have gone wrong.

But you couldn’t tell just by looking at her. She was laughing in the photograph of April 1942, which I’d taken outside our house in the Bahnhofstrasse after her so-called Italian trip with Gigi. And again in a picture from June 1941, where she is walking along Unter den Linden and comes across as cheerful. Had the other man taken this picture? I had also brought out a picture from her school days, one from the 1950s where she was finally playing tennis again, since I was once more earning enough, and a picture taken shortly before she died.