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.

I savored the summer. I savored the heat and the law of lassitude with which it blanketed everything and beneath which I felt free and at ease. I savored the storms, and also the moderate temperatures of the following weeks. Brigitte and I were looking for an apartment, and when I insisted on one with a view of the Rhine or the Neckar she knew that I wasn’t out to sabotage our search. I always would have liked to have a house by the sea, or if not by the sea then by a lake. But Mannheim isn’t by the sea or by a lake. The Rhine and Neckar flow through it.

“We’ll find a really good apartment, Gerhard.”

Everything was fine but not fine. The stories life writes demand endings, and as long as a story doesn’t have an ending, it keeps everyone who participates in it in check. It doesn’t have to be a happy ending. The good don’t have to be rewarded and the bad punished. But the threads of fate cannot be left dangling: they have to be woven into the story’s tapestry. Only when that is done can we leave the story behind us. Only then are we free to begin something new.

No, the story that had started at the beginning of the year in the snow was not yet over. Even if I’d have liked to make peace with Schuler, who’d maybe had one glass too many or been affected by the weather. I didn’t know all the threads that were still waiting to be woven into the carpet, and I knew even less what the carpet’s pattern was or how I could find out. But all I had to do was wait. Stories strive toward their ends, and don’t leave you alone until they reach them.

When the leaves began to turn I got a letter from Georg. He sent me a manuscript that was scheduled to be published in a law journal. “Laban’s children”-Georg had turned his research on Laban’s heirs into an article. Did I have any suggestions?

He made it clear from the start of the article that Laban did not in fact have any children. No natural children, and no disciples, either. While other professors guard their circle of students like mother hens, Laban saw to it that his students would stand on their own feet as soon as possible and follow their own paths. Georg suspected that an early passion for a colleague’s wife, one that was perhaps reciprocated but that remained unfulfilled, had marked him in a way that kept him from close bonds with students and from deep relationships with women.

But he did have children. He was as close to his sister’s two children as he might have been had they been his own. He particularly favored his nephew, Walter Brock, who had also become a lawyer and judge.

Walter Brock. Georg described his path from Breslau to Leipzig, his career from district court judge to judge of the regional high court, the insults, the humiliations, and finally the firing with which his career came to an end in 1933. He described his marriage; his children, Heinrich and Ursula; his and his wife’s suicides after their apartment was ransacked during Kristallnacht. He described how Heinrich had escaped to London at the eleventh hour, and how Ursula hadn’t managed to get out in time and so had gone into hiding when the deportations began. She had disappeared. Laban, who died in 1918, had tenderly loved little Ursula, who was born in 1911.

There was no need for me to double-check, but I took Ursula Brock’s passport out of my filing cabinet and saw that her date of birth was October 10, 1911. Then I studied her passport photograph. She had had bobbed dark hair and a dimple in her left cheek, and she looked at me attentively with happy, somewhat startled eyes.

I found Georg at the courthouse. “I’ve got Ursula Brock’s passport.”

“You’ve got what?”

“Ursula Brock, Laban’s great-niece. I’ve got her passport. I just read your article, and-”

“I’ve got a case at two. Can I drop by afterward?”

“Sure, I’ll be at the office.”

He came by and wouldn’t take coffee, tea, or mineral water.

“Where is it?”

He studied the initial pages with the photograph and the entries and leafed through the rest of the pages slowly and carefully, as if he might be able to elicit hidden information from them.

“Where did you get this?” he asked.

I told him about Adolf Schuler, his archive, and his visit. “He gave me an attaché case that had… that had this passport in it-after which he got into his car, drove off, crashed into a tree, and died.”

“This means that after she went into hiding she sought help in Schwetzingen. Did she find help? Did Weller and Welker get her a new passport? Did they keep this old one for after the war?” He shook his head slowly and sadly. “But she didn’t make it.”

“In your article you wrote that as a Jew she was expelled from the university in 1936. Do you know what she studied?”

“All kinds of things. Her parents were very indulgent and didn’t push her. In the end it was Slavonic studies.” He looked at me entreatingly. “Do you need the passport? Can I have it? I’ve got a picture of Walter Brock and his wife with the small children, and one of Heinrich in London, but I haven’t got a picture of Ursula as an adult.”

He took an envelope out of his briefcase and laid out a series of photographs on my desk. A married couple standing in front of a carefully pruned hedge, the man wearing a suit with a stiff collar beneath his chin and a walking stick in his left hand, the woman in a long dress down to the ground, with a strap in her right hand that harnessed Heinrich around shoulders and chest, like a horse’s bridle. Heinrich was wearing a sailor suit and cap, and Ursula, bigger than her brother and not in a harness, was standing next to her father. She was wearing a summer dress and a wide sun hat. “Don’t move,” the photographer had just called out, and they all were standing still, unblinking. Another picture showed a young man in front of the Tower Bridge, which had just been raised to let a ship pass through.