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He also suggested, and in this
he actively participated, that Halder devote his attention to the rare objects,
taking only the really old and therefore forgotten antiques, diadems of no
apparent value that had belonged to his great-grandmother or great-great-grandmother,
silver-handled walking sticks of precious wood, swords that his forebears had
used in the Napoleonic wars or against the Danes or the Austrians.

Meanwhile, Halder was always
generous. Upon each new visit he gave Hans what he called his share of the
booty, which was really no more than a rather large tip, but which for Hans
Reiter constituted a fortune. He didn't show his parents this fortune, of
course, because they would have been quick to accuse him of stealing. Nor did
he buy anything for himself. He found a biscuit tin, into which he put the few
bills and many coins, wrote on a paper "this money belongs to Lotte
Reiter," and buried it in the forest.

Of course, there were German
medieval poets more important than Wolfram von Eschenbach. Like Friedrich von
Hausen or Walther von der Vogelweide. But Wolfram's pride (
I
fled the pursuit of letters, I was untutored in the arts),
a
pride that stands aloof, a pride that says
die, all of you, but I'll live,
confers
on him a halo of dizzying mystery, of terrible indifference, which attracted
the young Hans the way a giant magnet attracts a slender nail.

Wolfram had no lands. Wolfram
therefore lived in a state of vassalage. Wolfram had some protectors, counts
who allowed their vassals—or at least some of them—to be visible. Wolfram said:
my hereditary office is the shield.
And as Halder told Hans all these
things about Wolfram, as if to place him at the scene of the crime, Hans read
Parzival
from beginning to end, sometimes aloud, out in the fields or on his way
along the path home from work, and not only did he understand it, he liked it.
And what he liked most, what made him cry and roll laughing in the grass, was
that Parzival sometimes rode
(my hereditary office is the shield)
wearing
his madman's garb under his suit of armor.

Chance or the devil had it that
the book Hans Reiter chose to read was Wolfram von Eschenbach's
Parzival.
When
Halder saw him with it he smiled and told him he wouldn't understand it, but he
also said he wasn't surprised he had chosen that book and none other, because
in fact, he said, though he might never understand it, it was the perfect book
for him, just as Wolfram von Eschenbach was the author in whom he would find
the clearest resemblance to himself or his inner being or what he aspired to
be, and, regrettably, never would become, though he might come this close, said
Halder, holding his thumb and index finger a fraction of an inch apart.

Wolfram, Hans discovered, said
of himself: I fled the pursuit of letters. Wolfram, Hans discovered, broke with
the archetype of the courtly knight and was denied (or denied himself) all
training, all clerical schooling. Wolfram, Hans discovered, unlike the
troubadours and the minnesingers, declined to serve a lady. Wolfram, Hans
discovered, declared that he was untutored in the arts, not to boast of a lack
of education, but as a way of saying he was free from the burden of Latin
learning and that he was a lay and independent knight. Lay and independent.

The years he spent in Hugo
Halder's company were profitable for him. The thefts continued, now at a
furious pace, now slowing, in part because there was little left to rob anymore
that wouldn't be noticed by Hugo's cousin or the other servants. Only once did
the baron make an appearance. He drove up in a black sedan, with the curtains
drawn, and stayed one night.

Hans thought he would see him,
thought perhaps the baron would speak to him, but nothing happened like that.
The baron spent only a single night at the estate, roaming the most neglected wings
of the house, in constant motion (and constant silence), making no demands on
the servants, as if he were lost in a dream and couldn't communicate verbally
with anyone. At night he dined on black bread and cheese and went down to the
cellars himself to choose the bottle of wine he opened to accompany his frugal
meal. The next morning he was gone by the first light of day.

The baron's daughter, however,
he saw many times. Always in the company of her friends. On three occasions
during the time Hans worked at the house she came to stay while Halder was
visiting, and each time Halder, profoundly ill at ease in his cousin's
presence, was quick to pack his bags and leave. The last time, as they were
crossing the forest that had in some sense sealed their complicity, Hans asked
what made him so nervous. Halder's response was curt and ill-tempered. He said
Hans wouldn't understand and strode along under the leafy forest roof.

In 1936 the baron closed the
country house and let the servants go, retaining only the groundskeeper. For a
while Hans had nothing to do and then he moved on to swell the ranks of the
laborers who built the Reich's highways. Each month he sent his family almost
his entire salary, because his needs were few, although on his free days he went
down with his fellow workers to the taverns in the nearest towns, where they
drank themselves insensible with beer. Among the young workers he undoubtedly
held his liquor best, and a few times he took part in impromptu contests to see
who could drink the most in the shortest time. But he didn't like alcohol, or
he didn't like it any more than food, and when his team was stationed near
Berlin
he gave his
notice and headed off.

It didn't take him long to find
Halder in the big city, and he turned up at his door in search of assistance.
Halder got him a job as a clerk in a stationery shop. Hans lived in a room in a
house of workmen, where he was let a bed. He shared the room with a man of
about forty who worked as a night watchman at a factory. The man's name was Füchler
and he suffered from an affliction, possibly of nervous origin, as he admitted,
that some nights manifested itself in the form of rheumatism and other nights
as heart trouble or sudden attacks of asthma.

He and Füchler didn't see each
other often, because Füchler worked at night and Hans worked during the day,
but when they did meet they got along marvelously. As Füchler confessed, long
ago he had been married and had a child. When his son was five the boy fell
ill, and soon afterward he died. The child's death was more than Füchler could
bear, and after three months of mourning in the cellar, he filled a pack and
left without a word to anyone. For a time he wandered the roads of
Germany
, living
on charity or whatever chance saw fit to offer him. A number of years later he
came to
Berlin
,
where a friend recognized him on the street and offered him a job. This friend,
who was dead now, worked as a supervisor at the factory where Füchler was still
employed as a watchman. The factory wasn't very big and it used to make
shotguns, but lately it had been converted to the production of rifles.

One night, when he got back
from work, Hans Reiter found the watchman in bed. The landlady had brought up a
plate of soup. The stationer's apprentice knew at once that his roommate was
going to die.

Healthy people flee contact
with the diseased. This rule applies to almost everyone. Hans Reiter was an
exception. He feared neither the healthy nor the diseased. He never got bored.
He was always eager to help and he greatly valued the notion—so vague, so
malleable, so warped—of friendship. The diseased, anyway, are more interesting
than the healthy. The words of the diseased, even those who can manage only a
murmur, carry more weight than those of the healthy. Then, too, all healthy
people will in the future know disease. That sense of time, ah, the diseased
man's sense of time, what treasure hidden in a desert cave. Then, too, the
diseased truly bite, whereas the healthy pretend to bite but really only snap
at the air. Then, too, then, too, then, too.

Before he died, Füchler told
Hans he could have his job if he wanted it. He asked how much he earned at the
stationer's. Hans told him. A pittance. Füchler wrote Hans a letter of
introduction to the new supervisor, in which he vouched for the young man's
conduct, saying he had known Hans since he was born. Hans thought about it all
day, as he unloaded boxes of pencils and erasers and notebooks and swept the
sidewalk in front of the shop. When he got home he told Füchler he liked the
idea, he would change jobs. That same night he showed up at the rifle factory,
which was on the edge of the city, and after a brief conversation with the
supervisor they agreed on a two-week trial period. Shortly afterward, Füchler
died. Since there was no one to give his belongings to, Hans kept them. A coat,
two pairs of shoes, a wool scarf, four shirts, various undershirts, seven pairs
of socks. Füchler's razor he presented to the landlord. Under the bed, in a
cardboard box, he found several cowboy novels. He kept those for himself.

From then on Hans Reiter had much more
free time. At night he paced the flagstone factory yard and the cold corridors
of long rooms with big glass windows designed to let in as much sunlight as
possible, and in the mornings, after breakfasting at some cart in the
working-class neighborhood where he lived, he slept between four and six hours
and then he had his afternoons free to ride the tram to the center of Berlin,
where he would drop in on Hugo Halder, with whom he would go for a walk or to
cafes and restaurants where the baron's nephew invariably came upon
acquaintances and proposed deals that were never made.

In those days Hugo Halder was
living on a backstreet near the Himmelstrasse, in a small flat crammed with old
furniture and dusty paintings, and his best friend, besides Hans, was a
Japanese who worked as assistant to the charge of agricultural affairs at the
Japanese legation. The Japanese man's name was Noburo Nisamata, but Halder, and
Hans, too, called him Nisa. He was twenty-eight and good-natured, ready to
laugh at the most innocent jokes and willing to listen to the most outrageous
ideas. Generally they met at the Stone Virgin Cafe, a few steps from
Alexanderplatz, where Halder and Hans usually arrived first and had something
to eat, perhaps sausage with a bit of sauerkraut. An hour or two later, the
Japanese man would meet them, impeccably dressed, and they would scarcely drink
a glass of whiskey neat before leaving in a hurry and losing themselves in the
Berlin
night.

Then Halder would take charge.
They went by taxi to the Eclipse, a cabaret with the worst performers in
Berlin, a group of talentless old women who had found success in the unadorned
exhibition of failure, and where, despite the laughter and whistles, if one
knew a waiter well enough to be given an out-of-the-way table, one could
converse without too much difficulty. The Eclipse was cheap, too, although
Halder didn't concern himself with money during these nights of
Berlin
revelry, among
other reasons because his Japanese friend always paid. Then, well lubricated,
they would go to the Cafe des Artistes, where there were no variety acts but
one could catch a glimpse of some of the Reich's painters, and—this was
something Nisa greatly enjoyed—share a table with an art world celebrity or
two, many of whom Halder had long known and some of whom he even called by
their first names.

It was generally three in the
morning when they left the Cafe des Artistes for the Danube, a fancy cabaret,
where the dancers were very tall and beautiful and where they more than once
had trouble convincing the doorman or maitre d' to let Hans in, since he was as
poor as a church mouse and his attire didn't conform to the dress code. On
weekdays, anyway, Hans left his friends at ten to run to the tram stop and make
it just on time to the factory where he worked as night watchman. On these
days, if the weather was good, they spent hours sitting on the terrace of some
fashionable restaurant, talking about the inventions Halder came up with.
Halder swore that someday, when he had time, he would patent them and make his
fortune, which provoked strange attacks of hilarity in his Japanese friend.
There was something hysterical about Nisa's laughter: he laughed not only with
his lips and eyes and throat but also with his hands and neck and feet,
stamping delicately on the floor.

Once, after explaining the
usefulness of a machine that would make artificial clouds, Halder asked Nisa
abruptly whether his mission in
Germany
was what he claimed it to be or whether he was really a secret agent. The
question, so unexpected, took Nisa by surprise, and at first he didn't fully
understand it. Then, when Halder seriously explained the mission of a secret
agent, Nisa exploded in an attack of laughter like nothing Hans had witnessed
in his life, going so far as to fall in a faint onto the table, and Hans and
Halder had to carry him off to the washroom, where they splashed water on his
face and managed to revive him.

Nisa didn't talk much himself,
whether out of discretion or because he didn't want to offend with his heavily
accented German. And yet sometimes he said interesting things. He said, for
example, that Zen was a mountain that bites its own tail. He said the language
he had studied was English and it was just another of the ministry's many
mistakes that he was stationed in
Berlin
.
He said that samurais were like fish in a waterfall but the best samurai in
history was a woman. He said his father had known a Christian monk who lived
for fifteen years without ever leaving the
island
of
Endo
, a few miles from
Okinawa
, an island of volcanic rock with no water.