2666 (145 page)

One day, without having shown any signs of illness, the mechanic
died and Werner took over the shop. Some relatives appeared, distant cousins
who demanded their share of the inheritance, but Lotte's one-eyed mother and
her lawyers fixed everything and in the end the country cousins left with a bit
of money and little else. By then Werner had gotten fat and begun to lose his
hair, and although there was less physical work, his responsibilities grew,
which made him quieter than ever. The two of them moved into the mechanic's
flat, which was big but right over the shop, so that the boundary between work
and home faded and Werner was always working.

Deep down he would have preferred that the mechanic hadn't died or
that Lotte's one-eyed mother had put someone else in charge of the shop. Of
course, the new job also had its compensations. That summer Lotte and Werner
spent a week in
Paris
.
And for Christmas they went to
Lake
Constanza
with Lotte's
mother, because Lotte loved to travel. Back in
Paderborn
, too, something new happened; for
the first time they talked about the possibility of having a baby, something
neither of the two was inclined to favor because of the Cold War and the threat
of nuclear attack, even though their financial situation had never been better.

For two months they discussed in rather halfhearted fashion the
repercussions of taking such a step, until one morning, at breakfast, Lotte
told Werner she was pregnant and there was nothing else to discuss. Before the
baby was born they bought a car and for more than a week they vacationed in the
south of
France
and in
Spain
and
Portugal
. On the way home Lotte
asked to drive through
Cologne
and they went looking for the only address she had for her brother.

In the place where Archimboldi
had once lived with Ingeborg, there now rose a new apartment building and no
one who lived there remembered a young man matching Archimboldi's description,
tall and blond, bony, a former soldier, a giant.

For
half the ride home Lotte was quiet, as if in a sulk, but then they stopped to
eat at a roadside restaurant and talked about the cities they'd seen and her
mood improved considerably. Three months before her son was born, Lotte stopped
working. The birth was normal and quick, although the boy weighed more than
nine pounds and according to the doctors he was in the wrong position. But at
the last minute, it seemed, the baby turned head down and everything was fine.

They
called him Klaus, after Lotte's maternal grandfather, although at some point
Lotte thought about calling him Hans, after her brother. But the name doesn't
really matter, thought Lotte, what matters is the person. From the beginning
Klaus was his grandmother's and father's darling, but the boy loved Lotte best.
Sometimes she looked at him and saw a resemblance to her brother, as if Klaus
were Hans's reincarnation in miniature, which pleased her because until then
she had always associated her brother with all things large and outsized.

When
Klaus was two, Lotte got pregnant again, but four months later she had a
miscarriage, and something must have gone wrong because she couldn't have any
more children. Klaus had the childhood of a typical middle-class boy in
Paderborn
. He liked to
play soccer with his friends, but at school he played basketball. Only once did
he come home with a black eye. As he explained it, a classmate had made fun of
his one-eyed grandmother and they had fought. He wasn't a brilliant student,
but he had a great liking for machines of any kind, and he could spend hours in
the shop watching his father's mechanics work. He almost never got sick,
although the few times he did his temperature soared and he was delirious and
saw things no one else could see.

When
he was twelve his grandmother died of cancer in the
Paderborn
hospital. She was on a constant
morphine drip and when Klaus went to see her she confused him with Archimboldi
and called him my son or talked to him in the dialect of the Prussian village
where she was born. Sometimes she told him things about his one-legged
grandfather, about the years the old soldier had served faithfully under the
kaiser and how much he always regretted not being tall enough to join the elite
Prussian regiment that admitted only soldiers over five foot eleven.

"Small
in stature, but brave as they come, that was your father," said his
grandmother with a morphine-addled smile.

Until
then no one had told Klaus anything about his uncle. After his grandmother's
death he asked Lotte about him. He wasn't really very interested, but he felt
so sad he thought it might take his mind off things. It had been a long time
since Lotte thought about her brother and Klaus's question came as something of
a surprise. Around this time Lotte and Werner had gotten involved in real
estate, which neither of them knew anything about, and they were afraid of
losing money. So Lotte's answer was vague: she told him that his uncle was ten
years older than she was, more or less, and that the way he made a living
wasn't exactly a model for young people, more or less, and that it had been a
long time since the family had news of him, because he had disappeared from the
face of the earth, more or less.

Later she told Klaus that when she was little she thought her
brother was a giant, but that this was the sort of thing little girls often
imagined.

Another
time Klaus asked Werner about his uncle and Werner said he was a nice man,
quiet and very observant, although according to Lotte her brother hadn't always
been like that, it was the artillery, the mortars, the bursts of machine gun
fire during the war that had made him quiet. When Klaus asked whether he looked
like his uncle, Lotte said yes, there was a resemblance, they were both tall
and thin, but Klaus's hair was much blonder than her brother's and his eyes
might be a brighter blue. Then Klaus stopped asking questions and life went on
as it had before his one-eyed grandmother's death.

The
new business projects didn't turn out as well as Lotte and Werner had hoped,
but they didn't lose money and in fact they made a bit, although they didn't
get rich. The shop continued to work at full capacity and no one could have
said things were going badly.

At
seventeen Klaus got in trouble with the police. He wasn't a good student and
his parents had accepted that he wouldn't go to college, but at seventeen he
got mixed up, with two friends, in the theft of a car and a later case of
sexual assault involving an Italian girl who worked at a small medical supply
factory. Klaus's two friends spent a while in prison, because they were legally
adults. Klaus was sent to a reformatory for four months and then he came home
to his parents. During his time at the reformatory he worked in the repair shop
and learned how to fix all kinds of appliances, from refrigerators to blenders.
When he got home he was given a job in his father's shop and for a while he
stayed out of trouble.

Lotte and Werner tried to
convince each other that their son was back on the right track. At eighteen
Klaus dated a girl who worked at a bakery, but the relationship lasted scarcely
three months, in Lotte's opinion because the girl wasn't exactly a beauty. After
that, they didn't meet any other girlfriends and they came to the conclusion
that Klaus didn't have any or that for unknown reasons he avoided bringing them
home. Around this time, Klaus took up drinking, and at the end of the workday
he would go to the beer halls of
Paderborn
to drink with other young workers from the shop.

More than once, on a Friday or Saturday night, he got into
trouble, nothing out of the ordinary, fights with other youths and vandalism,
and Werner had to pay the fine and collect him from the police station. One day
Klaus decided that
Paderborn
was too small for
him and he left for
Munich
.
Sometimes he called his mother collect and they had forced, trivial
conversations that Lotte nevertheless found comforting.

A
few months went by before Lotte saw him again. According to Klaus, there was no
future in
Germany
or Europe
and the only thing left for him was to try his luck in
America
, where he planned to go as
soon as he could save some money. After he'd worked at the shop for a few months
he set sail from
Kiel
on a German ship whose
final destination was
New York
.
When he left Paderborn, Lotte wept: her son was very tall and hardly fragile
looking, but still she wept because she had a feeling he wouldn't be happy on
the new continent, where the men weren't as tall or as blond as he was, but
they were clever and often ill intentioned, the dregs of society, people one
couldn't trust.

Werner
drove Klaus to
Kiel
and when he got back to
Paderborn
he told Lotte
the ship was fine, sturdy, it wouldn't sink, and there was nothing dangerous
about Klaus's job as a waiter and part-time dishwasher. But his words didn't
calm Lotte, who had refused to go to
Kiel
so as not to "prolong the agony."

When
Klaus reached
New York
he sent his mother a postcard of the Statue of Liberty. This lady is on my
side, he wrote. Then months went by and they didn't hear from him. Then more
than a year. Until they received another postcard in which he told them he was
applying for
U.S.
citizenship and he had a good job. The return address was
Macon
,
Georgia
,
and Lotte and Werner each wrote a letter full of questions about his health,
his finances, his future plans, which Klaus never answered.

With
time, Lotte and Werner got used to the idea that Klaus had left the nest and was
fine. Sometimes Lotte imagined him married to an American, living in a sunny
American house, and leading a life similar to the lives one could see in the
American movies shown on television. In Lotte's dreams, however, Klaus's
American wife had no face. Lotte always saw her from behind, that is, she saw
her blond hair, just a shade darker than Klaus's, her tanned shoulders, and her
slender, upright figure. She saw Klaus's face, looking serious or expectant,
but she never saw his wife's face or the faces of his children, when she
imagined him with children. In fact, she never even saw Klaus's children from
behind. She
knew
they were there, in some room, but she didn't see them,
nor did she hear them, which was the oddest thing, because children are hardly ever
quiet for long.

Some
nights Lotte spent so long thinking about the life she had imagined for Klaus
that she fell asleep and dreamed about her son. Then she saw a house, an
American house, but a house she didn't identify as an American house. As she approached
the house she could smell something pungent, unpleasant at first, but then she
thought: Klaus's wife must be cooking Indian food. And so, in a matter of
seconds, the smell became an exotic smell, even pleasant. Then she saw herself
sitting at a table. On the table there was a pitcher, an empty plate, a plastic
cup, and a fork, nothing else, but all she could think about was who had let
her in. No matter how she tried she couldn't remember and that troubled her
greatly.

Her
suffering was like the screech of chalk on a blackboard. As if a boy were
dragging a piece of chalk across a blackboard on purpose to make it screech. Or
maybe it wasn't chalk but the boy's fingernails, or maybe it wasn't his
fingernails but his teeth. As time went by, this nightmare, the Klaus
nightmare, as she called it, became a recurring dream. Sometimes, in the
morning, as she helped Werner with breakfast, she would say:

"I had a
nightmare."

"The Klaus
nightmare?" Werner would ask.

And
Lotte, her eyes averted and a distracted expression on her face, would nod.
Secretly, both she and Werner hoped that at some point Klaus would come to them
asking for money, but the years went by and Klaus seemed lost forever in the
United States
.

"Knowing
Klaus," said Werner, "I wouldn't be surprised if he was living in
Alaska
by now."

One day Werner got sick and the
doctors ordered him to stop working. Since money wasn't a problem he turned the
shop over to one of the most experienced mechanics and he and Lotte set out to
travel. They took a cruise on the Nile, they visited
Jerusalem
,
they drove a rental car around the south of
Spain
,
they saw
Florence
and
Rome
and
Venice
. The
first destination they chose, however, was the
United States
. They stopped in
New York
and then they visited
Macon
,
Georgia
,
and they discovered with sorrow that the house where Klaus had lived was an
apartment in an old building near the black ghetto.