Olga, page 10
I also can’t watch any film on DVD or download one from the internet without thinking how happy Olga would be to be able to switch on subtitles for every film. Good as she was at lip-reading and working things out from the screen, her greatest joy was foreign films with German subtitles. I can’t see paintings by Feuerbach and Böcklin or The Execution of Emperor Maximilian without thinking of her, or any fountain pen, or any sewing machine, especially an old one.
And she comes to my mind when something happens that I know she would regard as getting too grand. She had thought we students were getting above ourselves with our moralizing—nowadays she would scoff at the media that have forgotten how to do research and replaced it with moralizing sensationalism. In Berlin, she would find the Chancellery and the Bundestag building and the Holocaust memorial too grand. She would be pleased about German reunification, but she would find the newly enlarged Europe too big, and the globalized world as well.
18
At times I was reminded of Herbert too. One Sunday, a long time ago now, when the children were still small, my wife and I were walking with them through a big flea market, and among the crockery and cutlery, brass lamps and Bakelite fountain pens, handbags and hand towels, I found, in a box of old postcards, a series entitled “German Horsemen in South West Africa,” with colored pictures of members of the colonial force. They were on horseback and on foot, sometimes on a hill with a view off into the distance, sometimes taking cover beneath the crest of a dune, sometimes driving up with a cannon or a machine gun, often charging with a raised saber or fixed bayonet; finally, mouths agape, singing at the Christmas party beside an African tree decorated with metallic stars.
Two pictures show them in battle. In one they are lying on a rocky plateau, shooting, small white clouds emerging from the muzzles of their rifles; in the other they are riding toward a few Herero. These German horsemen in South West Africa, with their sand-gray uniforms and dark-gray hats, brim jauntily turned up on the right with a black, white, and red cockade, their mustaches twirled into points—they look almost dapper. And I could imagine them setting German hearts aflutter.
I thought of Herbert too when I read about the Ovambos’ struggle for liberation, and about Namibian independence, and again when American and Soviet submarines broke through the ice and surfaced at the North Pole and a Soviet icebreaker made it through the Northeast Passage in eighteen days. Would Herbert have been angry, or Olga happy, that the story rendered his endeavors superfluous?
Then I read in the paper about an expedition that had set off for Nordaustlandet to find out what had happened to Herbert all those years ago. It was an opportunity to commemorate Herbert’s life, his deployment in Africa and his Arctic ambitions, the madness of the poorly prepared expedition to Nordaustlandet that had set out too late, its failure, and the unsuccessful attempts by several rescue expeditions to save Herbert and the three companions with whom he set out to cross the island. There was also mention of various pieces of equipment: an aluminum saucepan picked up by a Norwegian seal hunter in 1937 and aluminum plates German soldiers came across in 1945.
The expedition found no trace of Herbert. Just as a man who loses his key can only search for it under the streetlamp, because it’s only under the streetlamp that he has enough light to search, the expedition could only search where the terrain was suitable for searching, not on the ice caps and glaciers where Herbert may have strayed. The expedition report described efficient solar modules, encounters with reindeer and polar bears, and sled rides, mostly laborious toil through pack ice or grease ice, sometimes rushes of joy. The pictures showed blue sky, white snow, red tents, sleds laden with red cargo, huskies with red tongues, and cheerful, heavily bundled-up people.
I had pictured the Arctic differently, as a chasm of gloom, the nothingness in which Herbert’s longing had lost itself. The books I found in the university library about Herbert’s expedition had black-and-white pictures in which everything is indeed gloomy: gray snow and sky, the men and dogs dark silhouettes, the landscape indistinct, craggy, inhospitable. A member of Herbert’s expedition who made it back concluded his notes with a sigh about the unfathomable workings of cruel nature, bowing down before her in silent, horrified awe.
19
An expedition that didn’t find what it sought and a few postcards designed to inspire nationalist feelings—how strange, the things that end up determining our path!
Six months after the expedition report was published, I received a letter from a certain Adelheid Volkmann in Berlin requesting a meeting. Her father had told her about Herbert Schröder and Olga Rinke, and a newspaper report had prompted her to resume the search for Olga Rinke, which had previously been abandoned as hopeless. This time she had engaged a detective agency, and that was how she had come across me as Olga Rinke’s heir.
At the same time, I received an email from Robert Kurz, in Sinsheim, another postcard collector. The pictures of the German horsemen in South West Africa had awakened my enthusiasm for old postcards. My wife loved flea markets, and while she looked around, open to anything, I would sift through boxes of old postcards. These days, I’m familiar with the world of postcard collectors; I know that they specialize in subjects, events, and locations; I know their journals, meetings, swap meets, websites and chat rooms, and the criteria that determine a postcard’s value and price. I didn’t become a serious collector. Serious collectors specialize, and particularly ambitious collectors even hope for completeness, every single postcard of the Kyffhäuser monument or the Golden Gate Bridge, for example. I collected postcards I liked. I also paid attention to what was written on the back. Serious collectors are contemptuous of this, but I like it when the postcards tell a story.
In my collection I have a postcard of the Boston Light lighthouse, on which a mother warns her son in Casablanca in September 1918 that there’s a deadly influenza outbreak and he should delay his return to Boston. In October 1926, Gilbert in Belfast sent his friend Haakon in Oslo a picture of a full wine glass, urging him not to miss voting in the referendum while on holiday; he would only come and visit if prohibition in Norway were repealed. A postcard from June 1936 shows Napoleon on St. Helena; on it, James sends greetings from St. Helena to his brother Phil in Oxford and writes that he has found traces of arsenic in the earth where Napoleon was buried before being transferred to Paris. I also have an old postcard of the Bismarck monument on which the pedestal and bust stand upright. But I digress.
Three years ago, I found a postcard of the German Reichstag from May 1913, sent to Peter Goldbach in Tromsø, poste restante. The dealer couldn’t remember where he’d gotten the postcard. I advertised in all the places postcard collectors advertise. Who knew someone who was offering postcards sent to Tromsø poste restante in 1913–14? The tips I got weren’t helpful, but I remained undeterred and kept renewing the advertisements. A few days after receiving Adelheid Volkmann’s letter, the email arrived from Robert Kurz. His son had just brought back for him from a Norwegian cruise a bunch of postcards he’d found in a secondhand bookshop in Tromsø, all with addressees in Tromsø, poste restante. His son couldn’t remember the name of the bookshop.
A secondhand bookshop in Tromsø was listed on the internet. I called, asked questions in English, and got English answers. It wasn’t there that the son had found the postcards. Were there other secondhand bookshops in Tromsø? One, but the owner was in the process of reorganizing and renovating and wasn’t properly open for business yet. They were sorry, but they couldn’t help with a name, an address, or a telephone number.
I wrote to Adelheid Volkmann suggesting we meet in two weeks’ time, and gave her my telephone number and email. I booked a ticket and flew to Oslo two days later, and from there I went on to Tromsø.
20
It was dark in Tromsø when I woke in the morning, and I realized that in January I couldn’t expect anything else, at most a faint light at midday. I went over to the window and looked out across a harbor with lights and small and large ships, other hotels with flat roofs and smooth facades, and a square covered in dirty snow. The previous evening, a bus had conveyed me through snowy countryside and a long tunnel from the airport into town, down a brightly lit street with shops and restaurants to my hotel on a side street. The brightly lit street must be the main street; there had to be a place on it where I could find a map of the city and ask about the secondhand bookshop.
It was on one of the streets on the hill, I was told, if it was already open for business. So I walked around the streets on the hill and saw a church, a university campus, office buildings, residential buildings, a flower shop belonging to a garden center, and a shop whose windows no longer displayed items for sale but women and men sitting at computers. At midday I ate in a restaurant on the main street, then went back to the streets on the hill. It was snowing, and I placed my feet slowly and carefully on the slippery, snow-covered pavement.
I found the secondhand bookshop just as the gray of midday was again giving way to darkness. It was in the basement of an apartment building; steps led down to the door and the windows were at ground level. Stuck on them were big white transparent letters—ANTIKVARIAT—and between the letters I could see the bookseller shelving books. I greeted him as I entered, and he greeted me; that was all. The bookseller had no other customers, but he didn’t turn to me and ask if I was looking for something or if he could help me. He gave me a searching look, his face unfriendly, mistrustful, and turned back to the books.
I went along the shelves. Sometimes I recognized the name of an author and was able to work out the title; I also understood geografi and historie, but apart from that I capitulated before the foreign language. On a table sat boxes of old postcards from all over the world, sorted by country. I picked out one after another and checked the address. Tromsø, poste restante.
I didn’t know how to proceed. Could I simply ask where he had gotten all these postcards sent to Tromsø general delivery? And whether there were also any letters sent general delivery to Tromsø? Whether I might look through the letters? How much he wanted for a letter? Would we even understand each other?
I asked the bookseller in English for German books, and he directed me, in English, to a shelf of German literature in the next room. I found geographical, geological, and biological texts and novels from the 1930s and 1940s; the books had probably been left behind after the occupation. In the middle of the room was a table with two armchairs, and on the table I found more boxes—not old postcards this time but old letters, again addressed to Tromsø, poste restante.
I went back to the bookseller. “You have a lot of interesting things.”
“Glad you think so. I’d like to have a wider selection, but I’m just starting out.”
“You have a wide range of old postcards and letters.”
“Yes. Customers often come just for the letters. I don’t know what I’d do without people’s voyeuristic pleasure in letters from the past and their long-forgotten writers.”
“Where did you get them?”
He laughed. “That’s my secret.”
“Do you have more?”
“Enough to fill the boxes for years.”
The obvious thing now was to get around to talking about Olga’s letters. But he had mentioned his secret, and I wanted to get to the bottom of it first. At least I knew he had letters, and that we could speak to each other in English. So I said, “I’ll be back,” and left. A sign on the door said: ÅPNINGSTIDER 14:00–20:00.
21
The next day I waited until evening. I wandered around the streets of the old town with its wooden houses and churches. At the harbor, I looked out at the shimmering gray sea and the gray bridge that stretches in a high arc from the island where Tromsø is situated to the mainland. I threw bread to the seagulls; they snatched it up mid-flight and carried it away. I walked over the gray bridge, the wind whistling through the railings. I took a cable car up a mountain, stood in the snow, and saw the town and the sea below me.
Enough poste restante sent to Tromsø to fill boxes for years—there was something fishy about this. I’d been a civil servant; uncollected poste restante had to be either brought to the post office archive or destroyed. To do anything else would in the past have simply been sloppy, and nowadays it was incompatible with personal security and data protection.
I entered the bookshop shortly before eight. The bookseller was just putting on his coat. “Are you leaving? I need to talk to you.”
He stood there, undecided, and gave me a surly look before eventually removing his coat again. “I think I can spare a moment.”
“Close the shop and let’s go into the other room.” I sat down in one of the two armchairs, took the bottle of bourbon and the two glasses I’d bought out of my bag, and poured us both a measure. He sat down, and I raised my glass. “To good business!”
“I don’t know—”
“Drink!” We drank, and in his face I saw the unfriendly, mistrustful look I had noticed the previous day—but also greed.
“I don’t know whether you have what I’m looking for. Perhaps you’ve never had it or have already sold it. But perhaps it might turn up in your treasure trove of Tromsø poste restante.” I told him about Olga Rinke and Herbert Schröder.
“What are the letters worth to you?”
“Do you have them?”
“I don’t know. I’d have to search through what you call my treasure trove. That’s a lot of work; it’ll take a long time. So, again, what are the letters worth to you?”
“One hundred euros per letter.”
“One hundred euros?” He shook his head, laughing. “If they’re not worth a thousand to you—”
“In that case, I’d rather go to the people from the post office archive and hope they’ll let me look through the treasure trove once they’ve recovered it from you.”
“And what if they don’t let you look through it?”
“Then I’ll have had bad luck. That’s why I’d like to do business with you. But it has to work for both of us.”
“Five hundred.”
“Two hundred.”
We agreed on three hundred, and he told me how he had acquired the treasure.
“Do you know the old post office? Soon to be the new library? The building had a huge attic, and instead of giving the uncollected poste restante to the post office archive, as they should have done, the postmasters stored it up there. It was easy, and there was always something more important to do than packing the stuff up and sending it off. Once the new post office was ready and the old one was being cleared out and handed over, it was a bit late for that. So they wanted to get rid of the old mail. Secretly, of course. A friend who works at the post office promised he would deal with it, and we dealt with it and cleared the attic.”
He got up and unlocked the door to the next room, a cellar full of letters, individual and bundled, in small and large envelopes, along with small and large packets, and postcards.
I went and stood beside him. “Shouldn’t I look through this? You have plenty of other things to do.”
“So you can find twenty letters and pocket ten and show me ten? How dumb do you think I am?”
“I could—”
“You could nothing. I’d have to body-search you every time. No, I’ll look through the mail, and if I find something, send me the money, and I’ll send you the letters. And I’d like a thousand now for searching, in case I don’t find any letters, and if I do find some, you can send me the balance.”
“How long will you need?”
“A few weeks, one or two months, maybe three—as you say, I’ve got plenty of other things to do. I’ll do it as fast as I can.”
“Two thousand, and no longer than two months.”
He nodded, I topped off our glasses, and we toasted the deal.
The next day I withdrew two thousand euros from the bank, brought them to him, and flew home.
22
I still hadn’t accomplished anything. But the traveling, the finding, and the haggling, the setting the search for the letters in motion and getting a fair price had invigorated me. Was I living too cautiously the rest of the time? Ought I to be more courageous?
I remembered the fox I’d seen at the zoo in my hometown when I was a child. It was a small zoo, and the canopied wire enclosure in which the fox ran ceaselessly from left to right and from right to left was small as well. As it turned, it always pushed off with the same paw from the same dark, worn-down, gleaming patch on the enclosure’s concrete base. Was I too leaving only a dark, worn-down, gleaming patch? Or not even that?
I’m just an ordinary man with an ordinary life. I haven’t achieved anything great. I have an eye for the greatness of others and would have been a good chronicler of a Faustian friend. I had no such friend. But I had Olga; my memories of her were precious to me, and it was enough for me to be her chronicler.
It had taken me to Tromsø, and it brought me the visit from Adelheid Volkmann.
We spoke on the phone a few times. Should she fly or take the train, book the hotel by the river or the guest house near me? She opted for the train and the guest house, and I puzzled as to why. Did she like the idea of a relaxed train journey and staying near my house, or did she not have much money? Was she thrifty or tightfisted? The saver ticket on the train was cheaper than a flight, and the guest house cheaper than the hotel. And what was she like otherwise? Her voice sounded youthful, but old women can have young voices, and her speaking calmly could indicate a relaxed personality or a slow or boring one.
I picked her up at the station, and because it was a February day with spring in the air and people were sitting in street cafés and beer gardens in their shirtsleeves, I drove her to a garden restaurant by the river. We had an hour of sunshine left, enough for tea.
We sat down, and I looked at her, the wrinkles around her eyes and mouth, the gray-blonde hair, the green eyes, the large mouth. She was probably around sixty. Her skin was withered, as if she smoked or had done so until recently, and she wasn’t wearing any makeup. Walking from the train platform to the car and from the car to the restaurant—I, a little taller than her; she, a little fatter than me—I’d noticed her confident, assertive step. And this was how she was as she sat opposite me: confident and assertive.
And she comes to my mind when something happens that I know she would regard as getting too grand. She had thought we students were getting above ourselves with our moralizing—nowadays she would scoff at the media that have forgotten how to do research and replaced it with moralizing sensationalism. In Berlin, she would find the Chancellery and the Bundestag building and the Holocaust memorial too grand. She would be pleased about German reunification, but she would find the newly enlarged Europe too big, and the globalized world as well.
18
At times I was reminded of Herbert too. One Sunday, a long time ago now, when the children were still small, my wife and I were walking with them through a big flea market, and among the crockery and cutlery, brass lamps and Bakelite fountain pens, handbags and hand towels, I found, in a box of old postcards, a series entitled “German Horsemen in South West Africa,” with colored pictures of members of the colonial force. They were on horseback and on foot, sometimes on a hill with a view off into the distance, sometimes taking cover beneath the crest of a dune, sometimes driving up with a cannon or a machine gun, often charging with a raised saber or fixed bayonet; finally, mouths agape, singing at the Christmas party beside an African tree decorated with metallic stars.
Two pictures show them in battle. In one they are lying on a rocky plateau, shooting, small white clouds emerging from the muzzles of their rifles; in the other they are riding toward a few Herero. These German horsemen in South West Africa, with their sand-gray uniforms and dark-gray hats, brim jauntily turned up on the right with a black, white, and red cockade, their mustaches twirled into points—they look almost dapper. And I could imagine them setting German hearts aflutter.
I thought of Herbert too when I read about the Ovambos’ struggle for liberation, and about Namibian independence, and again when American and Soviet submarines broke through the ice and surfaced at the North Pole and a Soviet icebreaker made it through the Northeast Passage in eighteen days. Would Herbert have been angry, or Olga happy, that the story rendered his endeavors superfluous?
Then I read in the paper about an expedition that had set off for Nordaustlandet to find out what had happened to Herbert all those years ago. It was an opportunity to commemorate Herbert’s life, his deployment in Africa and his Arctic ambitions, the madness of the poorly prepared expedition to Nordaustlandet that had set out too late, its failure, and the unsuccessful attempts by several rescue expeditions to save Herbert and the three companions with whom he set out to cross the island. There was also mention of various pieces of equipment: an aluminum saucepan picked up by a Norwegian seal hunter in 1937 and aluminum plates German soldiers came across in 1945.
The expedition found no trace of Herbert. Just as a man who loses his key can only search for it under the streetlamp, because it’s only under the streetlamp that he has enough light to search, the expedition could only search where the terrain was suitable for searching, not on the ice caps and glaciers where Herbert may have strayed. The expedition report described efficient solar modules, encounters with reindeer and polar bears, and sled rides, mostly laborious toil through pack ice or grease ice, sometimes rushes of joy. The pictures showed blue sky, white snow, red tents, sleds laden with red cargo, huskies with red tongues, and cheerful, heavily bundled-up people.
I had pictured the Arctic differently, as a chasm of gloom, the nothingness in which Herbert’s longing had lost itself. The books I found in the university library about Herbert’s expedition had black-and-white pictures in which everything is indeed gloomy: gray snow and sky, the men and dogs dark silhouettes, the landscape indistinct, craggy, inhospitable. A member of Herbert’s expedition who made it back concluded his notes with a sigh about the unfathomable workings of cruel nature, bowing down before her in silent, horrified awe.
19
An expedition that didn’t find what it sought and a few postcards designed to inspire nationalist feelings—how strange, the things that end up determining our path!
Six months after the expedition report was published, I received a letter from a certain Adelheid Volkmann in Berlin requesting a meeting. Her father had told her about Herbert Schröder and Olga Rinke, and a newspaper report had prompted her to resume the search for Olga Rinke, which had previously been abandoned as hopeless. This time she had engaged a detective agency, and that was how she had come across me as Olga Rinke’s heir.
At the same time, I received an email from Robert Kurz, in Sinsheim, another postcard collector. The pictures of the German horsemen in South West Africa had awakened my enthusiasm for old postcards. My wife loved flea markets, and while she looked around, open to anything, I would sift through boxes of old postcards. These days, I’m familiar with the world of postcard collectors; I know that they specialize in subjects, events, and locations; I know their journals, meetings, swap meets, websites and chat rooms, and the criteria that determine a postcard’s value and price. I didn’t become a serious collector. Serious collectors specialize, and particularly ambitious collectors even hope for completeness, every single postcard of the Kyffhäuser monument or the Golden Gate Bridge, for example. I collected postcards I liked. I also paid attention to what was written on the back. Serious collectors are contemptuous of this, but I like it when the postcards tell a story.
In my collection I have a postcard of the Boston Light lighthouse, on which a mother warns her son in Casablanca in September 1918 that there’s a deadly influenza outbreak and he should delay his return to Boston. In October 1926, Gilbert in Belfast sent his friend Haakon in Oslo a picture of a full wine glass, urging him not to miss voting in the referendum while on holiday; he would only come and visit if prohibition in Norway were repealed. A postcard from June 1936 shows Napoleon on St. Helena; on it, James sends greetings from St. Helena to his brother Phil in Oxford and writes that he has found traces of arsenic in the earth where Napoleon was buried before being transferred to Paris. I also have an old postcard of the Bismarck monument on which the pedestal and bust stand upright. But I digress.
Three years ago, I found a postcard of the German Reichstag from May 1913, sent to Peter Goldbach in Tromsø, poste restante. The dealer couldn’t remember where he’d gotten the postcard. I advertised in all the places postcard collectors advertise. Who knew someone who was offering postcards sent to Tromsø poste restante in 1913–14? The tips I got weren’t helpful, but I remained undeterred and kept renewing the advertisements. A few days after receiving Adelheid Volkmann’s letter, the email arrived from Robert Kurz. His son had just brought back for him from a Norwegian cruise a bunch of postcards he’d found in a secondhand bookshop in Tromsø, all with addressees in Tromsø, poste restante. His son couldn’t remember the name of the bookshop.
A secondhand bookshop in Tromsø was listed on the internet. I called, asked questions in English, and got English answers. It wasn’t there that the son had found the postcards. Were there other secondhand bookshops in Tromsø? One, but the owner was in the process of reorganizing and renovating and wasn’t properly open for business yet. They were sorry, but they couldn’t help with a name, an address, or a telephone number.
I wrote to Adelheid Volkmann suggesting we meet in two weeks’ time, and gave her my telephone number and email. I booked a ticket and flew to Oslo two days later, and from there I went on to Tromsø.
20
It was dark in Tromsø when I woke in the morning, and I realized that in January I couldn’t expect anything else, at most a faint light at midday. I went over to the window and looked out across a harbor with lights and small and large ships, other hotels with flat roofs and smooth facades, and a square covered in dirty snow. The previous evening, a bus had conveyed me through snowy countryside and a long tunnel from the airport into town, down a brightly lit street with shops and restaurants to my hotel on a side street. The brightly lit street must be the main street; there had to be a place on it where I could find a map of the city and ask about the secondhand bookshop.
It was on one of the streets on the hill, I was told, if it was already open for business. So I walked around the streets on the hill and saw a church, a university campus, office buildings, residential buildings, a flower shop belonging to a garden center, and a shop whose windows no longer displayed items for sale but women and men sitting at computers. At midday I ate in a restaurant on the main street, then went back to the streets on the hill. It was snowing, and I placed my feet slowly and carefully on the slippery, snow-covered pavement.
I found the secondhand bookshop just as the gray of midday was again giving way to darkness. It was in the basement of an apartment building; steps led down to the door and the windows were at ground level. Stuck on them were big white transparent letters—ANTIKVARIAT—and between the letters I could see the bookseller shelving books. I greeted him as I entered, and he greeted me; that was all. The bookseller had no other customers, but he didn’t turn to me and ask if I was looking for something or if he could help me. He gave me a searching look, his face unfriendly, mistrustful, and turned back to the books.
I went along the shelves. Sometimes I recognized the name of an author and was able to work out the title; I also understood geografi and historie, but apart from that I capitulated before the foreign language. On a table sat boxes of old postcards from all over the world, sorted by country. I picked out one after another and checked the address. Tromsø, poste restante.
I didn’t know how to proceed. Could I simply ask where he had gotten all these postcards sent to Tromsø general delivery? And whether there were also any letters sent general delivery to Tromsø? Whether I might look through the letters? How much he wanted for a letter? Would we even understand each other?
I asked the bookseller in English for German books, and he directed me, in English, to a shelf of German literature in the next room. I found geographical, geological, and biological texts and novels from the 1930s and 1940s; the books had probably been left behind after the occupation. In the middle of the room was a table with two armchairs, and on the table I found more boxes—not old postcards this time but old letters, again addressed to Tromsø, poste restante.
I went back to the bookseller. “You have a lot of interesting things.”
“Glad you think so. I’d like to have a wider selection, but I’m just starting out.”
“You have a wide range of old postcards and letters.”
“Yes. Customers often come just for the letters. I don’t know what I’d do without people’s voyeuristic pleasure in letters from the past and their long-forgotten writers.”
“Where did you get them?”
He laughed. “That’s my secret.”
“Do you have more?”
“Enough to fill the boxes for years.”
The obvious thing now was to get around to talking about Olga’s letters. But he had mentioned his secret, and I wanted to get to the bottom of it first. At least I knew he had letters, and that we could speak to each other in English. So I said, “I’ll be back,” and left. A sign on the door said: ÅPNINGSTIDER 14:00–20:00.
21
The next day I waited until evening. I wandered around the streets of the old town with its wooden houses and churches. At the harbor, I looked out at the shimmering gray sea and the gray bridge that stretches in a high arc from the island where Tromsø is situated to the mainland. I threw bread to the seagulls; they snatched it up mid-flight and carried it away. I walked over the gray bridge, the wind whistling through the railings. I took a cable car up a mountain, stood in the snow, and saw the town and the sea below me.
Enough poste restante sent to Tromsø to fill boxes for years—there was something fishy about this. I’d been a civil servant; uncollected poste restante had to be either brought to the post office archive or destroyed. To do anything else would in the past have simply been sloppy, and nowadays it was incompatible with personal security and data protection.
I entered the bookshop shortly before eight. The bookseller was just putting on his coat. “Are you leaving? I need to talk to you.”
He stood there, undecided, and gave me a surly look before eventually removing his coat again. “I think I can spare a moment.”
“Close the shop and let’s go into the other room.” I sat down in one of the two armchairs, took the bottle of bourbon and the two glasses I’d bought out of my bag, and poured us both a measure. He sat down, and I raised my glass. “To good business!”
“I don’t know—”
“Drink!” We drank, and in his face I saw the unfriendly, mistrustful look I had noticed the previous day—but also greed.
“I don’t know whether you have what I’m looking for. Perhaps you’ve never had it or have already sold it. But perhaps it might turn up in your treasure trove of Tromsø poste restante.” I told him about Olga Rinke and Herbert Schröder.
“What are the letters worth to you?”
“Do you have them?”
“I don’t know. I’d have to search through what you call my treasure trove. That’s a lot of work; it’ll take a long time. So, again, what are the letters worth to you?”
“One hundred euros per letter.”
“One hundred euros?” He shook his head, laughing. “If they’re not worth a thousand to you—”
“In that case, I’d rather go to the people from the post office archive and hope they’ll let me look through the treasure trove once they’ve recovered it from you.”
“And what if they don’t let you look through it?”
“Then I’ll have had bad luck. That’s why I’d like to do business with you. But it has to work for both of us.”
“Five hundred.”
“Two hundred.”
We agreed on three hundred, and he told me how he had acquired the treasure.
“Do you know the old post office? Soon to be the new library? The building had a huge attic, and instead of giving the uncollected poste restante to the post office archive, as they should have done, the postmasters stored it up there. It was easy, and there was always something more important to do than packing the stuff up and sending it off. Once the new post office was ready and the old one was being cleared out and handed over, it was a bit late for that. So they wanted to get rid of the old mail. Secretly, of course. A friend who works at the post office promised he would deal with it, and we dealt with it and cleared the attic.”
He got up and unlocked the door to the next room, a cellar full of letters, individual and bundled, in small and large envelopes, along with small and large packets, and postcards.
I went and stood beside him. “Shouldn’t I look through this? You have plenty of other things to do.”
“So you can find twenty letters and pocket ten and show me ten? How dumb do you think I am?”
“I could—”
“You could nothing. I’d have to body-search you every time. No, I’ll look through the mail, and if I find something, send me the money, and I’ll send you the letters. And I’d like a thousand now for searching, in case I don’t find any letters, and if I do find some, you can send me the balance.”
“How long will you need?”
“A few weeks, one or two months, maybe three—as you say, I’ve got plenty of other things to do. I’ll do it as fast as I can.”
“Two thousand, and no longer than two months.”
He nodded, I topped off our glasses, and we toasted the deal.
The next day I withdrew two thousand euros from the bank, brought them to him, and flew home.
22
I still hadn’t accomplished anything. But the traveling, the finding, and the haggling, the setting the search for the letters in motion and getting a fair price had invigorated me. Was I living too cautiously the rest of the time? Ought I to be more courageous?
I remembered the fox I’d seen at the zoo in my hometown when I was a child. It was a small zoo, and the canopied wire enclosure in which the fox ran ceaselessly from left to right and from right to left was small as well. As it turned, it always pushed off with the same paw from the same dark, worn-down, gleaming patch on the enclosure’s concrete base. Was I too leaving only a dark, worn-down, gleaming patch? Or not even that?
I’m just an ordinary man with an ordinary life. I haven’t achieved anything great. I have an eye for the greatness of others and would have been a good chronicler of a Faustian friend. I had no such friend. But I had Olga; my memories of her were precious to me, and it was enough for me to be her chronicler.
It had taken me to Tromsø, and it brought me the visit from Adelheid Volkmann.
We spoke on the phone a few times. Should she fly or take the train, book the hotel by the river or the guest house near me? She opted for the train and the guest house, and I puzzled as to why. Did she like the idea of a relaxed train journey and staying near my house, or did she not have much money? Was she thrifty or tightfisted? The saver ticket on the train was cheaper than a flight, and the guest house cheaper than the hotel. And what was she like otherwise? Her voice sounded youthful, but old women can have young voices, and her speaking calmly could indicate a relaxed personality or a slow or boring one.
I picked her up at the station, and because it was a February day with spring in the air and people were sitting in street cafés and beer gardens in their shirtsleeves, I drove her to a garden restaurant by the river. We had an hour of sunshine left, enough for tea.
We sat down, and I looked at her, the wrinkles around her eyes and mouth, the gray-blonde hair, the green eyes, the large mouth. She was probably around sixty. Her skin was withered, as if she smoked or had done so until recently, and she wasn’t wearing any makeup. Walking from the train platform to the car and from the car to the restaurant—I, a little taller than her; she, a little fatter than me—I’d noticed her confident, assertive step. And this was how she was as she sat opposite me: confident and assertive.
