Self's Murder by Bernhard Schlink Page B

you here in the West could ever hope for. Things weren’t all bad in East Germany, and I won’t have it or me painted black.”
    I motioned to him to calm down. “When were you born?”
    “March ninth, 1942. Your fascist Wehrmacht was attacking the Soviet Union.”
    I did my arithmetic. March 9, 1942, I was living at the hotel in Heidelberg, behind me the Poland Campaign, getting wounded in action, and the field hospital. I had finished my law degree and begun working at the public prosecutor’s office. I had not yet found an apartment, so Klara was staying with her parents in Berlin. Or was she traveling with her girlfriend Gigi through Italy? Or was she somewhere in hiding so she could give birth to a child? I would have liked to have had children. But not a child born on March 9, 1942. From May to August 1941, I was in Warthegau and had been with Klara only a single night.
    I shook my head. “I’m sorry, but—”
    “I knew it. I knew you’d shake your head and say, ‘I’m sorry, I don’t want to have anything to do with you.‘ You could talk about us as brothers and sisters. That you could do, but you could never act like we were. There you shake your head and raise your hands.” He shook his head and raised his hands, the way he imagined us doing. He was trying to sound derisive but in fact sounded despondent.
    I shouldn’t have told him that I was sorry. I was not sorry that I wasn’t his father. Furthermore, my apology provoked more accusations, which again triggered my apology reflex. I was on the point of apologizing for all the rigors the West did and did not unleash upon the East.
    “I’m not coming empty-handed. You didn’t notice the blue Mercedes when you were driving to Schwetzingen, and I imagine you didn’t notice it this morning, either.” He saw the interest in my face. “You want to know more. Well, I’ll tell you more. The Mercedes came after the old man gave you the attaché case and got into his car. It pulled up, and during the brouhaha the man sitting next to the driver got out and went snooping, first around your office and then around the old man’s car. I needn’t tell you what he was looking for.”
    “Do you know who these men were?”
    “All I know is that the Mercedes’s number plates were from Berlin. But I’ll find out. As it is, you and I are in the same line of business, and soon you’ll be … soon enough you’ll be …” He fell silent.
    He actually was thinking of taking over my business, from father to son. Not right away, but after a period of transition in which we would operate as “Detective Agency: Gerhard Self & Son.” I did not propose “Gerhard Self & Klara Self’s Son.” I didn’t explain to him that he might possibly be the son of my deceased wife, but that he was most definitely no son of mine. I didn’t want to confide in him, talking about my marriage, opening up about myself, compromising Klara. In later years our marriage had been empty. But in those early days, when I had started at the Heidelberg public prosecutor’s office and Klara was soon to follow me to Heidelberg, our marriage was young and, I thought, full of magic, promising lasting happiness. It did affect me that there might have been someone else with whom Klara had had a relationship and a child, someone who didn’t even love her enough to insist she divorce me and marry him. Or did he die on the battlefield? I recalled an officer she knew, about whom she initially spoke a lot but then stopped mentioning, an officer who fell outside Moscow. I searched the face of the man before me for that officer’s features but found no trace of them.
    “What is your name?”
    “Karl-Heinz Ulbrich, with a hyphen. The Ulbrich without a
T
.”
    “Where do you live?”
    “At the Kolpinghaus. Its address is R 7—isn’t that crazy? That sounds like … like a cigarette brand name, not a street.” He shook his head in disbelief.
    I forbore explaining the Mannheim street system. I