was empty, something I discovered one evening while waiting for Lotte, who had gone down the hall to use the lavatory, and which somehow made the desk, the specter of that enormous desk, really more like a ship than a desk, a ship riding a pitch-black sea in the dead of a moonless night with no hope of land in any direction, seem even more unnerving. It was, I always thought, a very masculine desk. At times, or from time to time when I came to pick her up, I even felt a kind of strange, inexplicable jealousy overtake me when she opened the door and there, hovering behind her, threatening to swallow her up, was that tremendous body of furniture.
One day I got up the courage to ask her where she had found it. She was as poor as a church mouse; it was impossible to imagine that she had ever been able to save enough money to buy such a desk. But rather than allaying my fears, her answer plunged me into despair: It was a gift, she said. And when, trying my best to act casually but already feeling my lips begin to twitch as they do whenever my emotions get the better of me, I asked her from whom, she gave me a look, a look I will never forget as it was my first introduction to the complex laws that governed life with Lotte, though it would be years before I came to understand those laws, if I ever really understood them at all, a look equivalent to the raising of a wall. Needless to say, nothing more was said on the subject.
During the day she worked in the basement of the British Library reshelving books, and at night she wrote. Strange and often disturbing stories that she left out, I assumed, for me to read. Two children who take the life of a third child because they covet his shoes, and only after he is dead discover that the shoes don’t fit, and pawn them off to another child, whom the shoes fit, and who wears them with joy. A bereaved family out for a drive in an unnamed country at war, who accidentally drive across enemy lines and discover an empty house, in which they take up residence, oblivious to the horrific crimes of its former owner.
She wrote in English, of course. In all the years we lived together I only heard her utter something in German a few times. Even once her Alzheimer’s became advanced and language came unbraided in her, she did not revert to the syllables of her childhood, as many do. I sometimes thought that if we’d had a child it would have given her a way to return to her mother tongue. But we never had a child. From the beginning Lotte made it clear that it wasn’t a possibility. I’d always imagined that I would have children one day, perhaps just because it seemed to me that was what happened to one as a matter of course; I don’t think I ever really pictured myself as a father. On the few occasions I tried to raise the subject with Lotte she immediately erected a wall between us that took me days to dismantle. She didn’t have to explain herself, or defend her position; I should have understood. (Not that she expected me to understand. More than anyone I’ve known, Lotte was content to live in a perennial state of misunderstanding. It’s so rare, when you think about it, a trait one can imagine belonging to the psychology of a race more advanced than ours.) Eventually I came to accept the idea of a life without children, and I can’t say that part of me wasn’t also a bit relieved. Though later, as the years passed with so little to account for them, with almost nothing in our lives that grew and changed, I sometimes regretted that I hadn’t argued harder for it—footsteps on the stairs, an unknown quantity, an envoy.
But, no: our life together was organized around protecting the ordinary; to throw a child into it would have shattered everything. Lotte was unnerved by disruptions to our habits. I tried to insulate her from the unexpected; the smallest change in plans threw her completely. The day would be lost reassembling a sense of peace. It took more than a year to convince her to leave that shabby room overlooking the rubble and come to live with me