which no doubt he tossed off breathlessly with his face inches from hers. As I write this all these years later, in the long shadow of that boy’s tragic fate, it sounds ridiculous, but at the time it felt real. In my desperation, with wounded pride, I wanted, or thought I wanted, to force her to do what I was convinced she longed for, to realize her desires instead of harboring them in secret, and to deliver us both to the terrible consequences that would follow. Though the truth was that all I was really searching for was proof that she wanted only me. Don’t ask me with what evidence I intended to prove things either way. When I return, I told myself, everything will be clear.
I informed Lotte that I was going to attend a conference in Frankfurt. She nodded, and her face gave away nothing, though later, lying in my miserable hotel room while nothing happened and things got worse and worse, I thought I recalled seeing a little glint in her eyes. Once or twice a year I attended the English Romantic conferences held throughout Europe, brief gatherings perhaps not dissimilar in feeling for the participants than the feeling Jews have when they get off the plane in Israel: the relief of at last being surrounded on all sides by your own kind—the relief and the horror. Lotte rarely accompanied me on these trips, preferring not to have her work interrupted, and for this reason I always turned down the invitations I received to conferences held on other continents, in Sydney, Tokyo, or Johannesburg, whose native Wordsworth or Coleridge experts longed to host their friends and colleagues. Yes, I would refuse these invitations because they would have taken me away from Lotte for too long.
I don’t remember why I chose Frankfurt. Perhaps a conference had recently taken place or was scheduled to take place there at some point in the near future, so that should any of my colleagues run into Lotte and the subject of a conference in Frankfurt came up, no one would think twice about it. Or perhaps, never very good at lying, I’d chosen Frankfurt because the name was so commanding, and at the same time it was a sufficiently uninteresting city that it wouldn’t invite suspicion, like Paris, say, or Milan, although the idea of Lotte being suspicious was, in any case, absurd. So perhaps I chose it because I knew that Lotte would never, under any circumstances, return to Germany, and could be sure that she would not offer to accompany me.
The morning of my departure I got up very early, dressed in the suit I always wore when I flew, and drank my coffee while Lotte was still asleep. Then I took one last look around our house as if I might have been seeing it for the last time: the wide-plank floors smooth from use, Lotte’s pale yellow reading chair with the tea stains on the left arm, the groaning bookshelves with their endless, unrepeating pattern of spines, the French doors leading out to the garden, the trees skeletal under the frost. I saw it all and felt it like an arrow in me, not in my heart but in my gut. Then I closed the door and got into the taxi waiting at the curb.
Almost as soon as I arrived in Frankfurt I regretted the choice. The flight was plagued by turbulence, and during the rocky descent through the storm an ominous silence overtook the few passengers huddled in their coats, or perhaps it only seemed ominous as background to the loud moans of an Indian woman in a violet sari, clutching a small, terrified child to her breast. The sky outside the baggage claim was dark and immobile. I took the train to the main station and from there I walked to the hotel where I’d made a reservation, on a small street off Theaterplatz, which turned out to be a grim and anonymous-looking place whose only effort at conviviality was the red-striped awnings above the windows of the lobby and restaurant, an effort that had obviously been made long ago in a spirit since lost or forgotten, as the awnings were dingy and stained with bird droppings. A bored, pimpled bellboy showed me to my room and handed me the key attached to a large paddle, making it impractical to carry around and thus ensuring that the residents of that miserable place would deposit their keys