at the reception whenever leaving the building. After switching on the heater and opening the curtains to reveal a view of the concrete building across the street, the bellboy waited around, even going so far as to make sure the minibar was stocked with the appropriate combination of tiny bottles and cans, before I finally remembered to tip him and he bid me a good morning and left.
As soon as the door closed behind him I felt overwhelmed by loneliness, a cavernous loneliness I had not felt for many years, perhaps since my student days. To calm myself I unpacked the few items I had in my suitcase. At the bottom was Daniel’s black diary. I took it out and sat down on the bed. Until then I had only paged through it without trying to decipher the dwarfed Spanish, but now with nothing else to do I tried to make sense of it. From what I could tell, it seemed to be a rather dull account of his life: what he ate, what books he read, who he met, and so on, a long list lacking in any reflection about these activities, a banal march against oblivion, as ineffectual as every other. Obviously I searched for Lotte’s name. I found it six times: on the date he had first rung the bell, then five more times, always on days when I was away at Oxford. I began to sweat, a cold sweat, since the heater had yet to have any effect, and helped myself to a bottle of Johnnie Walker. Then I turned on the television, and soon enough I fell asleep. In my dreams I saw Lotte on all fours being taken from behind by the Chilean. When I woke only half an hour had passed, though it seemed like much more. I washed my face and went downstairs, relinquished my key to the receptionist who was busy counting great wads of German marks, and went out into the gray street where it had just begun to rain. A few blocks from the hotel I passed a woman leaning against the buzzers of a beige apartment block and sobbing. I thought of stopping to ask her what was wrong, maybe even taking her out for a drink. I slowed down as I approached her, close enough to notice the rip in her stockings, but in the end it was too out of character for the person I have been all my life, whether I’ve liked it or not, and I kept walking.
Those days in Frankfurt passed with excruciating slowness, like the descent of something lifeless through the fathoms of the ocean, darker and darker, colder and colder, more and more hopeless. I spent my time walking up and down the quays of the river Main, because as far as I could tell the whole city was gray, ugly, and full of miserable people, and there was no point in venturing beyond those banks where the Franks had first stepped ashore with their javelins, and because in that whole city only the trees by the riverside, large and beautiful, had any kind of calming effect on me. Away from them, I imagined the worst. Lying in my hotel room, too agitated to read, the enormous paddle hanging from the lock, I saw Varsky strutting shirtless around the kitchen, or going through my wardrobe to choose a clean shirt, dropping those he didn’t care for on the floor, or sliding into bed, the one we had shared for almost twenty years, next to a naked Lotte. When I couldn’t stand it anymore I forced myself back out onto the grim, colorless streets.
On the third day it began to pour and I ducked into a restaurant, a cafeteria really, populated by zombies, or so it seemed in that muted light. It was while sitting there, feeling sorry for myself over a plate of oily pasta I didn’t have the stomach to eat, that a realization suddenly hit me. For the first time it occurred to me that I might have misunderstood Lotte. I mean utterly and grossly misunderstood her. All these years that I’d thought she’d needed regularity, routine, a life uninterrupted by anything out of the ordinary, maybe the opposite had actually been true. Maybe she had been longing the whole time for something to come along and smash all that carefully maintained order to pieces, a train through the bedroom wall or a piano falling out of the sky,