up as if she were seeing the magistrate for the first time.
A coldness entered my head, a kind of severe numbness as if ice had crept up my spine and begun to flow into my brain, to protect my sensorium from the blow of the news it had just received. I managed to thank the magistrate profusely, and as soon as she drove away I went in and fired the nurse, who left cursing. I found Lotte in the kitchen, helping herself from a box of biscuits.
AT FIRST I did nothing. Slowly, my mind began to thaw. I listened to the noises of Lotte moving through the house, the breathing and the cracking of bones and swallowing and wetting dry lips and allowing a little groan to escape through the mouth. When I helped her to undress or bathe, as I had to do now, I looked at her slim body that I thought I’d known every inch of, and wondered how it was possible that I’d never realized it had borne a child. I smelled her smells, the familiar ones and the newer smells of her old age, and I thought to myself, Ours is the home of two different species. Here in this house live two different species, one on land and one in the water, one who clings to the surface and the other who lurks in the depths, and yet every night, through a loophole in the laws of physics, they share the same bed. I looked at Lotte brushing her white hair in the mirror, and I knew that every day from then until the end we would grow stranger and stranger to each other.
Who had been the father of the child? To whom had Lotte given the infant? Had she ever seen him again, or been in touch with him in any way? Where was he now? I turned these questions over and over in my mind, questions that I still found hard to believe I was asking at all, as if I were asking myself why the sky was green or why a river was running through the walls of our house. Lotte and I had never spoken to each other of the lovers we’d had before we met; I out of respect for her, and she because that is how she dealt with the past: in total silence. Of course I was aware that she’d had lovers. I knew, for example, that the desk had been a gift from one of these men. Perhaps he had been the only one, though I doubted it; she was already twenty-eight when I met her. But now it dawned on me that he must have been the child’s father. What else could explain her strange attachment to the desk, her agreeing to live with that monstrous thing, and not just live with it but to work in the lap of the beast day in and day out—what else but guilt and almost certainly regret? It wasn’t long before my mind arrived, inevitably, at the ghost of Daniel Varsky. If what she had told the magistrate was true, he would have been almost exactly the same age as her child. I never imagined that he actually was her child—that would have been utterly impossible. I couldn’t say exactly how she would have responded had her grown son walked through the door, but I knew it would not have been in the way she had when she first laid eyes on Daniel. And yet, suddenly I understood what had drawn her to him, and all at once the whole thing became clear, or at least a glimpse of the whole, before it dissolved into more unknowns and more questions.
It must have been four years after Daniel Varsky first rang our bell that Lotte picked me up at Paddington one evening, a winter evening in 1974, and as soon as I got into the car I realized that she had been crying. Alarmed, I asked her what was wrong. For some time she didn’t speak. We drove in silence over the Westway and through St. John’s Wood, along the dark edge of Regent’s Park where from time to time the headlights would illuminate the ghostly flash of a runner. Do you remember that Chilean boy who visited a few years ago? Daniel Varksy? I asked. Of course. At that moment I had no idea what she was about to say to me. Any number of things flashed through