my mind, but none of them even approached what she told me next. About five months ago he was arrested by Pinochet’s secret police, she said. His family hasn’t heard anything from him since, and they have reason to believe he was killed. Tortured first and then killed, she said, and as her voice slid over those nightmarish last words it didn’t catch in her throat or contract to hold back tears, but rather expanded, the way pupils do in the dark, as if it contained not one nightmare but many.
I asked Lotte how she knew, and she told me that she had been corresponding with Daniel from time to time, until one day she stopped hearing from him. At first she hadn’t been concerned since it often took time for her letters to reach him, as they were always forwarded on by a friend; Daniel himself moved around quite a bit, and so he had an agreement with a friend who lived in Santiago. She wrote again, and still heard nothing. At that point she became worried, aware of how bad the situation was in Chile. So this time she wrote directly to the friend and asked him whether Daniel was all right. Almost a month passed before she finally got a letter back from the friend who gave her the news that Daniel had disappeared.
That night I tried to console Lotte. And yet even as I tried, I was aware that I didn’t know how to, that what we were performing together was a kind of empty pantomime, since I couldn’t hope to know or understand what the boy had meant to her. It was not for me to know, and yet she wanted or perhaps even needed my comfort, and though I suppose a better man might have felt differently, I couldn’t help feeling a grain of resentment. Just a drop, nothing more, but as I held her in the car outside our house I felt it. After all, wasn’t it unfair of her to erect walls and then ask me to comfort her for what went on behind them? Unfair and even selfish? Of course I said nothing. What could I have said? Once upon a time I had promised to forgive her everything. The violent tragedy of the boy loomed over us in the darkness. I held her and comforted her.
A week or ten days after the magistrate brought Lotte home, while she was napping on the sofa, I went up to her study. It had been a year and a half since she had been there, and on her desk were her papers exactly as she had left them on the last day she had tried to battle her failing mind and lost for good. The sight of her handwriting on those curling pages pained me deeply. I sat down at her desk, the simple wooden table she had been using since she gave the other away to Varsky twenty-five years before, and spread my hands on the surface. Most of the writing on the top page was crossed out, leaving only lines or phrases here or there. What I could make out was largely senseless, and yet in the manic cross-outs and shaky letters Lotte’s frustration was clear, the frustration of someone trying to transcribe a fading echo. My eye caught a line near the bottom: The astonished man stood under the ceiling: Who can that be? Who in the world can that be? Without warning, a sob came over me like a violent wave, a wave that had traveled across a flat and otherwise placid ocean with the express purpose of crashing down on my head. It pulled me under.
After that I got up and went to the cabinet where Lotte kept her papers and files. I didn’t know what I was looking for, but imagined that sooner or later I would find whatever it was. There were old letters from her editor, birthday cards from me, drafts of stories she never published, postcards from people I knew and others I didn’t. I looked for an hour but didn’t find anything that referred in any way to the child. Nor did I find any letters from Daniel Varsky. After that I went downstairs, where Lotte was just waking up. We went out together for a walk, as we had done every afternoon since I had retired. We got as far as Parliament Hill, where we watched the kites tossed by the wind