That night after Lotte had fallen asleep I slipped out of bed, made myself a cup of chamomile tea, paged through the newspaper in a leisurely manner, and then, as if the thought had only just occurred to me, made my way up to the attic. I opened other drawers and other files, and when I had finished with these more drawers and more files sprung up in the place of those I’d already gone through, some marked and others not. Pages seemed to drift out of their own accord and migrate across the floor, like a paper autumn staged by a bored child. There seemed no end to the amount of paper that Lotte had squirreled away in that deceptively small cabinet, and I began to lose hope of ever finding what I was looking for. And all the while, as I read snatches of letters, notes, and manuscripts, I couldn’t escape the feeling that I was betraying Lotte in the way she would have found most unforgivable.
It was well past three in the morning when at last I found the plastic folder holding two documents. The first was a yellowed release from the East End Maternity Hospital, dated June 15, 1948. Under Patient’s Name, someone, a nurse or secretary, had typed Lotte Berg. The address given wasn’t of the room near Russell Square, but another street I’d never heard of, which I looked up later and found was in Stepney, not far from the hospital. Below that it said that Lotte had given birth to a boy on June 12th, at 10:25 in the morning, and that he had weighed seven pounds and two ounces. The second was a sealed envelope. The glue was ancient and dry, and gave way easily when I tried to open it with my finger. Inside was a small lock of dark, fine hair. I picked it up and held it in the palm of my hand. For reasons I can’t explain, what came to mind was a tuft of hair stuck to a low branch I had once found walking in the woods as a boy. I didn’t know what kind of animal it was from, and in my mind I saw a majestic beast as large as a moose, but very graceful, making its way silently across the forest floor, a magical creature that never revealed itself to humans, but that had left a sign behind for me alone to find. I tried to shake that ancient image, which really I hadn’t thought of for more than sixty years, and to concentrate instead on the fact that what I held in my palm was the hair of my wife’s child. But no matter how I tried, all I could think about was that beautiful animal that strode with silent footfalls through the forest, an animal that didn’t speak but knew all and looked with great sadness and pain on the ravages of human life, against its own kind and every other. At one point I even wondered whether fatigue was making me hallucinate, but then I thought to myself, No, this is what happens when you get old, time abandons you and all your memories become involuntary.
There was nothing else in the envelope. After a moment, I dropped the lock of hair back in, and sealed the envelope with tape. I tucked it back into the plastic folder, and laid it back at the bottom of the drawer I’d found it in. Then I cleared up all of the papers, put them back in order as best I could, closed the drawers of the bureau, and turned off the lights. By now it was near dawn. I crept down the stairs and went into the kitchen to put the water on to boil. In the pale light, I thought I saw something move under the azalea by the garden door. A hedgehog, I thought with delight, though I had no reason to believe as much. What has happened to the hedgehogs of England? Those friendly creatures I used to find everywhere as a boy, though even then they were often dead by the roadside. What has killed all the hedgehogs? I thought as the tea bag steeped in the steaming water, and in my mind I made a note to myself, a note I might remember or not, to tell Lotte that once upon a time you could find them everywhere in this country, those lovely