parents were compulsive investors, there was nothing they didn’t want to possess, it seems. Vast tracts of pampas and ranchland, wheat and sugarcane plantations, as well as commercial space in the city and warehouses near the river. Some properties generate an income it’s true, but expenditures have to be set against profits, and my time has value, as well.
Beatriz wrote that she and Zita had traveled on the charming British-owned Argentine Central Railway to Rosario, a beautiful city, with parks and wide avenues, familiar to her from those long-ago days with her governess. Rosario is more than ever a clean, orderly city. You could eat off the pavement, as Zita says. Neither of us is discounting a permanent move to Buenos Aires.
She folded her mother’s letter into its envelope and glanced around the café. This was the best part: watching people. A woman in a rose-colored slip of a dress, with her hair in kiss-curls across her forehead, gazed into the distance with a melancholy look, and then a man in plus fours joined her, and she began scolding him for keeping her waiting, and he responded by laughing uproariously, so that people turned to look. An elderly couple, both thin to the point of emaciation, as if they lived on nothing but air, cut iced cakes into small pieces and fed each other tastes on their forks. At another table two priests were drinking coffee and arguing, possibly over some doctrinal point.
Someone said her name. She looked up, and there was Herr Becker. She recognized him at once. He beamed at her. “Is this you?” he said. “Is this Fräulein Faber? But yes, it is you. I knew it, you look so like your mother.”
“Herr Becker,” Natalia said. “How good to see you.” He was about to grab lunch, a solitary lunch, and then get back to his office, he said. What could Natalia do but invite him to sit at her table? She moved aside her papers. He thanked her and sat down. He was now a junior member of a law firm with offices in Potsdam. He often thought of her and Frau Faber, he said, when she told him her mother was in Buenos Aires. He had wanted to get in touch with them, but always his natural reserve and respect for their privacy had held him back.
Was he still reading Spengler? Natalia asked. It was Chekhov now. Chekhov was his inspiration and moral guide in art and in life. The practice of law involved defending sometimes quite odious individuals, and he devoted whatever free time he had to literature, music, family, and friends; but his friends were few, and he had no family in Berlin. He talked while eating pickled herring on rye bread and gulping hot coffee, and when he was finished he wiped his mouth on a napkin and said again what a pleasure to see her looking so well. Would she give him permission to telephone her at home? Yes, that would be nice, she said.
In January the River Spree froze, and Natalia went ice-skating with Herr Becker, who insisted on holding her hand so they wouldn’t get separated in the crowd. He skated with a fine, practiced efficiency, one hand in his coat pocket. The cold wind brought a high color to his cheeks. One day, after skating, Natalia invited him home for hot chocolate and a slice of Hildegard’s warm spice cake with whipped cream. Hildegard approved of Herr Becker and praised his good manners. Natalia had to agree; it was difficult to find fault with Herr Becker.
When the weather warmed, and the ice thinned, she and Herr Becker skated indoors at the Sportpalast. They visited the library, walked in parks, decided it would be appropriate to address one another with the familiar du and to use first names, a significant change in their friendship that merited a celebratory lunch at a café. Natalia introduced Martin to Margot Brückner and her brother, Hermann. All four of them went to see an avant-garde film called Ghosts before Breakfast. It was only ten minutes long but seemed longer, each scene bizarre, disorienting. Hats floated in space, clocks dissolved, a man’s head came off his shoulders and drifted around the screen. Natalia was enchanted and horrified, equally. “Mein Gott,” Martin said, laughing. Hermann said it was an insult to the intelligence. It was French, he added: What did one expect?
* * *
One afternoon in June, Miklós came to see her. He brought a