Chapters (43)
“Dr. Ritter? He’s an exporter in Hamburg now. Why do you ask?”
“And General Lahousen?”
“Why would you bring him up? A traitor!”
“I’m just interested in what becomes of a person like that.”
“The Americans gave him a fat pension after he sold everybody out and sent them to their deaths. Lives somewhere in Tirol now. Innsbruck, I think.”
A few minutes later he’s alone again. Dörsam is walking up toward the cathedral, and Josef would also like to head that way but opts not to and continues walking along the Rhine.
The water is blue and sparkling, not a cloud in the sky. The black trail of smoke left by a steamship hovers over the river. While the ship’s paddle wheel struggles against the current, he searches in vain for the feeling of peace that the Harlem River always brought him. The conversation is still running through his head. It makes him uneasy. Will he be able to steer clear of the Germans once he gets to Buenos Aires? Maybe, somehow, he can even keep going. He could cross the border in Mexico—America is his true homeland after all.
* * *
Back in Neuss he notices that Edith has started avoiding his gaze. Yesterday it was happening as well. He hasn’t given it too much thought. But now it seems to him as though she were making an extra show of being busy and that there was a mild fury in everything she did. All the tasks she performed around the house, which he so liked to watch, that were so calming—she now carries them out with more severity, more loudly. As if she wanted to drive him off.
When Carl goes into the parlor, where of late he’s been playing chess against himself (“And soon I’ll be able to beat you, my dear man”), he goes up to Edith. She looks up from the dishes. “Please,” he says. “At least when Carl’s around. He’s going to think I’ve done something awful to you!”
She looks hurt. It occurs to him that maybe that’s the reason she’s so angry? That there wasn’t much, and there will be even less?
“You’re going to leave,” she says, and he can sense that it’s not a request, but an accusation. There’s a bitterness to it. You’re leaving. We’re staying. I’m staying. Everything is going to stay just as it is.