Maybe you get it, about women and love, if you have a mother and sisters. When my mother died, my father gave me to his parents, who might have liked to spoil me, the way grandparents like to spoil grandchildren, but didn’t feel like raising me. This duty, they had fulfilled with their own four children, and they found no joy in repeating the experience; with me, they got through it as efficiently and matter-of-factly as possible. Not that I lacked anything. I had piano and tennis lessons, went to dance classes, learned to drive. But that was as far as it went; beyond that, my grandparents let me know that they preferred to be left alone.

Here is how I’d imagined falling in love: I’d get to know a woman, we’d like each other, meet up, like each other more and more, meet up again and again, grow ever closer, then finally fall in love. And that’s how it went, a couple of years later, with my wife. She started at the firm as an apprentice, she was dedicated and cheerful, and she accepted my invitations to meals, the opera, and museums, first once a week, then more frequently. We grew ever closer and married after she passed her second state exam. Once the children were older she went into local politics and became a city councilwoman. Just after her re-election, she had a car accident. It’s ten years since she died, and to this day, I do not understand how, in early afternoon, she could have had a blood alcohol concentration of .16, and driven off a country road into a tree. Had she been an alcoholic? the police had asked. My wife, an alcoholic?

The force with which my desire for Irene Gundlach overcame me – nothing had prepared me for it, and luckily, it never happened again. On the drive back to Frankfurt I had to stop and get out of the car because I was so dazed. So it existed – a happiness I wouldn’t have dreamed of, and all it took was this one woman, her closeness, her voice, her nakedness. She hadn’t taken the last step from the staircase of her old life into a new life – if only she would take it into mine, and if, every morning, she would step into my arms!

11

By Wednesday evening, the head of the detective agency hadn’t called, so I called him Thursday morning. I couldn’t reach anybody. Only after ten did I get a secretary, who connected me to his cell phone. I’d thought a good detective agency would be staffed round the clock, or at least from early morning.

“I told you it could take a couple days.”

“I have to go back to Germany today.”

“I have your telephone number. Can you give me your email address? I’ll let you know as soon as I have something.”