She gave us a note with a name, Luise Kalterer, and a street address in Neuperlach, a part of Munich.
Shortly afterward we were back in Nick’s car. He gave me a puzzled look.
“Well, now what, Watson? My grandmother’s been dead forever, and that’s as far as we’ve gotten.”
“Let’s go to this address so you can see where you came from.”
He shook his head impatiently. “It’s completely useless, Laura. I guarantee we won’t find anything there. It’s been more than thirty years, and I was only there with my grandmother for a short time as a baby. Child Welfare says everyone in my original family is dead. And I’m gradually adjusting to the idea that I’m not Angela and Jürgen’s biological son. I’m glad and grateful that I grew up with them. Who knows what might have become of me otherwise?”
He got a pretty good idea about that upon arriving at the address indicated and stopping in front of an ugly concrete apartment building in need of restoration in an unappealing high-rise area. Some shady figures were loitering on the unkempt grounds and gave us unfriendly looks. We hesitated as we got out, checked that the car was locked, and stared up at the building’s graffiti-smeared facade. To judge by the arcades leading to the upper floors, there were countless apartments in this uninviting building. Nick held my hand as he shuddered beside me.
He articulated exactly what I was thinking. “God, this looks dismal!”
I was only able to get him inside with much artful persuasion. The safety lock on the front door was broken, so we went right in. The dirty floor in the lobby was strewn with cigarette butts, stinking fast-food containers, half-empty plastic bottles, and more trash. We tried not to step on the chewing gum on the warped floor tiles on our way to the elevator. It was broken, but I didn’t regret not getting into that awful stinking car. We walked up four flights of stairs. I stayed close to the wall with Nick on the outside to avoid looking over the center railing. I focused on the numbers that appeared now and then on the doors. It was ridiculous, but even our little climbing game on the bridge hadn’t cured me entirely from my fear.
We reached the fifth floor and went to the inside corridor. Scratched in chalk on the sixth door was the number 46A with the tenant’s illegible name underneath. Four holes revealed that the original number plate had been ripped out of the wood. We stopped at the door, and Nick looked with disgust at the brownish swollen wood, the black-stained brass doorknob, and the two stinking garbage bags in front of it. There was a greasy window next to the door with gray rags blocking the view inside. We heard noises from the stairs. An elderly woman with long, unkempt gray hair and wearing a stained green smock appeared at the end of the corridor. She groaned as she dragged two full plastic bags behind her. The bags emitted suspicious sounds. When she saw us, she stopped and stared at us with mistrust.
“Whaddaya want in my apartment, huh? My son ain’t in, but he didn’t do nothin’. He was with me here the whole time, I can testify to that!” she announced.
Nick stepped up and looked at her reassuringly. “We’re not from the police. I lived in this apartment when I was a kid and just wanted to take a look at it.”
The old lady broke into croaking laughter. I felt like I was in a “Hansel and Gretel” parody. She was going to entice us into her apartment, lock us up, and stuff us with the contents of her bags . . .
Instead, she came so close that my stomach rebelled with nausea from the alcoholic fumes she emitted and the unbearable smell of her sweaty, unwashed body.
She stuck out her forefinger at Nick, and looked us up and down with scorn. “Don’ give me none of that shit! Dunno who sent you snot-noses or what yer doin’, but you ain’t comin’ into my apartment!”
She unlocked the door with amazing agility, disappeared inside, and slammed it in our faces with a bang.
I cursed. We were obviously too well dressed for the neighborhood.
Nick was grim-faced as he grabbed me by the arm. “Well, that was that. Let’s blow this joint.”
I reluctantly let him pull me toward the staircase, but my detective skills had been aroused. I wanted to try the surrounding apartments in case somebody still remembered Luise Kalterer and her grandson, but Nick made it clear that he wanted to get out of the revolting place as fast as he could.
I ruminated all the way home. I just couldn’t accept that we’d hit a dead end. What had happened, exactly? When and how did his biological parents die? But the more I tortured my brain, the less I came up with as to how to find the answers. All the parties were dead. It was like we were jinxed.
Nick covered up his dismay at being confronted with the site of his earliest childhood. He cracked jokes about what the old lady and her son with apparent criminal leanings had in the apartment. But I sensed that the desolate atmosphere in the building had given him a lot to think about. I instinctively put a hand on his arm when he stopped at a red light two streets away from our house.
“You know, it might have looked very different when you were living there. The building could have had completely normal, working-class tenants and has just gone downhill over the last several years.”
“Sure, and this year Easter and Christmas fall on the same day. I’m too big for fairy tales.” He gave me a sidelong glance. “Now that we’ve closed the book on that story, we ought to talk about us and our future.” His dark eyes looked plaintive and emotional. “I miss you terribly. Come back to me.”
I was back in the old bind faster than expected. I’d been pinning all my hopes for our future on following up on clues and looking for a breakthrough for Nick. Coming across a trauma in Nick’s earliest childhood could with a single stroke make his death wish understandable. Once we knew why, I could have had ammunition to get him to work on it with a specialist. And then we could try a new beginning. His eyes grew dark, and he ground his teeth when I didn’t answer immediately.
I made an effort to stay calm. “You haven’t tried to kill yourself one single time since I moved out, right?”
Now it was his turn not to answer. I’d never been that straightforward. I felt mean, but I went ahead with it: “If I come back to you now, the whole business will start up again. You’ll be nice and charming, in love, funny—until your black moods attack. Then you’ll cause a lot of shit, and I’ll come to the rescue. For some reason you want to test me and my love to the extreme. Maybe because you feel unconsciously that your real parents left you high and dry. But it only happens when I’m near you.” I took a deep breath. “And that’s exactly the reason I can’t come back.”
We’d reached our house, and I was madly determined to pack the rest of my things on the spot and drive to Chris’s, no matter how hard it would be. I knew I was dangerously skirting the abyss. The moment I was gone, he could suffer from another short circuit, but I had to take that risk. Otherwise everything I’d done would be futile.
He surprised me once again. He took out his wallet and picked out a crumpled yellow Post-it from among his credit cards. “This is the address of that hypnosis therapist that Mira tried to talk me into seeing. I called him this morning and am going tomorrow morning. I’m still very skeptical about it having any success, but I’ll give it a shot for your sake. Will you at least stay until tomorrow?”
Nick had finally given the signal I’d been hoping for. He had changed during my absence, grown more serious, more responsible, and he’d processed the fact of his adoption remarkably well. And he realized that if he wanted me to come back he’d have to deliver something more substantial than love notes, promises, and pleas. I called Chris to let her know that Nick and I had some things to clear up and I wouldn’t be into work that day. I’d also be spending another night away from the apartment. She wished us all the best.
“Laura, as much as I love having you sublet, I’d honestly be delighted if you and Nick got back together. That would give my faith in true love an enormous boost.”
That night, for the first time in three months, I slept with my husband. Nick bubbled over with joy to have me with him for a while. When I arrived back from Chris’s, Nick had gone grocery shopping, so we cooked together like in the old days. The power of the physical attraction between us was undiminished. In the narrow kitchen, we constantly had to wriggle by each other. Nick often used to seize these opportunities to give me a slap on the butt or pull me to him for a quick smooch. At first we behaved like two friends, interacting with fastidious propriety. He excused himself whenever he had to go past me to get a platter out of the cupboard, and I stepped aside to avoid any contact. And yet the air in the little room was electric with our suppressed desire. Finally, I tried to fish a bowl out of an upper cupboard but couldn’t reach it on tiptoe. Nick saw his chance. Quick as a flash, I felt his warm body right on my back, his arm reaching past me. He effortlessly took down the stack of bowls and placed the dishes in front of me. But instead of stepping back, he pressed himself so tightly against me that I could clearly feel his arousal.
He whispered in my ear, “Just tell me what you need, and I’ll get it for you.”
The exciting suggestion in his throaty, whispered words, the warmth and hardness of his body, and his lips against my ear brought my self-control to an instantaneous collapse. All food preparation was forgotten as we stood in a tight embrace and kissed passionately in the middle of the kitchen. We didn’t even make it to the bedroom that first time but got right down to business on the kitchen table. Nick simply swept all the vegetables onto the floor, and seconds later he was inside me. I completely blocked out everything but my intense sexual desire, his warm lips, and his gentle hands. I looked at Nick. His eyes were closed and his mouth was tense. He softly moaned my name. I arched my lower body up toward him; he opened his eyes, and the moment our eyes met I dropped my back and screamed my climactic release. His face reflected the same boundless desire and love I felt at that moment. Afterward we laughed that it might be best to shift further activities to the bedroom; the table was awfully hard and not particularly friendly on the back.
We didn’t sleep much that night. We made love again and again, interspersing our passion with whispered chats and snacks of cheese and olives that Nick served me in bed. Then we snuggled next to each other in silence, relishing our closeness.
The next morning, we had to face the day. Nick had his morning appointment with the therapist, and I told him I needed to go straight to the office.
“Can’t you stay until I tell you what the visit was like?” he asked with a mournful look. That was another change in him: Before, he would simply take it for granted that after the previous night, I would change my mind and come back to him with banners flying. Now he understood that one night filled with passion was insufficient for the continuity of our marriage.
I nodded and said, “Yes, I’ll wait for you.”
I didn’t let him know that I’d decided early that morning to go back to Neuperlach without him. Something told me not to give up quite yet.
Chapter 23
Two hours later, a taxi dropped me off near the apartment building where Nick had once lived. I’d waited until he left before putting on an old pair of my jeans that were still at the house, a T-shirt, and one of Nick’s faded hoodies. I set out with my cell phone, wallet, and palpitations.
Luckily, the oddballs we saw the day before were nowhere to be seen. It was probably too early for them to be hanging around in the cold. The only person I met on the way to the building was an old man walking his dachshund. He coughed wretchedly and spat on the sidewalk. I tried to hide my disgust as I passed him. To my surprise, the man greeted me with “A very good morning to you.” The waddling dog sniffed eagerly at my pant legs before his master pulled him along.
I entered the lobby with its penetrating stink of urine—a tenant probably hadn’t made it to his bathroom—and climbed up to the fifth-floor corridor, sticking close to the wall.
Standing again at number 46A, I couldn’t decide whether to ring the bell or not. I tried to think up something to say so the door wouldn’t be slammed in my face. I instinctively cringed when the apartment door two numbers down suddenly opened and I heard a child crying loudly. Baby sounds still got me right in the heart.
A young woman with a baby on her shoulder came out into the corridor and tried to calm her offspring with rocking movements.
“It’s all right, darling, you can go back to sleep in the stroller,” she cooed, pulling the stroller by the railing toward her with one hand. When she’d settled the baby down, and then briskly buckled it into the stroller and covered it with a blanket, she stood up and noticed me.
“Oh, good morning,” she said, looking at me inquiringly. “Are you looking for Magda? Nobody will open the door. You can’t get her this early in the morning. Got to sleep off the booze,” she added by way of explanation.
The baby had calmed down, sucking its thumb with dedication, and looked at me with big eyes. I went off my plan momentarily and walked over to the chatty tenant. She looked as though she was in her late twenties, and although I knew she was far too young to give me any useful information, something drove me to explain that my husband had lived at 46A with his grandmother as a baby, before he was adopted. She understood at once. Her round, freckled face revealed her empathy.
“And now you want to find out more about it? I guarantee you’ll get no help from Magda, the old lush. Besides, she’s only been here for three years. Got the apartment through the welfare agency.”
I gave a shrug of resignation and prepared to leave. But before I could say good-bye, she said, “Wait! When did your husband live here?”
Just a few minutes later, I was running down the stairs with revived hopes. The young woman had given me the address of a nursing home where her mother lived.
“I’m in the middle of cleaning up Mom’s apartment for the next tenant. We had to put her in a home two months ago because she couldn’t look after herself anymore. She couldn’t do the stairs with that arthritis of hers, and the elevator doesn’t work most of the time. But she was in this building for more than thirty-five years and might remember your husband’s grandmother. Mom is weak physically, but her mind’s all there.”
The frail, white-haired woman, Maria Keller, was delighted by my surprise visit. I’d quickly found the friendly-looking senior’s home, which was recently built and painted pink. It was only a few blocks away from her old address. I conveyed her daughter’s warm wishes as I sat in a room overflowing with all sorts of odds and ends. Countless trinkets, dolls, angel figurines, plastic miniatures of tourist sights, holy cards, and crocheted doilies covered every available surface above floor level. The old lady caught me stealing a glance around and a friendly smile creased her wrinkled face.
“You might laugh to yourself about all this stuff, but when you are old and frail and cannot do much anymore, you live off the good memories of your past life. And these things”—she gingerly picked up a colored picture of the Virgin Mary in an ugly rhinestone frame—“bring back wonderful times, at least to my mind. My husband gave me this as a present on our pilgrimage to Alttöting.” Her watery blue eyes glazed over with a touch of melancholy. “We never had much money, but we did have a lot of fun together. He knew my weakness for kitschy objects. That’s why he bought me this miniature.”
I visualized the two key-chain pendants Nick and I had bought each other in Paris, and I made a mental note to store mine in a place of honor forever.
Then her face grew seri
ous as she regarded me alertly.
“But you surely have not come to hear my old stories. What do you wish to know?”
I explained it all to her, saying that I deliberately did not come with my husband, as he was very much shaken by the facts of his ancestry and adoption. Then I twisted the truth a little bit in my favor, saying, “It’s taken a lot out of him to learn that all his blood relatives are dead, because he’d dearly love to know anything about his early childhood and family. He’s at work today, so that’s why I trotted off on my own.”
I was afraid when I’d ended that the old lady had nodded off because her eyelids were closed.
“Frau Keller?” I asked tentatively.
She slowly shook her head and gazed at me with a strange look on her face. “No worry, I am not asleep. I was reflecting. You said your husband learned only recently about his adoption. Is he well otherwise?”
“How do you mean?”
Her gaze turned inward. “You know, I had never dared hope to hear about little Dominick again.”
Electrified, I leaned forward and grasped her delicate, bony, blue-veined hand.
“You remember? What was his grandmother like and how did his parents die?”
She heaved a sigh and began to tell me Nick’s story, including the sad course of his first few months. And then I understood everything at a stroke.
“Luise was much too strict with the girl. She rebelled, but her mother beat her time and again until she finally ran away when she was eighteen. Nora had the good fortune to meet a nice young man and fall in love with him. She married him at twenty. I met them once in town and had a long conversation with them. They were very happy. Nora quickly became pregnant and tried to see her mother shortly before the baby was due so they could make up. At that time I saw her in the corridor, crying because Luise had thrown her out of the apartment and shouted after her, ‘You ran away, so there’s no need to come crawling back here.’”
November Sky Page 22