That auburn-haired secretary did not flick him from her mind; instead, she drew him closer inside it. She became obsessed with what had been wrong with Hans. Why hang himself? Why all the guards named his name? What would cause a person to distort so profoundly? She was about thirty years old, and her life had fallen into predictability, and so these thoughts of Hans would not leave her mind, which was as open as a bowl, ready to receive them.
She dreamed of him all the time, walking through the streets with a cane like her father’s, trailed by a tangle of scruffy dogs. Her father, a man so quiet and unobtrusive he often had been handed people’s plates and trash—even in public, even out dining. There was a generation of German men who, in response to what history had revealed, refused to tolerate any sign of internal aggression. Her father had never raised his voice. He would not even laugh loudly. He said, “I’m sorry,” when people bumped into him on the street, as if his presence on the sidewalk deserved apology, for had he not been there in the first place, he reasoned, the person would have had no one to bump into. “I am a mouse, a mouse,” he had whispered to her as he was dying. The problem was that being a mouse sometimes made people irritable, and many raised their voices in her father’s presence because he spoke so softly it was aggravating. “I CAN’T HEAR YOU!” her mother said, often. “SPEAK LOUDER, MAN!” While he was dying, which took a few days, the nurse kept leaving her mystery novel on his stomach, along with her purse, and sometimes her snack, so when the secretary visited he was covered with objects, breathing thinly and carefully so as not to shake anything off.
Hans joined her father’s ghost-space easily. The two men walked through her dreams together, unable to speak, shoulders folding in, followed by dogs. She couldn’t stop thinking about them. Once, she had yelled at her mother about something small, like clothes, or the telephone, and her father had stumbled in, weeping and whispering, “Stop it!” His exclamation point came in the form of a loud hush, like a radiator expelling heat. She and her mother had looked over, startled. They both liked fighting. It felt like a good workout, somewhat aerobic. German women had a different legacy to manage.
Through leads on her computer and in the phone book, the secretary tried to find living Hoefler relatives, but no one returned her phone calls. Finally, through an advertisement she placed on the Internet, she was able to track down a former girlfriend of Hans’s, from their courtship in the 1950s, when Germany was split in half like a bread roll; when the Ottoman Empire could still occasionally be found on globes in thirdhand trinket shops.
The secretary walked up a dark stairway, curling around to the back of the stone building. The walls smelled of wine, and mold.
“The curious thing about Hans,” said the woman, after introductions had been made and she was now curled on her sofa with bubbly water in a green glass on a coaster of cork, “is that he would not let me perform what many men enjoyed. That is,” she said, petting the long-haired white cat who’d hopped onto her lap, “what men often request. I assume you know what I mean?”
The secretary thought of several things. Which was it? The older woman leaned in. “With the mouth,” she whispered, tapping her chin with a long red fingernail. “Just that.
“He never allowed it. He did let me once, and then he insisted on serving me repeatedly for days. It was very pleasant for me,” she said. “Were you similarly treated? You’re awfully young.”
The secretary frowned. “No,” she said. “He was only an acquaintance.”
“Is he dead?”
The secretary picked at the old chocolates in a silver dish between them, their corners whitened and chalky with time. She removed one and took a cautious bite. Crystallized maple sugar inside.
“Yes,” she said. “I’m sorry. I should’ve said so earlier.”
The cat closed its eyes, and no one took a sip of anything, and the sugar was sticky and too sweet in the secretary’s mouth.
The older woman reached out a hand and put it on the secretary’s elbow. It was a light touch, but there was something else in it. “Let me show you something,” she said. She lifted the cat onto her shoulder and led the younger woman into her bedroom, which smelled musty, windows shut forever, and even with the lamp lit, had an undefeatable dimness. No direct sunlight, only the reflection of it off the building’s bricks next door. It made the secretary instantly weary.
The older woman knelt, and from a drawer next to her bed removed a small gold locket. Inside was a lock of hair.
“It’s my hair,” she said. “Not Hans’s. I soaked it in a deadly poison. Hair is porous. Had I needed to, I would’ve eaten it and died. We all had to have a plan.”
“How old were you? Can a person eat hair?” asked the secretary, who stood awkwardly by the bed, and felt that she was being lied to.
“Of course,” said the woman, dangling the hair over her mouth. “You young people don’t understand. You think all poison is in a bottle. I was a very bright child.”
“I am trying,” said the secretary, “it’s just—”
“Look,” said the woman, waving the hair. “Look, yes?”
And because she knew she was supposed to, the secretary stepped up and pushed down the older woman’s hand, though she was tempted to let the woman eat the hair, to call the bluff, to shut down the opera. By her estimation, the woman had probably been five years old during the height of the war. Listening to panicked voices in the next room. The majority of the living memories now owned by then-children.
The older woman began laughing; her shirt had lost its top button, purposefully or not, and you could see her skin under the luminous blouse, the settled wrinkles, the breasts, which struck the secretary as almost intolerably lonely.
“Hans was lousy,” said the woman, slipping the hair back into the locket. “He was lousy and he was wonderful. He was lousy, he was wonderful, and he was a self-centered bastard.”
She clipped the locket shut and announced that the secretary was no fun. “You should be wearing more textures,” she suggested. “Your face is too plain for standard cotton.” She stood and rummaged in her closet and returned with a brightly colored silk-and-sheep’s-wool scarf, tasseled at the ends. “Wear it,” she said. The secretary waved her hand. “Wear it,” said the woman. The secretary opened her mouth to protest, and the woman said: “Put it on, or I will call the police and tell them that you broke into my apartment.”
So it was that the secretary left the building, her coppery hair wrapped in the burgundy, ochre, and forest-green scarf, which did become her small precise features, and which did protect against the cold creeping in from the north in a streamy wind. She knew nothing new about Hans except that he did not invite fellatio when he was a young man and he had loved a woman as flamboyant in her inventions as he. They both had been so young. It said very little to her. Now she had a new scarf and a strange feeling in her hands and thoughts, as if the poison had somehow crept from the woman’s lock of hair into her, and so, when she was suitably far away, she found the first person who looked cold, handed her the scarf, and said take it, and that person, whoever it was, took it, because it was gorgeous, and because it was warm.
The secretary’s own family had survived the war, but barely. All her men had slotted into different ages than were required. They did not have to fight; they were either too old or too young. Her grandfather, her father, her brother, her first love. This generational split freed them all from making any of the torturous decisions that Hans Hoefler had made for himself regardless. They formed their identities in the negative space instead.