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folding chessboard—Alexander could have taken it out with his eyes closed—together with the chessmen carved at some time in the past by an anonymous inmate of the gulag.
    All that had been added in forty years—apart from new books—were a few of what had originally been large quantities of souvenirs brought back from Mexico by Alexander’s grandparents. Most of them had been given away or sold in haste after their deaths, and even the few things with which Kurt, curiously enough, had not wanted to part hadn’t gained admittance to the “jungle”—allegedly for lack of space, in reality because Irina had never been able to overcome her hatred of anything that came from her in-laws’ house. So Kurt had “provisionally” found room for them on the fitted wall unit in his study, and there they had “provisionally” stayed to this day. Kurt had hung the stuffed baby shark from a hook on one shelf with gift ribbon—as a child, Alexander had been fascinated by its rough skin; the terrifying Aztec mask still lay, faceup, in the glass-fronted part of the unit containing all the little schnapps bottles; and the large, pink, spiral seashell into which Wilhelm had fitted an electric bulb—no one knew how—still stood on one of the lower shelves, although without any electrical connection.
    Once again he thought of his son, Markus. Imagined Markus going around this house, in a hooded jacket and with headphones in his ears—that was how he had last seen him, two years ago—imagined Markus standing in front of Kurt’s book-lined wall and kicking the bottom shelves with the toes of his boots; imagined him handling the things that had been collected here, estimating their usefulness or saleability. Not many people would want to buy the works of Lenin from him; he might get a few marks for the folding chessboard. Probably only the stuffed baby shark and the big pink seashell would interest Markus himself, and he would take them home to his own place without giving much thought to their origin.
    For a second he wondered whether to take the shell with him and throw it back in the sea where it had come from—but then the idea struck him as corny, like a scene in a TV soap opera, and he thought better of it again.
    He sat down at the desk and opened the left-hand door of the storage space below the top of it. For the last forty years, the key to the wall safe had lain in the ancient photographic paper box right at the back of the middle drawer, hidden under tubes of adhesive—and it was still there (it had suddenly occurred to Alexander that the key might have disappeared, thus wrecking his plans, but that was a silly idea).
    For safety’s sake, he put the key in his pocket—as if someone might yet try taking it away from him—and then sipped his cold coffee.
    Strange how tiny Kurt’s desk was. Kurt had written all his works on that small surface. He used to sit here in a medically extremely unwise position, on an ergonomic catastrophe of a chair, drinking his bitter-tasting filter coffee, and hammering his works out on his typewriter by the hunt-and-peck method, tack-tack-tack-tack, Papa is working! Seven pages a day, that was his “norm,” but sometimes he would announce at lunchtime: “Twelve pages today!” Or, “Fifteen!” He had filled a complete section of the Swedish wall unit like this, shelving measuring one meter by three meters fifty, filled with the works of “one of the most productive historians of the German Democratic Republic,” as he had been described, and even if you took the articles out of the journals into which they were bound, and extracted the essays contributed to anthologies, and arranged them all in a row—together with the ten, twelve, or fourteen full-length books that Kurt had written—his writings still occupied a total expanse of shelving that could almost compete with the works of Lenin: a meter’s length of knowledge. Kurt had toiled away for thirty years to fill that meter