Self's deception Read Free Page A

Salger?”
    “Excuse me?”
    “Where did Leo live before she moved to the Häusser-strasse?”
    “I'm afraid I can't tell you that offhand.”
    “Could you take a look, or ask your wife? I need her old address. It was a university residence hall.”
    “Oh yes, the residence hall.” Salger fell silent. “Liebigstrasse? Eichendorffweg? Schnepfengewann? I can't think of it right now, Herr Self; the names of all kinds of streets are going through my head. I'll talk to my wife and take a look at my old address book—we might still have it somewhere. I'll let you know. Or I should say, if you don't find a message from me on your answering machine tomorrow morning, that means we couldn't find it. Would that be all? In that case, I wish you a good night.”
    I couldn't say I was warming up to Salger. Leo was leaning on the small stone lion, looking at me, pretty, alert, with a determination in her eyes that I felt I understood, and a question or a spark of defiance that I could not interpret. To have such a daughter and not know her address—shame on you, Herr Salger!
    I don't know why Klara and I never had any children. She never told me she'd gone to see a gynecologist, nor had she ever asked me to take a fertility test. We were not very happy together; but no clear links have ever been drawn between marital unhappiness and childlessness, or marital happiness and an abundance of children. I'd have liked to have been a widower with a daughter, but that is a disrespectful wish, and I've only admitted it to myself in my old age, when I no longer keep any secrets from myself.
    I spent a whole morning on the phone till I finally located Leo's residence hall. It was on Klausenpfad, not far from the public swimming pool and the zoo. She'd lived in room 408, and after crossing some grungy stairwells and hallways I found three students drinking tea in the communal kitchen on the fourth floor—two girls and a boy.
    “Excuse me, I'm looking for Leonore Salger.”
    “There's no Leonore here.” The young man was sitting with his back to me and spoke over his shoulder.
    “I'm Leo's uncle. I'm passing through Heidelberg, and this is the address I've got for her. Could you—”
    “A dear old uncle visiting his dear young niece—how sweet! Hey, what d'you say to that, Andrea?”
    Andrea turned around, the young man turned around, and all three of them eyed me with interest.
    Philipp, an old friend of mine who's a surgeon at the Mannheim Municipal Hospital, works a lot with young interns and tells me how well behaved the students of the nineties are. My ex-girlfriend Babs has a son who's studying to be a lawyer, and he's polite and serious, too. His girlfriend, a nice girl studying theology, whom I always addressed as “Frau,” as the women's movement has taught me to do, corrected me gently, telling me that she is a “Fräulein.”
    These three students seemed to have missed this trend— were they sociologists? I sat down on the fourth chair.
    “When did Leo move out?”
    “Who says she ever—”
    “It was before your time,” Andrea cut in. “Leo moved out about a year ago, to somewhere on the west side, I think.” She turned toward me. “I don't have her new address. But they must have it over at the registrar's office. I'm going there—want to come along?”
    She led the way down the stairs, her black ponytail swinging, her skirt swaying. She was a robust girl, but quite pleasing to the eye. The office had already closed, as it was almost four. We stood irresolutely in front of the locked door.
    “Do you happen to have a recent picture of her?” I went on to tell her that Leo's father, my brother-in-law, had a birthday coming up, and that we were going to have a party on the Drachenfels, and that all her aunts, uncles, and cousins would be coming from Dresden. “One of the reasons I want to see Leo is because I'm putting together a photo album of family and friends.”
    She took me up to her room. We sat down on