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A new thought, though, came more and more often to occupy my mind. The Sunday after the air raids, around noon, I had taken the car from the garage and had gone to visit Helene Anders. The day was cold and wet, the sky overcast, but it wasn’t raining. On the way, I had managed to find a bouquet of flowers, sold in the street by an old woman near an S-Bahn station. Having reached Helene’s building, I realized I didn’t know what apartment she lived in. Her name wasn’t on the letter boxes. A rather hefty woman who was leaving at that moment stopped and eyed me from head to foot before barking at me, in strong Berlin slang: “Who are you looking for?”—“Fräulein Anders.”—“Anders? There’s no Anders here.” I described her. “You mean the Wi
I didn’t understand what I was seeking with this young woman; but I didn’t try to understand it. What I liked about her was her gentleness, a gentleness I thought existed only in the paintings of Vermeer of Delft, through which could clearly be felt the supple force of a steel blade. I had enjoyed that afternoon very much, and for now I didn’t look any further, I didn’t want to think. I felt that thinking would immediately have led to painful questions and demands: for once, I didn’t feel the need, I was happy to let myself be carried by the course of events, as I was by Monteverdi’s music, at once utterly lucid and emotional, and then we’d see. During the week that followed, in the slack moments during work, or at night, at home, the thought of her grave face or of the calmness of her smile came back to me, almost warm, a friendly, affectionate thought, which didn’t alarm me.
But the past is a thing that, once it has sunk its teeth into your flesh, doesn’t let go. Around the middle of the week after the air raids, Fräulein Praxa knocked on my office door. “Obersturmba