THIRTY-SEVEN • Erich Again

Something was burning in Margaret’s apartment on the Grunewaldstrasse. From the courtyard of Number 88, Erich the Hausmeister could see smoke puffing out of the upper panel of Margaret’s kitchen window. The window was open, and the smoke flushed out of it, black and sturdy.

He knew that the American was out. He had seen her unlocking her racing bike. He knew that when she was bicycling in the neighborhood she did not wear a helmet, but when she was going a long distance, she did. Today, she had worn a helmet.

So now Erich climbed up the drainpipe next to the recyclables and hoisted himself onto the ledge. His agile body thin as a long-legged spider, he shimmied along the copper overhang that ran above the windows of the Döner shop. Margaret always left the window of her bathroom open, and now he went through it.

He fell into the room with a soft bounce and a ripple of popping bones, light as a ballerina. For a split second, Erich eyed a cabinet at the end of the long, lion-footed bathtub. Then he made his quick way into the kitchen.

It was only one burner that was on, and all the smoke billowed from a single pot—it was unclear what it had once been—the charred remains were perhaps lentils by the black outline.

The stove turned off, the pot under cold water, Erich began to look around the flat. Disarray, books, disarray, and more books. It was good he had come when he had. The whole place might have gone up like birch bark.

He returned to the bathroom. It happened that once he had seen Margaret leaning out the window of this bathroom, and believing herself unobserved, she had thrown something yellowy-gold out of it. Later, Erich found the brass key among dry leaves—it had been in the autumn—and it was ding-dong in his mind: here is Margaret’s secret.

As though he was meant for it, the first piece of furniture he tried—yes, yes, he brought the key with him, for it was always on his heavy ring—opened under the key’s ministrations as though charmed. Of course a key opening a lock is not a matter of charm, but still the ease of it had a magic quality.

Inside the drawer of the cabinet was very little. Just a few documents, mostly health insurance forms. And then—a birth certificate.

Erich stood for a long time with his chin in his hand. He thought of Margaret; he thought of her face.

It made him sorry.

But none of this would do. None of it would do at all.

The first thing Erich did the next day: he checked the birth registry at the city hall, for confirmation.

A boy, born September 5, 2002. Christoph Amadeus Taub.