Authors: Roberto Bolaño
Tags: #Fiction, #Literary Collections, #Mystery & Detective, #Mexico, #Caribbean & Latin American, #Cold Cases (Criminal Investigation), #Crime, #Literary, #Young Women, #Missing Persons, #General, #Women
The second column was made up
of ghosts, corpses just risen from a graveyard, specters in gray or verdigris
uniforms and steel helmets, invisible to all eyes except Lotte's, and she
repeated her question, which a few scarecrows deigned to answer, saying yes,
they'd seen him in Soviet country, fleeing like a coward, or they'd seen him
swimming in the Dnieper and then drowning, as he well deserved, or they'd seen
him on the Kalmuk Steppe, gulping water as if he were dying of thirst, or
they'd seen him crouching in a forest in Hungary, wondering how to shoot
himself with his own rifle, or they'd seen him on the edge of a cemetery, the
stupid bastard, not daring to go in, pacing back and forth until night fell and
the cemetery emptied of relatives and only then, the faggot, did he stop pacing
and climb the walls, digging his hobnailed boots into the red, crumbling bricks
and poking his nose and blue eyes over the edge, peering down at where the dead
lay, the Grotes and the Kruses, the Neitzkes and the Kunzes, the Barzes and the
Wilkes, the Lemkes and the Noacks, discreet Ladenthin and brave Voss, and then,
emboldened, he climbed to the top of the wall and sat there for a while, his
long legs dangling, and then he stuck out his tongue at the dead, and then he
took off his helmet and pressed both hands to his temples, and then he closed his
eyes and howled, that was what the specters told Lotte, as they laughed and
marched behind the column of the living.
Then
Lotte's parents stopped for a while in Lübeck, along with many others from
their village, but her father said the Russians would come and he took his
family and kept walking west, and then Lotte lost all sense of time, the days
were like nights and the nights like days, and sometimes the days and nights
were unlike anything, everything was a continuum of blinding brightness and explosions.
One
night Lotte saw shadows listening to the radio. One of the shadows was her
father. Another shadow was her mother. Other shadows had eyes and noses and
mouths that she didn't recognize. Mouths like carrots, with peeling lips, and
noses like wet potatoes. They all had their heads and ears covered with
kerchiefs and blankets and on the radio a man's voice said Hitler didn't exist,
that he was dead. But not existing and dying were different things, thought
Lotte. Until then her first menstrual period had been late in coming. Earlier
that day, however, she had begun to bleed and she didn't feel well. Her
one-eyed mother told her it was normal, the same thing happened sooner or later
to all women. My brother the giant doesn't exist, thought Lotte, but that
doesn't mean he's dead. The shadows didn't notice her presence. Some sighed.
Others began to weep.
"Mein
führer, mein führer," they cried without raising their voices, like women
who haven't yet begun to menstruate.
Her father didn't weep. Her mother did
weep and the tears flowed only from her good eye.
"He's stopped
existing," said the shadows, "he's dead."
"He died like
a soldier," said one of the shadows.
"He's stopped
existing."
Then they left for
where a brother of Lotte's one-eyed mother lived, but when they got there the
house was occupied by refugees. They moved in, though there was no sign of the
brother. A neighbor told them that unless he was greatly mistaken they would
never see him again. For a while they lived on charity, handouts from the
English. Then Lotte's one-legged father fell ill and died. His last wish was to
be buried in his village with military honors, and his wife and Lotte told him
they would make sure it happened, yes, yes, we promise, but his remains were
tossed in the common grave in the
was
precisely
the time for ceremony, for gallant gestures, for attention
to detail.
The refugees left and Lotte's one-eyed mother took possession of
her brother's house. Lotte found work. Later she went back to school. Not for
long. She returned to work. She quit. She went back to school again for a
little while. She found another job, a better one. She left school for the last
time. Her one-eyed mother found a boyfriend, an old man who'd been a civil
servant in the days of the kaiser and during the Nazi years and had taken up
the same job again in postwar
"A German civil servant," said the old man, "isn't
easy to find, even in
That was the sum total of his
shrewdness, his intelligence, his astuteness. And for him it was enough. By
then Lotte's one-eyed mother didn't want to return to the village, which had
ended up in the Soviet zone. Nor did she want to see the sea again. Nor did she
show much interest in learning the fate of her lost son. He must be buried in
she said with a hard, resigned shrug. Lotte began to go out. First she dated an
English soldier. Then, when the soldier was transferred, she dated a boy from
middle-class family wasn't pleased by his romance with the giddy blond girl,
because Lotte, in those days, knew every popular dance. What she cared about
was being happy, and she cared about the boy, too, not his family, and they
were together until he left for university and then their relations ended.
One night her brother appeared.
Lotte was in the kitchen, ironing a dress, and she heard his footsteps. It's
Hans, she thought. When a knock came on the door she ran to let him in. He
didn't recognize her, because she was a woman now, as he told her later, but
she had no need to ask him any questions and she clung to him for a long time.
That night they talked until dawn and Lotte had time to iron not just her dress
but also all her clean clothes. After a few hours Archimboldi fell asleep, with
his head resting on the table, and he woke only when his mother touched his
shoulder.
Two
days later he left and everything returned to normal. By then Lotte's one-eyed
mother had replaced the civil servant with a mechanic, a jovial man with his
own business, who was doing very well repairing vehicles for the occupation
troops and trucks for the farmers and factory owners of
found a younger, prettier woman, but he preferred someone decent and
hardworking, who wouldn't suck his blood like a vampire. The mechanic's shop
was big and at Lotte's mother's request he found a job there for Lotte, but she
refused it. Shortly before her mother married the mechanic, Lotte met Werner
Haas, a worker at the shop, and since they liked each other and never fought
they began to go out together, first to the movies, then to dance halls.
One
night Lotte dreamed that her brother appeared outside her bedroom window and
asked why their mother was going to marry. I don't know, answered Lotte from
her bed. Don't you ever get married, her brother said. Lotte nodded and then
her brother's head disappeared and all that was left was the frost-covered
window and an echo of the giant's footsteps. But when Archimboldi came to
mother's marriage, Lotte introduced him to Werner Haas and they seemed to get
along.
When
her mother got married, the two women went to live at the mechanic's house. The
mechanic thought Archimboldi must be a crook, someone who lived off swindles or
thieving or black market deals.
"I can smell
swindlers at one hundred yards," said the mechanic.
His
wife didn't say anything. Lotte and Werner Haas discussed it. According to
Werner, the crook was the mechanic, who smuggled parts over the border and
often said a car was fixed when it wasn't. Werner, thought Lotte, was a good
person, always with a kind word for everyone. Around this time it occurred to
Lotte that she and Werner and all the young people born around 1930 or 1931
were fated to be unhappy.
Werner,
who was her confidant, listened to her without saying anything, and then they
went to the movies, to see American or English films, or they went out dancing.
Some weekends they went to the country, especially after Werner bought a
broken-down motorcycle that he repaired himself in his free time. For these
picnics Lotte prepared sandwiches of black bread and white bread, a bit of
kuchen, and never more than three bottles of beer. Werner, meanwhile, filled a
canteen with water and sometimes brought sweets and chocolates. On occasion,
after walking and eating in the woods, they spread a blanket on the ground and
fell asleep holding hands.
The dreams Lotte had in the country were disturbing. She dreamed
about dead squirrels and dead deer and dead rabbits, and sometimes she thought
she saw a wild boar in the undergrowth and she approached it very slowly, and
when she parted the branches she saw an enormous female boar lying on the
ground, in its death throes, surrounded by hundreds of little dead boars. When
this happened she woke with a start and only the sight of Werner next to her,
sleeping placidly, could soothe her. For a while she thought about becoming a
vegetarian. Instead, she took up smoking.
Back
then, in
in
at least, few did so in public, when they were out for a walk or on their way
to work. Lotte was one of the few who smoked openly. She lit her first
cigarette early in the morning and as she walked to the bus stop she was
already on her second of the day. Werner didn't smoke, and although Lotte
insisted he take it up, the most he would do, to make her happy, was to take a
few puffs on her cigarette and nearly choke.
When Lotte began to
smoke, Werner asked her to marry him.
"I
have to think about it," said Lotte, "but for weeks or months, not a
day or two."
Werner
told her to take all the time she needed, because he wanted their marriage to
last a lifetime and he knew it was important not to make a hasty decision. From
then on Lotte and Werner saw less of each other. When Werner noticed, he asked
her whether she had stopped loving him and when Lotte answered that she was
trying to decide whether to marry him or not, he regretted having asked her.
They no longer went on excursions as regularly as before, nor did they go to
the movies or out to dance. Around the same time, Lotte met a man who worked at
a pipe factory that had just been built in the city and she began to see this
man, an engineer named Heinrich who lived in a boardinghouse downtown, because
his real home was in
the site of the factory's main plant.
Shortly
after she began to spend time with him, Heinrich confessed that he was married
and had a child, but he didn't love his wife and was planning to get a divorce.
Lotte didn't care that he was married but she did care that he had a child,
because she loved children and the idea of hurting a child, even indirectly,
seemed horrible to her. Even so, they saw each other for almost two months, and
sometimes Lotte talked to Werner and Werner asked her how things were going
with her new boyfriend and Lotte said fine, normal, typical. In the end,
however, it became clear that Heinrich would never leave his wife and she broke
things off with him, although every so often they went to the movies and then
out to dinner.
One
day, when she left work, Werner was outside on his motorcycle, waiting for her.
This time he didn't talk about marriage or love but just invited her to a cafe
and then took her home. Gradually they began to see each other again, which
pleased Lotte's mother and the mechanic, the latter of whom had no children and
liked it that Werner was serious and hardworking. The nightmares that had
troubled Lotte since childhood came less frequently, until finally they were
gone, and she never dreamed at all.
"I'm
sure I dream," she said, "like everybody, but I'm lucky enough not to
remember anything when I wake up."
When
she told Werner that she had thought long enough about his proposal and she
would marry him, he began to cry and in a choked voice confessed that he had
never been happier than he was at that instant. Two weeks later they were
married and during the party, which was held on a restaurant terrace, Lotte
remembered her brother, and for a moment she wasn't sure—maybe because she'd
had too much to drink—whether she'd invited him to the wedding or not.
They
spent their honeymoon in a small spa on the banks of the
as it had before. Living with Werner, even in a one-room flat, was easy,
because her husband did everything he could to make her happy. On Saturday they
went to the movies, on Sundays they often rode into the country on the
motorcycle or went dancing. During the week, despite how hard he worked, Werner
managed to help her with all the chores. The only thing he couldn't do was
cook. At the end of the month, he often bought her a present or took her to the
center of
money, Werner began to work overtime at the shop or sometimes he did jobs of
his own, behind the mechanic's back, fixing tractors or combines for farmers,
who didn't pay much but instead gave him sausages and meat and even sacks of
flour, which made it look as if Lotte's kitchen was a storeroom or as if the
two of them were preparing for the next war.