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But bravery was another thing
he held in high esteem, and when he saw that a boy, though at first he mistook
him for seaweed, was drowning, he didn't hesitate a second before throwing
himself into the sea, which wasn't exactly calm near the rocks just there, to rescue
him. One further thing must be noted, which is that Vogel's blunder (mistaking
a boy with brown skin and blond hair for a tangle of seaweed) tormented him
that night, after it was all over. In bed, in the dark, Vogel relived the day's
occurrences just as he always did, that is, with great satisfaction, until
suddenly he saw the drowning boy again and himself watching, not sure whether
it was a human being or seaweed. Sleep deserted him. How could he have mistaken
a boy for seaweed? he asked himself. And then: in what sense can a boy resemble
seaweed? And then: can a boy and seaweed have anything in common?

Before he formulated a fourth
question, Vogel thought that possibly his doctor in Berlin was right and he was
going mad, or perhaps not mad in the usual sense, but he was approaching the
path of madness, so to speak, because a boy, he thought, has nothing in common
with seaweed, and an observer from the rocks who mistakes a boy for seaweed is
a person with a half-loosened screw, not a madman, exactly, with a screw
altogether loose, but a man whose screw is loosening, and who, as a result,
must tread more carefully in all matters regarding his mental health.

Then, since he knew he wouldn't
be able to sleep all night, he began to think about the boy he had saved. He
was very thin, he remembered, very tall for his age, and his speech was
confoundedly garbled. When Vogel asked what had happened, the boy answered:

"Nut."

"What?" asked Vogel.
"What did you say?"

"Nut," repeated the
boy. And Vogel understood that nut meant: nothing, nothing happened.

And so it was with the rest of
his vocabulary, which struck Vogel as highly picturesque and amusing, so he
began to ask all kinds of pointless questions, just for the pleasure of
listening to the boy, who answered everything in the most natural manner, for
example, what do you call this wood, Vogel asked, and the boy answered Slavs,
which meant Gustav's wood, and: what's the name of that wood over there, and
the boy answered Retas, which meant Greta's wood, and: what's the name of that
dark wood, to the right of Greta's wood, and the boy answered an-naname, which
meant the wood that has no name, until they got to the top of the rocks where
Vogel had left his jacket with the important papers in the pocket, and at the urging
of Vogel, who wouldn't let him get back in the water, the boy retrieved his
clothes from a cave a little farther down the shore, a kind of resting place
for gulls, and then they said goodbye, not without first introducing
themselves:

"My name is Heinz
Vogel," Vogel said as if he were addressing an idiot, "what is your
name?"

The boy told him it was Hans
Reiter, pronouncing the name clearly, and then they shook hands and each went
his separate way. All of this Vogel recalled as he tossed and turned in bed,
reluctant to turn on the light and unable to sleep. What was it about the boy
that made him look like seaweed? he asked himself. Was it his thinness, his
sun-bleached hair, his long, placid face? And he wondered: should I return to
Berlin
, should I take my
doctor more seriously, should I embark on a course of self-examination? Finally
he grew tired of all the questions and jerked off, and fell asleep.

The second time young Hans
Reiter almost drowned was in winter, when he went with some fishermen to cast
nets across from the
Village
of
Blue Women
. It was
getting dark and the fishermen began to talk about the lights that moved at the
bottom of the sea. One said it was dead fishermen searching for the way to
their villages, their cemeteries on dry land. Another said it was shining
lichens, lichens that shone only once a month, as if in a single night they
gave off all the light it had taken them thirty days to build up. Another said
it was a kind of anemone particular to that coast, and the female anemones lit
up to attract the male anemones, although everywhere else in the world anemones
were hermaphrodites, neither male nor female, but male and female in a single
body, as if the mind lapsed into sleep and when it woke, a part of the anemone
had fucked the other part, as if inside each of us there were a woman and a
man, or a faggot and a man in the cases where the anemone was sterile. Another
said it was electric fish, a very strange kind of fish that required great
vigilance, because if they landed in your nets they looked no different from
any other kind of fish, but when people ate them they fell ill, with terrible
electric shocks in the stomach, which at times could even be deadly.

And as the fishermen talked,
young Hans Reiter's irrepressible curiosity, or madness, which at times made
him do things he shouldn't, led him to drop off the boat with no warning, and
he dove down after the lights or light of those singular fish or that singular
fish, and at first the fishermen weren't alarmed, nor did they shout or cry
out, because they were all aware of young Reiter's peculiarities, and yet,
after a few seconds without a sighting of his head, they grew worried, because
even though they were uneducated Prussians they were also men of the sea and
they knew that no one can hold his breath for more than two minutes (or
thereabouts), certainly not a boy, whose lungs—no matter how tall he is—aren't
strong enough to survive the strain.

And finally two of them plunged
into that dark sea, a sea like a pack of wolves, and they dove around the boat
trying to find young Reiter's body, with no success, until they had to come up
for air, and before they dove again, they asked the men on the boat whether the
brat had surfaced. And then, under the weight of the negative response, they
disappeared once more among the dark waves like forest beasts and one of the
men who hadn't been in before joined them, and it was he who some fifteen feet
down spotted the body of young Reiter floating like uprooted seaweed, upward, a
brilliant white in the underwater space, and it was he who grabbed the boy
under the arms and brought him up, and also he who made the young Reiter vomit
all the water he had swallowed.

•

When Hans Reiter was ten, his
one-eyed mother and one-legged father had their second child. It was a girl and
they called her Lotte. She was a beautiful child and she might have been the
first person on the surface of the earth who interested (or moved) Hans Reiter.
Often his parents left her in his care. In no time at all he learned to change
diapers, fix bottles, walk with the baby in his arms until she fell asleep. As
far as Hans was concerned, his sister was the best thing that had ever happened
to him, and many times he tried to draw her in the same notebook where he'd
drawn different kinds of seaweed, but the results were always unsatisfactory:
sometimes the baby looked like a bag of rubbish left on a pebbly beach, other
times like
Petrobius maritimus,
a marine insect that lives in crevices
and rocks and feeds on scraps, or
Lipura maritima,
another insect, very
small and dark slate or gray, its habitat the puddles among rocks.

In time, by stretching his
imagination or his tastes or his own artistic nature, he managed to draw her as
a little mermaid, more fish than girl, closer to fat than thin, but always
smiling, always with an enviable tendency to smile and see the positive side of
things, which was a faithful reflection of his sister's character.

At thirteen Hans Reiter left
school. This was 1933, the year Hitler came to power. At twelve Hans had begun
to attend a school in the Town of
Chattering
Girls
. But for various reasons, all of them perfectly
sensible, he didn't like it there, and he dawdled on his way, finding the path
neither flat nor flat with hills nor flat with switchbacks, but vertical, a
prolonged fall toward the bottom of the sea where everything, trees, grass,
swamps, animals, fences, was transformed into marine insects or crustaceans,
into suspended and
remote
forms of life, into starfish and sea spiders,
whose bodies, the young Reiter knew, were so tiny that the animal's stomach
didn't fit inside and extended into its legs, which were themselves enormous
and mysterious, or in other words contained an enigma (or at least for him they
did), because the sea spider has eight legs, four on each side, plus another
pair, much smaller, in fact infinitely smaller
and useless,
at the end
nearest its head, and those legs or tiny appendages struck Reiter not as legs
but as hands, as if the sea spider, over a long process of evolution, had
finally developed two arms and therefore two hands but didn't know yet that it
had them. How long would the sea spider be unaware that it had hands?

"Probly," the young
Reiter said to himself out loud, "nuffer a thou-sings, nuffer two thousings,
nuffer ten thousings year. Nuffer long, long time."

And that was how he walked to
school in the Town of
Chattering Girls
,
and of course he was always late, his mind elsewhere, too.

In 1933, the headmaster of the
school summoned Hans Reiter's parents. Only Hans's mother came. The headmaster
ushered her into his office and explained briefly that the boy wasn't fit for
school. Then he spread his arms, as if to take the sting out of what he'd said,
and suggested that she apprentice him in a trade.

This was the year Hitler seized
power. The same year, before Hitler seized power, a propaganda committee passed
through Hans Reiter's town. The committee stopped first in the Town of
Chattering Girls, where it held a rally at the movie theater, a success, and
the next day it moved on to Pig Village and Egg Village and in the afternoon it
reached Hans Reiter's town, where the members of the committee drank beer at
the tavern with the local farmers and fishermen, bringing glad tidings and
explanations of National Socialism, a movement that would raise Germany up from
its ashes and Prussia from its ashes, too, the talk open and friendly, until
someone who couldn't keep his mouth shut mentioned Hans Reiter's one-legged
father, the only townsman who had returned alive from the front, a hero, a
seasoned veteran, every inch a Prussian, although perhaps a bit lazy, a
countryman who told war stories that gave you goose bumps, stories he had lived
himself, the townspeople put special emphasis on this, he had lived them, they
were true, and not only were they true but the storyteller had lived them, and
then one member of the committee, a man who put on lordly airs (this must be
stressed, because his companions certainly didn't put on lordly airs, they were
ordinary men, happy to drink beer and eat fish and sausages and fart and laugh
and sing, and they didn't put on airs, which is only fair to say and bears
repeating because in fact they were like villagers, salesmen who traveled from
village to village and sprang from the common herd and lived as part of the
common herd, and who, when they died, would fade from common memory), said that
perhaps, just perhaps, it would be interesting to meet this soldier, and then
he asked why Reiter wasn't there, at the tavern, conversing with his National
Socialist comrades who had only Germany at heart, and one of the townspeople, a
man who had a one-eyed horse that he looked after more carefully than Reiter
looked after his one-eyed wife, said that the aforementioned wasn't at the
tavern because he didn't have the money to buy even a mug of beer, which led
the members of the committee to protest that they would buy the soldier a beer,
and then the man who put on lordly airs singled out one of the townsmen and
ordered him to go to Reiter's house and bring the old soldier to the tavern,
and the townsman hurried off, but when he returned, fifteen minutes later, he
informed those present that Reiter had refused to come, with the excuse that he
wasn't dressed properly to be introduced to the distinguished members of the
committee, and also that he was alone with his daughter, because his one-eyed
wife was still at work, and naturally his daughter couldn't be left alone, an
argument that nearly moved the members of the committee (who were swine) to tears,
because in addition to being swine they were sentimentalists, and the fate of
this veteran and war cripple touched their hearts, but not so the lordly man,
who got up and, after saying, as evidence of his great learning, that if
Mohammed couldn't come to the mountain, the mountain would come to Mohammed,
motioned for the townsman to lead him to the soldier's house and forbade any of
the other members of the committee to accompany them, and so this National
Socialist Party member dirtied his boots in the mud of the town streets and
followed the townsman nearly to the edge of the forest, where the Reiter family
house stood, which the lordly man scanned with a knowing eye for an instant
before he went in, as if to weigh the character of the paterfamilias by the
harmony or strength of the house's lines, or as if he were tremendously
interested in rustic architecture in that part of Prussia, and then they went
into the house and there really was a girl of three asleep in a wooden cot and
her one-legged father really was dressed in rags, because his military cloak
and only pair of decent trousers were in the washtub that day or hanging wet in
the yard, which didn't prevent the old soldier from offering his visitor a warm
welcome, and surely at first he felt proud, privileged, that a member of the
committee had come all the way to his house expressly to meet him, but then
things took a wrong turn or seemed to take a wrong turn, because the questions
asked by the lordly man began gradually to displease the one-legged man, and
the lordly man's remarks, which were more like prophecies, also began to
displease him, and then the one-legged man answered each question with a
statement, generally outlandish or outrageous, and countered each of the other
man's remarks with a question that somehow discredited the remark itself or
cast it in doubt or made it seem puerile, completely lacking in common sense,
which in turn began to exasperate the lordly man, and in a vain effort to find
common ground he told the one-legged man that he had been a pilot during the
war and shot down twelve French planes and eight English planes and he knew
very well the suffering one experienced at the front, to which the one-legged
man replied that his worst suffering hadn't come at the front but at the cursed
military hospital near Düren, where his comrades stole not only cigarettes but
whatever they could lay their hands on, they even stole men's souls to sell,
since there were a disproportionate number of satanists in German military
hospitals, which, after all, said the one-legged man, was understandable,
because a long stay in a military hospital drove people to become satanists, a
claim that exasperated the self-avowed aviator, who had also spent three weeks
in a military hospital, in Düren? asked the one-legged man, no, in Belgium,
said the lordly man, and the treatment he had received not only met but very
often exceeded every expectation of sacrifice but also of kindness and
understanding, marvelous and manly doctors, skilled and pretty nurses, an
atmosphere of solidarity and endurance and courage, even a group of Belgian
nuns had shown the highest sense of duty, in short, everyone had done his or her
part to make the patient's stay as pleasant as possible, taking into account
the circumstances, of course, because naturally a hospital isn't a cabaret or a
brothel, and then they moved on to other topics, like the creation of Greater
Germany, the construction of a Hinterland, the cleansing of the state
institutions, to be followed by the cleansing of the nation, the creation of
new jobs, the struggle for modernization, and as the ex-pilot talked Hans
Reiter's father grew more and more nervous, as if he were afraid little Lotte
would start to cry at any moment, or as if all at once he had realized that he
wasn't a worthy interlocutor for this lordly man, and that perhaps it would be
best to throw himself at the feet of this dreamer, this centurion of the skies,
and plead what was already obvious, his ignorance and poverty and the courage
he had lost, but he did nothing of the sort, instead he shook his head at each
word the other uttered, as if he wasn't convinced (in fact he was terrified),
as if it were difficult for him to understand the full scope of the other man's
dreams (in fact he didn't understand them at all), until suddenly both of them,
the former pilot who put on lordly airs and the old soldier, witnessed the
arrival of young Hans Reiter, who, without a word, lifted his sister from her
cot and carried her into the yard.