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The woman made a face, frowning, as if to say: a girl with
initiative. Then she said: we'll see, and she went away. After a while, Reiter
turned up the collar of his black leather jacket and went back to the door,
because people were beginning to arrive, and the girl remained sitting at the
table, every so often reading a few pages from a book and most of the time
watching people as the bar filled up. After a while the woman who had served
her the cup of tea took her by the arm and led her outside, explaining that the
table was needed for customers. The girl said a friendly goodbye to the woman
but got no reply. Reiter was talking to two American soldiers and the girl
decided not to bother him. Instead she crossed the street, settled into the
entranceway of the house opposite, and spent a while watching the constant
movement at the bar door.

As he worked, out of the corner of his
eye, Reiter watched the doorstep of the house across the street and sometimes
he thought he saw a bright pair of cat eyes peering at him from the dark. When
there was a lull he ventured into the entranceway and was about to call out to
her, but he realized he didn't know her name. With the help of a match he found
her asleep in a corner. On his knees, as the match burned down in his fingers, he
spent a few seconds gazing at her sleeping face. Then he remembered who she
was.

When
she woke Reiter was still by her side, but the doorway had become a room with a
vaguely feminine air, with photographs of performers stuck up on the walls and
a collection of dolls and stuffed bears on a chest of drawers. Stacked on the
floor, however, were cases of whiskey and wine. A green quilt was pulled up to
her neck. Someone had taken off her shoes. She felt so good she closed her eyes
again. But then she heard Reiter's voice saying: you're the girl who lived in
Hugo Halder's old flat. Without opening her eyes, she nodded. "I don't
remember your name," said Reiter. She rolled over, turning her back to
him, and said: "You have a terrible memory, my name is Ingeborg
Bauer." "Ingeborg Bauer," repeated Reiter, as if his fate were
contained in those two words.

Then
she fell asleep again and when she woke up she was alone.

That
morning, as she walked with Reiter around the destroyed city, Ingeborg Bauer
told him that she lived, with some strangers, in a building near the train
station. Her father had died in a bombing raid. Her mother and sisters fled
Berlin
before the city
was besieged by the Russians. First they were in the country, with one of her
mother's brothers, but despite what they'd imagined, there was nothing to eat
in the country and girls were often raped by their uncles and cousins.
According to Ingeborg Bauer the forests were full of graves where the locals
buried city dwellers after they had robbed, raped, and killed them.

"Were you
raped, too?" Reiter asked her.

No,
she wasn't, but one of her younger sisters had been raped by a cousin, a boy of
thirteen who wanted to join the Hitler Youth and die a hero's death. So her
mother decided they should move on and they left for a small city in the
Westerwald, in
Hesse
, where her mother was
from. Life there was boring and at the same time very strange, Ingeborg Bauer
told Reiter, because the inhabitants of the city lived as if there was no war,
even though many men had marched to the front with the army and the city itself
had suffered three bombing raids, none of them devastating, but raids all the
same. Her mother got a job at a beer hall and the girls found occasional work,
helping out in offices or filling in at factories or delivering messages, and
sometimes the youngest ones even had time to go to school.

Despite
the constant bustle, life was boring and when peace came Ingeborg couldn't
stand it any longer and one morning, when her mother and sisters were out, she
left for
Cologne
.

"I
was sure," she said to Reiter, "that I would find you here, or
someone very like you."

And
that was everything that had happened, broadly speaking, since they kissed in
the park, when Reiter was looking for Hugo Halder and she told him the story of
the Aztecs. Of course, Reiter soon understood that Ingeborg had gone mad, if
she wasn't already mad when he met her, and he also understood that she was
sick or maybe just hungry.

He brought her to live with him
in the cellar, but since Ingeborg was always coughing and seemed to have
something wrong with her lungs he looked for new lodgings. He found them in the
garret of a half-ruined building. There was no elevator and some stretches of
the stairs were
unsound, with steps that gradually sank under the weight of
the climbers, or gaps that yawned over an empty space, so that one could see or
guess at the building's innards and the bomb shrapnel. But they had no problem
living there: Ingeborg weighed just one hundred and ten pounds and Reiter,
although he was very tall, was thin and bony and the steps were perfectly able
to support his weight. The same wasn't true for the other tenants. A small,
amiable Brandenburger who worked for the occupation troops fell through a gap
between the second and third floors and broke his neck. Each time the
Brandenburger saw Ingeborg, he greeted her with interest and affection, and
each time, without fail, he presented her with the flower he wore in his
buttonhole.

At night, before he went to work, Reiter checked to make sure
Ingeborg had everything she needed so she wouldn't have to go down the stairs
to the street with just a candle to light her way, although in his heart he
knew that Ingeborg (and he too) lacked so many things that his precautions were
pointless from the outset. At first their relations excluded sex. Ingeborg was
very weak and all she wanted to do was talk, or read, when she was alone and
there were enough candles. Reiter sometimes fucked the girls who worked at the
bar. These were hardly very passionate encounters. On the contrary. They made
love as if they were talking soccer, sometimes even with a cigarette still in
their mouths or chewing American gum, which had begun to be fashionable, and it
was good for the nerves, chewing gum and fucking this way impersonally,
although the act was far from impersonal but rather objective, as if once the
nakedness of the slaughterhouse had been achieved everything else was
unacceptable theatricality.

Before he began working at the bar Reiter had slept with other
girls, at the Cologne or Solingen train stations or in Remscheid or Wuppertal,
factory workers and peasants who liked it when men (so long as they looked
healthy) came in their mouths. Some afternoons Ingeborg asked Reiter to tell
her about his adventures, that was what she called them, and Reiter, lighting a
cigarette, would tell her.

"Those
Solingen
girls thought
there were vitamins in semen," said Ingeborg, "just like the
Cologne
station girls you
fucked. I understand them perfectly," said Ingeborg, "I spent a while
at the
Cologne
station too and I talked to them and did what they did."

"You
sucked off strangers too, thinking the semen would be good for you?" asked
Reiter.

"I
did," said Ingeborg. "So long as the men looked healthy, so long as
they didn't seem to be rotting away from cancer or syphilis," said
Ingeborg. "The peasant women who roamed the station, the factory workers,
the madwomen who were lost or had fled their homes, we all believed that semen
was a precious nutrient, an extract of all kinds of vitamins, the best remedy
for a cold," said Ingeborg. "Some nights, before I went to sleep,
huddled in a corner of the station, I would think about the country girl who
first came up with the idea, an absurd idea, although certain respected doctors
say a daily dose of semen can cure anemia," said Ingeborg. "But I
would think about that country girl, that desperate girl who arrived at the
same idea by the process of deduction. I imagined her awestruck in the silent
city contemplating the ruins of everything and saying to herself that this was
how she had always dreamed the city would look. I imagined her as industrious,
with a smile on her face, helping anyone who asked, and curious, too, walking
the streets and squares and reconstructing the outline of the city where she
had secretly always wanted to live. Some nights, too, I imagined her dead, of
any disease, a disease that led not to a long, drawn-out death or to a death
that was too sudden but to a reasonably prolonged death, one that gave her time
to stop sucking dicks and retreat into her own chrysalis, her own
sorrows."

"But
what makes you think one girl came up with the idea, and not a few at
once?" Reiter asked her. "What makes you think a girl came up with it
at all, and a country girl at that? Couldn't it have been some fast-talker,
wanting to get sucked off for free?"

One morning Reiter and Ingeborg
made love. The girl was feverish and her legs, under her nightdress, seemed to
Reiter the most beautiful legs he had seen in his life. Ingeborg had just
turned twenty and Reiter was twenty-six. From then on they began to fuck every
day. Reiter liked to do it sitting by the window with Ingeborg straddling him,
making love as they looked into each other's eyes or out at the ruins of
Cologne. Ingeborg liked to do it in bed, where she cried and writhed and came
six or seven times, with her legs on Reiter's bony shoulders, calling him my
darling, my love, my prince, my sweetheart, words that embarrassed Reiter,
because he found them precious and in those days he had declared war on
preciousness and sentimentality and softness and anything
overembellished
or contrived or saccharine, but he didn't object, since the despair he glimpsed
in Ingeborg's eyes, never entirely dispelled even by pleasure, paralyzed him as
if he, Reiter, were a mouse caught in a trap.

Of course, they often laughed, though not always at the same
things. Reiter, for example, was highly amused when their Brandenburger
neighbor fell through the gap in the stairs. Ingeborg said the Brandenburger
was a nice person, always with a kind word on his lips, and anyway she couldn't
forget the flowers he had given her. Reiter warned her that nice people weren't
to be trusted. Most of them, he said, were war criminals who deserved to be
strung up in the main square, an image that gave Ingeborg the shivers. How
could a person who bought a flower every day to wear in his buttonhole be a war
criminal?

Ingeborg, meanwhile, was amused by more abstract things and
situations. Sometimes she laughed at the patterns traced by the damp on the
garret walls. On the plaster or stucco she saw long lines of trucks emerging
from a kind of tunnel, which for no reason she called the time tunnel. Other
times she laughed at the cockroaches that occasionally ventured into the attic.
Or at the birds that watched
Cologne
perched in the blackened coffers of the tallest buildings. Sometimes she even
laughed at her own disease, a nameless disease (its namelessness gave her real
amusement), which had been vaguely diagnosed by the two doctors she'd seen—one
of them a patron of the bar where Reiter worked and the other an old man with
white hair and a white beard and a booming, theatrical voice whom Reiter paid
with bottles of whiskey, one per visit, and who was probably, according to
Reiter, a war criminal— as something halfway between a nervous complaint and a
pulmonary ailment.

In any case, they spent many hours together, sometimes talking
about the most random things, or sometimes with Reiter at the table writing his
first novel in a notebook with a cane-colored cover and Ingeborg lying in bed,
reading. It was Reiter who usually did the housecleaning and shopping, and
Ingeborg cooked, which was something she was quite good at. Their after-supper
conversations were strange and on occasion turned into long monologues or
soliloquies or confessions.

They talked about
books, about poetry (Ingeborg asked Reiter why he didn't write poetry and he
answered that all poetry, of any style, was contained or could be contained in
fiction), about sex (they had made love in every possible way, or so they
believed, and they theorized about new ways but came up only with death), and
death. When the old crone made her appearance, they had usually finished eating
and the conversation was languishing, as Reiter, drawing himself up like a
great Prussian lord, lit a cigarette, and Ingeborg peeled an apple with a
short-bladed, wooden-handled knife.

Then,
too: their voices dropped nearly to a whisper. Once Ingeborg asked whether he
had ever killed anyone. After thinking about it for a moment, Reiter answered
that he had. For a few seconds, which stretched on a bit too long, Ingeborg
stared at him: his fleshless lips, the smoke that rose along his prominent
cheekbones, his blue eyes, his blond, rather dirty hair, perhaps in need of a
cut, his country-boy ears, his nose, which, in contrast to his ears, was noble
and jutting, his forehead, across which a spider seemed to crawl. A few seconds
earlier she might have been able to believe he had killed someone, some
nameless person, during the war, but after looking at him she was sure he meant
something else. She asked who he had killed.

"A
German," said Reiter.

In
Ingeborg's restless mind, always prone to wild imaginings, the victim could
only be Hugo Halder, the former tenant of her house in
Berlin
. When she asked Reiter, he laughed.
No, no. Hugo Halder was his friend. Then they were quiet for a long time and
the remains of their supper seemed to congeal on the table. Finally Ingeborg
asked if he was sorry and Reiter made a gesture with his hand that could have
meant anything. Then he said: