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Bubis
smiled.

"Benito
Juarez," he muttered, still smiling. "So it's Benito Juarez, is
it?" he asked in a slightly louder voice.

Archimboldi nodded.

"I
thought you were going to tell me it was in honor of Saint Benedict."

"I've never
heard of a saint by that name," said Archimboldi.

"Well,
I know of three," said Bubis. "Saint Benedict of Aniane, who reformed
the order of Benedictines in the ninth century. Saint Benedict of Nursia, who
in the sixth century founded the order that bears his name and was known as the
'Father of Europe,' a dangerous title, wouldn't you say? And Saint Benedict the
Moor, who was black, of the Negro race, I mean, and who lived and died in
Sicily
in the sixteenth
century and was a Franciscan monk. Which of the three do you prefer?"

"Benito
Juarez," said Archimboldi.

"And
that last name, Archimboldi, you can't expect me to believe everyone in your
family is called that?"

"That's
what I'm called," said Archimboldi, who was about to abandon this
bad-tempered little man midsentence and walk out without saying goodbye.

"No
one is called that," Bubis replied gloomily. "I suppose in this case
it's after Giuseppe Arcimboldo. And where on Earth does the von come in? Benno
isn't satisfied with being Benno Archimboldi? Benno wants to make it plain he's
German? What part of
Germany
are you from?"

"I'm
Prussian," said Archimboldi as he stood up, ready to go.

"Wait
a moment," protested Bubis, "before you leave for your hotel I want
you to see my wife."

"I'm
not going to any hotel," said Archimboldi, "I'm going back to
Cologne
. Please let me
have my manuscript."

Bubis smiled again.

"There'll
be time for that later," he said.

Then he rang a bell and before the door opened he asked for the
last time:

"So
you really won't tell me your name?"

"Benno
von
Archimboldi," said Archimboldi, looking him in the eye. Bubis
spread his hands apart and brought them together, as if he were clapping, but
without making a sound, and then his secretary poked her head in the door.

"Take
the gentleman to Mrs. Bubis's office," he said.

Archimboldi glanced at the secretary, a blond girl with her hair
in curls, and when he looked back at Bubis the latter was already immersed in a
manuscript. He followed the secretary. Mrs. Bubis's office was at the end of a
long hallway. The secretary knocked and then, without waiting for a response,
opened the door and said: Anna, Mr. Archimboldi is here. A voice ordered him to
come in. The secretary grabbed him by the arm and pushed him in. Then, with a
smile, she left. Mrs. Anna Bubis was sitting behind a desk that was nearly
empty (especially in contrast to Mr. Bubis's), on which there sat just an ashtray,
a pack of English cigarettes, a gold lighter, and a book in French.
Archimboldi, despite the years that had gone by, recognized her immediately. It
was the Baroness Von Zumpe. And yet he just stood there, determined at least
for the moment to say nothing. The baroness took off her glasses, which she
hadn't worn before, at least as far as Archimboldi remembered, and contemplated
him with a faraway look, as if it were an effort for her to tear herself away
from what she was reading or thinking, or perhaps that was her usual
expression.

"Benno von
Archimboldi?" she asked.

Archimboldi nodded. For a few seconds the baroness said
nothing and only studied his face.

"I'm tired," she said. "Would you like to step out
for a walk, perhaps for a cup of coffee?"

"All
right," said Archimboldi.

As they descended the building's dark stairs, the baroness said
that she had recognized him and was sure that he had recognized her too.

"Instantly,
Baroness," said Archimboldi.

"But it's been a long time," said the Baroness Von
Zumpe, "and I've changed."

"Not
physically, Baroness," said Archimboldi behind her.

"And
yet your name is unfamiliar," said the baroness. "You were the son of
one of our maids, that much I do remember, your mother worked in the house in
the woods, but your name is unfamiliar."

Archimboldi
thought it was amusing the way the baroness referred to her old country estate.
House in the woods
sounded like a doll's house, a cabin, a hut, a place
that existed on the edge of time and remained fixed in a willed and imaginary
childhood, comfortable and unspoiled.

"My
name is Benno von Archimboldi now, Baroness," said Archimboldi.

"Well,"
said the baroness, "you've chosen a very elegant name. Rather jarring, but
with a certain elegance, I'm sure."

Some
of the streets of Hamburg, Archimboldi could see as they walked, were in a
worse state than the most devastated streets of Cologne, although in Hamburg he
had the impression that the reconstruction efforts were more in earnest. As
they walked, the baroness as jauntily as a schoolgirl playing truant, and
Archimboldi with his bag over his shoulder, they told each other some of the
things that had happened since their last meeting in the Carpathians. Without
going into detail, Archimboldi told her about the war, about Crimea, about the
Kuban and the great rivers of the
Soviet Union
,
about the winters and the months he spent unable to speak, and somehow,
obliquely, he conjured up Ansky, though he never mentioned his name.

The
baroness, meanwhile, as if to counterbalance Archimboldi's forced travels, told
him about her own journeys, all planned and desired and therefore happy, exotic
trips to Bulgaria and Turkey and Montenegro and receptions at the German
embassies of Italy, Spain, and Portugal, and she confessed that sometimes she
tried to repent of the good times she'd had, but no matter how strongly she
rejected her hedonistic behavior on an intellectual or perhaps more accurately
a moral level, the truth was that when she thought back on those days she still
felt a shiver of pleasure.

"Do you
understand? Can you understand me?" she asked as they had cappuccino and
cakes at a coffee shop like something out of a fairy tale, next to a big window
with views of the river and rolling green hills. Then Archimboldi, rather than
saying whether he understood her or not, asked if she knew what had happened to
Entrescu, the Romanian general. I have no idea, said the baroness.

"I do,"
said Archimboldi, "and if you want, I can tell you."

"My
guess is it won't be anything good," said the baroness. "Am I
right?"

"I don't know," admitted Archimboldi, "depending on
how you look at it, it's either very bad or not so bad."

"So you saw him, did you?" murmured the baroness, gazing
out at the river where two ships were passing just then, one on the way to the
sea, the other heading inland.

"Yes,
I saw him," said Archimboldi.

"Then don't tell me yet," said the baroness,
"there'll be time enough later."

One of the waiters at the coffee shop called them a taxi. The
baroness gave the driver the name of a hotel. At the front desk there was a
reservation in the name of Benno von Archimboldi. The two of them followed the
porter to a single room. With surprise, Archimboldi discovered a radio on one
of the bureaus.

"Unpack your bag," said the baroness, "and freshen
up a little, tonight we dine with my husband."

As Archimboldi put away a pair of socks, a shirt, and a pair of
under-shorts, the baroness set about finding a jazz station on the radio.
Archimboldi went into the bathroom and shaved and splashed water on his hair
and then combed it. When he came out the lights were off, except for the lamp
on the little night table, and the baroness ordered him to take off his clothes
and get in bed. From there, with the covers pulled up to his chin and feeling
pleasantly tired, he watched the baroness, standing, dressed only in a pair of
black underpants, turn the dial until she found a classical station.

In
all, he spent three days in
Hamburg
.
Twice he dined with Mr. Bubis. The first time he talked about himself and the
second time he met some of the famous editor's friends and hardly opened his
mouth, for fear of saying something foolish. In Mr. Bubis's inner circle, at
least in
Hamburg
,
there were no writers. A banker, a ruined nobleman, a painter who now only
wrote monographs on seventeenth-century painters, and a translator from the
French, all well versed in cultural matters, all intelligent, but no writers.

Even so, he hardly
opened his mouth.

Mr.
Bubis's attitude toward him had changed considerably, which Archimboldi
attributed to the good offices of the baroness, to whom he had finally told his
real name. He told it to her in bed, as they made love, and the baroness didn't
need to ask him to repeat it. Her attitude, meanwhile, when she demanded he
tell her what had happened to General Entrescu, was strange and in a way
illuminating. After he told her that the Romanian had died at the hands of his
own soldiers in retreat, who beat him and then crucified him, the only thing
the baroness chose to ask, as if dying crucified was an everyday occurrence
during the war, was whether the body he'd seen on the cross was naked or
dressed in uniform. Archimboldi's answer was that to all intents and purposes
the body was naked, but scraps of uniform still clung to it, enough so that the
Russians who were close on their heels would have known when they reached the
spot that the gift the Romanian soldiers had left behind was a general. But he
was also naked enough so that the Russians could confirm with their own eyes
the colossal size of Romanian members, though General Entrescu's was definitely
a misleading specimen, said Archimboldi, because he had seen some Romanian
soldiers naked and their attributes were in no way different from, say, the
German average, whereas General Entrescu's penis, flaccid and bruised as might
be expected of a man who'd been beaten and then crucified, was double or triple
the size of a normal cock, whether Romanian or German, or, to give a random
example, French.

Having
said this, Archimboldi fell silent, and the baroness remarked that such a death
would not have displeased the bold general. And she added that Entrescu,
despite the successes attributed to him on the battlefield, was always a
disaster as a tactician and strategist. As a lover, however, he was the best
she'd ever had.

"Not
because of the size of his cock," the baroness explained, to clear up any
misunderstandings that Archimboldi, next to her in bed, might entertain,
"but because of a kind of shape-shifting quality: he was cleverer than a
crow when he talked and in bed he turned into a devil ray."

To
which Archimboldi replied that from the little he'd been able to observe during
Entrescu's short stay with his entourage at the castle in the Carpathians, he
believed the crow was actually Entrescu's secretary, Popescu, an opinion that
was immediately rejected by the baroness, to whom Popescu was nothing but a
cockatoo, a cockatoo flitting after a lion. Except that the lion had no claws
or if he did he wasn't prepared to use them, nor did he have the fangs to rip
anyone apart, just a somewhat ridiculous sense of his own destiny, a destiny
and a notion of destiny that in a way echoed Byron's destiny and notion of
destiny, though Archimboldi, who happened to have read Byron by one of those
coincidences that arise from the use of public libraries, thought the poet was
in no way comparable, even as an echo, to the execrable General Entrescu,
adding that incidentally the notion of destiny wasn't something that could be
separated from the destiny of an individual (a wretched individual), but that
the two things were essentially the same: destiny, ungraspable until it became
inevitable, was each person's notion of his own destiny.

To which the baroness responded with a smile, saying it was clear
Archimboldi had never fucked Entrescu. Which prompted Archimboldi to confess
that it was true, he had never gone to bed with Entrescu, but he had in fact
been an eyewitness to one of the general's famous trysts.

"With me, I
suppose," said the baroness.

"You suppose
right," said Archimboldi.

"And where
were you?" asked the baroness.

"In a secret
chamber," said Archimboldi.

Then the baroness laughed so hard she couldn't stop and between
gasps she said she wasn't surprised he had decided to call himself Benno von
Archimboldi. Archimboldi didn't understand what she meant, but he accepted the
remark with good grace, laughing with her.

So
after three very instructive days, Archimboldi returned to Cologne on the night
train, with people sleeping even in the corridors, and soon he was back in his
attic, relaying to Ingeborg the excellent news from Hamburg, news that upon
being shared filled them with such joy that they began to sing and then dance,
never fearing that the floor would collapse beneath their feet. Afterward they
made love and Archimboldi described the publishing house; Mr. Bubis; Mrs.
Bubis; Uta, the copy editor, who could correct the grammar of Lessing, whom she
despised with Hanseatic fervor, but not of Lichtenberg, whom she loved; Anita,
the bookkeeper or head of publicity, who knew practically every writer in
Germany but liked only French literature; Martha, the secretary, who had a
literature degree and gave him some books from the publishing house in which he
had expressed an interest; Rainer Maria, the storeroom attendant, who, despite
his youth, had already been an expressionist poet, a symbolist, and a decadent.