. . . you have the psychological or subjective moment of the father problem. This affects all of society. . . . The absence of the father is a typical German problem. That is the reason for such agitation, why it has such a disquieting effect. —Gerhard Richter, Catalogue 2002, MoMA

After my mother’s death, I cleaned out my parents’ house in Maryland sold it, sold

their things too, put whatever was not sold into storage centers, here and there, a little bit

everywhere.

My father’s artwork was stored in the house and I treated it the same way, sent it to

a part-time dealer in California, and asked him to put it out on eBay. I thought it would be

enough to intrigue the public with some details. My father was German, a painter. He

came to America in 1937. He was an immigrant, fleeing an autocracy.

A friend intervened: was I mad? Selling it online was like throwing it away. I

retrieved my horde. I began to take stock. I showed some paintings to a few more friends.

Each had a hand in sorting through the snips and bits of the past, turning them into

something that could be shown, a collection with a history, with an inventory, with

something that took it out of bulk and confusion, into the light of things that had a sense

and were freighted with quality and purpose.

Finally, to interest people in my father’s work, I had an attractive pamphlet made. A

nude was reproduced on the cover of the little book and it spoke for the man’s graphic

talent, for the way Max Beckmann must have influenced him, spoke to his youth, to his

reckless devotion to the emotion of a chalk stroke and the tension a line could bring to

paper—the way a stroke of lightning brings tension to the sky. Inside the pamphlet other

works impressed with the way he worked his charcoal and his brushes to capture the sway

of light and the dance of the dark. In one painting dated 1928 the sunshine reflects off the

water, bounces off it like a high note in a cadenza, and then off a shipside, a dock, calling

attention to the shadow shapes and patches of brilliance which never leave the Schleswig-

Holstein landscape alone. In another watercolor, a field of poppies is examined from below,

the heads of the poppies floating over the paper like balloons, like hallucinations, like red

clouds, full of hope and promise.

His brush was his guide. Wherever he found himself, he used it to pull back the

light as though it were dust that he could brush away to uncover something even lighter—

in the twenties—or something even darker, afterwards. There was an opulence to the early

work, a swollen expectation in the trees and the church steeples. But as time went on you

could see it grow tighter, darker, turning inward. By 1932 the structure of each work stood

out painfully, as though to resist the coming storm. A landscape with a bridge and the date

1933 was dark and twisted, village streets had tightened, roofs pitched forward toward the

coming folly. Turn the paintings upside down, and one discovered a composition so sure,

they worked just as well. Maybe they worked better. Maybe the artist was turned upside

down too while the storm left nothing behind, terrifying his mother, expelling his brother

(whose wife was Jewish) leaving my father to wander, a solitary man.

*

A time passed. I took steps. I live in Paris and met an art critic from Le Monde. He

looked at scans and assured me, over and over again. Yes, the work had “something.” I had

complete records made, and began to worry about protecting it all, about conservation and

storage. A few pieces even disappeared. Had they been stolen? This added to the aura of my

secret collection. I went to Kiel, north of Hamburg, in Schleswig-Holstein, where I knew

my father had been to school. At the Faculty of Fine Arts, they told me there had been no

studio courses in the twenties: but the work looked good—solid, strong and typical for the

period. Heinz Emil Salloch must have been at the Muthesiushochschule, an art and

architecture school, just down the hill.

As it turned out, school records from the studio courses at the Muthesiushochschule

had been systematically destroyed by the Nazis in ’33 (the school was considered very left-

wing) and whatever else was left had been obliterated by allied bombing in ’44. A long

investigative process began. Iris Mielke, a recent graduate of the design department,

discovered places my father had lived, Albertstrasse 23, Adolphstrasse 15. It was easy to

imagine the old man as a young man, imagine him in Kiel, a bowl of gruel, a slice of Sültze

for breakfast, his collar up, portfolio under his arm, going down to the docks to paint. But

had he really attended master classes at the Hochschule? The work always settled the issue.

If he lived in Kiel, if he did these paintings, he had been to the Hochschule.

Together we went to the Ostholsteinmuseum. Iris’s proposal to build flexible

exhibition architecture for the museum had won the Muthesiushochschule first prize the

year before. She and the director of the museum, Dr. Klaus- Dieter Hahn, were on good

terms. Dr. Hahn looked at the book of scans, and then at me:

“Yes, I agree, Es hat etwas Besonderes—there’s something special here. I can give you

a show in two years.”

The work had been hidden in sea chests for seventy years. Rarely had anyone even

bothered to unwrap the drawings, the fragile pastels. Now it was all about to become

visible. It would all stand on its own, hang in the light.

*

Chinatown, Canal Street, Manhattan, was the first stop on the return trip for Heinz

Emil Salloch’s work. I had taken the paintings out of storage, rewrapped them carefully,

each in its transparent plastic folder. Now I needed a suitcase. I went from shop to shop

until I found a gray Samsonite monster equipped with wheels. It could have been a

medium-sized refrigerator. I didn’t like it. But I didn’t have a choice. Empty, the

Samonsite made an enormous racket. Distinguished Chinese gentlemen turned to watch

me walk by, small Chinese women lowered their eyes in embarrassment. Children ran

around me, beating on the suitcase as they passed as if it were a drum.

When I filled the gray elephant with paintings and drawings, the noise abated,

perhaps out of deference to the contents. Still it was hard to negotiate in SoHo where I was

living, holding the elevator door open while I hauled the suitcase forward, hoisting it up

into the back of the taxicab. How long was the road and what would I find at the end? I

didn’t know. Each little link on the chain would provide the impetus for the next little link,

and each would find its own place in the expanding puzzle. I went through customs and

immigration, along moving sidewalks, up and down escalators, into and out of more taxis.

There are no photographs. There is no diary. The man himself was silent. Only a

logbook accounts for wanderings and production. That he took himself seriously as a

painter is not in doubt: every scrap of paper was annotated. Medium: place: size: price. In his

neat hand we go from Berlin to Kiel to Lubeck to Winterthur to Strassfingen to the

Sudetenland. We go from 1928 to 1937. The only other personal item he left behind from

that period before the war is a sketchbook called “Summer on Long Island.” It is a book in

the form of a letter, which accompanies a series of twelve modest watercolors, each with an

accompanying note, the whole addressed to his mother whom he left behind in Berlin in

1938. For the book still to be in his hands, it must have been very important for both of

them. He had to send it. She had to receive it, keep it safely in Berlin, throughout the war,

and throughout the Russian occupation, words that are worth repeating: safely in Berlin,

throughout the war, and throughout the Russian occupation. Then she had to bring it with

her to America.

“For my little Kate, Christmas 1938,” Heinz Emil Salloch wrote on the title page.

An introduction followed: “This is not artwork, it is not even original sketches, since it was

this fall that I copied them from watercolors I had done before. But for you I think it is a

good reminder of the many other beautiful summers we shared together when we were

happy.”

“Now imagine I am still sitting by your side and telling you about the pictures. But

not much: because a ‘painter’ should paint. . . .” Den Maler soll malen.

*

Close to the main train station, the hotel room in Hamburg was stark. There were

no paintings on the wall, there was a yellow nylon bedspread, pink, threadbare towels hung

limply off the racks in the bathroom. I was tired. Opposite, neon lights blinked, and down

on the boulevard traffic was heavy. On the far sidewalk men and women hurried to catch

the train for the Hamburg suburbs. Closer by, off to the left, some prostitutes plied their

trade. They wore boots and short skirts, their knees were red, scuffed, older than the bodies

they carried forward. They were young women, blond, pale, and white—probably from the

East. I wondered what color Heinz Emil Salloch was for his German compatriots when he

boarded the Luisenberg in Hamburg and sailed west in 1937? For most of them probably

no color at all, invisible, a phantom already.

Professor David Galloway, critic and curator and good friend, had encouraged me

with this project from the outset. Chance had brought us together in Hamburg and now

he had finished going through the portfolio. He was impressed. He waited to gather his

thoughts, announced that he would definitely write something. He would speak of the

paintings, but he wanted to do more, he wanted to create something like a log of the

journey, his journey, our journey, he said, more precisely. Perhaps everybody’s journey, he

added, this time more obscurely. After all, hadn’t he been there from the beginning? Did I

remember the café in Forcalquier, where we had first met, how hard it was to get the

waiter’s attention, his remark when he had been through the slides: “This deserves a

reputation.” Did I remember? Yes, very well. From coffee we had gone to wine, from wine

into the evening. The road home was long. I could remember almost driving into a ditch in

the last two kilometers. I felt extraordinarily tired.

The express trains that run between cities in Germany are called the Inter City

Express, their acronym, ICE. The trains slip into the stations on time, breathe for a minute

or two, and slip out again. Once again the station is empty, a cavernous greenhouse fit for

monkeys and palm trees. But there were only Turkish sausage vendors plying their trade

under improbable orange umbrellas, grilling bratwurst for famished travelers.

I waited with my suitcase at my feet until the express train to Berlin pulled in. Track

7, 13:42 PM. I boarded only to discover that most of the seats were reserved. Couples sat

with their heads lying on each other’s shoulders, exhausted from stages of a journey that

must have brought them from Rumania, to judge from the headscarf she was wearing and

his shattered rubber running shoes. A once distinguished businessman and his wife did

everything they could not to appear distraught because they had failed to reserve a place

and all the seats side by side in this compartment were taken. Finally I found a place myself

and left the mammoth valise in the aisle. I wanted to apologize, to explain why this beast

was necessary to me, to account for myself, even imagined myself as a character in one of

those novels of formation and apprenticeship that stud nineteenth-century German

literature. My suitcase was clearly an irritation, my German was not up to my ambitions;

instead I just slipped lower in my seat.

The train began to move out of the station and, very quickly, into the countryside. I

thought of how Heinz Emil Salloch would have traveled in his time: mostly on foot. All he

ever really wanted to do was get in close to some structure, or sit cross-legged for a while,

up high, on a hilltop with a view over some village. I stared out the window. Already we

were traveling at 250 kilometers per hour through flatland, and then, between small garden

plots that lined the intercity right of way.

In German the word for such garden plots is Lauben. Heinz Emil Salloch painted

them in winter. Through the snow, the geometrical patterns of the fences around the

Lauben in his watercolors seemed to be headed for the vanishing point, like people fleeing.

If I shut my eyes, I believed I could see the dates on the two pieces of the collected works

that came to mind, a watercolor of such a garden plot on a cold December afternoon, and

its accompanying small drawing: l933. When I opened my eyes, ICE and I were tearing

through the outskirts of a vast industrial park. Old cranes, rusting warehouses, and

abandoned cars made it look like installation art. If I shut my eyes again, I knew I could

come up with several paintings that looked like the scene outside. Trucks passed, a bridge

hovered in the distance. It looked like it might rain. What hope there was in my expedition

had nothing to do with nostalgia. There is no hope in nostalgia.

I fell asleep. My foot dangled into the corridor. A woman in a hat with a pink bell-

top and a synthetic pink fur coat woke me up and complained about my foot to her

traveling companion. She said the presence of my foot in the corridor was

“incomprehensible.” What would she have said had she known the gray mammoth was also

mine? My view of things darkened, as though the train had passed from the landscapes

painted by my father in 1929 into a new era. 1933. What William Faulkner said about the

American South seemed to apply here: “The past isn’t dead. It isn’t even past.”

8I dozed again and soon enough found myself in Berlin’s Ostbahnhof. I was staying

with friends in Friedrichshain, in what used to be the eastern sector of the city. The taxi

driver told me it was a short ride. We passed sections of the old legendary Berlin wall. They

were covered with paintings and graffiti. It was hard to tell the difference. On second

thought it was easy: painting obliterated the surface with color and meaning. Graffiti

obliterated color and meaning with an anger that created its own wall. If Heinz Emil

Salloch had gone on living in Germany, was that what he would have painted, walls

becoming walls? Walls of marching men, of squadrons in black shirts? Did he think light

anywhere else might still be like the light that had so inspired him, the soft glow of the

Schleswig-Holstein countryside in the morning? Was he disappointed and disoriented when

he came to America? Was that why he stopped painting oils? Why did he leave the oils in

Germany? Maybe they were simply too heavy to carry with the other art, all of it works on

paper. Maybe he sold them for 5 DM and they are still hanging on some walls around

Hamburg and Kiel, good pieces by an unknown maler. What meaning his destiny gave to

the word “missed,” as in wide of the mark, propelled forever into the indifferent cosmos.

Could he imagine he might even be a father one day?

He wasn’t Jewish. He didn’t have to go. Why did he leave, I was often asked?

He was unhappy: the Nazis didn’t like him. He got in trouble. . . . What was he? . . .

A loner, a painter, a hard worker. A radical. . . . Are you doing this for him? . . . No, I am

doing it for myself. . . . What does it bring you? . . . I will tell you when I have finished.

When I have gotten them to the museum. When I have pulled this Samsonite mammoth

on wheels across the lawn of the castle in Eutin and opened it for Dr. H. the museum

9director who looked at the scans and said, “Yes, they have something, I can give you two

months for a show in three years.”

*

Before my mother died I had published two stories about my father, “Nightrise”

and “Romantic Landscape.” Each story represented my effort to come to grips with

something that was haunting me about this man who, in spite of a lifetime together, I felt I

barely knew, Heinz Emil Salloch, born December 31, 1907.

In “Nightrise,” my father’s slow descent into extreme ill health was described in

minute detail. A man who had always been on time became a man outside of time. A man

who hiked across Germany and who, according to his brother, once thought of killing

Hitler became an invalid in a bed in the dining room. A man who was beyond reach

became a man anyone could touch—but long after such a touch might have made a

difference, when that touch was nothing but the expression of wishful thinking, a way of

bringing a story to an end, of stepping out of a narrative so that someone else’s could

begin.

Perhaps jealousy was what explained his last words to me: he was jealous of whatever

was going to happen next. I would know, he wouldn’t, and he wanted to disrupt the

pleasure of that privilege: lowering his newspaper, squinting outside through his huge

eyeglasses, he reached for the glass of water by his bedside and without turning around

remarked, not incidentally, “I don’t know who you are.” Perhaps he didn’t really mean it.

Or perhaps he did mean it, and felt his son looking for the answer to that question himself.

Or perhaps he didn’t know who he was himself anymore, and the next assertion merely

10followed logically. So we too entered the German problem, father and son, absent to each

other.

In the second story, “Romantic Landscape,” questions about my father’s painting

took precedence over more personal concerns. The story related a visit I had made to my

father late in his life. He was ill, sitting in a wheelchair on the veranda of a veterans’

hospital. He spoke little and remained noncommittal when asked about his work. Why had

he stopped painting? What had happened to the youthful ardor, the sure hand, the

powerful compositions?

There was no future to those questions, there was no future to this man. Viel Erfolg,

“much success,” was all the old man said to me from his hospital bed, and I was left to

make up the rest, to dream of a scene in which little children had gathered around Heinz

Emil Salloch and watched him paint the bridge at Hohenfriedberg, as peasants in the field

might have stopped their labors to watch van Gogh’s hands craft haystacks. Resigned

fantasy rather than wishful thinking. Virginia, an old friend of mine, said: forget the stuff

about reconciliation, about redemption. Forget about meaning washing up out of the twist

in a bridge, out of charcoal lines that dissolve at the horizon like Heinz Emil Salloch must

have watched his dreams dissolve even as he painted. How long was I going to go on

romancing that particular ghost, Virginia wanted to know?

The night after I arrived in Berlin, I had too much to drink in the company of a

German artist whom I shall call Graciella Y. We had met in Paris. We had agreed to see

each other again in Berlin. We drank half a liter of white German burgundy, then another.

She talked about her tuberculosis as a child; I of my own good health. We laughed: the

11tuberculosis had been a better mother of invention than good health. Or in any case, good

health had not been enough to vanquish the army of ghosts. Nor had a good education.

Sometimes it came to me, I told Graciella Y. Imagine what a triumph it must have been for

my parents, first-generation German immigrants, to have their son get into Harvard.

Sometimes it also came to me how little difference it had made to me. Robert

Oppenheimer had spent his undergraduate years milking Widener Library dry. It seemed to

me I had spent those years just trying to find something I could hold onto, a woman, a

meaning, a novel or two, a learned text. There was Thucydides, there was Peter Handke—

anything that would prevent me from falling back into the whispers of the ghosts. Days, it

was all right. What had I proved incapable of learning from my parents? They worked hard;

they never watched television. They almost never spoke German.

Said Graciella Y: “They didn’t have to speak German. They were in exile. Theirs was

a universal tongue.”

*

Before 1933, after 1933. These are the divisions in Heinz Emil Salloch’s German

work. Before 1933, landscapes dominate. They are filled with wind and breezes, zephyrs

and the fluttering sounds of leaves in birch trees. Colors float across the paper, human

figures wash laundry, walk side by side, a smile is never far, water floats up from canals,

drifts lazily through the curves of rivers and laps at the bottom of the composition. After

1933 we hear the wheels of purposeful activity on city streets, see the rush of smoke

billowing out of chimneys, turn around at the rattle of trucks on steel bridges. The early

landscapes are feminine, shapes are round; the stronger, darker urban works erect what

12Auden once called “the bare plan of a tree” in counterpoise to the naked purpose of a

bridge. A time passes. Nature and mankind become one, a tangle of tortured ambition. In

one painting, red flags whip across gray facades promising revolution while a sentimental

creature in the foreground hunches in despair, waiting for the worst that he knows is still to

come.

Before I brought the paintings back to Germany, I wrote a third story about my

father, “The Shadowman and the Light.” It was less sentimental than the first two. It

sought to explain what it had been like to be the child of people who lived their domestic

lives in dark places, in pine-paneled living rooms, who drank dark rum, who played chess

for hours without saying a word, who had dark secrets, who hardly ever spoke their own

language.

It was not a story of laughter and forgetting, but only of forgetting. I fell asleep no

longer remembering what I still thought I could discover. Had this solitary painter really

dreamed of killing Hitler? Had Hitler been aggressed, Heinz Emil Salloch would have been

dead fifteen minutes later. Why did he want to commit suicide? Why didn’t they talk

German at home?

Through mutual friends, Margarethe von Trotta, the German movie director heard

about my story. She asked that I forward it to her. I discovered I was not the only one with

the preoccupations I had considered strictly personal before then.

“Dear Roger,” von Trotta wrote, “I read your text or, as you say, your short story.

Yes, it is a story, but I have the feeling it could go on and on, and that you have so many

more things to describe about the darkness of your youth and your father’s silence and so

13many more to discover about yourself. Did you ask yourself why you are still today so

linked to him? It seems to me that the reason can’t be only the exhibition of his paintings.

“As I told you my father was also a painter, he was well considered during the Nazi

period and wasn’t forced to emigrate, but his paintings also became darker and darker at

the end of his life. Did he finally understand that something went wrong in German history

and in his own life? I never could ask him because he died when I was ten years old. I

would have so many questions for him. So my darkness is a total one.”

*

From Berlin I went to Halle to meet Bettina G., actually Frau Dr. Assistant

Professor of Art History at the Halle School of Architecture and Design and an expert on

Ludwig Kirchner. She had agreed to write a text for the catalogue and we finally got

together at the Rotes Ross Hotel around nine in the evening.

“Shall we just ask for room service, have some wine? And a bite to eat?”

How long I sat in that hotel room while Bettina G. looked at the paintings, I don’t

know. Time had stopped in Halle anyway. It was in the heartless heartland of the former

East Germany, and the pedestrian walkways and new streetlamps didn’t do much to make

the place feel any warmer than it had probably been in the last fifty years. I drank my wine.

I was comfortable. I was in generous company—was it in her eyes as she looked at my

father’s work, was it in her manner? I could feel Bettina’s thinking happening, could watch

her ideas coalesce, and knew they would slowly fit and become an understanding.

I let my own thoughts wander. Rotes Ross means the red stallion, and that led me to

remember my great grandfather on my father’s side, an old Polish cavalry officer who, as

14legend had it, lost everything, home, holdings, title and lands in one wild night of vodka

and cards. He was last seen headed East, and never heard from again. There was a tendency

to go missing in the family. On horseback, I always liked to think.

Finally Bettina G. glanced away from the gouache she had on her knees. “Look at

this painting,” she said. “What do you see?” She waited patiently for my reply: I looked at

the painting again. How well I knew the work. Of course what I saw was the bridge, the

trees dissolving at the horizon, the rearranged walls of the barn, the solitude in the choices

Heinz Emil Salloch had made of what he wanted to paint. I studied the composition again.

Bettina’s question had focused my eye. Then I saw it distinctly. It was there in the lower

left hand corner of the piece. I pointed to it, the curious shorthand signature Heinz Emil

Salloch had developed, a light assertion of his identity—as though in counterpoise to the

swastika that must have been on everybody’s mind in those days, the prevailing

iconographic symbol of its time, obliterating meaning with the same twisted anger with

which it obliterated lives. His signature was firmly planted in the lower left-hand corner,

and with it the almost shocking, irrevocable date—1933.

“Exactly,” said Bettina, her eyes half closed, as though time were laying fingertips

on her eyelids, asking her to take a moment, to feel the weight of something that had no

weight but that could nevertheless crush you with its mass. “Yes,” she went on, “1933. It’s

a good painting but it is transcended by the power of the date Heinz Emil Salloch insisted

on inscribing with such precision, like someone bearing witness, no? On the one hand,

there is the year, time usurped by power, dictating its own truths. On the other, there is a

watercolor. Not just art, but living history too. That is how we have to approach this

15exhibition. We need texts on the walls of the museum. We must help people put things in a

context that makes it possible for them to see what Heinz Emil Salloch was going through.

You know, if his later work resembles Kirchner’s mountain landscapes, it is not an accident.

Kirchner went to Switzerland but went mad anyway. Perhaps it was good for Salloch that

he went to the States.”

Room service knocked: they had brought us club sandwiches and a carafe of red

wine. The carafe might have been modeled from the body of a swan, the neck was that

long. “How elegant,” said Bettina G. The elegance was certainly incongruous, there in the

middle of that dark night in that dark city. Outside, through the window, the walkway

glistened. The ICE train would take me back to Berlin in the morning. I needed a good

night’s sleep.

#5 The path to the beach: I particularly like this painting, my father wrote to his

mother, “Little Kate,”—first because I painted it on your birthday and second because there it

was that a young girl said something very nice and lovely to me, reminding me, for a year and

a half now “without children,” how young people have always trusted me. The next Sunday,

after the hurricane, there was nothing left, no fence, no telegraph pole, no path. Nothing but

emptiness and the swamp. Nur noch Wüste und Sumpf.

The notebook was made of ten folded sheets of yellowed craft paper. The paintings

and drawings all had separate numbers. Medium, date, place, and price. He wanted to

know where he had been. He wanted to know what he had done. The meticulous way in

which each entry was recorded had the aspect of ritual, gestures to ease the passage from

16Berlin to Lubeck, from Lubeck to the Westphalian plain. Or was it more than that: was he

already fending off the doubts and fears, worried about the transition from being at home

to becoming a homeless being, or from being a citizen to becoming an alien refugee, or

from being at one with the light to going to another end of the prism where there was no

telling how the shadows would fall.

On the outside cover of the notebook, a place and a street name were recorded: 67

Argonnenweg, Adlershof. It took my friend Dorothee R., an information specialist, a day

to discover that Argonnenweg had been renamed Steinmannstrasse by the East German

municipality. The Argonne had been a major World War I battle, a principle German

victory. Under Soviet tutelage, the East German regime had done its best to efface traces of

anything that might lead the population back to a reverence for fallen heroes. It wasn’t just

fathers who had disappeared. It was the idea of fathers.

We drove down along the Spree. On the far bank, old factories were being

converted into elegant lofts. Along the river, commerce still plied its trade, barges and

tugboats trundling up and down the quiet waters, though now sometimes forced to

navigate between pieces of contemporary sculpture. Yet as we passed under the

Jannowitzbrücke 2005, Heinz Emil Salloch’s brush would hardly have had much touching

up to do to bring “A 453, Jannowitzbrücke 1934, Medium, acquarelle, Datum 8/34,

Preis, 12 marks” up to date with the present landscape.

67 Steinmannstrasse, Adlershof: the house was still there, a small corner building, on

a street lined with trees. Two names on the doorbells, one German, one Vietnamese. Even

had it proved possible, walking around in rooms where Heinz Emil Salloch had woken up,

17made coffee, sharpened pencils, looked out at the little garden, put a blanket over his

shoulders, and sat down at a makeshift desk to do some more drawings, or to correct some

papers turned in by his elementary school pupils—that would have been trespassing on

something.

“Aren’t you touched?” Dorothée’s husband, Martin, asked me. I was silent. I just

stared at the little house, stared at it unflinchingly, conjuring with spirits. Mysteries coursed

through me but met a resilient pride: I wished there had been a second step, a studio with

huge windows in Berlin. A studio with huge windows in New York would not have been

bad either. I was a congeries of knots, some of which I knew were made of very German

fibers. As we drove away, I said something to that effect: “Touched, I am not sure: But das

hat sich gelohnt.” It was worth it. Martin remarked that since I had come to Berlin I had

begun to lard my speech with German expressions. Were we watching a native son, being

born? I considered all possibilities. It seemed unlikely, but what was likely, I could not

explain any better.

We drove back to Berlin proper in silence. I believe I must have disappointed my

hosts: they wanted exclamations of pleasure and pain. They wanted whole families to fall

into place. But of course, they were German. Painfully they had pieced together the

fragments of their own stories. My intimate little epic was child’s play compared to theirs.

Yet I felt inadequate anyway, not even up to the closing rounds of this minor endeavor

upon which I had embarked a few years back, felt out of sorts, felt perhaps the way Heinz

Emil Salloch must have felt when he turned his back on Argonnenstrasse 57. However

small and cold in the winter, and however small and very hot in the summer, the little

18house was nevertheless what he called home. I wondered what his suitcase was like when he

left: a portfolio, a backpack? Did the painter he was even have a suitcase when he turned his

back on his own country and began his trek into the annals of the missing?

I tried to take stock. I worked in Dorothea and Martin’s luminous apartment in

Berlin. I began to sort through my feelings about this German enterprise. I began to be

eager for it to be over, yet fretful too, about the reception I would get when I opened the

suitcase in Eutin and watched Dr. Hahn react to the real thing, fold back the papers,

examine the charcoal flourishes, the light passage of pastels over ink brushstrokes.

Did I think there was some way out of what Gerhard Richter evoked as the central

German problem, the absent father, some way out of those obscurities? Or did I think

there was a better way in?

Already it was Wednesday. I had an appointment in Eutin on Saturday at three in

the afternoon. I would take a train from Berlin in the morning, get to Kiel on Friday night.

On Saturday I would rent a car and drive the forty miles to the museum. Elegant and

affable, Dr. Hahn would come down to the reception desk. And then . . .

I drank coffee in the morning and wine at night. I walked a great deal. I spent some

time at a small coffee shop around the corner from where I was staying. One coffee shop

right next door was run by an engaging Turkish couple but I preferred Yuki’s tearoom

which was down the road, closer to the river. The décor was minimalist, the homemade

cakes were delicious and the coffee even better. Yuki stood behind her counter, behind her

glasses, a slight woman with a volume of John Milton’s Paradise Lost on the counter in

front of her. Why was she reading that? Because she felt it gave one a way into the business

19of dealing with one’s own conception of God, and then too because in Milton’s text Adam

and Eve were so human and, it seemed to her, might help one understand something about

the nature of love.

That night I had drinks with Graciella Y. again. I mentioned Yuki to her. Graciella

smiled knowingly. Her smile was like Yuki’s thoughtful expression when she mentioned the

force of Milton’s text: it seemed to set consideration of God aside, we could get to Him

later. God could wait. It was one of His qualities. Let us now praise famous men and

women, said Graciella, consciously echoing Agee and Evans praise the huddled, the

terrified, the exiled, the lonely, the angry whose anger would go unrequited, or just the

hopeful like Heinz Emil Salloch, one emigrant among so many, fleeing across the sea and

into the arms of the unknown.

#3 Evening on the sound

Once I stayed very late and alone on the beach, just went on walking until I got to this

small inlet. My painting finished, with a harmonica and just the stars to guide me, I returned

home. It was already night and I was very hungry. Love, your son.

Heinz Emil Salloch lived in Kiel from 1927 to 1930 and moved three times.

Adolfstrasse, Richtmanstrasse, and some other place that I could have found out about,

noted its name in my journal—but didn’t. I hadn’t even gone to 24 Adolfstrasse to try to

imagine what it had been like for him to walk up what I was sure was a cold-water garret

with a toilet down the hall, if that. This had never been conceived as a trip of fealty, the

accomplishment of some duty, a noble but sentimental completion of one of life’s

20obligatory stages. I distinctly remember opening the suitcase in my friends’ living room,

opening it again to make my point, and with theatrical emphasis telling them “This, and

these, these pieces of painted paper, that is all this whole expedition is about.” And I

distinctly remember my friend, Martin, saying, “Well, we will see about that.”

I went on seeing about it. I slept well in the hotel by the sea, and went for a long

walk in the morning. This was not Hamburg, nor was it Lubeck, on the other side of

Germany’s access to the Baltic: there was nothing picturesque about Kiel. The eighteenth

century, the nineteenth century were all gone, destroyed by the war. Buildings were either

makeshift or they were permanent glass towers of twentieth-century enterprise, of German

efficiency and drive. The port was in full swing. Travelers to Scandinavia waited patiently in

line to get their automobiles onto the huge ferries. Glass office buildings vibrated with

orders from all over the globe. And just below them, dives and cafés put out a purple neon

welcome to sailors and any other parties who might be interested in drink and smoke and

coarse jokes and female company. Cardamom and smoked fish and ground ginger and

engine oil and the intrigues of all the adventure novels I devoured when young hung in the

air. Emphatically this was a port. I turned back to the hotel. I wasn’t leaving. I was arriving.

I had a good lunch.

Only a big Mercedes was available for rent at Avis. It was dark blue except for the

thick leather of its seats, which was nearly black. The mammoth suitcase fit into the trunk

with room for the luggage of several fellow travelers. But there were none. No friendly

hand would lean across the front seat and open the door for me from the inside. Perhaps

no one else would have wanted to be around. Destiny was a big word: it could make even

21close friends uncomfortable. They had learned to stay away from it. They wanted its fruits,

not its growing pains, hoped I would figure it out on my own. Destiny was for the screen,

or eulogies, or unspoken regrets. Destiny was someone else’s problem, someone else’s

solution, preferably clearly legible, and in Technicolor, darkly etched against a glowing sky.

Driving through northern Schleswig-Holstein that early afternoon, it felt appropriate to be

alone.

Fields beckoned, the hills were gentle. Other drivers were careful. No one was in a

rush. Midday was luminous. Sunlight streamed through clouds to play havoc with my

awareness: when finally I concentrated again, something my wife once said came back to

me with insistence—we should always try to tell the truth “anyway.” Why? Because the

truth is always so much more interesting.

The only painting I have not brought with me to Eutin is a study of a nude woman,

dated 1933. It hangs in my living room. It is large, and the woman is seated with her face

turned away from the viewer. At the same time, she is exposed: her breasts are small, her

thighs ample, her feet only partly finished, her hand rests lightly on the bench that supports

her hips. The pose must have been easy to hold: she might have been there for hours, yet

the drawing suggests a tension: Is it in her hand that holds her body away from the painter?

Is it in the weight of a head that is almost out of proportion with the rest of the study?

After Kiel, Heinz Emil Salloch must have taken a few classes in life drawing. Did he know

this woman? Did he pay her to pose? Before the exhibition opens, I know I will add this

drawing to the collection. Its place is in Eutin.

*

22Eutin, three o’clock that afternoon. The village was quiet. Behind the brick walls

that lined the quaint streets the tips of garden trees shot toward the gray sky and seemed to

loft a canopy of prosperity over the surroundings. I had parked close to the castle that

shelters the Ostholstein museum but I was five minutes early. I wandered among the shops.

After the butcher shop with its huge choice of sausages, there was a lingerie shop, without

many choices at all. On a street corner, four men argued the virtues of the new Chancellor.

That she was a woman didn’t matter; that she was selling out to the Americans did. I

stopped wandering and walked toward the museum, my suitcase clattering behind me.

Dr. Hahn was expecting me and moments later we were upstairs in his office. Coffee

cups, paper cutters, posters for the next exhibition. He cleared the desk.

For the last time I hoisted the suitcase. I set it on a sturdy cabinet. I opened the

seals on my beast.

Outwardly I was calm. Inwardly my demeanor was otherwise. Three years ago my

heart had soared when I was told it would be possible to do an exhibition. Out of the

darkness into the light, out of the shadows into the bright attention of people who would

look at the work and see some of their own history. But what would Dr. Hahn say? Would

he be disappointed? Would he finger the paper speculatively, grimace a little, smile, shake

my hand, and say he looked forward to seeing me again, in September when the show

would open, wondering how he was going to squeeze this work in between his other

ongoing concerns?

But Dr. Hahn was thrilled. He made gruff sounds and squinted with pleasure. “Yes,

yes,” he said and repeated. He went back to the work. I had more coffee. At last he was

23finished. He nodded and smiled. In the fifty pieces I had had photographed for eventual

use in a catalogue, he said he had more than enough for a good show. But he wanted to

keep everything, examine it closely. He was fascinated by Heinz Emil Salloch’s repertoire,

saw that each item could be located in the logbook—and like the very good museum

director I knew him to be, began to compare, trying to locate the pieces that could be

traced back to Lubeck. There was a foundation in Lubeck that supported arts relating to

that city. Perhaps we could get some help.

It was not yet dark as I drove back toward Kiel. The road floated ahead of me. The

horizon seemed to want to lift the road higher, up toward that light. I knew there was a

phrase in German to describe this late afternoon phenomenon: Es wurde breiter, it is

becoming wider. I pulled off to the side of the road. I took some photographs of the fields

around me, black and white. I tried to imagine that the images would speak to my father,

tell him that es wurde breiter. In the optimism of that moment, I could see him nod.

During my travels, in my several hotel rooms, at night before I fell asleep, I would

read passages from a book I had brought with me: Robert Musil’s diaries, 1899–1942. I

had read his novel The Man without Qualities when I was in college, and I was feeling a bit

like his hero when I left New York with my Samsonite, not sure of any of my qualities

except determination.

Musil’s thinking was vast, his notations warm. He was full of curiosity for other

people’s curiosities and intrigues. “Work in progress” meant nothing to Musil. Everything

was work in progress.

24“In truth one does not function in this mode or that; the way things actually happen

is that, when one comes into contact with other people, they strike within one a quite

specific (or quite unspecific) note—and this then is the mode in which one functions.”

And:

“Intellectual progress has always simply consisted in correcting, at every stage, the

errors that one produced at the previous stage.”

And what about emotional progress?, I wondered, sitting in a restaurant in Kiel. I

was alone. I had my Musil, I had had my meeting with Dr. Hahn, which wasn’t even a

memory yet. I didn’t need anything else. I liked the restaurant: the food was good, the

lighting was soft, the building was one of the few in Kiel that had not been destroyed

during the war.

I paged through the volume, and watched as a strikingly glamorous woman came in

and sat to my left. Her skin looked as golden and as velvety as the white burgundy I was

drinking. When her friends came in and she departed for a large table on the other side of

the restaurant, I went back to reading, and saw that Musil had been watching me the whole

time.

“[W]hen one comes from a garden where the sun shines warmly one is assailed by

the fragrance of the strongest flowers. And women are a perfume that nests securely in our

nerves.”

Perhaps I looked up at the ceiling, just then, wondering about angels, longing for a

fresco. Maybe I was possessed by a new sense of purpose, or maybe I just ordered another

glass of white burgundy. I do know that I did suddenly glance under the table, because I

25had spent the past two weeks always looking back over my shoulder, checking to make sure

my suitcase was still safely in place, at my feet—my burden, my accomplishment, my friend,

my sea trunk.

But of course, it wasn’t.

There is a word to describe exactly what happened at that instant: Epiphany. It

means a moment of great and sudden revelation. Usually it has a religious connotation. If I

looked further in Musil, would I come across an accounting of how such an event would be

possible in secular terms? Or did I have to retreat to Proust, or to Wordsworth and Keats?

Perhaps an epiphany was exactly what had no explanation. It does not come with the rush

of memory, or show up on a video tape: it grows from buried longings, or from a stalk

where buds appear only to the eye that didn’t know it was paying attention. How grateful I

was suddenly to Dr. Hahn for having taken the whole suitcase unquestioningly. How

grateful I was to . . .

My finger was on a line in Musil when I froze at my table, or rather when some

force immobilized me there, as if in anticipation of a gift I could not believe I was about to

receive. You know where I was: Kiel. You know what I was doing: drinking. You know that

I was thinking whatever came to mind, whatever Musil thought might intrigue me, these

thoughts keeping me company as friends, keeping myself company, until suddenly the

thoughts themselves vanished and in their place was Heinz Emil Salloch in his chair. In his

rocking chair, in his wooden chair at the head of the table as I was growing up, in the chair

where he played his lute, in that last wheelchair, his back to me, his voice coming at me like

an echo: “I do not know who you are.” Only now he had turned around and he was

26looking at me. There was so much more going on in that face than I knew I would ever

understand. He shrugged. Why bother trying? He was right. It was my turn to speak.

“Well,” I told him, as though time had suddenly been suspended and everything

was again happening all at once, but this time for all the right reasons, as though with me

pulling, and he guiding, we had crossed the chipped and tarnished lacquer of the years

together, gotten the cart to the temple, and were standing there side by side, me,

exhausted, and he, never to be tired again, for after all, he was dead.

“Well, old man,” I said, “Now you certainly do know who I am. I am your son.”

27

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