All Souls' Day

by Cees Nooteboom

Genres: Literary Fiction

Synopsis

"An outstanding addition to an impressive oeuvre" Times Literary Supplement

"One of the greatest modern novelists" AS Byatt

"One of the most remarkable writers of our time" Alberto Manguel

Arthur Daane, a documentary film-maker and inveterate globetrotter, has lost his wife and child in a plane crash. In ALL SOULS' DAY we follow him as he wanders the streets of Berlin, a city uniquely shaped by history. Berlin provides the backdrop for Daane's reflections on life as he plans his latest project - a self-funded film that will show the world through Daane's eyes.

With a new circle of friends - a philosopher, a sculptor and a physicist - Arthur discusses everything from history to metaphysics, and the cumulative power of remembered images and philosophical musings on the meaning of our contemporary existence comes to permeate the atmosphere of the book. Then one cold, wintry day, Daane meets the young history student Elik Orange and his world is turned upside down. Whenever this mysterious woman beckons, Daane is compelled to follow.

ALL SOULS' DAY is, finally, an elegiac love story in which the personal histories of the characters are skilfully interwoven with the history of the countries in which they find themselves. It is also the poignant and affecting tale of a man coming to terms with his place in the world.

Translated from the Dutch by Susan Massotty

Release date: August 18, 2022

Publisher: Quercus Publishing

Print pages: 352

Sample

Arthur Daane was several steps away from Schoeler’s Bookshop before he realised that a word had stuck in his head and that he had already translated it into his own language. His brain had registered the German word for history – Geschichte – but quickly turned it into the Dutch geschiedenis. Somehow it sounded less ominous in Dutch. He wondered if that was because of the last three letters, the suffix nis, which also meant ‘niche’. A strange word. Short. Not mean and curt, as short words could be, but comforting. After all, a niche was a place to hide in, a place to find hidden things. Other languages didn’t have that. He began to walk faster, hoping to rid himself of the word that way, but his little ploy didn’t work, not here, not in this city, for every inch of Berlin was steeped in history. This word was going to be hard to forget. Lately all kinds of words had been getting stuck in his head. ‘Stuck’ was definitely the right word: once they were in there, they stayed put. He could also hear them – there seemed to be a voice attached to the words, even when he hadn’t said them aloud. Sometimes they even seemed to echo. The moment you plucked them out of the chain of sentences they belonged to, they would turn, if you were sensitive to that kind of thing, into something so strange, so terrifying that it would be better not to dwell on it too long, otherwise the world would slide out from under you. Too much free time, he thought. Yet he had arranged his life to achieve just that. He remembered reading about ‘the Javanese’ in an old textbook at school: the story of a Javanese man who, once he had earned a few pennies, would go and sit under a palm tree. In those long-gone colonial days, you could apparently live for quite a while on that amount, because the man didn’t go back to work until he had spent every last one. A disgraceful custom, according to the book, because you got ahead only by dint of hard work. Arthur Daane had seen the light. He made and produced his own TV documentaries, hired himself out as a cameraman if the subject seemed interesting enough, and every once in a while, if he needed the money or the mood struck, he would make an advert for a company owned by a friend of his. It was exciting as long as you didn’t do it too often, and at the end of a project he would take time off and lounge about for a while. He used to have a wife, and a child, but they’d died in a plane crash. All he had left now were photographs whose images seemed more remote every time he looked at them. Ten long years. One morning they simply took off for Málaga and never came back. A scene he had filmed, but never seen. The blonde woman with the child, a little boy, on her back. Schiphol Airport, the passport queue. Actually, the boy is too big to be carried on her back. He calls her name, she turns. Freeze, memory. There they stand, at a ninety-degree angle, for one whole second. She raises her hand, the boy waves, a few short waves. Someone else will film the arrival, which will vanish, along with the bungalow, the swimming pool, and the sea, into the hard, lumpy, blackened mass that swallowed up their lives. He walks over to the queue and hands her the small film camera. One last glimpse, then they disappear. He has closed himself off from the puzzle posed by the pictures. It’s too big, he can’t take it in. Some dreams are like that – wanting to scream and not being able to, hearing a sound you know you didn’t make, the sound of glass. He sold the house, gave away the clothes and toys, as if all their belongings were contaminated. Since then he’s been a traveller without a suitcase – a laptop, a portable camera, a mobile phone, a world-band travel radio, a couple of books. An answerphone in his flat in Amsterdam, a fax in a friend’s office – a man with machines. Free but tied down, invisible wires connecting him to the world. Voices, messages. Friends, mostly colleagues, who lead the same lives. They use his flat, he uses theirs. Or else cheap hotels and bed and breakfasts, a floating universe. New York, Madrid, Berlin. Each of them, it occurs to him now, a niche. He still hasn’t shaken off that word. Not the short suffix, and certainly not the long noun to which it does and doesn’t belong. ‘What is it about Germany that you find so attractive?’ his Dutch friends ask him from time to time. They make it sound as if he’d caught a terrible disease.

He’d managed to come up with a trite answer that usually served his purpose. ‘I like it there. Germans are so serious.’ ‘So they are,’ they’d say, or something else along those lines. Imagine having to explain the social codes of the Dutch. How could a foreigner, even one who’s learned the language, ever understand that a quasi-confirmation of that kind was actually an expression of cynical disbelief?

In the time it took for all these words to go through his head, he had arrived at the off-licence on the corner of Knesebeckstrasse and Mommsenstrasse, the point at which he usually wondered whether he should go on walking or turn back. He stopped, looked at the gleaming cars in the showroom across the street, watched the traffic on the Kurfürstendamm, then caught sight of himself in the mirror of a champagne ad in the off-licence window. The disgusting servility of mirrors – they go on reflecting your image even when you don’t want them to. He had already seen himself once today. Except that this time he was wearing his clothes, his armour. That was different. He had a fairly good idea of who he was and wondered how much of his real self was visible to others. ‘All and nothing,’ Erna had said. What was he going to do with Erna, now that she had popped up on the corner of Mommsenstrasse?

‘Are you being serious?’

‘You bet your boots I am.’ Only Erna could say a thing like that. So now he had not only Erna, but also her boots to deal with. It had started to snow. In the mirror he could see the powdery flakes clinging to his coat. Good, he thought, now I don’t look quite so much like an ad.

‘Don’t be silly.’ That, too, was something only Erna would say. They had discussed the subject often enough.

‘If you think you look like you’ve just stepped out of an ad, buy yourself different clothes. Not Armani.’

‘This isn’t Armani.’

‘Well, it looks like Armani.’

‘My point exactly. I don’t even know what brand it is. I bought it on sale somewhere. Dirt cheap.’

‘Clothes look good on you.’

‘Right, that’s what I’m saying. I look like an ad.’

‘You hate yourself, that’s all. It happens to a lot of men when they reach middle age.’

‘No, that’s not it. I just don’t think I look like the real me.’

‘You mean you have all kinds of thoughts you don’t talk about, and we can’t see that?’

‘Sort of.’

‘In that case you ought to get a different haircut. That’s not a hairstyle; it’s a disguise.’

‘You see?’

Erna was his oldest friend. He had met his wife through her, and she was the only person he ever talked to about Roelfje. Other men had male friends. He had them too, but Erna was his best friend.

‘I don’t know if I should take that as a compliment.’

Sometimes he phoned her, in the middle of the night, from some godforsaken place on the other side of the globe. She was always home. Men came and went in her life, moved in with her, were jealous of him. ‘That Daane – what a fraud. A couple of stupid documentaries, and he walks down the street as if he’s Claude Lanzmann.’ That usually put an end to the relationship. At least she’d got something out of all those men: three children, all of whom looked like her.

‘That’s what happens when you mate with such nondescript men. An entire gene pool out there, and you pick the losers. You’d have been better off with me.’

‘Ah, but you’re my forbidden fruit.’

‘The price we pay for the love known as friendship.’

‘Exactly.’

He turned around, which meant no to Kurfürstendamm, yes to Savignyplatz. It also meant passing Schoeler’s again. Nis was such a handy suffix in Dutch. It cropped up in all kinds of words: bekommernis, gebeurtenis, belijdenis, besnijdenis – solicitude, event, creed, circumcision. The snow had started coming down faster. That’s what happened when you worked with cameras, he thought – you were constantly looking at yourself when you walked. Not so much out of vanity as amazement. Amazement mixed with, well . . . that too had been discussed with Erna.

‘Why don’t you just go ahead and say it?’ ‘Because I don’t know what to call it.’

‘Nonsense. You know perfectly well what to call it. I can think of the word, so you must be able to as well. You just don’t want to say it.’

‘Okay, so what’s the word?’

‘Fear. Awe.’

He preferred awe.

In one long sweep the camera registered Berlin’s snow-covered Knesebeckstrasse, the majestic houses, the handful of pedestrians with their shoulders hunched against the snow. And he was one of them. That’s what it was all about – the pure coincidence of that particular moment. The lone figure heading down the street, past Schoeler’s Bookshop, past the photography gallery, that’s you. Why did such moments always seem so ordinary, and yet sometimes, suddenly, for one amazing second, so unbearable? Weren’t you supposed to take them for granted? Unless, of course, you were a lifelong adolescent.

‘That doesn’t have anything to do with it. Some people never stop to think. But that feeling of wonderment and awe is the source of everything.’

‘Such as?’

‘Art, religion, philosophy. I do pick up the occasional book, you know.’

Erna had studied philosophy for a few years, before switching to literature.

At the corner of Savignyplatz he was almost blown off his feet by a sudden snow flurry. This was getting serious. A continental climate. Another reason he liked Berlin. It always made him feel that he was in the middle of a vast plain stretching deep into the heart of Russia. Berlin, Warsaw, Moscow – mere stops along the way.

He wasn’t wearing gloves, and his fingers were feeling frozen. During that same conversation, he’d delivered a lecture on fingers as well.

‘Look – what are these?’

‘They’re fingers, Arthur.’

‘Yes, but they’re also pincers. Watch this.’

He picked up a pencil, twirled it around a couple of times.

‘Clever, huh? People are amazed by robots, but never by themselves. They see a robot do this and it freaks them out, but they do it themselves all the time without giving it a second thought. Robots made of flesh and blood – now that ought to freak you out. What a great expression! Anyway, robots can do anything, even reproduce themselves. And those eyes! Cameras and screens all rolled into one. The same instrument used to record and display. I don’t know how to phrase it – either we have computers or we are computers. Electronic commands, chemical reactions, the lot.’

‘Computers don’t have chemical reactions.’

‘Not yet. Do you know what the really strange part is?’

‘No.’

‘That the people living back in the Middle Ages, people who knew nothing about electronics or neurology – no, farther back than that, the Neanderthals, the ones we think of as primitive – those people were the same advanced machines that we are. Even though they had no way of knowing that when they said something they were using their very own audio system, complete with sound boxes, speakers . . .’

‘Oh, Arthur, cut it out.’

‘I told you, an adolescent. With the same sense of awe.’

‘But that isn’t the kind you meant.’

‘No.’

What I meant, he wanted to say, was a lightning flash of fear, a righteous trembling at the overpowering strangeness of things that presumably never struck other people as strange, things that at his age were supposed to seem normal.

He walked past the bistro owned by his friend Philippe, who didn’t even know that he was back in Berlin. He never let anyone know, he just came waltzing in.

At the corner of Kantstrasse the light was red. He looked to the left, to the right, didn’t see any cars, and was tempted to cross, but stayed where he was, feeling his body process contradictory commands: an odd kind of neural wave going to the wrong leg, so that one foot stayed on the kerb while the other stepped off it. Through the snow he watched the silent group of people waiting on the other side of the crossing. At moments like these the difference between the Dutch and the Germans was plainly manifest. As a pedestrian in Amsterdam, you were an idiot if you didn’t cross on red, and here you were one if you did, something the Germans didn’t hesitate to point out: ‘Tut, tut, there goes another suicidal maniac.’

He had asked Victor, a Dutch sculptor now living in Berlin, what he did when there were no cars in sight.

‘I cross the street, except when there are children around. Got to set a good example, and all that.’

As for himself, he had decided to make use of those odd, empty moments by doing what he called ‘instant meditation’. In Amsterdam no self-respecting cyclist had lights, stopped at a red light or went the right way down a one-way street. Dutch people always wanted to decide for themselves whether or not a rule applied to them – a mixture of Protestantism and anarchy that produced a stubborn kind of chaos. On his last visit he had noticed that cars, and sometimes even trams, had also started ignoring red lights.

‘You’ve turned into a real German. Rules are rules. There’s got to be Ordnung. The next time you ride the U-Bahn, listen to how they bark out commands: Einsteigen bitte! ZURÜCKBLEIBEN!! Well, we all know where obeying orders got them.’

‘The Dutch don’t like being told what to do.’ ‘Germans like discipline.’ There seemed to be no end to the parade of prejudices.

‘In Amsterdam the traffic is downright dangerous.’

‘Oh, honestly. It’s nothing compared to how fast the Germans drive on the autobahn. Now that’s aggression, one giant fit of rage.’

The light turned green. The six snowy figures on the other side of the street simultaneously set themselves in motion. Okay, you shouldn’t generalise, but there is such a thing as a national character. How had it come about?

‘From history,’ Erna had said.

What he found so fascinating about the idea of history was that it was based on a chemical compound of fate, chance and design. The combination of these three elements produced a chain of events that produced another chain of events, which were said to be inevitable, or random, or to happen according to a secret plan that was not yet known to us, though by now things were getting pretty esoteric.

For a moment he considered going into the Tintenmaus to read the paper. At least it would be warm inside. He didn’t know a single one of the customers, yet every face was familiar. They were people like him, people with time on their hands. Except that they didn’t look like ads. There was a plate-glass window across the entire front of the Tintenmaus, with only a few rows of tables between it and the bar. No one ever sat at that bar in the way people usually do – the attraction of the outside world was too great. What you saw from the pavement was a row of staring figures, engrossed in one long, slow thought, a silent contemplation so heavy that it could be borne only by the incredibly slow sipping of enormous glasses of beer.

His face felt frozen, but this was one of those days when he welcomed the sensation: a mixture of self-imposed punishment and pleasure, such as one got from walking on the island of Schiermonnikoog in pouring rain or hiking to a deserted village in the Pyrenees in blistering heat. Sometimes joggers had a similar expression of exhaustion on their faces – an almost indecent form of public suffering, like Christs sprinting towards Golgotha. Jogging didn’t suit him; it disturbed the rhythm of his thinking, or what he liked to call his thinking. It wasn’t really, but back when he was fifteen or sixteen he had decided that it was the best way to describe the process going on in his head. In order for it to work, he needed to withdraw into himself. Ridiculous, of course, but it had become a habit.

In the beginning he had been able to do his thinking only in certain places; now he could do it anywhere. The one prerequisite was not having to talk. Roelfje had understood that. They had been able to walk for hours without saying a word. The two of them had never discussed it; he simply knew that she knew that this process was crucial to whatever was good about his work. He had no idea how the mechanism worked. After one of these sessions it was as if he were able to remember what he wanted to say in a film, not just the concept, but how to go about it. Remember – that was the right word. The camera angles, the lighting, the sequence, everything he did seemed to be accompanied by a strange feeling of déjà vu. Even the handful of short films he’d made with film-school students had come about the same way, much to the despair of anyone who’d ever had to work with him. He’d start out with nothing, then make a death-defying leap – like a figure at the top of a tent hanging suspended in mid-air for several breathtaking minutes – and eventually land on his feet. The result usually bore little resemblance to the original proposal he’d submitted to get the job or grant, but they forgave him if it was good. Anyway, how could he describe the process? Somehow it involved emptiness – no other word would do. The day had to be empty. For that matter, so did he. Walking, he felt himself emptying out, as if he had become transparent or was no longer there, no longer belonged to the world of others, might as well not exist. Afterwards he could never reproduce his thoughts in tangible form, though ‘thought’ was too big a word to describe his indistinct, vague reveries, the jumbled images and snatches of sentences that passed through his head. The whole process resembled a surrealistic painting he’d once seen, whose title he couldn’t remember. A female figure composed of fragments, climbing a set of stairs that stretched into infinity. She had not got very far, and the topmost step disappeared somewhere in the clouds. You could tell it was a woman even though the segments weren’t connected and parts of her body were missing. Actually, if you stared at it for a while, it was downright disturbing. Wisps of fog wound their way through her body where her eyes, her breasts and her sex should have been. Amorphous software was inserting itself inside her – unrecognisable at this stage – but one day, if all went well, she might be transmuted into something he was unable to conceive of now.

At the corner of Goethestrasse the wind nearly took his breath away. Mommsen, Kant, Goethe – you were always in good company in this neighbourhood. He walked past the Turkish espresso bar frequented by Victor, but didn’t see him there today. Victor had made a point of what he called ‘descending deep into the German soul’. He had talked to both victims and perpetrators, and also written a book about them without using their names, short pieces that touched the reader deeply because of their complete lack of overt pathos. Arthur was attracted to people who, as he liked to put it, ‘had more than one person’, especially when those persons appeared to be opposites. Victor may have looked casual on the outside, but on the inside he housed an entire cast of characters: a pianist, a mountain climber, a cool observer of human life, a Wagnerian poet steeped in battles and blood, a sculptor, an artist whose eloquent drawings usually consisted of only a few lines and whose titles seemed, even today, to be a commentary on a war that had ended long ago. Berlin and the war had become Victor’s hunting grounds. He rarely discussed his work, but when he did he would shrug it off as a kind of joke, chalking it up to his childhood in occupied Holland, because ‘when you’re a little boy, soldiers seem very, very big’, and he had seen a lot of soldiers because he and his parents had lived near a German army base. His clothes were vaguely reminiscent of a pre-war vaudeville star – checked jacket, silk scarf – and he wore a thin, David Niven moustache, shaped like two raised eyebrows. As if his appearance was meant to suggest that there never should have been a war, that the 1930s should have gone on forever.

A walk through Berlin with Victor often began with ‘Look, you see that? Those bullet holes?’ At such moments he seemed to turn into the city itself, to pour forth its memories – a political murder, a round-up, a book-burning, the spot where Rosa Luxemburg had been thrown into the Landwehr Canal, the exact point the Russians had advanced to in 1945. He read the city like a book, a story of unseen buildings swallowed up by history – Gestapo torture chambers, the barren stretch of land where Hitler’s plane had been able to land up to the very last day, everything told in a continuous, almost chanted recitative. Arthur had once suggested making a programme about Walter Benjamin, which he wanted to call, using one of Benjamin’s phrases, ‘The Soles of Memory’. Victor would have been the perfect person to portray the flaneur, the aimless wanderer strolling down the streets of Berlin, because if anyone walked on the soles of memory, Victor did. But Dutch television wasn’t interested in a programme on Walter Benjamin. He could still picture the producer, a Tilburg University graduate with the usual mix of Marxism and Catholicism still clinging to him like a dirty nimbus – a musty middle-aged man in a musty office in a dried-up dream factory, where Dutch celebrities kept parading through the canteen with their carefully acquired indoor tans and throat-cancer voices. Arthur was out of the country so often that he was spared the necessity of remembering their names, but one glance was enough to know who was who.

‘I know you have two polar opposites in your . . . head,’ the producer said (he had been about to say ‘soul’), ‘namely action and reflection. But reflection doesn’t get high ratings.’ The shattered idealism of the Marxist and the wily corruption of the Catholic who had sold himself to the highest bidder for the security of a pension plan – it continued to be an irresistible combination.

‘That programme you made in Guatemala, the one about the missing union officials, that was absolutely first-rate. And the Rio de Janeiro thing, about those kids shot by the police, the one you got the prize for in Ottawa, that’s the kind of thing we’re looking for. It cost us a fortune, but I think we finally broke even. The Germans bought it for Channel 3, along with some Swedish channel . . . Walter Benjamin! I used to be able to reel off entire passages.’

Arthur saw the bodies of eight or so boys and girls stretched out on marble slabs, grotesque feet poking out from under grey sheets, labels around their ankles, names on pieces of paper that would perish along with them one day, interchangeable, bits of words that had already begun to moulder along with the broken bodies they supposedly named.

‘Poor Benjamin,’ the producer continued. ‘What a tragic fate. And yet, if he hadn’t lost hope, there in the Pyrenees, when the Spanish threatened to turn the group over to the Gestapo, he probably would have made it across the border. After all, the Spanish were fascist pigs, yet they didn’t hand their Jews over to Hitler. But no, he had to go and kill himself. I don’t know why, but suicide has always bothered me. If only he’d waited, he would have made it across, as the others did. Imagine what it would have been like if Benjamin had gone to America, if he’d been there along with Adorno and Horkheimer.’

‘Yes, just imagine,’ Arthur said.

‘God knows what would have happened,’ the man mused further. ‘They probably would have wound up quarrelling like the rest of the exiles.’

Some people, Arthur thought, manage to look, even when they’re fully dressed, as if they’re lying in bed in rumpled pyjamas and are never going to get up again. He glanced at the figure slumped by the window, then at the view: the opposite wing of the studio. So there’s where they produce the rubbish, the B grade sludge that oozes through the channels and inundates the country, the place where Dutch imitation is mixed with the mud of the mighty transatlantic example. All of his acquaintances swore up and down that they never watched TV, but he could tell from idle pub chat and conversations with friends that they did.

He got up to leave, and the producer opened the door onto a room full of silent figures staring at their computers. Death would be infinitely preferable to this, he later remembered thinking, though that wasn’t fair. What did he know about these people?

‘What are they doing?’ he asked.

‘They’re writing background material for news programmes, panel discussions. The kind of stuff we hand our geniuses when they’re obliged to talk about something they know nothing about, which is most of the time. Facts, historical analyses, that kind of thing. We condense the information, spoon-feed it to them.’

‘A spoonful at a time?’

‘Not exactly. Only about a tenth of the material produced in this room ever gets used. Viewers can’t handle more than that. The world’s getting smaller every day, but most people think it’s already too damn big. They wish it would just go away. In any case, they certainly don’t want to be reminded of it.’

‘So what about my union officials?’

He could picture them as well. Photos on the desk of a human-rights organisation in New York: hard, closed Indian faces.

‘You want an honest answer? You’re our alibi act. Besides, we’ve got a bunch of empty time slots that have to be filled. Everyone’s sick and tired of Bosnia, but if you’re dying to go to Bosnia . . .’

‘I don’t want to go back there.’

‘Then you could come up with something that’ll interest at least the select few of a select few. That’ll gain us some international prestige in the bargain. An award always looks good in the lobby. It’s hard to get approval for Third World stuff these days, but in your case . . .’

‘The Third World will be coming our way soon. Actually, it’s already here.’

‘Nobody wants to hear that. They want to keep it at a distance.’

Alibi act. ‘Boredom is the physical sensation of chaos,’ he’d read recently. No earthly reason for that to have popped into his head just now. Or was there? The figures in the outer office, those men and women – they weren’t human. Flash! That one second of inhuman, bestial boredom, that dislike, hate or fear, was somehow related to the monitors attached to those bodies: semimechanical dyads with fingers that gently clicked the keys that filled the monitors with words that would soon be scrolled away, but that for one brief moment represented all the chaos in the world. He tried to describe the sound of those keys in the bottomless silence. The nearest he could come was the gentle cluck of a sedated chicken. He watched the immaculate hands move over the keys. They’re working, he thought, this was work. What had the producer said? Condense, spoon-feed. They dish up the data – fate’s latest past tense. Data was Latin for ‘things that were given’. But who gave them to us?

‘I still wish I could make a programme about Walter Benjamin,’ he said.

‘Try the Germans,’ the producer replied. ‘They know you, and they know your work well enough by now.’

‘They want a programme on drugs,’ Arthur said. ‘And they want to know why we still hate them.’

‘I don’t hate them.’

‘If I tell them that, they won’t want the programme.’

‘Oh, well, thanks for coming. You know we’re always on the lookout for good ideas. Especially yours. Soaring crime rates in Moscow, the Russian Mafia, that kind of thing. Think it over.’

The door clicked shut behind him. He walked through the room as if he were walking through a church, with a feeling of total desolation. What right did he have to judge the people sitting there? Once again he was assailed by the same thought that came into his head now, in this other now, here in Berlin: What kind of person would he have been if he hadn’t lost his wife and child?

‘Thomas.’ It was Erna’s voice. ‘If you avoid using his name, it means you want him out of your life.’

‘He is out of my life.’

‘He has a right to his name.’ Erna could be firm. Still, he’d never forgotten that conversation.

There was something diabolical about the question. What kind of person would he have been? He certainly wouldn’t have had the freedom he had now, which clearly set him apart from others. Just the thought of it was enough to make him feel guilty, without knowing why. By now he was so used to not being tied down that he couldn’t imagine any other life. Yet freedom was also barren, destitute. Well, so what? The same could be said of people who did have children and who, as he had once told Erna when he was drunk, ‘wouldn’t have to die alone’.

‘Spare me the maudlin sentimentality, Arthur. I hate that.’

He smiled. All these thoughts had brought him no farther than Steinplatz. Amazing how much you can think in the space of a few hundred yards. On the door of a tall house on Uhlandstrasse he saw a copper doorknob polished to within an inch of its life, with a dab of snow on top, l