‘Do you recognise my mother?’
Tobias shook his head. ‘I’m fifty-six years old, Mr Tayte. In 1963 I was only a small boy.’ He stood up and took Tayte’s photograph to show his father. ‘Papa, do you recognise this woman?’
Elijah Kaufmann adjusted his glasses and leaned closer.
‘It was a long time ago,’ Tobias added. ‘She might have come to see you in the 1960s.’
The old man shook his head and sat back again.
‘I’m sorry,’ Tobias said as he returned to the desk and sat down. He handed Tayte’s photograph back to him.
‘That’s okay. As you said, it was a long time ago, and I’m sure your father has seen plenty of people since then.’
‘You’re welcome to check our files,’ Tobias said. ‘It might take a while, but we’ve been in the habit of photographing our visitors since around 1950, when Papa acquired our first Park instamatic camera.’ He paused and reached into the desk drawer. ‘It’s all digital now, of course,’ he continued as he withdrew a small digital camera. ‘Many of the older pictures have faded beyond recognition, but it could help to locate the file you’re looking for if we have one.’
‘It’s worth a try,’ Jean said.
‘Where do we start?’ Tayte added.
Tobias Kaufmann held up the camera. ‘We start with me taking a picture of you for my files before I forget. Now, if you could move closer together so I can get you both in. That’s it.’ He clicked the shutter and checked the image. Next he had Tayte fill in a form, giving his and Jean’s names and the address where they were staying. Tobias began to pull at his beard as he gazed up at the wall of lever-arch files behind Tayte and Jean, as though considering which files to start with. He stood up and went to them, and then he turned back and pointed at Tayte’s chair. ‘Do you mind?’
Tayte stood up and Tobias pulled the chair closer to the files. He stood on it and slid a couple of boxes out and handed them to Tayte, who was tall enough to reach them without the chair. ‘Here, let me help,’ he said, and Tobias pointed at a few others to try, which Tayte lifted down.
‘There might be something in these,’ he said. ‘If not, we can try a few more.’
Tayte set the photograph of his mother down onto the desk and they each took a box to go through. The photographs inside were mostly faded, as Tobias had suggested. Some files were no more than a single page, with little information on them. Others contained several pages, but offered no connection for Tayte. The majority were from survivors of the holocaust, in particular the survivors of Dachau, whose accounts of their incarceration at the concentration camp were perhaps of the greatest value to Kaufmann und Kaufmann.
An hour passed in relative silence, with only the sound of rustling papers to be heard. Then Jean sat up with a short gasp, drawing Tayte’s attention. She was scrutinising one of the photographs, as though she’d seen a possible match. She handed the image to Tayte. It showed a man and a woman standing side by side in that same room, but with a less full wall of files in the background. It was washed out completely in places, and Tayte was glad he’d had a copy made of his mother’s photograph before it began to go the same way. He recognised what he could see of the woman’s face immediately—he’d stared at his own photograph of his mother long enough to know it was her. He turned back to Jean, whose eyes were wide with interest as she read through the file.
‘You’re not going to believe this,’ she said.
‘Here, let me see.’
Jean handed the file to Tayte. ‘I don’t think you’re going to like it, either.’
With a sense of foreboding Tayte took the file and glanced over it. There were two pages, and on the first page his eyes were drawn to the two names that appeared at the top: Sarah and Karl. Status: married. There was no surname.
‘So my mother’s name is Sarah,’ Tayte said under his breath.
His eyes were then drawn to the reason for Sarah’s and Karl’s interest in Volker Strobel, and as soon as he read it, he knew Jean was right—he couldn’t believe it. He didn’t want to believe it.
He screwed his face up. ‘My mother came here with her husband, Karl, trying to identify Karl’s father.’
The spelling of Karl’s name hadn’t slipped Tayte’s attention. It had German or Scandinavian origins, but under the circumstances, Tayte felt it was almost certainly a German given name. The implications of what he’d read left him numb. He looked at the faded instamatic photograph of the couple again, and he studied the pale image of the man standing beside his mother.