The Courier

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When he was growing up in Altona, Germany, Karl Rasp owned a wooden boat he used to sail on the Elbe. It was a hand-carved replica of a steamer, and it had been given to him on his eighth birthday by his grandmother. He named it Adelheid, in her honor, his father having told him that ships were always named for women. Each Sunday, if it wasn’t raining, Karl and his father would go to church, have lunch at a busy café, and walk to the riverbank. There, after attaching the hook-eye at the front of the vessel to a sturdy rope, the boy would watch it surge forward on the current, then twitch from side to side when it could go no farther. While he watched the boat struggle, Karl would listen to his father talk, between thoughtful puffs on his pipe, about dispatches he received at the telegraph office where he worked. This was the part of the ritual Karl loved best. The messages had come from places around the world, many with exotic names like Calcutta and Veracruz, some of which, the elder Rasp assured him, were filled with very dangerous people — just like the evil knights and deceitful lovers in the books they read and the operas his mother played on the piano while singing “arias.” The stories sometimes frightened Karl, but his mother’s voice made him feel safer, as did the confined, cozy embrace of the tiny salon in their small flat right on the border of Hamburg.

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