Lotte Reiter and Klaus Haas

Lotte Reiter and Klaus Haas are mother and son, and their relationship is shaped by a persistent imbalance: Lotte holds fast to the child she loves and the adult son she cannot reach, while Klaus repeatedly remains distant. His migration to the United States turns ordinary separation into years of uncertainty; his imprisonment in Santa Teresa eventually brings them face to face, but not into easy intimacy. Their bond gives the family history an emotional line across continents, while its silences echo the novel’s larger patterns of disappearance and incomplete knowledge.

Family and Early Attachment

Before Klaus’s birth, Lotte and her husband, Werner Haas, discussed having a child halfheartedly for two months. At breakfast one morning, Lotte told Werner she was pregnant, ending the discussion. They bought a car and travelled through the south of France, Spain, and Portugal before returning to Germany. On the journey home, Lotte asked to go through Cologne to look for the only address she had for her brother, Hans Reiter. The address led nowhere: the place where Hans had lived was gone, and no one could remember him. The unsuccessful search for her brother thus precedes the birth of the son who would become, for Lotte, an intimate but imperfect echo of him.

They named the baby Klaus, after Lotte’s maternal grandfather, although she had considered naming him Hans. She thought that the name mattered less than the person. Klaus was especially loved by his grandmother and father, but he loved Lotte best. At times, she saw in him a small likeness of her brother, a resemblance that pleased her because she had always associated Hans with things large and outsized. Her son’s presence gave that lost family resemblance a new, living form, though it could never replace the brother whose whereabouts remained unknown.

When Klaus was two, Lotte became pregnant again, but miscarried four months later and could have no more children. Klaus grew up in Paderborn, playing soccer with friends and basketball at school. His attachment to machines became apparent early: he was drawn to the workshop where his father’s mechanics worked and could spend hours watching them. Lotte’s bond with him was therefore rooted not only in affection but in close attention to the particular child he was, including interests that would later shape his work.

Departure and the Long Silence

As a teenager, Klaus got into trouble with the police and spent four months in a reformatory. There he worked in a repair shop and learned to fix household appliances; once he returned home, his father gave him a job in the family shop. Lotte and Werner tried to believe that he had got back on the right track. After a short relationship with a girl who worked at a bakery, Klaus did not bring other girlfriends home, and his parents did not know whether he was seeing anyone. He began drinking with other young workers and occasionally got into fights or vandalized property. Werner had to pay fines and collect him from the police station.

Klaus eventually decided Paderborn was too small for him and left for Munich. His calls to Lotte were collect calls, and their conversations were forced and trivial, yet she found them comforting. The smallness of what they exchanged did not make the calls meaningless: they were a thin, recurring connection between a mother at home and a son intent on leaving it.

After seeing his parents again, Klaus told Lotte there was no future for him in Germany or Europe and that he intended to try his luck in America once he had saved enough money. He later sailed from Kiel on a German ship bound for New York, working as a waiter and part-time dishwasher. Lotte wept when he left Paderborn. Werner drove him to Kiel, then reassured her that the ship was sturdy and Klaus’s work was not dangerous. Lotte had refused to go to the port, not wanting to prolong the agony of the departure; reassurance could not remove the uncertainty of sending her son across the ocean.

Klaus’s first postcard, sent from New York, showed the Statue of Liberty. He wrote that the statue was on his side. Months passed, then more than a year, before another postcard arrived. Klaus said he was applying for U.S. citizenship and had a good job; the return address was Macon, Georgia. Lotte and Werner each wrote to ask about his health, money, and plans, but he did not answer their questions. Over time they accepted that he had left home and seemed to be managing, although they had little actual knowledge of his life.

Imagined Life, Unanswered Questions

Lotte tried to picture Klaus settled in America, married to an American woman and living in a sunny house like those in the films shown on television. But her imagining remained conspicuously incomplete. She could see the woman’s blond hair, tanned shoulders, and upright figure, and she could see Klaus’s serious or expectant face; she never saw his imagined wife’s face. She knew that children were somewhere in the imagined household, but could not see them or hear them. The family life she constructed offered a form of hope while preserving the blankness at its centre: she could imagine that Klaus belonged somewhere without knowing where, or to whom.

The fantasy returned as a nightmare. Lotte dreamed of a house she did not recognize as American, and of being seated at a table with a pitcher, an empty plate, a plastic cup, and a fork. She could not remember who had let her in. When she told Werner she had had the nightmare, he recognized it as the recurring Klaus nightmare. Both parents secretly hoped that Klaus would eventually come home asking for money, but the years passed and he seemed lost in the United States. Werner joked that, knowing Klaus, he might now be living in Alaska. Beneath the humor, their wish for a practical reason to return was also a wish for any sign that the separation was not final.

When Werner became ill and stopped working, he and Lotte began travelling. Their first destination was the United States: they went to New York and then Macon, where they found that the house Klaus had lived in was an apartment in an old building near the Black neighborhood. The visit did not reunite them with him or resolve his absence. The difference between Lotte’s imagined sunny American home and the actual address sharpened the distance between a life she had pictured for her son and the limited facts she possessed.

Prison and Reunion in Santa Teresa

In 1995, a telegram from Santa Teresa changed the meaning of the long silence: Klaus was in prison. It came from Isabel Santolaya, his lawyer. Lotte was so shocked that she left her office and went upstairs to lie down, though she could not sleep. The decisive fact was that Klaus was alive. She replied with her telephone number, and four days later received a collect call. The caller spoke English, which Lotte did not understand; at last she caught the words “Klaus fine” and “Translator,” along with a telephone number that she wrote down.

Lotte stopped working that day and immediately sought someone fluent in English and Spanish to accompany her. Four days after the call, she and Ingrid flew to Los Angeles, changed planes for Tucson, and drove from there to Santa Teresa. Seeing Klaus again, Lotte heard him say that she looked older. The remark embarrassed her, and the tears that followed kept her from answering that a long time had passed. Their reunion took place not in a family home but in a cement-walled visiting room, where Lotte sat with Ingrid and the lawyer while Klaus sat across from them. He was not handcuffed and showed no signs of mistreatment; he had gained weight since she had last seen him as a boy.

When the lawyer listed the murders Klaus was accused of, Lotte could not reconcile the charges with the son she thought she knew. She said that no one in his right mind could kill so many women. The lawyer answered that Santa Teresa had someone who probably was not in his right mind. The exchange exposes the limits of maternal certainty: Lotte’s conviction about what Klaus could not do is not evidence that he is innocent, and the accusation does not erase the son she has come to see. Her visit brings her face to face with a legal crisis that her love alone cannot settle.

The Trial and an Unresolved Bond

Lotte returned to Mexico in 1997, this time alone; Ingrid had found a good job and could not come. Lotte had begun learning Spanish and could now speak with Isabel Santolaya by telephone. At Santa Teresa, she sensed from the lawyer’s expression and unusually prolonged embrace that something was wrong. Klaus’s trial lasted twenty days and seemed to pass like a dream. He was found guilty of four murders.

That evening Santolaya drove Lotte to her hotel. Lotte, tired but reading the lawyer’s hesitation, offered to buy her a drink. As they sat beside a large window overlooking a broad, tree-lined avenue, Santolaya cursed in Spanish and began to cry. Lotte understood that the lawyer was in love with her son. The discovery gave Lotte a new way to imagine a relationship in Klaus’s life, but it did not produce a simple reconciliation: she thought that the two of them made a good couple in a way that was strange and also natural.

Santolaya told Lotte that the trial had been plagued with irregularities and would probably be declared a mistrial; she promised to appeal. Lotte thought about her son, whom the verdict seemed not to have affected, and about the lawyer. Neither the conviction nor the promised appeal resolves what Klaus has done or what will happen to him. The relationship ends this episode in suspended form: Lotte has reached him after years of absence, but the son across the visiting-room table remains difficult to know, and the future of his case remains uncertain.