Reiter and Ingeborg reunite in Cologne through a delayed act of recognition. Reiter initially cannot place the woman who calls to him outside a bar, and later cannot remember her name even after recognizing where he knows her from. Their renewed connection leads to a life together, but the account presents that intimacy alongside Ingeborg’s precarious health and the damaged buildings around them.

The Call and the First Recognition

One night, while Reiter is guarding the entrance to a bar on Spengler-strasse, a woman calls his name from the darkness. He looks around and sees no one. At first he supposes that one of the women who frequent the bar is playing a joke, but the voice calls again; he then understands that it belongs to someone else and asks what she wants.

Reiter examines the woman and cannot remember who she is. The uncertainty persists as she speaks: he feels that he knows her, but cannot identify where or under what circumstances they met. Rather than press her, he keeps the encounter calm and offers her a drink. She looks toward the bar before accepting, and they sit near the entrance with tea. When the woman serving them asks who the newcomer is, Reiter calls her his girlfriend. The casual answer gives their uncertain reunion a provisional intimacy before he has recovered even her name.

A Name Returned

Later, while working, Reiter watches the entrance of the house across the street. At times he thinks he sees a pair of eyes in the dark. During a lull he goes to the doorway, intending to speak to the woman, then realizes that he does not know her name. Using a match, he finds her asleep in a corner. As he kneels beside her, he remembers who she is.

When she wakes, the doorway has become a room with photographs of performers on the walls and dolls and stuffed bears on a chest of drawers. Cases of whiskey and wine are stacked on the floor. Ingeborg is under a green quilt, with her shoes removed. Reiter identifies her as the girl who lived in Hugo Halder’s old flat. She confirms this without opening her eyes, but when he admits that he still cannot remember her name, she corrects him: she is Ingeborg Bauer. Reiter repeats the name as though it contained his fate. The sequence turns recognition into more than simple recollection: he retrieves both her connection to Hugo Halder and the name that makes their reunion definite.

From Encounter to Shared Life

The narrative looks back to the kiss in the park, when Reiter was searching for Hugo Halder and Ingeborg told him the story of the Aztecs. In retrospect, Reiter understands that she had gone mad, or may already have been mad when they first met. He also recognizes that she was ill, or perhaps hungry. Their reunion therefore does not begin from secure knowledge of one another. It restores a connection whose earlier circumstances had been obscured by Reiter’s failures of memory and by Ingeborg’s unstable situation.

Reiter brings Ingeborg to live with him in his cellar. Her persistent coughing and apparent lung trouble prompt him to look for different accommodation, and he finds a garret in a partly ruined building. The stairs are unsafe: some steps sink under a climber’s weight, while gaps open onto the building’s interior and the damage left by bomb shrapnel. Ingeborg weighs 110 pounds, and Reiter, though very tall, is thin and bony; their light frames make the stairs manageable for them. A small, amiable Brandenburger employed by the occupation troops is not so fortunate: he falls through a gap between the second and third floors and breaks his neck. The account sets the couple’s fragile domestic arrangement within a structure whose dangers are not merely metaphorical, but part of everyday life.

The Meaning of the Reunion

The episode binds personal recognition to material vulnerability. Reiter’s memory returns in stages: first a feeling that he knows the woman, then the recollection of Hugo Halder’s former flat, and finally Ingeborg’s name. Each recovery brings the relationship into clearer focus, while leaving its future uncertain. His declaration at the bar that she is his girlfriend precedes that knowledge, making the reunion feel less like a settled romantic resolution than an improvised beginning.

The move from cellar to garret further defines that beginning. Reiter responds to Ingeborg’s coughing by seeking another place to live, but the accommodation he finds is itself precarious, scarred by wartime destruction and unsafe for other tenants. Their shared life takes shape not in a secure home but in compromised rooms and unstable passageways. The reunion thus joins affection and care to the novel’s persistent attention to damaged places and vulnerable lives, without offering a clean separation between private intimacy and the historical environment around them.