The black leather coat

The black leather coat is a garment given to Hans Reiter by an old fortune-teller, and its uncanny fit makes it seem destined for him. Its history, however, never settles into a single account: the old woman variously identifies its dead former owner as a Gestapo agent, a Communist lover, or a Scottish spy. When Reiter later encounters paratroopers in coats much like his during a clandestine theft, the garment becomes more than clothing. It connects his private, unexplained inheritance to the unstable moral and material world of postwar Germany.

The Gift and Its Fit

After sunrise, the old woman leads Reiter into a room crowded with clothes, which he remembers as resembling a ragpicker’s room. She searches through the heaps and emerges with the black leather coat, presenting it as something that had been waiting for him since its previous owner died. Reiter puts it on, and it fits as if made for him. The sequence gives the garment the character of an inheritance without a known family line: it passes from a dead stranger to a young man whose future is still taking shape, while the old woman’s certainty about its suitability contrasts with her uncertainty about its past.

The coat’s arrival is framed by the old woman’s account of hearing a nightingale’s call. That detail and her emphatic presentation of the garment give the encounter the air of an omen, but the narrative does not confirm any supernatural explanation. Its force lies instead in the gap between the coat’s precise fit and the incoherence of the stories attached to it. Reiter can wear it immediately; neither he nor the reader can establish whose life has left its mark on it.

Three Histories for One Garment

Reiter asks who owned the coat before him, but the fortune-teller’s answers conflict. At one point she says it belonged to a Gestapo agent, one of the men who tracked down and crushed deserters gathering in Cologne at the end of 1944 and beginning of 1945. At another, she says the owner was her lover, a Communist who died in a concentration camp. Each version places the garment within a different strand of wartime persecution and violence, and none is confirmed as the truth.

Her most elaborate account makes the former owner a Scottish, though supposedly English, spy who parachuted near Cologne in 1941 to reconnoiter for a future uprising. The citizens he encountered regarded the prospect as incredible because, in their view and that of Europeans at the time, England was lost. The spy drank heavily, yet retained a measure of verbal coherence and a chilly elegance that helped win the anti-Fascist citizens’ admiration. The old woman says she lodged him and read his fortune on their first meeting, then supplied him with clothes and papers on their second, when he was returning to England. The coat, in this telling, is what he left behind.

Even this densely detailed story is withdrawn. At other times, the old woman dismisses talk of the spy as dreams, fantasies, and the imaginings of a desperate old woman, then returns to the Gestapo-agent account. The contradiction is not resolved by choosing the most plausible version: the narrative keeps each claim in circulation while denying any secure means of verifying it. The coat thus carries mutually incompatible histories, and the uncertainty belongs as much to the teller as to the object.

From Personal Inheritance to Shared Uniform

A later episode gives the coat a concrete public echo. At the Yellow Nightingale, where Archimboldi meets paratroopers for a job, he notices that they all wear black leather coats very similar to his. The garment that arrived through a fortune-teller’s intimate, uncertain story now appears as part of a recognizable group’s dress. The resemblance does not prove that Reiter’s coat came from the same source, or that the paratroopers’ coats share a history; instead, it unsettles the impression that his garment is singularly meant for him.

The paratroopers’ errand is to unload U.S. Army stoves from a freight car. An American demands payment, counts the money to the last bill, and restricts them to boxes marked PK. After the car is forced open, the men take the boxes by truck to Mickey Bittner’s office. There, with hot coffee and whiskey waiting, the conversation turns to General Udet and recollections of the past. The coats sit within this sequence of theft, payment, and military memory: their resemblance to Reiter’s garment gives the earlier gift an afterlife in a world where war’s identities and possessions remain difficult to separate.

The Coat as an Unsettled Relic

The black leather coat binds together a close, bodily fact and an unanswerable historical question. Its fit for Reiter is immediate and exact; its provenance multiplies into stories of collaboration, political persecution, espionage, and desertion. The garment does not settle which account is true, nor does its later resemblance to the paratroopers’ coats solve the mystery. Instead, it makes uncertainty material: the past reaches Reiter in something he can put on, while remaining inaccessible as a single reliable narrative.

That unresolved quality also resists treating the coat as a simple emblem with one fixed meaning. It may have belonged to a persecutor, a victim, or a spy; the fortune-teller can move among these possibilities and even disavow them. Reiter’s inheritance is therefore less a recovered biography than a contact with histories that cannot be cleanly distinguished. The coat’s recurring significance comes from that tension between intimate fit and historical opacity.