Ulla Volkenberg

Ulla Volkenberg is the absent partner whose return overturns the narrator’s assumption that Modena’s faith in her is delusion. After leaving him badly injured, she goes to Germany; years later, guilt and a family inheritance bring her back to find him. Their reunion answers the promise Modena had maintained even when the people around him could not believe it.

Identity and Background

Ulla’s history is disclosed through what she tells Modena and what is later reported to Lin. Her family is wealthy and has considerable influence in the German town where she was born, but cut her off while she was heavily involved with drugs. She receives none of their money for years; only after her father dies does she inherit a substantial sum.

That inheritance gives Ulla the means to return, but her account makes guilt the immediate reason for doing so. She says she could not live with herself and comes looking for Modena. Her return is therefore neither a simple recovery of wealth nor an unexplained romantic gesture: it follows years of estrangement from her family and a burden of remorse about the man she left behind.

Return and Reunion

Before Ulla comes back, Modena tells Lin that he is watching him because Ulla will not know where to find him. He has stopped going to Leopold’s Beer Bar and the other places they once shared, and expects that she will look for him through Lin or someone else in their circle. He speaks with calm certainty, even as Lin doubts she would return from Germany or be able to face Modena’s severely disfigured face.

Lin tells Modena that Ulla will not come back. Modena refuses that prediction: he believes she loves him and will return for him. The later account confirms that she does. After inheriting money, Ulla travels back to look for Modena, and finds him waiting. The reversal is striking because Lin had treated Modena’s conviction as evidence of a delusion; events prove that the hope he held onto was accurate.

Relationship and Practical Consequences

When Lin hears about the reunion, he learns that Ulla and Modena were together when she was visited. Modena was lying across her legs, his head near her shoulder. The arrangement recalls Michelangelo’s Pietà to the visitor, an image that makes the scene feel at once intimate and unsettling. The comparison gives their reunion the stillness of a tableau, while Modena’s damaged face prevents it from becoming an uncomplicated romantic picture.

The reunion also leads to a concrete request. Ulla wants help arranging a passport for Modena, who has remained in the country for years as an overstayer and has problems with the Spanish police under his own name. He needs a new passport to return to Europe and might pass as Italian or Portuguese. Ulla asks Karla to arrange it; Lin agrees to take on the work, offering to contact Modena for photographs and other necessary details despite the risk that his face would be recognizable at a customs check.

Narrative Significance

Ulla’s return changes the meaning of Modena’s earlier certainty. Lin had seen the contrast between Modena’s mutilation and his expectation of being loved again as proof that he could not understand the situation; Ulla’s arrival shows how incomplete that judgment was. The story does not erase the injury or the years apart. Instead, it places Modena’s continued belief beside Ulla’s guilt-driven return and lets their reunion make that belief consequential.

Ulla remains known chiefly through actions and accounts: she leaves for Germany, inherits money, comes back, finds Modena, and seeks a way for him to travel. That limited presentation keeps the reunion partly mysterious while establishing its practical stakes. Her return is an emotional answer to Modena’s hope, but the passport request makes it also a step toward a life beyond the place where he has been waiting.