Self's deception (26 page)

32
Too late

I had been too proud to ask Nägelsbach to explain what he meant. But I'd seen Leo on TV, and could imagine her being utterly exhausted, confused, perhaps even bitter and aggressive.

The following morning I tidied up my apartment, put a California champagne on ice that I had won a few years earlier as third prize in a seniors' surfing competition, and took a hot and cold shower. Then I spent a good twenty minutes in front of my closet until I finally decided on a brass-colored suit, a light blue shirt, and the tie with the small clouds. “Aren't you acting a little like a love-struck schoolboy?” an inner voice jeered as I drove to Heidelberg. I announced myself at the prison gate and handed the map over to a taciturn Bleckmeier. I had a good many reasons to feel queasy, and I did.

Leo was wearing the checked shirt she had been wearing on television after her arrest. But she had washed it and had slept away her bleary-eyed tiredness, and her brown curls again fell fully and softly over her shoulders. She saw me, waved, laughed, and stretched out her arms. It was a great weight off my mind. Where were the difficulties?

“Is that all you have with you?” I asked her. She was carrying a plastic bag.

“Yes, my things got lost along the way—the last ones when they arrested me. Your friend the chief inspector brought me a few things, even some eau de cologne, look!” She went over to the table and spread out her belongings. She started pushing the few items back and forth, as if she were trying to establish a certain order not yet discovered. The eau de cologne had to go in the middle and the other toiletries in an orbit around it, but there was no place for the handkerchief, the notepad, or the pen.

The correctional officer sitting behind a glass panel operating the gate buttons looked over at us. “What's going on?” he asked.

“Just a minute.” She tried one last time. “No, it just won't work.” She opened up the plastic bag and swept everything back into it. “Gerhard, I'd love to go for a drive somewhere and walk a bit, can we? The Heiligenberg Hill has been peeking into my cell the whole time.”

We drove to the Mönchhofplatz, climbed up the Mönch-berg, and followed the wide coils of the path to Michaels Basilica. It was almost like when we had climbed up to the ruins of Castle Wegelnburg: Leo often ran ahead of me, her hair flying. We barely spoke. She was skipping and jumping around. I watched her, and at times the memory of the trip we had taken together was as painful as if it had been a memory of distant years and long-lost youth. We sat at a table in the garden of the Waldschenke beneath tall old trees. It was only ten thirty in the morning, and we were the only customers.

“So tell me all about it.”

“What do you mean?” she asked.

“How you've been doing since you left me.”

“I didn't leave you. Did I leave you? I can't give you back the four hundred francs yet. I don't have any money. Helmut did have some, and I wanted him to send the four hundred francs to you, but he said you'd already made enough money off us. Did you? Helmut wanted to make money off me, and his friend did, too. I found out about that. But you …” She frowned and ran her finger along the squares on the tablecloth.

“If I hadn't been given the case, I wouldn't have gotten to know you. But by the time we were traveling together I no longer had the case and wasn't making any money. How did you get from Locarno to where Helmut was?”

“I called him and he came and picked me up. We traveled down the whole boot of Italy to Sicily, and then back up to the Riviera, and then over to Spain. Helmut was trying to drum up cash everywhere we went, but he couldn't.” She spoke as if she were talking about two strangers and countered my questions with terse answers. I pieced together that they had gone on a spending spree, squandering all the money he had brought with him, and then slept in the car, pulled off con tricks, filled up their gas tank without paying, and shoplifted at supermarkets. “Then Helmut wanted me to…Well, there were tourists, and others, too, who had the hots for me, and Helmut said I should be nice to them. But I wouldn't play along with that.”

“Why didn't you call me collect? You ran out of money— that's why you didn't call me anymore, right?”

She laughed. “That was fun, wasn't it, us talking on the phone at night? Sometimes you weren't there, but I suppose I wasn't either.” She laughed again. “I told Helmut to have his friend say hi to you from me, but I kind of knew he wouldn't.”

We ate lunch. In the old days they served up nice plain home cooking at the Waldschenke. Today microwaves give the most modest establishment the ability to serve up a bad boeuf bourgignon in minutes.

“You and I have eaten better,” she said, winking at me. “Remember the Hotel above Lake Murten?”

I nodded. “Let's go out and have a real dinner this evening,” I said. “What are your plans, by the way? Are you going to stay in Heidelberg? Are you going to go on with your studies? Visit your mother? I'm sure she's been told about developments—have you heard from her?”

She thought awhile. “I'd like to go to a hair salon. My hair's all stringy.” She took hold of a lock and tugged it straight. “And it stinks like hell.” She sniffed at it and wrinkled her nose. “Go on, smell it yourself.”

I was sitting opposite her and declined. “Don't worry, we'll go to a hair salon.”

“No, I want you to smell it.” She got up, walked around the table, bent toward me, and held her head in front of mine.

I smelled the sun in her hair, and a touch of eau de cologne. “Your hair doesn't stink, Leo, it has an aroma of—”

“It stinks! You have to take a better sniff!” She held her head even closer. I took her face in both hands. She gave me a short kiss. “And now be a good boy and smell it properly.”

“OK, Leo, you win. We'll head over to a hair salon afterward.”

Going back down the mountain was slower than the climb had been. The day had become oppressively hot; it was also strangely quiet. No breeze, no birds twittering in the heat, no cars or hikers, and the haze that covered the Rhine plain dampened the sounds rising from the city. Our steps were loud, heavy, and cumbersome. I felt tongue-tied.

Quite suddenly and spontaneously Leo began telling me about interpreting. She hadn't yet completed her studies, but for years had helped out with sister-town meetings between small German, French, and English communities. She spoke about mayors, priests, association chairmen, and other dignitaries, of the lives of the families that had put her up during these meetings. She mimicked the pastor of Korntal's Swabian attempts at English, and the pharmacist from Mirande who had learned German on a farm in Saxony as a prisoner of war. I laughed so hard that my sides hurt.

“It all sounds nice and fine, doesn't it?” she said, looking at me distressed. “But have you ever thought what interpreting really means? Inter is Latin for cutting between two things, plunging into, slashing through. And pretium means punishment, retribution, just deserts. That's what I've been trained for: slashing and punishing.”

“Nonsense, Leo. I don't know what the exact etymology is, but I'm sure it's not that. If it had such a dark origin, why would it have become the term for the harmless activity of translating the spoken word?”

“You think translation is harmless?”

I didn't know what to say.

Leo arranging and rearranging her things on the table in the prison, speaking of herself as a stranger, holding her hair under my nose, saying wild things about interpreting—what was I to think? She didn't wait for my answer, but went on talking. By the time we got back to the car, she had given me a full lecture on her theory of translation that I didn't understand, and when I'd asked whether this theory came from Professor Leider, she filled me in on his strengths, weaknesses, and habits, and also on his wife, secretary, and colleagues.

“Do you have a particular hairdresser in mind?” I asked.

“You choose one for me, Gerhard.”

Ever since I've lived in Mannheim, I've gone to a barber in the Schwetzinger Strasse and been satisfied. He has grown old along with me, and his fingers tremble, but the few hairs on my head don't challenge his capacity. He'd never do for Leo, though. I remembered that on my way to the Herschelbad I always passed a salon shining with chrome. That's where we'd go.

The young hairstylist greeted Leo as if he'd met her at a party the day before. Me he treated with the elegant respect befitting whatever I might be: her grandfather, father, or elderly gentleman friend. “You can wait here if you like,” he said to me, “but perhaps you might prefer to return in about an hour?”

I sauntered over to the Paradeplatz, bought a
Süddeutsche Zeitung
, and read it at the Café Journal over an ice cream and an espresso. In the science section, I learned that cockroaches lead warm and caring family lives—we wrong them by abhorring them. Then I saw the bottle of sambuca on the shelf behind the bar. I drank one glass to Leo's health, another to her freedom, and a third to her new hairstyle. It's amazing how a shot or two of sambuca can make the world click into place. An hour later I was back at the salon.

“One more minute!” the Figaro called out from behind the partition, where he could see me, but I couldn't see him. I sat down. “One more minute and we'll be ready!”

I know that women leave salons looking quite different from the way they go in. After all, that's why they go there. I also know that afterward they are usually miserable. They need time—they need our admiration and enthusiasm. Any snide or critical remark, let alone a sarcastic one, must be avoided at all costs. As a daring Indian brave must never show pain, a daring participant at the premiere of a hairstyle must never show shock.

For a second I didn't recognize Leo. For a second I thought that the young woman with the buzz cut was someone else, and so dropped my attentive, enthusiastic expression. By the time I recognized her and quickly reinstated it, it was too late.

“
You don't like it
?” she said to me in English.

“Oh, no, I do! There is something strict and piquant about you now. Yes, you remind me of the women in those French existentialist movies of the fifties, and at the same time you look younger and more tender, more delicate. I—”

“No,
you don't like it!
”

She said it so emphatically that I lost courage. What I had told her wasn't entirely false, either. I liked those women in French existentialist movies, and Leo's new look had something of their vulnerable determination. I also liked her head—its beautiful shape was now revealed by the brushlike hair that had been truncated to a finger's breadth. I had loved her curls, but if they were gone they were gone. Curls invite you to plunge your hand into them, while a buzz cut invites you to sweep your hand over it—more appropriate in the circumstances. If only Leo didn't look so shorn, though. She had the air of an inmate of a prison or a psychiatric ward, and that frightened me.

“Okay, let's go.”

I paid, we went to the car, and we drove home.

“Would you like to lie down and rest awhile?”

“Why not.”

She lay down on the couch. Its leather is cool, and even in the heat of summer allows for the cozy comfort of a light blanket. I covered her up and opened the balcony door wide. Turbo came in, crossed the room, jumped up onto the couch, and curled up beside her. Leo had closed her eyes.

I tiptoed into the kitchen. I sat down at the table, opened the newspaper, and pretended to read. The tap was dripping. A fat fly was buzzing at the window.

Then I heard Leo crying quietly. Was she crying herself to sleep? I listened and waited. Her crying grew louder, smooth, throaty, moaning, and wailing. I went back into the living room, sat down next to her, talked to her, held and caressed her. She stopped sobbing, but the tears continued to flow. After a while her wailing started up again, surged, and ebbed. This went on and on. Her tears never dried.

For a long time I didn't want to face that I wasn't equal to the situation. But then her wailing became so intense that she had trouble breathing. I called Philipp. He suggested that I talk to Eberlein. Eberlein told me to take her immediately to the State Psychiatric Hospital. On the way there she continued crying. She stopped as I walked her from the car to the old building.

On the way home I cried.

33
Imprisoned

It was to be a long, hot summer. For two weeks I took Brigitte and Manu to a beach resort, collected shells and starfish, and built a sand castle. Otherwise, I sat on my balcony a lot. I met Eberhard in the Luisenpark to play chess, and went out fishing with Philipp on his yacht. I occasionally practiced playing the flute or baking Christmas cookies. On a courageous day I went to the dentist. Tooth three-seven could be saved, and I was spared a removable prosthesis. Cases in the summer months had always come somewhat reluctantly. Now that I am older, they come very reluctantly indeed. I don't have to retire—I can just let my practice peter out.

In September the trial of Helmut Lemke, Richard Ingo Peschkalek, and Bertram Mohnhoff—the so-called Käfertal terrorist trial—began at the Karlsruhe Higher Regional Court. The newspapers were pleased with everything: the quick police investigation, the speedy court proceedings, and the terrorists who were eager to confess. Lemke was dignified and remorseful, Mohnhoff childishly eager. Only Peschkalek dug in his heels: He had had nothing to do with Wendt's death, he had not met up with him in Wieblingen, and the gun had not been in his possession. But then the news broke that the gun in question had been found during repair work in the Böck-strasse behind a brick in his apartment's firewall. When he presented the court with his version of the accident it didn't go over too well, even though the forensics couldn't exclude the possibility that Wendt had been killed not by the bullet but by a fall. Peschkalek was given twelve years, Lemke ten, and Mohnhoff eight. The newspapers were pleased with that, too. The lead writer of the
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
praised the idea the constitutional state had established by building bridges to repentant terrorists, bridges that were both golden and thorny.

I didn't go to the trial. Trials—like surgical procedures, holy masses, and sexual encounters—are events that I either participate in or stay away from. Not that I have anything against public trials, but I would feel like a voyeur.

After the trial was over I got a phone call from Nägelsbach. “These are the last evenings of summer where one can sit outside. Would you like to come over?”

We sat beneath the pear tree and made small talk. The Nägelsbachs were as little interested as I was about how and where we had spent our vacations—they in the mountains, I on a beach.

“How is Leonore Salger doing?” Frau Nägelsbach asked suddenly.

“I'm still not allowed to see her. But I called Eberlein the other day—he's been reinstated as director of the hospital now that the trial's over. He doesn't know when she'll be released, but he's certain that she will get well again and be able to complete her studies and lead a normal life.” I hesitated.

“Why don't you put your cards on the table, Herr Self?” Frau Nägelsbach said. “If you and my husband don't clear this matter up now, you never will.”

“But Reni, I think—” Nägelsbach began.

“That goes for you, too.”

He and I looked at each other uncomfortably. Needless to say, Frau Nägelsbach was right. Frau Nägelsbach was always right. But we both wondered whether it was already too late.

I gave myself a push. “So you knew about the condition Leo was in?”

“She was acting very strangely. During the interrogations there were moments when she seemed completely elsewhere, as if she didn't see or hear us. At times she'd talk up a storm, and then again you'd have to wring every single word out of her. Rawitz said right away that she was insane and that her lawyer would have to be an all-out idiot for her to get convicted. That's why he couldn't stop laughing when you were so set on freeing her. I and the others, however, weren't so sure she'd get off.” He hesitated. Now he, too, gave himself a push. “What's the deal with Peschkalek's material? Do you have it, or was it lost in the fire?”

“Self, the deceiver? I guess that would fit nicely. Lemke and Peschkalek deceived Leo and her friends, the police and the Federal and the Public Prosecutor's Office deceived the courts, perhaps the courts played along and did their bit of deceiving, and the deceived public heralds its deceivers. Is there even any poison gas in Viernheim?”

Nägelsbach looked at me angrily. Then he looked angrily at his wife. “You see, he has no intention of revealing anything— all he wants to do is to hurt me!” Then he looked angrily at me again. “I don't like it either when underhanded little tricks are being played, and I've been unhappy about the Käfertal terrorist case from the start, just as the others were. But we tried to deal with everything as best we could. You, on the other hand…first you wheedle your head out of the noose, and then that of Leonore Salger. Perhaps they couldn't have found her guilty. But even so, now that she has checked herself into the psychiatric hospital of her own volition, and will be free to leave of her own volition, she's in a better position than if a judge had had her committed, not to mention that she's been spared a trial. My compliments, Herr Self. And how does that make you feel? Would you say that the rules that apply to all of us don't apply to you? If so, your deception of yourself is far worse than your deception of others.” He read his wife's glance as a summons to pull in his horns. “No Reni, it's high time that all this was put on the table. He's just sitting here, a successful deceiver, and considers himself above the deception of the police. Are you claiming that the wrong people were convicted? And can you deny that you and Leonore Salger should have ended up in the dock, too, with you, at least, being slapped with a conviction?”

What could I say? That I had, after all, helped the police bring in Lemke and Peschkalek? That I knew that the rules that apply to everyone apply to me, but that I also have my own rules, too? That not all rules are the same, not all deception the same? That he was a policeman and I wasn't?

“I don't raise myself above you, Herr Nägelsbach. And I don't have Peschkalek's material. It was lost in the fire. All I have are the pictures I showed you copies of.”

He nodded, and for a long time gazed at the gnats that danced about the lamp. He refilled our glasses. “Poison gas? Well, I don't know if there's any poison gas in Viernheim. I wasn't informed, nor will I be. I hear, though, that they're out in full force at that depot. So if there is poison gas there, at least they seem to be dealing with it.”

The wind rustled in the leaves. It grew cooler. Voices echoed from the neighbor's garden, and smoke came wafting over from their barbecue. “How about a nice hot goulash soup, and a blanket over your knees?” Frau Nägelsbach said.

“Even if I belong in prison, I must say I'm much happier here with you under your pear tree.”

“You won't be able to dodge prison altogether, you know. My husband can't let you get away entirely unscathed. Come along.”

Frau Nägelsbach got up and led the way to her husband's workshop. I had no idea what was awaiting me, but I couldn't imagine that it would be anything bad. Nägelsbach and I walked in silence. The workshop was pitch black, and I grew a little uneasy. Then the fluorescent light above his workbench flickered on.

Nägelsbach had returned to architecture. On the workbench stood a nineteenth-century prison made of thousands upon thousands of matchsticks. There were a main building and cellblocks in the form of a star with five points, and around the compound ran a wall with a gate and watchtow-ers. There were gossamer wires along the top of the wall, and minute bars on the windows of the cells. Nägelsbach never populates his models with figures. But in this case he or his wife had made an exception: a tiny cardboard man.

“Is that me?”

“Yes, it is.”

I was standing alone in the prison yard in striped prison garb and cap. I was waving to myself.