Authors: Bernhard Schlink
The Weekend (3 page)
“No electricity—we’ll have to go sit in my car if we want to hear the President. It said on the news a moment ago that he’s going to deliver his speech in Berlin Cathedral, and I’m willing to bet that he’ll announce Jörg’s pardon. Very nice, I’d have to say, very nice of him to do it, when Jörg is already out, when he’s been able to find a spot where the reporters and the cameras can’t find him.” Ulrich looked around. “Not a bad spot, not a bad spot. But he can’t hide out here forever. Do you know what his plans are? They take on people like him in the arts, working as stagehands or doing lighting or proofreading. I’d be happy for him to start in one of my dental labs, but that wouldn’t be chic enough for him. No offense, but because I gave up my studies to
become a dental technician, you guys have always despised me a bit.”
Again, Henner had to struggle to remember. When they’d gone to demonstrations Ulrich had always been there, and when there had been a butyric acid attack on a politician he had been the one who got hold of the harmless but foul-smelling liquid. Despised him? In those days they wouldn’t have despised a working Ulrich, they would have admired him. He told Ulrich that.
“Really, forget about it. I sometimes read your pieces—excellent stuff. And the papers you write for—
Stern, Der Spiegel, Süddeutsche Zeitung
—prime addresses. The intellectual side of things has never really been my scene; I mean, I follow it, but I stay out of it myself. But where business is concerned—I think with my dental labs I’m way ahead of you intellectuals. So everyone does his own thing, you, me and Jörg. That’s what I said to myself when I got Christiane’s call. Everyone does his own thing, I said to myself. Jörg screwed up, he paid for it and now he’s got to get his life back in order. It isn’t going to be easy for him. In the old days he didn’t know how to work and get on with people and live in peace with the world—why should he be able to do it now? I don’t reckon it’s something you learn in jail—what do you think?”
Henner didn’t get a chance to say that he didn’t know. Karin and her husband came out of the house onto the terrace. Henner was glad to see a familiar face, and glad that he immediately remembered her name. She had been a vicar, and had become the bishop of a little
diocese, and he had interviewed her a few years before about the church and politics, and in the past year he had appeared with her on a talk show. On both occasions he had been glad to note that it had been no coincidence that he had liked her at university. Her soundness pleased him, so he forgave her for the marked gentleness and solemnity in her voice and her speech. Vicars just become unctuous, as journalists become boastful. And even though you can never tell with vicars how much their friendliness is due to their job and how much it is based on genuine sympathy, Henner had a sense that she was pleased to see him again too. Her husband, Eberhard, the retired curator of a South German museum, was much older than his wife, and the loving attention with which he fetched a shawl and put it around her shoulders when it grew cooler, and the affection with which she thanked him, made Henner think that this love fulfilled the longing of a daughter and a father. The husband saw through the arrangement of people around the table before sitting down, placing his chair between Ulrich’s wife, Ingeborg, and daughter, Dorle, and managing to draw them both into conversation, even raising the occasional peal of merry laughter from that bored, provocative, sulky mouth.
As Margarete walked Andreas onto the terrace, she announced that Jörg and Christiane had called and would be arriving in half an hour. At six o’clock there would be an aperitif on the terrace, and at seven o’clock dinner in the drawing room—if anyone wanted to stretch their legs before evening, now was the time. She would summon them with the bell just before six.
While the others stayed where they were, Henner got up. Andreas wasn’t one of the old friends who had met at school or in the first few terms at university. He had been Jörg’s defense counsel until giving up his mandate because Jörg and the other defendants had wanted to exploit him politically. He became his lawyer again when Jörg requested his support in his bid for an early release a few years previously. Henner had met him before too. If the afternoon’s choreography was designed to allow the guests to meet before everything started revolving around Jörg, Henner could take his leave. And besides, he didn’t know how he would be able to bear so many people for so many hours in such a small space.
Once again he took a wide arc around the fields. He walked slowly, in a gangly fashion, taking long strides and swinging his arms. He hadn’t phoned his mother from New York—he hadn’t even phoned her since he’d got back, and he felt guilty even though he knew that she wouldn’t remember when he had phoned her last. He hated the ritual of phone calls in which his mother repeatedly demanded that he speak up, before finally giving up and putting down the receiver, so that in the end nothing had been said. He hated the ritual of the visits that his mother looked forward to, but which always disappointed her because she sensed his distance. But without that distance he couldn’t have borne her and her illnesses, laments and accusations. His hand played with the phone in his jacket pocket, snapped it open and shut, open and shut. No, he wouldn’t call until Sunday.
Just before six he came back to the house, from the side this time, across an orchard, past a greenhouse with a big woodpile beneath a low roof. At the side, too, there was an oak tree, small and bent after being struck by lightning, and a door to the house. As he stood under the tree and looked into the evening, Margarete opened the door, wiped her hands on her apron, leaned against the door frame and looked into the evening, as he was doing. A bell hung beside the door; in a moment Margarete would step away from the door frame, grab the short bell pull with her powerful, bare arms and ring the bell. Henner didn’t know she’d noticed him until she asked him, just loudly enough for him to hear her across the distance between them, and without turning around to him: “Do you hear the blackbirds’ duet?” He hadn’t paid any attention; now he heard it. The evening, the blackbirds, Margarete in the doorway—Henner didn’t know why, but he was close to tears.
Ilse didn’t hear the bell. She was sitting in her room, on the other side of the house, writing. The room was furnished with a camp bed, chair and table; on the table there were a jug and basin, a candle, a box of matches and a bunch of tulips. It was a corner room; from one window Ilse could look out onto the oak and behind it a barn, from the other onto the gate.
The day after the funeral two lawyers came from Jan’s office to Ulla’s house. It was afternoon; the children were waiting for dinner and running noisily through the house. The older lawyer introduced himself as the senior partner of the office, the younger as the colleague with whom Jan had worked particularly closely. Ulla recognized them both; they had paid their respects to her the previous day, and the younger man had once come to pick up Jan
.
“We spoke on the phone to the police in France. They didn’t find the files your husband had just been working on in the car. Would you forgive us for asking whether the files are here?”
“I’ll have a look this evening.”
But that wasn’t enough for the two men. It was a matter of urgency, said the younger man, but she mustn’t go to any trouble, he knew the way, and he
slipped past her and up the stairs. The older man asked her to bear with them and apologized and followed the younger man into Jan’s study. Ulla wanted to go with them, but the twins were arguing, and the water was boiling. She forgot the lawyers. When she was sitting with the children at the dinner table, they emerged from Jan’s study. Their arms were full of files, but no, they hadn’t found the files for which they had come
.
The phone call came the same evening. Ulla had put the children to bed and was sitting at the kitchen table, too exhausted to feel pain or grief. She just wanted to lie down and go to sleep, and not wake up again in a new normality until several weeks or months had passed. But she didn’t have the strength to get up, climb the stairs to the bedroom and go to bed. And she answered the telephone only because it was mounted on the wall in such a way that she could pick up the receiver without getting to her feet. “Hello?”
No one answered. Then she heard the caller breathing, and it was his breath. She knew it very well, and she loved it, loved the pauses in their telephone conversations, when he was wordlessly close to her with his breath. “Jan,” she said. “Jan, say something—where are you, what’s going on?” But he didn’t speak, and when after anxious waiting she said, “Jan!” again, he hung up
.
She sat there as if anesthetized. She was sure she hadn’t been mistaken. She was sure that she must have been mistaken. She had seen Jan lying in the coffin. Jan
.
Two days later she received the autopsy report in the mail. Name, sex, date and place of birth, body measurements and physical features—she had problems with the French text only when the incisions and results were described. She fetched the dictionary and went to work, even though the account of each incision caused her pain. When she was finished, she read the whole text all the way through again. Only now did she think of the sweatshirt and jeans in which Jan had lain on the table in front of the doctor. He had driven to the office in his suit that day. And, the police had written in their report, he had been found in his suit in the car
.
She went to their shared wardrobe. She knew his clothes, even his jeans, his T-shirts and sweatshirts. Nothing was missing—as if it mattered. She called the undertakers. Somewhat surprised, they told her that her husband, when he was brought back from France, had been wearing a crumpled suit. She had been asked if she wanted to have it—didn’t she remember?
The same evening, when the children were asleep, Ulla rang Ilse. She couldn’t bear being on her own anymore. Ilse came dutifully. She and Ulla were not close friends. But if Ulla was lonely and desperate enough to seek comfort from her, then Ilse would give what she could
.
Ulla didn’t want comfort. She had put a suit of armor around her pain. She wanted to fight. She was sure that an ugly game was being played, and she wasn’t prepared to take it. Who was behind it? What
had they done with Jan? Had they abducted him? Abducted and murdered him?
Ilse set down her notepad and pen and looked out of the window. She and Ulla had been in a frenzied state back then. All the things they had tried! The search for the client with whom Jan had been most involved over the previous weeks, and about whom he had occasionally dropped dark hints. The shadowing of her by the office, which refused to let go because of the files. The trip to Normandy. No hypothesis was too absurd, no speculation too abstruse. Until after a year the giddiness had run out and with it their friendship. Ulla was insulted because Ilse didn’t agree with her that Jan had, as the result of some foul play by his office or a client, been driven to suicide or abducted and murdered, but insisted that he had only faked his death and was now living a new life. They still met, still called each other, but the intervals between meeting and calling grew longer, and in the end each was relieved that the other stopped.
Ilse understood why Ulla had fallen into that frenzy. It enabled her to sail swiftly across the dark water of grief; once the frenzy was past, she had got over Jan’s death. But why had she too been caught up in the frenzy? Was it a longing for common ground that found fulfillment in her dealings with Ulla? But if that was the case why didn’t she also share Ulla’s conviction that it had been suicide, or an abduction-and-murder plot? Was it a desire for adventure? Was it megalomania? There had been moments back then when she really
thought she was on the trail of something big. Whatever it was that had drawn her into that frenzy—where was it? Was there something within her that she had since suppressed? Something that had really yearned to be experienced, and perhaps still wished to be?
When Ilse finally heard the repeated ringing of the bell, it was seven o’clock and high time. There was no mirror in the room; Ilse opened the window and sought her image in the window. She resisted the temptation to adjust her hair or her face; her reflection was too vague and in any case she wasn’t good with comb, mascara and lipstick. But she didn’t avert her eyes from herself. She felt sorry for the woman that was her, always too inhibited to be entirely present wherever she happened to be. Except at home—she was homesick, even though she was a little ashamed of the meagerness of her domestic happiness with cats and books. She smiled ruefully at herself. The evening air was cool, she breathed deeply in and out. She summoned all her strength and went downstairs to join the others.
Christiane had made a seating plan, and in front of each plate stood a little card with a name and a picture—a picture from the old days. The pictures were handed around and marveled at. “Look!”—“The beard!”—“The hair!”—“Did I look like that back then?”—“But you’ve changed too!”—“Where did you get the pictures?”
Ilse had not yet greeted anyone apart from Margarete and Henner, and did so now. Jörg seemed just as awkward as she felt herself. When he didn’t return her hug, she thought at first that it was her fault. Then she told herself that in prison he had missed developments in etiquette and hadn’t learned to hug by way of greeting.
His place was on one of the long sides of the table between Christiane and Margarete. Opposite him sat Karin, flanked by Andreas and Ulrich. Next to Andreas and Margarete, Ulrich’s wife and Karin’s husband sat facing each other; next to Ulrich and Christiane were Ilse and Henner. On one of the short sides Ulrich’s daughter sat between Ilse and Henner, on the other a place was set for Marko Hahn, who could only come later. Karin tapped the glass with her fork and said, “Let us pray,” waited until they had all got over their amazement and were quiet, and prayed. “Lord, stay with us, for evening is on its way and the day has declined.”