The Weekend: A Novel

by Bernhard Schlink

  “Don’t you remember how often you used to talk about your longing for nature? For forests and meadows, the young greenery in spring and the colors in autumn, the smell of freshly mown grass and rotting leaves? And your longing for the sea—sometimes you said that after your release you would walk along the beach and look at the waves until you had the evenness of the waves inside you. And sometimes you dreamed of a big orchard, under which you would lie on a lawn chair in the spring, wrapped in a blanket, protected against the cold—don’t let them take that dream away!”

  With Marko at the table, Jörg’s longing and dreams were embarrassing to him. “I was desperate at the time, Christiane. I see more clearly now that I have a twofold responsibility, not just to me, but to those who believe in me. But the storm has passed, and I would like to walk another little way with you, through the forest and across the meadow.” He smiled. “Shall we?”

  And again Christiane was immediately reconciled. She had been oversensitive. Jörg had not revealed to Marko his longing for nature, which he had shared with her. She got to her feet before Jörg did so, and when he too was standing, she took his arm and clung to him like a lover.

  “Do we need a flashlight?”

  “No, I know all the paths.”

  “I’m sure you’ll all be in bed when we get back. Empty the bottle, and sleep well.” Jörg waved with his left hand and put his right around Christiane’s waist. They opened both wings of the door to the garden, stepped onto the terrace and were swallowed by the night.

  “Well, then.” Marko filled Ilse’s glass and his own from what was left in the bottle. “Want one?” He offered her a cigarette.

  “No thanks.”

  Marko took his time lighting his cigarette. “You looked at me all evening as if you were wondering whether I really believed what I said. Or whether I was in my right mind. Believe me, I’m in my right mind, and I believe what I say. On the other hand I wonder whether you and your kind understand what’s happening to the world. You probably think September Eleventh was just some crazy Muslim affair. No, without September Eleventh none of the good things that have happened over the past few years would have happened. The new attentiveness to the Palestinians, still the key to peace in the Middle East, and to the Muslims, still a quarter of the world’s population, the new sensitivity to the threats in the world, from the economic to the ecological, the realization that exploitation has a price that is always rising—sometimes the world needs a shock to come to its senses. Like people—after having his first heart attack, my father is at last living as sensibly as he should always have lived. With some people it takes two or three.”

  “Some die of heart attacks.”

  Marko stubbed out his half-smoked cigarette, drained his glass and got to his feet. “Ah, Ilse—that’s your name, Ilse?—if anyone dies of a heart attack today, it’s their own fault. Sleep well.”

  Eleven

  In her room Ilse sat in the dark for a while before lighting the candle and opening her notebook.

  “He’s the best”—she couldn’t get Jörg’s remark about Jan out of her head. Did he mean a different Jan? If he meant their mutual friend, “he’s the best” sat ill with Jörg’s words at the funeral, and would have been peculiar enough. “He’s the best” didn’t fit at all. Unless their mutual friend Jan really hadn’t killed himself back then, but escaped his old life to start a new one, a life as a terrorist, which he was still living today. Then Jörg’s contempt at the funeral had been only playacting and his admiration today was genuine. And then Jan had earned the admiration: a terrorist who hadn’t allowed himself to be caught.

  Ilse remembered all her research in those days and imagined how Jan had deceived them all. He must have bribed or blackmailed the undertakers. The undertakers had picked him up in France, brought him to Germany, put him in a coffin and buried him. He was also able to get hold of the other corpse, which the French pathologist had found on the table, the one on which he had performed the autopsy. That the corpse had been presented to him in sweatshirt and jeans rather than a suit was a glitch—perhaps Jan had forgotten to bring a second suit. Someone else must have helped Jan: a doctor, or a nurse.

  The French police had received an anonymous phone call back then. It was six o’clock, after a cold night, the fresh morning of a sunny spring day. A policeman rode his motorbike to the rocky coast and found the car parked in the given place. A 2CV—out of a mixture of nostalgia and snobbery Jan refused himself a Mercedes like the ones driven by his friends at his firm. The engine had used up all the gas and hadn’t been running for a while, the windows were clear, and the policeman could clearly see Jan, leaning back and against the window, eyes and mouth open, hands in his lap. The policeman could also see what had happened; a tube led from the exhaust pipe to the passenger side and through the carefully sealed window into the car. He opened the door, and Jan slipped from the seat, out of the car and onto the ground. He looked as dead as only a dead person could look, and felt like one too: cold skin, greenish color, no breath. The policeman informed headquarters and called an ambulance and took photographs until it arrived: the car, the tube on the exhaust pipe, the tube at the window, the rock on the accelerator, Jan on the ground beside the car, Jan’s face from above and from the front and from the side.

  Ilse and Ulla had looked at them again and again. And they had, when they were in Normandy, heard the story from the policeman. His name was Jacques Beaume, he had three children, he was very sympathetic and willing to tell the story in all its details and patiently answer questions. Wasn’t it suspicious that the caller had remained anonymous? No, it was Sunday, and the caller didn’t want to waste his time as a witness. Why had a second ambulance come after the first? The emergency services are all switched to the police frequency, and sometimes one snatched another’s mission away. Jacques Beaume sat with Ilse and Ulla, first at the police station and then in the café, until they could imagine everything.

  Jan leans against the car and waits until the tank is empty. The night is dark. The clouds shroud moon and stars and reflect no light—there is no town for miles around. In the distance Jan makes out the light of a lighthouse, no brighter than a bright star, with a little beam of light regularly flashing and vanishing.

  A vicar’s son, interested in theology as a schoolboy and philosophy as a student, dedicated throughout his life to doing what is right—Jan’s thoughts pass from the starry sky that he can’t see, to the moral law that he can’t feel, to the step that he will take: leaving wife and children. And as in the past weeks when he thought about it, he again consoles himself with the thought that they will never learn about what he is doing. That he will be dead to them. That anyone who is dead can only be mourned. That anyone who kills himself cannot be reproached, only pitied. That he gives those left behind not the pain of abandonment but the pain of having someone torn from them, a pain caused not by people but by death, not a pain that we resist but one that we have learned to accept. And he goes on thinking about his new life and the power he will have in it, the power of the phantom whose identity no one knows and whose trail leads nowhere. His deeds can be all the bolder. He will become part of the story, first as someone anonymous, and later perhaps with his true identity when he reveals who has forced the system to its knees and wrested justice from it. From the murky business whose mandate his firm imposed upon him, and whose documents he destroyed, he has already leeched a million.

  Jan shivers, even though the softly ticking, gently vibrating car gives off warmth. He knows that he will soon feel much colder.

  The engine coughs and dies. But the night isn’t quiet. The sea’s waves come rushing in, break crashing against the cliffs and, where they take sand and gravel with them, run hissing back to the sea. Sometimes a gull cries. Jan looks at his watch. It’s three o’clock; the others will be here any minute. Or what if only one comes?

  Then Jan hears the car. He hears it getting louder as it drives over the brow of a hill, then he sometim
es sees the headlights, switched to parking, and then it’s quieter, when it goes into a dip. Where the path leads off the country road and toward the cliffs, it stops. Jan hears a car door slam. So only one of them has come.

  The French comrades have sent a woman. She’s friendly, matter-of-fact, succinct. “You know if you’re unlucky you’ll die?”

  “Yes.” Jan won’t die. He knows it.

  “You have to show me the vein in your arm.”

  Jan takes off his jacket and lays it on the car roof, then unbuttons his shirtsleeve and pushes it up. With an encouraging gesture she gives him a flashlight. He grits his teeth and catches her in the beam. She takes out a syringe. “Valium first.” He looks away as she pricks his vein. Even before she’s finished, he looks. She doesn’t take very long; the syringe is unusually large. Then the woman is finished and presses cotton wool to the prick. “Now the Cardiogreen.” No one had mentioned that. But the second injection happens quickly.

  Jan buttons up his sleeve, puts on his jacket and sits down in the car. She runs the beam of the flashlight across the ground and makes sure that no cotton wool, none of the packaging of the syringe or the ampoule has fallen. She stands in the open door and tells him what he is to do next. “In fifteen minutes you’ll be asleep. At six you will be so cold, your breathing so shallow, that the police, if they aren’t very accurate, will think you’re dead. In fact you’ll hardly be breathing. Why should the police be very precise? They’ll call the ambulance.” She laughs. “The Cardiogreen was my idea. It makes really lovely corpses.” She lifts his increasingly heavy eyelids, shines the flashlight into his eyes and strokes his cheek. “At half past six, quarter to seven, our ambulance will collect you. Bonne chance!” She closes the door and goes.

  Suddenly he is frightened. Suddenly something that is only supposed to look like death feels like real death. His life is ending, and what comes after is no longer his life, but someone else’s. If it comes—Jan no longer knows that he isn’t going to die. You can’t play with death. It won’t be joked with. It …

  Full of the terror of death, Jan loses consciousness.

  Ilse snapped her notebook shut. She would have liked to drink one more glass of red wine, but she was afraid of the silent, dark house and didn’t dare go to the kitchen. When she was lying in bed she was afraid of going to sleep, as if by sleeping she were cavorting on the face of death. Or do we actually do that every time we go to sleep? And what about taking one’s leave? When we die for others and at the same time want to go on living?

  Then she too had fallen asleep.

  Twelve

  Ilse should not have been afraid of the silent, dark house. In the kitchen, Christiane sat at the table by the light of a candle, drank one last glass of red wine and one more and wondered how to hold the new day together better than the old one. Nothing had worked as she had planned. Of course Jörg should find the recognition that he had lacked for so long. But not from Marko—Christiane had always kept well away from the supporter scene, and thwarted their contact with Jörg wherever possible. Jörg was to find recognition among his old friends first of all, then through lectures, interviews, talk-show appearances and finally with an autobiography with a renowned publishing house. He had what it took, she knew he did, and she also knew that the public likes people who have been through hell and have thought about it and learned from it. If he relied on Marko, he would forfeit the chance of a lifetime. And why wasn’t he interested in Margarete, who, with her warmth and cheerfulness, was exactly what he needed? Since meeting Margarete nine years before, she knew that she was the right one for Jörg. Margarete had also heard a lot about Jörg over the course of the years and even shown an interest in visiting him in jail. However, Christiane had never taken her to see the imprisoned Jörg; she had wanted to save her up for the free one. Now Jörg was free and it could finally get going. But nothing had got going. And the nightshirt—it was supposed to make Jörg happy, and instead it had made him ridiculous. He must hate her for it.

  How defenseless we are on sleepless nights! Exposed to the stupid thoughts that our waking mind would immediately resolve, the hopelessness defeated by small successes with clothes washing, car parking or the consoling of friends, the sadness from which we wrest victories in the exhaustion of playing tennis, running, or lifting weights. On sleepless nights we turn on the television or reach for a book, just so that, even though we might not fall asleep, our eyes close over the pictures and pages, and we fall victim once again to stupid thoughts, to hopelessness and sadness. Christiane didn’t even have a television or a book. She had red wine, which didn’t help. How was she to get a better grip on the day to come? She had no idea.

  But she had to do it. If she didn’t help Jörg better through the new day, how could she hope to bring him into a new and better life? He who had never had a life, a real life with work and colleagues and a regular address, but was always setting off again, always wanting to be somewhere different, wanting to do something different from wherever he happened to be and whatever he happened to be doing. She had to teach him to live.

  She shouldn’t have encouraged him to keep leaving back then. It had made her proud how skillfully her little brother dreamed himself into other times and worlds and how vividly he talked of them. She had been moved by the nobility of the deeds he performed in his fantasy, with Falk von Stauf at the relief of Marienburg, with T. E. Lawrence at the liberation of the Arabs, with Rosa Parks in the fight against racial segregation. Didn’t that show that he was a good boy? Then his fantasy turned to the present and the future and turned from “Oh, if only I had” into “Oh, if only I could” and “I should.” And she had given him her approval in that as well. That he couldn’t accept the badness of the world, that he wanted to fight for justice, confront the oppressors and exploiters and help the hurt and the humiliated—how could she not have given him her approval for that? But she shouldn’t have done it. She certainly shouldn’t have let him realize how she yearned to see him as the hero of great deeds.

  She knew that mothers could destroy their sons with their expectations. But she wasn’t Jörg’s mother, she certainly wasn’t one of those mothers who didn’t have a life of their own, who expected nothing of themselves and had to expect everything of their son, and she loved Jörg anyway, whether he performed great deeds or not. No, she couldn’t have harmed Jörg with her expectations. Or could she?

  Or had she had too much of a life of her own? Should she have abandoned her medical studies, which she had begun when Jörg was going through puberty? Later, when he drifted out of his studies, she had been working as a specialist and had once again had only a little time for him. For a long time she didn’t notice what was coming. By the time she did, it was too late.

  She shook her head. Enough of the past. How can I give Jörg a future? The best offer he had received was a traineeship in a publishing house. Well-paid traineeship—she didn’t like that. Traineeships were hard to come by, and trainees worked for little money. The publisher only wanted to satisfy his romantic longing for revolution and terrorism, adorn himself with Jörg whatever the cost might be, but he wasn’t really interested in Jörg’s work. Did Henner know of anything for Jörg on a newspaper? Karin in the church? Ulrich in his labs? But Jörg wouldn’t put on white overalls and cast crowns. He wouldn’t have to either, if he played his cards right on his first talk-show appearance. He needed a coach. But would he listen to a coach?

  She was anxious about the next few weeks. What would he do when she was at work? Not risk going out among people and into the street and stay at home? Or, avid for life and the world, commit one idiocy after another? She had employed their neighbors’ son to familiarize Jörg with the computer and the Internet. In the guest room, Jörg’s room, she had put the manuscripts and books from over thirty years before, when he was working on his master’s degree. He hadn’t wanted to go on working on it in jail. Maybe now that he was free? But she didn’t believe that. In her anxiety she saw him in one
of those shiny synthetic tracksuits, shambling through the streets that the unemployed roamed with dogs and cigarettes and beer cans, aimless, goalless, spiritless.

  She knew she should be in bed. How could she do proper justice to the new day if she was tired and hung over? She got up and looked around. She stacked up the dirty crockery beside the sink; the sticky pots and pans stood on the stove. Christiane sighed, shocked by the extent of the task and relieved because, unlike the Jörg task, it was manageable. She lit more candles, put on water, filled the basin partway with cold water, squirted in dishwashing liquid, scraped the last bits of sausage and lettuce leaves off the plates and set one after the other into the sink. When the water was boiling, she poured it in and put more on to boil. Glasses, plates, bowls, cutlery, then pots and pans—it was no trouble, her head grew clearer and her heart calmer.

  Then she felt she was being watched, and looked up. Henner was leaning in the doorway, T-shirt over his jeans and hands in his back pockets.

  Thirteen

  “How long have you been watching me?” She bent again over the pan, which refused to be cleaned.

  “For two pans.”

  She nodded and went on rinsing. He stayed where he was and went on watching her. She wondered how she could endure his gaze. Did he recognize in her the woman he had liked back then? How did he recognize her, admiringly or pityingly, or with horror?

  “The way you push your hair back behind your ear with your little finger sticking out when you’re working—you used to do it exactly like that back then. And the way you turn from the hip where other people take a little step to the left or to the right. And the way you ask questions, blunt and serious and without any kind of flattery.” So that I immediately start feeling guilty. No, thought Henner, you haven’t changed. And the way I react to you hasn’t changed either.