The Weekend: A Novel

by Bernhard Schlink

  “And all that occurred to you when you thought about kissing for the first time in your life?”

  “It’s occurred to me since then. Some of it only here, because I want to know whether I, like Jörg …” He looked at her irritably, and she realized he was suddenly wondering whether she was laughing at him.

  He had no reason to wonder. “I’ve never thought about kissing. If I did, it wouldn’t lead me where it has led you. I think you’re making great leaps, from washing off shit to killing people, from doing good to doing evil, from imagination to reality. All people sometimes put themselves in imaginary situations that they would avoid like the plague in reality.”

  “Have you never wondered, yesterday and today, how Jörg was able to kill his victims and whether you could do the same thing too? I’ve realized that while I can’t see myself as a credible revolutionary killer, I can see myself as a cold-headed, coldhearted murderer.”

  Margarete shook her head and rested it against Henner’s chest. When she drew away from him and sank back down on the bed, he slipped off his shoes and lay down beside her. They went to sleep like that.

  Twenty-four

  Several of the others were asleep as well. Jörg and Dorle in their rooms, Christiane on the lounge chair on the terrace, Ilse in the prow of the boat. Marko was on his way into town, and the two married couples and Andreas were sitting in a pub garden by the lake; enjoying the lassitude of their heads and their limbs, they ordered another bottle of wine and looked at the glitter of the sun on the water. It was hot, in the house, on the terrace, on the stream and by the lake, and the heat made people sluggish and the sluggishness made them conciliatory. At least Christiane hoped that was what would happen to everyone when, just before she went to sleep, the good feeling settled in that everything would turn out all right.

  Ilse had gone to sleep because she couldn’t decide whether she should let Jan go to sleep. After the murder she was able to imagine both, a completely exhausted and an insanely elated Jan, one who goes to bed and doesn’t wake up until morning, and one who stays awake all night. When she woke up she decided to let him make a night of it.

  But then she couldn’t go on narrating Jan’s everyday life, not now. His car thefts and bank robberies, his escapes, his training with the Palestinians, his discussions with the others, his caches of money and arms, his encounters with women, his holidays—she could imagine all that, she would be able to write all that. She would have to do research: Did German terrorists, when stealing cars and robbing banks, follow a particular pattern? Where were the camps where they did their training? How long were they there for, what did they learn? When did they stop talking about political strategy and only discuss the details of their attacks? Where did they go on holiday? All those questions were answerable. The one question Ilse couldn’t answer was how to proceed with the murders. Taking hostages, having them around for one to two weeks, driving them from here to there, giving them food and drink, talking to them and maybe even joking with them—and then murdering them? How would you do that?

  For the first few days no one exchanged a word with him. He was bound hand and foot, not so that he couldn’t escape, but so that he couldn’t pull the tape from his mouth and shout. The walls were thin. By day he sat on a chair in the middle of the room, by night he lay on the floor. When they took him to the toilet, they untied one of his hands; when they gave him food and drink, one of them took the tape from his mouth, while another stood ready to knock him out if he tried to shout. None of them was ever alone with him, none was ever with him unmasked.

  In all that they did with him they urged him to hurry, when getting up and hobbling to the toilet, when doing his business, when hobbling back to the room, when eating and drinking. Although they urged him to chew and swallow quickly, he tried to talk to them in between. “Whatever you want to negotiate for me—I can help you,” or, “Let me write to the chancellor,” or, “Let me write to my wife, please!” or, “My legs hurt—could you please tie me in a different way?” or, “Please open the window.” They didn’t react. Even without them talking to him, he knew who they belonged to; he had seen the poster beneath which they had photographed him.

  They didn’t talk to him or with him. Not that they had reached an understanding not to; neither had they agreed to finish him off as soon as possible. They all had the same need to stay away from him. When Helmut, immediately after they had arrived at the apartment, cursed him as a fascist pig, a capitalist asshole, a money-fucker, the others found it embarrassing, and Maren put her arm around Helmut and led him out of the room.

  In the house in the forest, to which they switched after a few days, it was all really supposed to go on like that. But what they hadn’t known was that, apart from the kitchen and bathroom, the house had only one big room. “That isn’t a problem,” said Helmut. He fetched from the car the hood that they had pulled over his head during his abduction and when he was being transported, and pulled it over him again. But there was a problem. Even though he was bound, taped and wrapped up in a blanket, incapable of talking to them and seeing them, he was still there. He was all the more present, the more motionlessly he sat on his chair; when he stretched out his legs, craned his head and neck and slid back and forth, his presence was more bearable. Because they didn’t want to give away their voices and didn’t speak in front of him, it was silent in the big room, and they heard his heavy breathing. By day they could go into the kitchen or outside the house. At night they couldn’t escape his breathing.

  Then, between chewing and swallowing, he said, “I’m not getting enough air through my nose.” He said it again and again, but they paid no attention. Until he fell from the chair. Maren pulled the hood from his head and the tape from his mouth, and he breathed again. They were all unmasked, and Maren had had the presence of mind to pull the hood back over his head before he came around.

  From then on they stopped putting tape over his mouth, and sometimes he spoke. He discussed politics with them and, because they didn’t join in, he played their part as well. He told them about himself. He began with “You can plainly imagine, that I …” and then with “actually …” he came to the point. So he spoke of his time in the war, his business career, his contacts with politics. He never spoke for more than fifteen to twenty minutes. He was skillful; he wanted to plant some seeds within them, to sprout and force them to see him not as a stereotype for capital or the system, who could be killed, but as a human being. Then he started talking about his wife and his children. “I couldn’t have divorced my wife, however unhappy we were together. When she died unexpectedly, I thought that I too was dead to love and happiness. But then I met my current wife and fell in love again, first with her and then with our daughter. I didn’t even want to have children, and wasn’t even really pleased when she was born. But then … I fell in love with the little face that had turned toward me, with the chubby arms and legs, the cuddly belly. I fell in love with the baby the way you fall in love with a woman. Strange, isn’t it?”

  His voice was loud and resolute. When he spoke questioningly, hesitantly, thoughtfully, Jan said to himself, He’s playing a part for us. Even when his massive form slumped in the chair or his broad, fleshy face collapsed and assumed an anxious, tearful expression, Jan thought he was playacting. The man is fighting with the means that he has. If he is freed, will he give an account in a book or an interview of how he manipulated us? Or is he so put off by the idea of showing weakness that he won’t admit it, even though he did it to manipulate us?

  If he is freed—they had granted an extension of the ultimatum and photographed him again beneath the poster holding up a current newspaper. If the comrades weren’t released, they would have to shoot him. How could anyone take them seriously if they let him go?

  For the last few days of the ultimatum it rained. It wasn’t cold; they sat under the roof outside the house and looked into the rain. Scraps of fog hung in the trees on the meadow, and behind them the forest and mountains
disappeared among deep clouds. Even when the door was closed they could hear what he was saying. And similarly he heard the news coming from their transistor radio on the hour. When they drew lots for who was to shoot him, they were quiet; he wasn’t supposed to hear that.

  Jan tried to read. But he could no longer establish a connection between what he was reading and the way he was living. The lives he read about in novels were so alien, so false, that he could make nothing of them, and he couldn’t make anything of books about history or politics or society either; he had opted against learning and for the struggle. His inability to read caused him a small pang. It’s only a pang of leaving, he thought, one of the last; I’ve already put the others behind me.

  An hour before the ultimatum ran out the hostage said: “When the time is past, you will act quickly—can I write a letter to my wife?” Helmut sarcastically repeated, “a letter to my wife.” Maren shrugged. Jan got to his feet, fetched paper and pen, took off his hood and untied his hands. He watched him writing.

  “My dearest, we knew I would die before you. I’m sorry I have to go so soon, that I have to leave you alone so soon. I’m going richly endowed; for the past few days, when I’ve had so much time to think, my heart has been full of our years together. Yes, I would still have done lots of things with you, and I would have liked to watch our daughter …”

  He wrote slowly, and his handwriting was childishly clumsy. Of course, thought Jan, he hasn’t written himself for years—he’s dictated everything. He dictates and commands and manipulates and hassles. At the same time he has a young wife and a little child and a good dog, and when he comes home from his dirty tricks, the dog jumps up on him and his daughter cries, “Daddy, daddy!” and his wife takes him in her arms and says, “You look tired—have you had a bad day?” Jan took the gun from his belt, released the safety catch and fired.

  Ilse got to her feet and jumped from boat to land. No, it hadn’t been hard. The first murder had been hard, even though Jan had made it easy for himself by means of a kind of intoxication. With the first murder Jan had renounced the social contract according to which we don’t kill other people. What could hold him back after that?

  Twenty-five

  When Karin got out of the car in the driveway, a young man came up to her and asked, “Bishop?”

  She studied him kindly, as she had become accustomed to doing to everyone who approached her when she was a vicar. He was tall, he had a clear face, an open expression, and with his beige trousers, light blue shirt and dark blue jacket over his arm, he made a tidy, polite impression. “Yes?”

  “I’d like to ask you to put in a good word for me. You are a guest here, aren’t you, and I’d like to take a walk through the house and the park. I’m writing a paper on the little manor houses around here, and happened upon this one today. I sit in archives during the week, and on the weekend I drive across the country and look at what I’ve been reading about. Sometimes I don’t find it, but sometimes I come across something there isn’t anything to read about. I haven’t read anything about this house.”

  “I can introduce you to the owners.”

  “That would be kind of you. You won’t remember me. Nineteen years ago, in St. Matthäi, you confirmed my friend Frank Thorsten and shook my hand when I was leaving the church.”

  “No, I don’t remember you or your friend. You’re studying art history?” She walked up to the house and he walked along beside her.

  “I’ve nearly finished. Forgive me, I haven’t introduced myself. Gerd Schwarz.”

  They found Christiane in the kitchen with Ulrich’s daughter. Christiane was suspicious at first, then relieved. So this was the young man who’d been looking around in the neighborhood. She instructed Karin about the state of the meat roasting in the oven and walked through the house with Gerd Schwarz. Did she know who had built the house? It reminded him of the houses built by Karl Magnus Bauerfend in the 1760s and ’70s. The wide entrance hall, the stairs to the second floor made of wood rather than, as was customary at the time, stone, the two lost corner rooms that could be reached only through the drawing room—it all bore his signature. Had she checked whether the ceiling and the corners in the drawing room were painted under the white plaster? Bauerfeind had liked to have the corners painted with green foliage, and the ceiling with a light blue sky with delicate clouds. Gerd Schwarz was a good talker, and he was also a good listener. Christiane’s concerns about the mildew in the walls and the worms in the wood, about the roof, the pipes, government subsidies for repair—he had an attentive and sympathetic ear for everything. In the park she showed him the dip that she wanted to fill again with water from the stream. “Where the pond was, there was also a little island.” He sought and found in the middle of the dip a place that was slightly raised, and on it two stones that might once have supported a bench. He was so benignly modest about everything, and Christiane was soon so trusting that she suggested he go on looking around on his own. She had to go back into the kitchen.

  He wasn’t alone for long. Andreas, whom Christiane had told about Gerd Schwarz, found him and wasn’t taken in by his politeness or his modesty. “Have you got a mobile phone? Can I see it?” When Gerd Schwarz, baffled, gave him the phone, Andreas put it in his pocket. “You’ll get it back when you leave. We don’t want people making phone calls from here.”

  Gerd Schwarz asked with friendly irony, “Because of the radiation?”

  Andreas gave a noncommittally affirmative shrug, and remained by Gerd Schwarz’s side. When they had walked the length of the park and were on their way back to the house, Jörg came out of the drawing room onto the terrace. He stopped, blinked in the late sunlight and was unmistakably the person whose picture had appeared in every newspaper and on every television channel over the past few weeks. The fact that Gerd Schwarz didn’t seem to recognize him, and showed no astonishment, no curiosity, made Andreas highly suspicious. But Christiane overruled him. “Stay awhile!” Gerd Schwarz was happy to stay.

  If this new guest had wormed his way in, Andreas had no hope of silencing him with threats of legal action. So if a word was spoken out of place, they had to keep him there until they could be sure he wasn’t going to do any damage.

  “How was your outing?” Christiane asked the two couples and Andreas, and Ingeborg told her about the ruined monastery and the concert rehearsal that they had listened to, which had impressed them. “Then we sat by the lake and got a bit drunk and sleepy and happy, until those three started arguing. The leftist project—they got worked up about it, as if anyone today were still interested.”

  “No, my darling.” Ulrich spoke with deliberate patience. “We know no one’s still interested. We were arguing about the question of what killed off the leftist project.” He turned to Andreas. “You and I can agree. It was both: disenfranchisement in the East, terrorism in the West. Both finished off the leftist project. But what you’re saying, Karin … However lovely advances in feminism and commitment to the environment might be—the fact that we sort our rubbish and have a Christian Democrat woman chancellor has nothing to do with the leftist project.”

  Jörg had to control himself to let Ulrich finish. “Are you attacking me again? Was I one of the people who brought the leftist project down? The project you worked on in your dental labs, and you in your legal office? What kind of self-righteous …” He choked on the word assholes but couldn’t find anything else. “The leftist project means first and foremost that man can resist the power of the state, that he can break it rather than being broken by it. We have demonstrated that with our hunger strikes and our suicides and our …”

  “Murders. That the power of the state doesn’t accomplish anything any longer is apparent in all the globally operating businesses that pay no taxes, because where it should be paying taxes it’s making losses and where it’s making profits it doesn’t have to pay any taxes anyway. You don’t need murders or terrorists to do that.”

  Gerd Schwarz listened with interest. If he h
adn’t immediately recognized Jörg, wouldn’t he realize now who he was dealing with? Was it possible that he had simply heard nothing about the hype surrounding Jörg’s pardon? Then Andreas reflected that the new guest, if he had recognized Jörg by now, couldn’t possibly blurt it out. No grounds for suspicion, then? A harmless art historian who takes little interest in current events?

  Christiane looked helplessly around at the group. In a moment Jörg would once again ask Henner what it felt like to have betrayed him back then, and to be celebrating his release now. And here it came. “You didn’t answer my question. You put me in prison back then and now you’re celebrating my release from prison—how does that feel?”

  Henner was standing next to Margarete, not arm in arm, but hip to hip. He took a deep breath. “Yes, I thought you would use the cabin as a hiding place or a store. I once drove to the cabin and dropped off a letter there for you. Perhaps the police followed me—I wasn’t aware of it. Did you find the letter?”

  “A letter from you?” Jörg was confused. “No, I didn’t find a letter from you. But how could I have—the cops arrested me right away. Did you mention the letter when I was sentenced and you visited me?”

  “No idea. All I remember is that you didn’t talk to me, you just insulted me. As a ‘half-assed dilettante’—I remember that, because I particularly disliked the ‘half-assed’ bit. I never worked out what it was supposed to mean.”

  “Back then I wasn’t keen to talk to the person who’d just betrayed me. So you didn’t …” Jörg shook his head.

  “You sound disappointed. Would you rather your old friend the bourgeois dilettante had betrayed you?”