The Weekend: A Novel

by Bernhard Schlink

  Jörg had frozen under his son’s contempt. He looked at him with eyes wide and mouth half open, unable to think, unable to speak.

  “You are as incapable of truth and grief as the Nazis were. You’re not one jot better—not when you murdered people who had done nothing to you, and not later on when you failed to understand what you had done. You got worked up about your parents’ generation, the generation of murderers, but you turned out exactly the same. You could have known what it meant to be the child of murderers, and you became a murderer-father, my murderer-father. The way you look and speak, you don’t feel even slightly sorry about what you’ve done. You’re only sorry that things went wrong and you were caught and put in jail. You don’t feel sorry for anyone else, you just feel sorry for yourself.”

  Jörg looked stupid as he sat there frozen. As if he didn’t understand what was being said to him, only that it was terrible. It wanted to smash all his explanations and justifications, it wanted to destroy him. And he couldn’t argue with his accuser. He saw no common ground on which he could meet him, on which he could defeat him. He could only hope that the terrible storm would pass. But he feared this was a false hope. That this storm would stay and only wear itself out when everything was destroyed. So he had to try to protect and defend himself. Somehow. “I don’t have to listen to that. I’ve paid for everything.”

  “You’re right there. You don’t have to listen to anything I say. You’ve never listened to anything I’ve said. You can get up and escape to your room or into the park, and I won’t come running after you. But don’t tell me you’ve paid for everything. Not even twenty-four years for four murders? Is one life worth just six years? You haven’t paid for what you did—you’ve forgiven yourself for it. Presumably even before you did it. But only the others can forgive you. And they don’t.”

  It’s appalling, Henner thought. The son sitting in judgment over his father. The son in the right and the father in the wrong. The son escaping into a rant, the father escaping into defiance. The son who won’t admit his pain, the father who won’t admit his helplessness. How is that supposed to work? What are they both supposed to do? What are we supposed to do? Karin was sitting opposite him, and he could see that she too was appalled by what was happening in front of her, and that she didn’t know what was to be done either. Then she tried anyway. “I can imagine …”

  “No, you can’t imagine anything. Not what it’s like when your mother or father is murdered, and not when your father is a murderer. And my father can’t imagine it either. He doesn’t want to imagine it. Do you think he wrote to us when my mother killed herself? Or congratulated me when I graduated from high school? Or started my studies? Do you think I’ve ever had a letter from my father?”

  “I’m sorry. Your father simply didn’t manage to write to you. He …”

  “But I wrote to him.” Jörg was worked up now. “I sent him letters and cards from prison, but they all came back, and then I gave up. I wrote to him.”

  “What’s supposed to have been in them?”

  “How should I know? It’s twenty years ago. I think I told you why I wasn’t living with you, but in jail. I wrote about the oppression in the world and the struggle that we were waging, and the sacrifices we had to make. I … What should I have written to you?”

  Ferdinand looked contemptuously at Jörg again. “I don’t believe a word of it. Whatever doesn’t fit with your memories you forget, and what’s missing from your memories you invent. Probably your role in the murder of the president was so repellent that you can’t bear the memory. And you can’t bear the fact that your child doesn’t interest you either—or else your friends find it so wretched that you have to make up something for them. You’re …” Ferdinand broke off; he didn’t want to say what his father was. Didn’t want to say he was a pig? Didn’t want to talk about other people as his father had talked? He went on: “You murdered Mother too. Not with your own hands. But you did murder her. When she fell in love with you and you made me … She laid down her heart and her life—she was like that, everyone who knew her says as much—and don’t try to tell me you didn’t know.” He fought back tears. But he wouldn’t show any weakness to his father and his friends. His voice didn’t break. “But you’ll probably tell me just that. You didn’t know or don’t remember what you knew. You’ve forgotten it. Or are you trying to tell me she couldn’t have been happy with you? That you prevented even worse things by leaving her rather than staying with her?”

  Then he couldn’t stand it anymore; he got up and walked into the darkness of the park. After a moment’s hesitation Karin got to her feet.

  “Don’t,” said Dorle, who got up as well and went after him.

  If not the famous terrorist, then at least his son, Henner thought, and was ashamed of himself. Perhaps there was more to the girl than he had guessed. He was uncomfortable about the son. The longer he had spent listening to him, the more his relentlessness reminded him of Jörg’s implacability back then, and he thought about how misery passes itself on and on.

  Twenty-nine

  As she took her first steps into the park, the light from the candles in the drawing room still shone for Dorle. Then it was completely dark. She walked slowly on, groping to find where the thicket of branches and leaves began and where the path ran, and tried to listen for Ferdinand’s footsteps. Then branches close in front of her cracked and her groping hands found Ferdinand. He hadn’t got far in the dark.

  “Let’s go to the bench by the stream,” she whispered and took his hand. “To the end of the path and then right.” He said nothing, but let her take his hand. She guided him, and again and again it was fine for a few footsteps and then he stumbled or she did, and she held him or he her, then they stopped, close together, to get their bearings. Their eyes became accustomed to the dark, and when they could no longer hear the group on the terrace, their ears picked up the sounds of the forest, the song of a bird, the call of the screech owl, the rustle of the wind in the leaves. “That’s a nightingale,” Dorle whispered to Ferdinand when the bird started singing again.

  Then they were by the stream and by the bench. It was lighter here; they saw the water flowing, the trees ending and the field beginning. A light burned in the village behind the fields. They looked at each other. “My name’s Dorle,” she said. “What’s yours?”

  “Ferdinand.” They sat down.

  “Would you rather be alone?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Because you don’t know me? I’m the daughter of an old friend of your father’s, a friend from before he was a terrorist. I don’t think they were close friends; they all just belonged to the same group. My father parted with politics early on, and became a businessman, dental laboratories, and I’m the spoiled only daughter. Last night I tried to seduce your father, but he didn’t want to, and this afternoon he cried, and I comforted him. I’m like that, I get involved in things that have nothing to do with me, and if people let me I do them good. With your father I said to myself that his pardon closed the chapter of terrorism and prison and he had to learn to live again. I didn’t know his wife had committed suicide or that you existed.”

  “They weren’t married. She hoped he would marry her, all the more when I was born. But she acted as if it didn’t matter and as if she were above bourgeois affectation. Until he left her. And they were never really together. He met her only a few times, because she was pretty and threw herself at him. Maybe I should tell myself that times were like that then, and forgive him for dumping her and me. But I can’t do it.” He laughed bitterly. “Even the President of the Republic hasn’t been able to pardon him for that. Mother didn’t pardon him, and I’m not going to either. And as for Mother’s suicide …”

  “But the suicide happened years after he left her. How old were you?”

  “I was six, in my first year at school. After Father left her, Mother never found peace. After the woman was murdered she tried to contact the parents, and after the pol
iceman was killed she tried to contact his widow, but the parents and the widow saw her only as the murderer’s wife. Children I didn’t know mocked me and beat me up in the schoolyard, and although I didn’t tell Mother, she found out and started blaming everybody. She also blamed herself: because I had grown up without a father figure, because I didn’t do any sport, no football or handball or basketball, because her parents were worried about her and about me. Well, OK, after Mother’s death they really did have to worry about me and they took a lot of trouble, and I’m really grateful to them. But I’d rather have grown up with Mother, and most of all with Father and Mother.”

  “Is your whole life going to revolve around that? I know a boy who’s almost paralyzed by the fact that his father is a great scientist and Nobel Prize winner. There are children of famous artists or politicians who wither away in their parents’ shadow. I know gays who can do nothing with their lives because they constantly have to find their identities as gays.” She didn’t know if he understood what she was trying to say to him, but she didn’t want to ask him. “Was your father as you had imagined him?”

  He shrugged. “I thought he’d be stronger, more resolute, not so pitiful. What did you think of him?”

  “You thought he was pitiful?”

  “Either or. Either he stands by what he did and says it was correct and still is, or else he finds it wrong now and regrets it. I could cope with either, but not with his pathetic nonsense about having forgotten everything and paid for everything.”

  Dorle didn’t know where to go next. The obvious thing to say was that your parents, when you grow up, are always a disappointment. Her father wasn’t the hero that she had seen him as when she was a little girl either. But he was all right. And disappointed? No, she wasn’t disappointed in him. Besides, she saw that Ferdinand wouldn’t find it any easier to free himself of his father if he stood more strongly by his actions or if he regretted them. She sensed that in order to be free of him, he would have to make his peace with him. But how? “Do you love your grandparents?”

  “I think I do. They were older, and not particularly warm—they were rather reticent. But they sent me to a good school and supported me in everything I wanted to do, piano, languages, traveling. I can’t complain.”

  Dorle tried again. “Can you understand your father? I mean, can you try? Can you talk to him more, and to your aunt and to his friends? You find him pitiful—perhaps he himself wishes he were stronger, and it’s worth finding out why he isn’t.”

  He snorted contemptuously.

  She looked at him and waited. He didn’t say anything else. She took that as a good sign. “If you try, you might understand the old man who hasn’t got his life in order and doesn’t know how to cope with it. Murders, kidnappings and bank robberies, escape, prison, revolution came to nothing—what’s the point of such a shitty life? But one’s own life must have some kind of point.” She looked at him again. He showed her his profile, with the lips pressed together and the cheek muscles working, and she thought he looked delightfully masculine. He bent down, picked up a little piece of wood from the ground and started whittling it with his thumbnail. She had the feeling he liked listening to her and wanted her to go on talking. But what else was she supposed to say? “Do you still live with your grandparents?”

  He took time with his answer. “Sometimes on the holidays. During term time I’m in Zurich.” He went on carving. “I nearly cried before. I can’t remember the last time I did that, it’s so long ago. After Mother’s death? I’d rather harm myself than cry in front of him. It wasn’t grief, but rage—I didn’t know it could hurt just as much as pain. He’s sitting opposite me, his belly hanging over his trousers, his puny arms sticking out of his shirt, his face collapsed, his eyes vague and unsteady, and I’m thinking, What kinds of things has this pipsqueak done? and the rage ties a knot in my chest. You think I should understand him. I often thought I should shoot him.” He stood up and rested his arms on the back of the bench. “Was it right or wrong to come here?”

  “Right.”

  He shrugged.

  “It’s getting chilly,” she said and snuggled up against him.

  He didn’t pull away, but that was all. She remembered Jörg, when she hugged him, sitting stiffly on the chair, and laughed quietly. Like father, like son. But then Ferdinand put his arm around her after all.

  Thirty

  After Ferdinand and Dorle had left the table, Jörg stayed sitting only long enough to summon the strength to get to his feet, get up and leave. He had the feeling he had to explain himself to the others, and he started a few times but didn’t know what to say. The others were dumbstruck too. They looked into the candlelight and into the darkness of the park, and when their eyes met, they smiled with embarrassment. “Good night” was all that Jörg managed as he left, and more than “good night” they couldn’t reply. A little later Christiane got up as well, to follow Jörg, and this time Ulrich didn’t look mocking, but nodded.

  “I’ll ring the bell for a little prayer meeting at nine tomorrow,” said Karin, before Christiane disappeared. “Not that I would expect you all to come, just so that you’ll know why it’s ringing.”

  That broke the spell. She’s relentless, Andreas thought, shaking his head, and Marko immediately announced that he wouldn’t come. Ilse was also startled by Karin’s announcement, but then thought that the ritual of an occasional prayer meeting was more natural than Karin’s constant attempts to defuse conflicts and create harmony. Ingeborg said, “Oh, how lovely—we’d be delighted,” and Ulrich was pleased to be able to look scornful again. During the announcement of time and bell ringing, Margarete was thinking about breakfast, crockery and washing up. “Who’s going to help me afterward?” Everyone was ready, and why not right away, and why not the last glass of wine afterward?

  When they were sitting together on the terrace again, Eberhard said, “We’ll have to leave in the early afternoon. Karin’s going to offer Jörg a job in her archive. Can any of you think what we could do to make things easier for Jörg and Christiane?”

  “I’ve already told him he can work in my labs.”

  “If he wants to write, I’m happy to help him get published.”

  Marko began with the words “Well, I think …” and was interrupted by Andreas.

  “Yes, we know you think we should leave him in peace to get on with the revolution again, the only thing he wanted to do and, if you like, did with a certain amount of success. Forget the revolution. But leaving him in peace—you’re right about that. Jörg knows we can help him get a job, and he’ll ask us if he needs us. You leave him in peace as well.”

  “Enough of that supercilious talk. You can’t tell me what to do and what not to do, and you can’t tell Jörg either. You’re acting as if you know Jörg better than I do, but all you know is the accused, sentenced, imprisoned, weak Jörg. I know another one. You betrayed the dream of the revolution—you’ve all betrayed the dream and let yourselves be bought and corrupted. Not me and not Jörg. You’re not going to turn him into a traitor.” At first the others couldn’t understand why Marko always talked himself into a rage. Until he said, “You won’t be able to take it away from him anymore—I issued the press declaration today.” Marko had been trying to talk himself into being right.

  Andreas looked at Marko wearily, with a hint of revulsion. He got up and asked the group: “Where’s the place in the park where you can use your phone?”

  Margarete got up as well. “Come with me!”

  Marko struck his hand on the table. “Are you mad? You want to shatter Jörg’s life without even talking to him?” He jumped up, reached Andreas in one, two leaps, knocked the phone out of his hand, bent down, grabbed it, stood up and threw it into the park. Skipping with triumph like a boxer, he came back to face Andreas. Andreas turned to Karin’s husband and asked wearily, “Can I have yours?” Eberhard nodded, took the phone out of his pocket and gave it to Andreas. Again Marko pursued Andreas as he left. But this
time Ilse stretched out her leg and Marko stumbled and landed on the floor together with Margarete’s empty chair so noisily that Ilse threw her hand to her mouth with a little gasp of horror.

  For a moment they all held their breath. Then Marko sat up awkwardly. He couldn’t get to his feet, and rested his back against Ilse’s chair. Andreas and Margarete went into the park. Ulrich said to his wife, “Look, it’s pretty late. I’ve had enough for today. You too?” She held out her hand, and both nodded to the others and left. Karin looked quizzically at her husband. He nodded too and got to his feet, and she did likewise. But then she stood there indecisively, until Henner said, “Off you go!” and Ilse added, “Yes, go to bed!”

  Marko said, in a baffled voice, “I tripped.” He held his head in both hands.

  Ilse stroked his hair. “I stuck my leg out.”

  “Really?”

  “Really.”

  “I was having an argument.”

  “You were having an argument with Andreas. And when Andreas comes back, you should go to bed. We don’t want any more drama; we’ve had enough for one day. Henner will help you to your room. Do you have any aspirin? No? I’ll bring you some when I go to bed.”

  Ilse sat alone on the terrace for a while. Then Henner came back and told her that Marko had gone right off to sleep; he might be suffering from a slight concussion. Andreas and Margarete asked about Marko when they returned from the darkness of the park to the light of the terrace. Andreas had been half successful. “The agencies have taken out the report about the press declaration. But it was in there for a few hours. Some newspapers will carry it, and I’ll be able to get a correction out of them, but it’s still awkward.”