Homecoming

by Bernhard Schlink

  “Why did we think we had to keep going all these weeks?” the grenadier wondered.

  And Jürgen just smiled at the stump of his hand.

  Karl drew his lips back and showed his teeth. Should he move on without them? Many were the times he had wished he were alone, many the days they had been an albatross around his neck. The day might come when they would really bring him down. Nor did he care for them: not Jürgen, the child who would never grow up; not the silly, arrogant count; not the grenadier, a war machine who could no sooner be converted into a viable civilian than a tank could be converted into a tractor; or Gerd, whose naive and upstanding peasant ways got on his nerves. Yet he knew that he would do everything in his power to jolt them out of it, that they would mewl and whine and refuse to budge, that he would kick them in the rear until whatever it was the Lochens had given them yesterday was out of their system. He would stay on their backs until they came to see again that they were on their way home.

  “Good-natured people, the Lochens,” thought

  4

  HAD I READ BEFORE about the putrid hand or the good-natured Lochens? I could not remember. I skimmed on through adventure after adventure. Then I skipped forward to see what of the end had remained, and read the final pages:

  on and on, stopping just short of Moscow, then up and up, in the Caucasus. But after Stalingrad we stopped hearing from him.

  Karl shook his head. “He'll be back. He'll be back to rebuild the shop and the house.”

  The old man gave a derisive laugh. “Wouldn't that be nice, but don't count on it. We've heard from all them others taken by the Russians.” He looked Karl up and down. “They get you too? Looks like you been through a lot and still got a lot to go. You can sleep here in the warehouse till you find something better.”

  “Is his wife alive?”

  “Yes.” The man looked straight ahead. “But she moved away.” He lifted his arms and let them fall. “Women are having a hard time of it.”

  “I'd like to give her a message from her husband. Where . . .”

  “From her husband?” The man shook his head and stood. “You get some sleep. I'll wake you in the morning.”

  And so Karl spent his first night home amidst the stock of his shop. He walked through the warehouse checking what was left: a lot of chairs, a few wardrobes and chests of drawers, the first model of the desk he had designed before he had been called up. He still liked it: he had done well to design the desk for writers and scholars rather than factory managers and party bosses. He was grateful to the faithful old man for having watched over the warehouse and saved the stock. He was nearly blind, hard of hearing, and all but lame. It must have been an enormous strain on him, and he would not have made the effort had he not believed there was at least a possibility that his young employer would return. Should he have revealed his identity to him?

  Whatever it was that prevented him from doing so then was still at work the following morning: he merely thanked him. Then he went to the local register office. The upper stories were gone, but the odor of officialdom in the basement and on the ground floor was as strong as if nothing had happened. It could not have been simpler: his wife lived in the neighboring city. Kleinmüllerstrasse 58. He stood at the side of the Autobahn, and before long a small three-wheeled van picked him up. It set him down in the city center twenty minutes later. He wandered through the streets in amazement: houses intact, gardens in bloom; rubble, debris, bomb craters nowhere to be seen; the bells in the double-steepled church tolling noon; the market well stocked with potatoes, vegetables, apples . . . Peacetime conditions, he thought. He was glad his wife did not have to live amidst the wreckage.

  For a long time he stood staring at the house from across the road. Red sandstone, a door that looked as if it were keeping somebody prisoner, a balcony that seemed made for cannons, a number of large windows but a number of narrow, embrasure-like windows too, a massive building, and gloomy despite the garden surrounding it. Then he crossed the road, opened the garden gate, and went up the

  Too bad. I would have liked to read again about what happened when he rang the bell, the door opened, and his wife stood before him. And I would have loved to know what happened after that. But even though I didn't expect to learn more than I had when I read it the first time, I found it exciting, as if this time I could read on to the end.

  5

  AFTER SETTLING into the apartment, I settled into the city. I knew it: it was the fair sister of my ugly native city, and early on my friends and I started making excursions into its elegant Old Town, whose cafés, bars, and wine cellars had a lot more going on than the ones we were used to. Later many of those friends chose its university over ours: it was older and more attractive. I would have gone there as well had I not been offered a student job at the university in my hometown.

  I visited the Saturday markets, a new one each week. The markets had little merchandise but many small stands manned by peasants from the surrounding countryside or their wives or grandmas. They sold homegrown fruits and vegetables, honey from their hives, homemade marmalade, freshly squeezed juice. Different markets had different stands, of course, but the selection was similar, as were the overall picture and smell and the cries in broad dialect praising their chard and fresh strawberries. What differed most was the clientele, and it was at the markets that I became acquainted with the city's various neighborhoods: here a self-contained enclave of longtime petit bourgeois inhabitants, there a well-manicured section where old and new wealth coexisted, and, farther on, a neighborhood in transition: crumbling gray edifices and family-run shops next to smartly gentrified houses along traffic-free streets whose intersections were inlaid with granite cobblestones. It was 1980. German cities were recovering from the tear-down and build-up mania of the fifties, sixties, and seventies and regaining a certain self-respect.

  The Friedrichsplatz neighborhood was a case in point. Some of the private residences, many of which boasted Renaissance and art nouveau elements, had been remodeled; most of the older, plainer, more or less standardized houses were still waiting their turn, though here and there they, too, were covered with scaffolding. The twin-steepled, red-sandstone and yellow-brick Church of Jesus towering so majestically over the chestnut trees and the bustle of the marketplace must have been cleaned out not too long ago. The street along the nearby school was already closed to cars, and the confusing network of one-way streets leading to and from it was meant to scare drivers away. I enjoyed shopping at the market there and, when I was through, sitting at a restaurant that had tables and chairs outside.

  6

  BEFORE I COULD decipher what was being described in the novel of the soldier on his way home, I had to dream about it. I dreamed that, like Karl, I had come from afar, that, like Karl, I had walked amazed through the streets of a city, and that, like him, after crossing a marketplace, I had stopped in front of a massive, gloomy, inhospitable building of red sandstone. Then I awoke to realize that I knew the building, that I had seen it while sitting in the market but failed to single it out.

  I drove there after work. The name of the street bordering one side of Friedrichsplatz was not Kleinmüllerstrasse but Kleinmeyerstrasse, and the number of the building not 58 but 38. Still the red sandstone, the prisonlike door, the cannon balcony, and the embrasures matched perfectly. The building was dark and did not stand out. Its façade looked east and was in shadow when I arrived, but I could imagine it looking more inviting in the morning sun. I would get to the bottom of things. I would get to the bottom of everything.

  I opened the garden gate, walked up the steps to the door, and read the names next to the bell. Karl had climbed at least one flight of stairs, so his wife had to have lived in one of the upper stories. None of the names struck a chord. I jotted them down so I could write to them or phone.

  Karl had hitched a ride in a small, three-wheeled van. The ride took twenty minutes. He must have lived and worked in the city I grew up in, and his wife must have moved to
the city in which I now lived and worked. The novel did not mention where his warehouse was. Near where I used to live? I had been born by the time he came back. I might well have been playing outside when he walked past.

  I laughed over my near-miss meeting with a fictional character. But I also began to wonder how my grandparents had come by the manuscript. Could the author have been a friend of my mother's whom she recommended to them? Or was it all a matter of chance? I was aware that the Novels for Your Reading Pleasure and Entertainment series featured German authors as well as Swiss. Why not one from my hometown? And why not one who, instead of making up cities and buildings, stole them from reality?

  7

  BACK HOME AGAIN, I read on:

  river was wide, wider than any they had ever seen.

  “That must be the Amazon,” Jürgen said reverently. “I've read . . .”

  “The Amazon!” the count said with a sarcastic laugh.

  “Shut your trap!”

  The grenadier pointed upstream. “What's that?”

  It was not a ship. Passenger or cargo. Nor was it a string of barges such as Karl was used to seeing on the Rhine. It looked like an island swimming down the river, an island with a house and fence on it. Karl knew immediately that this floating island was their only chance: they would never make it across the river, but they might be able to reach the island and from there the other shore. He tore off his shoes, trousers, and shirt and tossed them into the bag. Knowing that the others would not accept an explanation but would follow him, he jumped into the river.

  They made it. Even Jürgen, who thought he had to keep his stump above water; even the count, who had an irrational fear of getting water up his nose. In a half hour they were sitting on the logs that constituted the island, dangling their legs in the water while they caught their breath.

  “What's that?” The grenadier was pointing to the fence and the house.

  “We'll find out soon enough,” Karl said, standing up and nodding to the grenadier. “Follow me.”

  They walked around the fence, found the entrance, and were admitted and taken to the leader.

  “Germans,” he said with a laugh, “soldiers. You've lost nothing here in Russia, in Siberia.”

  “We're not looking for anything. We want to go home.”

  “Ha ha,” he went on laughing and slapped his thigh. “You're in luck. You're in luck because you've found Aolsky. If you're willing to work, I'll take you on until they forget you on the shore.” Then he pointed to both banks and said, “That is the Soviet Union, and that is the Soviet Union, but this is a free country. No Party, no commissars, no soviets. I've got six sons and six daughters, and if each child has eight children the free country will soon have a great and free people. Long live free Aolistan.”

  “What will happen when the journey comes to an end?” Karl did not know what river they were on or where it flowed, but the lumber would have to be delivered somewhere this side of the border.

  The leader gave him an ill-humored, suspicious look. He was a bear of a man. For a moment Karl thought he meant to crush him with his paws, but then he laughed again and slapped his thigh again.

  “So the clever German wants to know what will happen when the journey comes to an end? Well, free Aolistan will break asunder and the wind will blow us away. But when it sets us down, we'll put free Aolistan back together again.”

  He went over to a flat, wide, roughly hewn structure and opened the gate. There was a seaplane inside.

  Karl wondered how the great free Aolistani people would manage to fly back to the upper reaches of the river in such a small plane, but if the leader had it in him to get hold of a small plane he might be able to get hold of a large one too. Maybe even one that the wind could blow back home or at least across the border.

  They stayed a whole month. Every night the leader, his wife, and his children had a party, and they were invited. Every morning they got up with the sun and did the leader's

  giants would have overtaken them and tried to do away with them. Stones rained down as if hurled by a thousand mighty arms; the trees they had camped under split like matches in a toy forest constructed by children; the ground shook as if about to sink. Karl, who had taken shelter behind a rock and was unharmed, heard the cries of his comrades amid the falling stones and cracking trees. He recognized Jürgen's voice, squeaking as it had when he amputated his hand; the count's, gurgling and nasal; the grenadier's, bellowing as if, hit and wounded, he were flinging himself on the foe with his bayonet. He could not hear Gerd but then spied him in the pale moonlight, a step away, but safe for the second he needed to reach out and pull him behind the rock. There they lay, panting, while the giants' fury gained the upper hand and the cries of the others weakened and died out.

  When they ventured out from behind the rock the next morning, they no longer recognized the place. Gerd picked up a few stones in an attempt to find his comrades, but soon gave up. The maze of roots, branches, and stone they were standing on was a good two meters higher than the ground they had camped on the day before. They would have needed an excavator to recover the bodies.

  “First the airplane accident—and so near the border—now this. Can there be a jinx on us?”

  Karl gave a derisive snort. “A jinx? Anything is better than the mine. The worst day here in the open is better than the best in the mine.” Then, having pondered his words, he added, “Even death here in the open is better than the mine.”

  Gerd shook his head. “I know you're right, but God seems to be playing games with us.”

  “We've got to get out of here.”

  “Wait a minute.” Gerd took Karl's arm. “Can't you feel it? Can't you feel them taking leave of us and willing us to take leave of them?” He put his other hand to his ear as if listening to something.

  Karl tried to master his impatience by counting. I'll give him to fifty, he said to himself, then went on to a hundred and a hundred and fifty. Still counting, he heard Gerd hum “I Once Had a Faithful Comrade,”

  8

  I COULD NOT REMEMBER having read about the putrid hand and the good-natured Lochens; nor did Aolistan and the giants' fury come back to me; not even the meeting with the faithful old man had left a trace in my memory, much as I was concerned how it ended. Yet despite my failure to recognize what I had once read in what I was now reading, it felt familiar. Familiar, though alien: something was missing. And I kept feeling the missing link was water: I remember water playing a bigger role in Karl's adventures. There was more than a wide river; there were lakes and oceans, islands and coasts, Lake Baikal and Lake Aral, the Caspian Sea, the Black Sea.

  I was nonplussed by the tricks my memory was playing on me. While writing my dissertation, I had worked for a while with some colleagues on a computer program for resolving court cases. The program was meant to determine whether a plaint was justified, a claim well grounded, a payment required—that kind of thing. We soon realized that the problem was not programming, memory, or computation time; the problem was that we were insufficiently clear as to how lawyers go about resolving cases. As long as we were unclear about that, we could not simulate it on the computer. We had plenty of ideas about what they should do, but precious few about what they did. One of the few we did have was that, as with medical diagnoses and chemical analyses, the establishment of patterns played a decisive role. My job was to interview lawyers about the role of pattern recognition in their work.

  “Déjà vu is a sense of recognizing something one has not in fact experienced,” a retired judge told me. “The older I got the more often I found myself thinking I recognized an old case in a new one. I would resolve it with the assurance of a sleepwalker, but when I went to file it with the old one there was no old one to file it with.”

  “How do you explain . . .”

  “Patterns. Isn't that what we're talking about? Over the years the patterns of past cases and resolutions are not merely stored in the brain; the elements that make up the patterns com
bine to form patterns of their own. These new patterns are what we call déjà vu.”

  “Do they combine by themselves?”

  “Well, presumably you've run the pattern through your head while working on a case. Napoleon is supposed to have had a déjà vu on the morning of the Battle of Austerlitz. I can see why. He had more on his mind than the battles he had known and fought; he had all the battles that had ever gone through his head, pattern after pattern made up of elements like soldiers, infantry and cavalry, cannons, terrain, positions . . . One of them was the Austerlitz pattern.”

  It was ambitious and costly enough for our program to come up with existing patterns; now we had imaginary ones to consider as well. What were the elements that made up our juridical patterns? And if we succeeded in identifying them, how should the program combine them into imaginary patterns, patterns that were fair, not random? Or even fair and unstained by considerations of utility.

  I solved none of these puzzles; I simply presented the results of my interviews. One of the reasons I was happy to move into publishing was that I could leave the puzzles behind. Handling authors, evaluating manuscripts, predicting whether a book will sell—that is all puzzle-free.

  But now I had another puzzle to deal with, a déjà vu whose basis I might well have remembered. What had the elements of the novel done behind my back? What patterns had they combined to form?

  9

  I READ THE REST:

  was lively and gay, with tired eyes and a sad mouth. “Everything's in ruins, destroyed: the house, the shop, everything.”

  “Then we'll build them back up.”

  “Like the crèche,” his mother said with a smile, and Karl remembered how at one Christmas a cousin had smashed their old crèche and all its figures with his new ball and he and Mother had put it back together. He was about to return her smile, but noticed it was gone. “Everything's in ruins, destroyed: the house, the shop, everything.”