Homecoming

by Bernhard Schlink

  He did not want to repeat himself but had nothing else to say. That a house is only a house, a shop a shop? That being alive is all that matters?

  “Everything . . .”

  “Quiet!”

  He said it so loudly that he awoke with a start.

  “Anything wrong?” Gerd asked.

  He nodded. “Sorry to have woken you.”

  “Dreaming of the mountain? Every night I dream I've got to push that dump truck up it. You remember, the heavy dump truck that crushed the Westphalian when he couldn't push it anymore and it rolled back on him?”

  Karl nodded. “Go back to sleep, Gerd. Stop thinking about the dump truck. Stop thinking about the dead. Think of home.”

  “Do you think they'll still want us?” Gerd asked after a pause.

  “I don't think I'll ask.” Karl sneered.

  and if they didn't pay up, his curse would be upon them. Then he let them go.

  They set off. Karl in the lead, then Gerd. The ground was stony, but already the sand, which they were not supposed to expect until the fourth day, had lodged itself between their teeth. The wind never stopped, never stopped blowing the sand into their mouths and hair and clothes and ears and nose and eyes, which they pinched into slits. The mountains seemed as far off on the evening of the first day as they had that morning. Ditto the second and third day. By the fourth day they had lost interest in the mountains. They came to the fountain. Though prepared for the worst, they were disappointed: the water stank.

  “He said it was good water.”

  “Listen here!” Karl said, hot under the collar. “When there's no choice, there's no point in sniveling. We'll drink the water and take some with us. We'll pay for it too.” There were a few coins in the hollow behind the stone that had been described to them, and he added the sum he had promised.

  The water had a foul taste to it, but it was water. It gave them back their lips, mouths, and throats; it gurgled in their stomachs; it moistened their faces and hands. “It's good,” Gerd said reverently. “It's good.”

  They filled their bottles and moved on. Karl said nothing about the dark cloud forming at one edge of the mountains. No matter what was brewing up ahead, they could only move on. The cloud soon left the horizon for the sky above the mountains and eventually took up half the sky.

  Now Gerd saw it too. “Looks like rain.”

  Karl shook his head. He watched it growing and growing. It was no simple cloud; it was a living thing, like a swarm of mosquitoes, of bees, of birds. It spun on its axis, circulating something, spitting it out, then reincorporating it to spur its growth. And all the while it made a whirring noise Karl had never heard before and never wanted to hear again. It reminded him of the sound made by high-tension wires. There was a flash of lightning, but not the lightning he knew. The sudden streaks were a glistening network of light, like the pattern of veins on the hand of a terrifying, raging, punitive god. It was a roaring electric storm. Karl could hear the air crackle and feel his hair rise. Then he heard a horrible cry, a knife blade of a cry, a gaping wound of a cry, and saw Gerd flare up for a second, then fall, turn head over heels, roll next to his feet, and lie there, black. Even the image of the black, grinning face lasted only an instant; then everything went black and the wind broke loose and whipped up the sand, forcing Karl to his knees.

  This is the last judgment, he thought. If I survive this, I will survive everything. He felt the sand rising higher and higher up his sides. I must not remain here. I must not let the sand engulf me. I must not be buried here. He stood and moved on, step by step. He had no goal and no strength; sheer defiance dragged him forward. They might get him in the end—the sand, the desert, death—but he would not give himself to them. Three times he collapsed and felt the sand engulfing him; three times he got to his feet and moved on. Then he stopped moving and was moved, shoved, carried, hurled. The cloud no longer wished to engulf and bury him; it was inhaling and exhaling him, lifting him up and bearing him away, blowing him over the ground, making him its plaything, having its way with him. He could do nothing, nothing at all but register he was still alive.

  Then, all at once, he could see again: the raging sand had died down; the sky was shining bright blue again, arrogant, indifferent to the insult of having been so rudely overrun. After the darkness Karl greeted the sun, which he had so often cursed during his march across the desert, as a friend. He saw that the storm had brought him to the edge of the mountains, saw a small hut perched atop one of the gray slopes, and knew it was the goal the storm had in mind for him.

  As he was nearing the hut, the door opened and a woman emerged and came up to him. She has the bearing of a queen, Karl thought, and was afraid. All his strength and will were gone; he was weak. He was in dirty, ill-smelling rags. She would waste no time in calling her men and having them chase him away like a mangy dog. She was beautiful, he saw: she had curly hair, strong shoulders, full breasts, rounded hips, and long legs. As she approached, he also saw a friendly question in her eyes and a smiling mouth. But all he could manage was a croak. And then he stumbled and tipped over. His last thought was that he should have fallen at her feet.

  When he came to, he was lying in a bed. He felt a linen cloth on his forehead. After all these years it was like clear water or fresh bread. He heard singing and opened his eyes to see

  won't stop you. I'll give you my father's long coat and large pouch and pack enough food to get you over the mountains and into the valley where the border runs.”

  Karl did not know if he should believe her. “I . . .”

  “Don't say a word,” Kalinka said, flinging her arm around his neck and laying her head on his breast. “If thoughts of home weigh so heavily on you . . . thoughts about her . . . Will she be good to you? Will she sing to you when you sleep? Will she know the herbs to use when your old wound smarts? Will she bury your head between her breasts when you dream of the mine and awake with a start? Oh, how I should like to keep you for nine more months and yet nine more. How I should like to keep you forever.”

  Kalinka freed herself from him and went inside. Gazing out into the distance, over the desert and the mountain slopes and up to its peaks, he felt none of the sadness he had so often felt standing here. Sorry as he was at the thought of leaving, the joy of setting off was greater.

  After a while she called him in. She had laid out the coat and packed the pouch. She had made him their usual supper and made love to him as she had on other nights. When he got up and set off, she feigned sleep, but then she went to the doorway and watched him climb higher and higher.

  Nine months! He arrived at Kalinka's on page ninety-three and set off on page ninety-five, and for nine months he had done nothing but eat, gaze sadly into the distance, and make love. Nine months when he was unable to move on? No, nine months when for all his desire to see house, home, and wife he did not wish to move on.

  I was surprised that my moral grandparents had let that through. Though perhaps they punished him by putting another man beside his wife when he got home. If the novel amounted to a punishment of its protagonist, Karl's wife would not fling her arms around him with a shout of joy after recovering from the shock of seeing a man presumed dead standing before her. The man beside her would have no reason to steal away after being shown up as a liar and a cheat, and if Karl ventured to challenge him he would suffer an ignominious defeat.

  10

  THAT WEEKEND I visited my mother. When the village on the Neckar we had moved to became a suburb, she moved into a village on the edge of the Odenwald. She would say hello to all and sundry and chat in the general store but otherwise kept to herself. She had always enjoyed driving and started driving sporty convertibles as soon as she could afford it. She would get stuck in traffic on the way to work, but since she worked late into the evening the drive home was fast. In summer she would put the top down, let the wind ruffle her long blond hair, and, at traffic lights, bask in the admiring glances of men she had absolutely no interest in.
She would have been a beautiful woman had it not been for the contemptuous lines around the mouth and had she not been so aloof, but such things were invisible at traffic lights. Sometimes the contempt and aloofness disappeared, though perhaps that was the twilight on her terrace or the candlelight in a restaurant.

  I visited her once every four or five weeks, and we occasionally met to see a film or have dinner together in town—effortless and mildly boring encounters. My mother always had a not-quite-unloving but highly formal way of treating me. She valued formality in any case, but with me it came out more than usual, because she felt it would introduce a note of manliness into my upbringing. Tenderness, intimacy, regret over things gone wrong or gone by, vacillation over making a decision—these were all foreign to her, or she had buried them so long ago and so deeply that they no longer dared to surface. We informed each other of the events in our lives without much commentary. Her criticisms of me did not subside; she merely couched them in pointed questions: “Do you ever think of your dissertation? Are you still seeing the person you introduced to me that time?”

  Sometimes I brought all the ingredients and cooked. My mother did not like to cook and was not good at it: I was raised on bread, cold cuts, and warmed-up canned foods. Seldom did I see her so happy and gay, so girlish, as when I was at work at the stove and she was doing some unimportant task for me or was simply on her first glass of champagne. Taboo topics remained taboo: not a word about my father, her relationship with him, her relationships with other men and with her boss. But she did sometimes talk about her childhood and the new start after our flight from the bombs: the foraging at local farms, the Care packages, the dishes that could be made from stinging nettles . . .

  “You cooked nettles?”

  “Believe it or not.”

  “Did you take me on your foraging trips?”

  “I was the small, brave blond woman, babe in arms. You started earning your keep early.”

  I asked her about Novels for Your Reading Pleasure and Entertainment. She had never come with me to see my grandparents or—so far as I knew—gone on her own. Even as a child I kept at her until she explained that they had never forgiven her their son's having fallen in love with her and married her, and therefore having stayed in Germany and been killed there. She said she understood their grief but did not see why they placed the blame on her. I responded with the heavy but proud heart of a child: if that was the case, I would no longer go either. Oh no, she replied. I shouldn't have to suffer, nor should I hold it against them: they loved me and I them; they were good people; they just couldn't get over their grief.

  “Remember the series of novels Grandmother and Grandfather published after the war? Did you ever recommend authors to them? Friends or acquaintances who wrote?”

  “We communicated only about the essentials: when your train was getting in, how long you'd be staying. I never recommended any authors to them.”

  “Do you happen to know a sandstone building near the Church of Jesus, Kleinmeyerstrasse 38, Friedrichsplatz?”

  “Is this an interrogation? May I at least be informed of what I stand accused?”

  “It's no interrogation. I'm just trying to find out something about one of the novels in the series.” I told her about my two readings—many years ago and several days ago—of Karl's adventures and how I had located the house. “The author must be from here.”

  “Don't you have anything better to do?”

  “You mean my dissertation? I'd never have got to the bottom of it. I can't tell you how happy I was to let it go. Sometimes I enjoy thinking about one or another of the issues involved, but I'd much rather get to the bottom of Karl's story.”

  “There are any number of ways for that story to end. You have no idea how many homecoming stories were told and published after the war. Homecoming novels were a genre all their own, like war novels or romances.”

  “Can you give me one way it might end?”

  She thought awhile, quite a while, then said, “She stays with the other man. She had been told Karl was dead, and she mourned him. But then she met the other man and fell in love with him. Karl just stands there while she tells him. Then he asks her and the other man to swear on their daughter's life that they will tell nobody he is alive. She can't understand why, but he insists, so she swears, and the other man does too. Then Karl leaves.”

  11

  DON'T YOU HAVE don't you have anything better to do? My mother was good at making me feel guilty. It was the way she brought me up to be good in school, to do my house and garden chores, to deliver my magazines on time, and to see to the needs of my friends. The privilege of getting an education, living in a nice house with a nice garden, having the money to pay for necessities (let alone extras), enjoying the company of friends and of a loving mother—all this had to be earned; moreover, it had to be earned with a smile: my mother had solved the conflict between duty and desire by decreeing that I was to desire to do my duty.

  I often made fun of it later. And I thought I had broken free of it all when I blithely gave up the dissertation. But the moment Mother asked those questions, my guilty conscience was back, and again there was no evil deed behind it: I had a guilty conscience even though I had done nothing wrong.

  Seek and ye shall find. In my California paradise I made up my mind to be a good friend to my former girlfriend and her son should they need one. I had only the best intentions. Veronika was chaotic and did need a friend: her son, Max, whose father had never paid any attention to him, had grown close to me after eight years under my roof and let me, more than anyone, talk him out of at least some of his shenanigans. I did not want Max to suffer just because I did not wish to run into the man Veronika had taken up with before our separation.

  He wasn't around anymore, but I ran into his successor. Veronika was not interested in my offer of friendship: she said she had needed me when the last one left her, but now she could manage on her own. Max, however, was happy to see me, and we took up our old habit of going to the movies together every two weeks. Sometimes we did not even wait till the end of the film to go out for pizza or curry wurst with French fries and one Coke after the other.

  Now I had something better to do, once every two weeks, anyway. Not only that, it was not long in giving me a clue to the end of Karl's story, and I took this as a sign that I should lay aside my guilty conscience and move on with my search.

  One day Max and I went to see the adventures of Odysseus with Kirk Douglas, and suddenly everything was clear: it was not the Caspian or Black Sea I was after; it was the Aegean. The model for Karl and his companions, for their wanderings, their adventures, the dangers they succumbed to, was none other than The Odyssey.

  I had read the adventures of Odysseus as a child in a collection of Greek tales. In school I had translated excerpts of The Odyssey from Greek and had even learned the first ninety-six lines by heart in the original. I had never forgotten Polyphemus, the Sirens, Scylla and Charybdis, Nausicaa, Penelope, Odysseus' revenge on the suitors. That very night I took it up again. I started with the end. I had thought Odysseus found home and happiness intact on Ithaca with his Penelope; instead I learned that he had to take leave of her once more and set to wandering with an oar on his shoulder until he came to a land in which the people had no idea what an oar, a ship, the sea, or even salt was. From there he was allowed to wander back, but since he was to die far from the sea and Ithaca is an island in the sea, death would befall him far from his home. Thus had Tiresias prophesied in Hades, and Homer assures us at the end of The Odyssey that Tiresias' prophesy came true.

  Homer's mention of Tiresias led me from the end to the earlier book in which Odysseus descends into the underworld and learns of the future from Tiresias. In the same book he alights in the land of the Laestrygonians, giants who devour many of his companions and destroy their ships. Before that he is taken in by Aeolus' fourteen-headed family on a floating island, and even before that he must drive his companions on by force because,
treated to lotus by the good-natured Lotus Eaters, they have forgotten their homeland. In Hades, Odysseus speaks not only to Tiresias but also to his mother. Later his companions lay hands on the sun god's sheep and cattle and perish in a storm by way of punishment, and Odysseus is washed ashore on Calypso's island, where he remains for nine years before she lets him travel on.

  Then there are the encounters with the cyclops Polyphemus and a happy year with the goddess Circe, the tempting song of the Sirens, and the journey between the whirlpool of Charybdis and the rock of Scylla. Presumably my novel's author too had turned them into adventures, adventures depicted on the pages I no longer had. Perhaps the encounter with Polyphemus had been transformed into Karl's having to sneak his comrades out of a cave past Russian rescue teams; perhaps Circe had been transformed into a Siberian shamaness or the Sirens into a KGB choir. Whirlpool and rock could remain as is, though they might as well have shown up as a narrow mountain pass or high waterfall. The author had let his imagination soar: Aolsky, though lord of the winds no longer, was the proud possessor of an airplane and possibly helped Karl to acquire the one with which Karl's comrades wreaked as much havoc as Odysseus' companions with Aeolus' sack of winds; there were no giants, but the forces of nature raged as if they were giants; Karl's mother met him in a dream rather than in Hades; and Gerd had not stolen cattle and sheep from the sun god but presumably coins from the owner of the well. Sandstorm for storm at sea—why had the author rejected the Caspian or the Black Sea? Were the nine months with Kalinka that replaced the nine years with Calypso a function of the increased tempo of our times or the fact that the novel was written after the war?

  The prototype for Jürgen's putrid hand may have been Philoctetes' putrid foot, and Eumaeus the swineherd, who was the first person Odysseus met at Ithaca and who helped him to take revenge on the suitors, lived on in Karl's faithful old watchman, though such prowess was hardly to be expected of a man nearly blind, hard of hearing, and all but lame. In fact, the last part of the novel showed too many discrepancies with the model to allow me to use the model as the solution to the riddle of the ending. Karl had no son, no Telemachus; Karl's Penelope had not stood up to the suitors; she had chosen one and had had a child—if not two—by him. Striking him dead was not as indicated as Odysseus' frenzy in the presence of the brazen band that pressed, plagued, and plundered Penelope. No, neither Kleinmüllerstrasse nor Kleinmeyerstrasse had been the scene of a massacre.