Homecoming

by Bernhard Schlink

  We were at my place. We had finished eating and were having an espresso. I was counting on our moving in together. True, the topic had never come up, but we were now buying only furniture that would make sense in a common flat: she the leather couch, I two leather armchairs with matching table; she a large mirror in a gold frame for her entrance hall, I an art deco lamp for mine, but, as she had pointed out many times over, one that would look perfect in her dining room. Because I had no dining room, we were eating in the kitchen. She was staring daggers at me, the open window a dark square behind her. Suddenly I noticed a dimple above the inner end of the left eyebrow—a Lucia dimple—but a dimple of defiance and anger. It made me laugh, which naturally infuriated her. She stuck out her jaw, parted her lips, and trained her flashing eyes on mine. I barely recognized her.

  “I haven't quite thought through what to say to her,” I said. “The best thing would be for us to go and see her together, talk to her together. If that won't work, if you've got a problem with her, then just give me your take on how to deal with her.”

  “Yes,” she said, and then raised her voice. “I don't see why I have to come out and say it—you must certainly have noticed it—but since there's no way around it now, I will: I have a problem with my sister. You must certainly have noticed too that I don't want to talk about it. Is that clear?”

  “Does that mean we'll never go to see her?”

  “Never, never . . . I don't know. We'll have to see.”

  “And if I went on my own?”

  “You've got nothing better to do?”

  I laughed. “You sound like my mother. What's so bad about . . .”

  But the comparison with my mother got her hackles up. I could not understand it. She had never met my mother, and I had said practically nothing—and nothing bad—about her. Do women have some primordial fear of being identified with their menfolk's mothers? I never had a chance to ask. She blasted my behavior, my character, the way I looked, the way I made love, the way I lived life. I could tell she was working through a tension that had its roots in the mother comparison, the problem with her sister, our talk, even our relationship as a whole, but what the tension consisted of I never found out. Not even after she had calmed down.

  “I've always been like that. Even as a girl. It doesn't mean anything. It just happens. Sorry.”

  16

  IT WAS IN AUGUST that I had first rung her bell. School had just started. She had come back from Kenya with her big trunks that summer.

  It stayed warm until November. Then it turned cold from one day to the next and began to rain. I loved hearing the rain during the night and seeing it out of my office window. It gave me a cozy feeling. Now is the time for us to move in together, I thought.

  On Wednesday, Barbara phoned me at the office to make plans for the weekend. “Let's go to Basel,” she said. “I once went there with my parents and liked it. I'd like to take you around.”

  “I like Basel too, but rain is forecast for the weekend, and all cities are gray in the rain. There's so much we haven't done here yet, and if nothing appeals to you we can always bake Christmas cookies: Christmas is only six weeks off.”

  “You know I like getting away over the weekend.”

  “We've gone away every weekend since we met.”

  “Because we both wanted to. At least I thought it was both of us.”

  I could hear that tension coming back to her voice and did not want to experience her working through it again. “Oh yes, those were wonderful times.”

  “Then it's clear: we took those trips because we wanted to. If you want to stay here and I want to go away, you can stay and I'll go. I'll give you a ring on Monday.” And she hung up.

  I was furious, and disappointed. If that was all we meant to each other, what about my hopes? Move in together? I might as well save my breath. But then why had she played the furniture game with me? Or had she? Maybe it was all my imagination. Yet it had seemed so obvious.

  At first I only pretended to be enjoying my weekend alone. I wanted to show her. And myself. Then I actually began to enjoy it. I took Max to the movies, which I had not given up in the previous weeks, though I had cut down on the time I allotted him. This week we went to one place for pizza and another for ice cream, and I listened with a sympathetic ear—and without ranting or giving advice—while he went on about his problems with Veronika's new friend. I tidied up my apartment, which gave me the nice feeling of having tidied up my life along with it. I sifted through bills and paid the ones I needed to, filed them away, and tossed the ones that could wait into the wastepaper basket. I read the manuscripts that had come in for the first issues of the journal I had started and wrote letters to difficult authors. I never seemed to find the time for either when I was at the office.

  Then I did something I had been meaning to do for a long time: I put together all my Karl material. There was not much. I had scoured the university library for information on forties and fifties pulp fiction and came up short. What I did find was extensive historical and sociological literature on German prisoners of war and returnees: interesting, but not particularly useful. The National Committee for a Free Germany, the German antifascist groups, the summary justice of various trials and verdicts, the hierarchy in the prison camps that resulted first from the prisoners' military ranks, then from their complicity with the Russian camp administration, and, when the Russians stopped limiting the receipt of packages, from their hawking their contents in the market that arose for that purpose—none of it had anything to do with Karl or his author. The same held for the fate of the late returnees: the trouble they had finding a place to live and a place in society, their marital problems and problems with their children, their alcoholism and pathological reserve, all of which figured prominently in the scholarly literature.

  Fiction was potentially more promising. If Karl's author had found the ending of The Odyssey unsuitable for his story, perhaps he had gone elsewhere rather than think up his own. Discovering the model would doubtless bring me closer to him. He would perhaps be transformed from a Greek teacher to a Greek and German teacher, from a theater director to a theater director who had made a name for himself with the stage adaptation of a homecoming novel.

  I also had to go to the residence registration office—not so much for Barbara's sister as to find out who else had lived at Kleinmeyerstrasse 38 in 1945. In the neighboring buildings too. I had to write to them, visit them, describe the author to them as best I could, and hear what they had to say. I also drafted a letter to Barbara's sister, which I planned to show to Barbara before sending it off.

  I took a bath and read Leonhard Frank's tale about Anna, the woman whose husband does not return, and Karl, his friend, who has heard so much about Anna that he not only pictures her but falls in love with her and cannot resist the temptation to assume the role of his friend, whom he has had to leave behind in captivity. If Anna realizes from the start that he is not her husband, why does she pretend he is? If she is unsure but suspects something, why does she never ask? Is it to keep her options open so she can later feign shock and horror and go back to her husband? But she has renounced her husband long before he returns, and she goes off with his friend. I knew the story of Martin Guerre, whose charming—and enterprising—double took over his wife, house, and land and, greedy as he was, sued the family for even more land but was unmasked before the court by the unexpected appearance of the real, long-since-presumed-dead Martin Guerre. In this case I could understand the wife: Martin Guerre had not loved her; he had abused and abandoned her. But in Leonhard Frank's story the husband must have been madly in love with his wife: after all, he had talked about her in such a way as to make someone else fall in love with her simply by listening to him. Or was his talk a form of betrayal? Was that what alienated his wife, what she could not forgive him?

  By Sunday my life was mine again. I knew it with a certainty that started out sad, turned defiant, and ended up reconciled. Darkness fell. It was col
d and wet out. But my apartment was warm, full of music, and redolent of rosemary.

  17

  AT FIVE THE DOORBELL RANG. Barbara was at the door. She was wet, her hair looked pasted onto her head, her coat was dripping. “I . . . I ran.”

  “All the way from Basel?”

  “No, moron! From the bridge, where my car gave up on me. I didn't go to Basel; I stayed at home. Have you got anything dry I can put on?”

  She took a shower and pulled on the underwear, socks, jeans, and sweater I gave her. Then she sat in the other armchair, using the cup of hot chocolate I had given her to keep her hands warm. “What's that music? It's beautiful.”

  “Arvo Pärt. It's music without beginning or end. I've been listening to it over and over for hours.”

  She took a sip and said, “I've got to talk to you.”

  I waited.

  “There's another man. Not here. In Kenya. I haven't seen him since I came back, and hadn't seen him there for months. Since March, to be exact. But he's still in the picture. I can feel it. And he may be coming.”

  “Do you want him to come?”

  She looked at me as if I were torturing her. “He's . . . We're . . . We're kind of married.”

  “Kind of? I didn't know people could be ‘kind of’ married.”

  That tortured look again. “He's a journalist, an American, always on the road. We've never really lived together and didn't really want to get married. It didn't make sense with him here today, gone tomorrow and me in Germany—he doesn't speak a word of German. But then we thought, well, that's the kind of life we led—footloose, unsettled, unsociable—and yet we wanted to have each other no matter where we were. I've always felt unsettled, even here in Germany, even as a child.”

  I smiled. “Always escaping on the weekends?”

  She smiled back. “Always.” She took another sip. “In April he went off to Sudan, where the rebels are in power, not unchallenged of course, and they're internally divided as well. That was the last I heard from him. I've heard about him, though: that he was captured by the rebels or by government troops, that he took part in the negotiations between the two, that he was involved in emergency relief, you name it. Once before, he stayed away for over a year without a word and then turned up with a fantastic scoop. Maybe you've heard of him. His name is Augie Markovich; he's a two-time Pulitzer winner. I used to worry. Then we promised not to.” She shook her head. “There were times when he could easily have kept in touch and didn't, just to give me practice in not worrying.”

  Again I waited: I did not want to repeat the question I had asked before. But then she might not proffer the answer on her own, and finally, much as I wanted to avoid pressing her, I could not help myself. “Well, what do you want? Do you want him back in your life?”

  She gave me a bewildered look. “I don't know. I never thought you and me would . . . It just happened, and it's good. I can't believe how good it is. But at the same time . . .” She shook her head again. “I don't know who I am anymore. Maybe I'm not the footloose, unsettled, unsociable person I used to take myself for. Maybe I'm the same as everyone else, out for a house and garden and dog and friends and kids and hubby, looking forward to home every day and a nice cozy existence. No, that's not what I want. I hate that and always have.”

  “What if you put the husband and children first, followed it with the friends and dog, and left the house and garden till last?”

  She took me seriously. “I see what you mean. I'll give it some thought, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  She finished the hot chocolate. “Will you help me get the car to a garage? And let's go to a movie afterward. And can I stay over tonight? It'll give my clothes a chance to dry.”

  18

  THE NEXT WEEKEND we left town again—the rain had let up, and Basel lay pretty as a picture under a clear, cold, blue sky. From then on, things were different between us. The weekends before Christmas we spent at home. We got together more often during the week and led the normal life of a normal couple. She got to know my friends and colleagues better, and I hers. We went to the opera, though I preferred concerts, and to concerts, though she preferred the opera. We saw every African film that was shown on television or released commercially. We baked cinnamon stars, hazelnut macaroons, and Hilda rolls. We took a yoga course together. She did not want me to introduce her to my mother: she wasn't ready yet. Nor was she ready to go and see her sister with me. As a token of her goodwill, however, she gave me her sister's address.

  She remained as witty as she had been from the outset, but was no longer so content, so cheerful. It was as if our relationship had begun as an enclave from which she had shut out her anxieties. Now the enclave had become an integral part of her life and the anxieties had seeped in. Barbara felt guilty about not having visited her mother—or her father—when they were dying. In both cases it would have been difficult but possible, and in both instances it was not a must: when her father went into the hospital, she was an exchange student in Edinburgh and he had made it through other heart attacks, and her mother's cancer would progress so fast just before she was coming home anyway the doctors either had not known or did not tell her. I also learned that Barbara found the large classes, apathetic pupils, and frazzled colleagues a burden after Kenya, that there had been more interest in English and German there, that the cold, wet, gray autumn had got to her more than before, that she had grown away from most of her friends and they from her.

  We talked a lot about ourselves. I told her about my grandparents, my parents, about Veronika and Max, the utility of justice and the possibilities of homecoming. She thought I should be asking my mother more about my father, talking more to Veronika about the things that worried me about Max, and turning my ideas on the utility of justice into an essay. She would listen when I went on about my work, and run for a bandage when I cut myself cooking. She did everything to be there for me.

  Sometimes she awoke at night with a little cry or woke me because she had not been able to fall asleep for hours even though her eyes kept closing over her book. Sometimes she cried at night. I would take her in my arms, and when she had a nightmare she would tell me what she remembered of it; otherwise she didn't feel like talking. I would then tell her homecoming stories, battle stories, stories of justice, the stories of the long-winded Winkelried at Sempach and of Mennon and Eugène. More often than not she fell asleep before the story was over. Sometimes she had back pain, and I massaged her.

  She talked about her husband too, of course, but I did not find out what I wanted to know. I did not want to know the dangers he might be in or the dangers he had been in and how he had got out of them; I did not want to discuss the ways they attempted to maintain hope and patience and fidelity in light of the arrangement they had set up; what I wanted to know was what she saw in him, loved in him. And whether she still loved him. She could not write to him that they were through, because she could not write to him. But what would she write if she could?

  19

  ELUSIVE AS HE WAS, he was ever present. Perhaps his very elusiveness made his presence all the more palpable. When she was quiet, absent, pensive, sad, I thought: She's thinking about him; when she leafed through a newspaper looking for something, I thought: She's looking for a report about him; when she jumped up to answer the telephone, I thought: She's hoping it's him.

  I would give her an occasional ultimatum: “I can't take any more of this, Barbara. If you can't commit to me, I've got to reconsider my own commitment.”

  “But I am committed to you, every day and every hour we're together.”

  “No, you aren't, and you won't be until you give up your commitment to him.”

  She gave me a sad look. “What do you want me to do? Write him a farewell letter, prop it against the mirror, and hand it to him without a word if he comes? I can make all the inner commitments you like; they don't mean a thing in the outside world until I tell him.”

  When I stayed over at her place, I some
times awoke at night. Had I heard something? A car door slam? A car take off ? Had he rung the bell? Thrown a stone at the window? Then I would lie there listening to the sounds of the night—the Church of Jesus chimes, a train passing if the wind was from the west, the patter of the rain in the trees outside the window—waiting for him, if it was him, to ring again, call again, throw another stone.

  “Does he know where you're living now?” I asked, after waking up the first time and listening in the night.

  “Yes. Mother had died by the time he left for Sudan, and I had decided to move into her apartment.”

  So it was not completely crazy of me to listen in the night. Sometimes, while falling back to sleep, I thought of looking up the late evening and early morning arrival times of planes from Africa and calculating how long it would take him to get from Frankfurt to Barbara's apartment, but I never did.

  He came in broad daylight. A Saturday. We had been shopping and were emptying the bags. Our wine merchant had offered to deliver the four cases we ordered, and when the doorbell rang, Barbara said, “That must be the wine” and went to the door. But she did not say, “It goes in the basement. I'll show you,” or “Just leave it there. We'll take it down ourselves.” She did not call out cheerily, as was her wont, to either the delivery man or the parcel post man or the landlord; she just stood there and, as far as I could tell, listened to the footsteps coming up the stairs.

  I reached her just as he appeared on the staircase. She let out a cry and ran down the stairs, flung her arms around his neck, and burst into tears; he dropped his bag, which bumped down the stairs, and took her in his arms. I grabbed my coat off the coatrack and walked down the stairs. His eyes were closed. As I passed them, she threw a teary glance at me and whispered, “No.” I stopped for a moment, but as she said nothing more I went on. I waited another moment before letting the entrance door go, but she did not run after me or call down.