Homecoming

by Bernhard Schlink

  Part Three

  1

  I LATER LEARNED to give an ironic account of having tried to reconstruct the end of a story of a man who returns home after a long absence, climbs the stairs, and sees his wife in the doorway standing next to another man and of my having stood next to a woman in a doorway as her husband climbs the stairs, returning home after a long absence. I would get questions like “Had you known anything about the man beforehand?” and I would tell the truth: “I'd hoped she loved me more than him. But she ran up to him and flung her arms around his neck.” Then I would laugh and say, “At least I had the ending to my story.”

  It always went down well, especially with women. Women find sad, sensitive, valiantly laughing losers interesting.

  But that was later. That Saturday I drove into the woods thinking a walk would do me good, but I soon saw that with every step, every movement, every breath, things in fact got worse. I asked a doctor friend of mine to prescribe some powerful sleeping pills and switched off the telephone. I had read somewhere that one mourns a love for as long as it lasted, and hoped I would recover by spring. When a letter came from Barbara—the envelope so slim it could have been no more than a single sheet—I carried it around with me for a while but eventually tore it up, unread, and threw it away.

  I was also on the point of throwing away the file containing Karl's story. I was sick and tired of homecoming stories. Many soldiers came back, many did not. So what. So what if Karl came home or moved on. Augie came home like Odysseus, and Barbara had waited for him like Penelope, a modern Penelope who did not weave by day and undo what she had woven by night; no, she had fallen in love, but she too knew when to tear apart the fabric of love. That was all that counted. But in the end I kept the file.

  I bought a dining table, four chairs, and a leather couch. I saw a lot of Max and occasionally went out with friends. Yes, I did feel better by the spring, and in the autumn I slept with a journalist who invited me home after a reception my publishing house gave at the Frankfurt Book Fair. The morning after, she accused me of having forced her into it: she hadn't wanted to, I'd followed her home against her will, insisted on coming in, then all but raped her. I was furious and defended myself, and though I apologized in case I had misconstrued something or other, I had not misconstrued a thing: I remembered her invitation to come up for a drink word for word. It was all terribly disconcerting, so much so that I made a note to ask a colleague whether I had had too much to drink at the reception. Then I forgot about it, and when the journalist phoned me at home a few days later and bawled me out again I was completely indifferent.

  That same autumn I received an offer from another publisher in another city. It meant a fresh start in a city where she did not live, a release from hoping and fearing to meet her. Of course she might have moved away. She and Augie. I was still tempted to dial her number and see whether she answered.

  My employers did everything they could to keep me, and Max's “That means no more movies together” was so plaintive that I felt terrible. I stayed. What good was a fresh start that smacked of retreat?

  2

  NO, THAT'S NOT what happened. I wish it had; I wish I had been so ironic, removed, in charge. Instead I was childish.

  I did not treat the staircase scene with irony; I ridiculed it. Once I started going out again, I made fun of women for running from man to man, and men for believing in the love of a woman. It was embarrassing: the men laughed only to be polite, and the women were either pitying or put off. But I could not let the wound be. A friend once sat me down with a drink after a party and tried as diplomatically as possible to convince me I was making a fool of myself. He talked about renegades intent on showing how much they scorn what they have outgrown: the atheist his faith, the communist his bourgeois upbringing, the social climber his modest origins. I refused to understand him.

  The sleeping pills did their job: a combination of pills and alcohol put me out of commission for days. Because the telephone kept jangling, I ripped the wire out of the wall. I did not let Barbara in when she stood downstairs ringing the bell or when someone else let her in and she came upstairs and knocked on my door shouting. I was drunk at the time, though I remembered it well enough to know that I had to destroy the follow-up letter when it came.

  But that was not all. If Barbara had really been in earnest, wouldn't she have written another letter? Would she have left off after one ringing, knocking, and shouting session? After all, she could not have known whether I was even there to hear it all. That she had come and written but did not come or write again was proof she did not love me enough. Yet not even a second coming or a second letter would have sufficed, because true love requires a third and fourth attempt, an unlimited number.

  Table, chairs, and couch, Max and friends—life went on, and after a few months things were going better. What I feared most about the night with the journalist was not that I had raped her: I had not. But she had been right in feeling that during the act I had been absent in a way that was insulting to her. She had found nothing in the way I treated her of what usually brings two people together for a night: the need for intimacy and tenderness, the fear of loneliness or demons of the past. She saw through me, and my conduct had so outraged her that she identified it with rape.

  I began to wonder if I had lost the ability to feel. In fact, I seemed to lack the ability not only to feel engagement in the act but also to feign feeling; it had been torn off like a wig, a mask. Was I having blackouts? Did I need to keep an eye on myself ? How could I ask a colleague about that!

  I should also mention that though I never waited long enough for Barbara to pick up the phone I repeatedly gave in to my temptation to dial her number. I would let it ring two or three times, then hang up. I did it not to wake or annoy her or even to dare myself to let it keep ringing; I did it to be part of her life.

  3

  ONE NEED NOT BE TOLD by a psychotherapist that it is bad to repress pain, to bury oneself in one's work, to sleep with journalists one does not love, to move in with the first woman who comes along. That one must let the mourning process take its course. These are the psychotherapist's stock-in-trade.

  But how was I to mourn? How to meditate? And on what? How long was I to stay at home listening to records and reading? How often was I to tell my friends about my pain? Embarrassed but not wanting to hurt me, they heard me out, ready to do anything to hasten our return to normal, friendly relations. I knew that the mourning process meant one did not throw oneself at somebody else, but I had no desire to do so anyway.

  Nor did I find that friends and colleagues who had taken up with sweet young things soon after their marriage or relationship went sour suffered inordinately from failing to work through their past or that those who had retreated into themselves eventually made hale and hearty comebacks. Sometimes I thought of the work-through and let-be alternatives as analogous to the baby-on-the-back versus baby-on-the-tummy wars that raged from generation to generation. I remember the long talks on the subject we had had with doctors and nurses after Max was born.

  Yes, once I was able to work, I worked more than ever. Then again, the situation demanded it: the publisher had acquired some other scholarly presses and was scaling ours down, which made me the only legal expert on the staff and increased my responsibilities. Our legal list was smaller than our medical or science list, smaller too than our fishing, sailing, skin diving, and other hobby lists. Presumably the executive board, whose members all came from those fields, would not even notice if my little niche failed to hold its own. But I needed either to write off the line of textbooks I had initiated or put them out immediately so they could make a place for themselves. The same held for the journal: either I gave it up or went all out for quality and visibility. And I had invested too much thought and hard work to be able to give the projects up.

  During those early months of reshuffling I had no time to look at a woman. I left the house early, came back late, and traveled a lot. Even my
mother noticed I was working hard. Not too hard, because that was impossible for her, but hard. When my efforts met with success—several of the textbooks became bestsellers, and the circulation of the journal grew monthly—I became a workaholic as a way of handling the ever-increasing workload. After the success of the textbook series the old textbooks and reference manuals had to be updated in both content and design, so that the students who had grown accustomed to buying our books would find the material they needed in them once they began practicing. So I got the executive board to hire two students to assist me.

  I did not hire Bettina because of her velvetlike beauty. I did not really notice her unintimidating, low-pressure, calming looks until she started work. I cannot quite put my finger on what made her so pleasing to the eye and heart. The brown hair, the brown eyes, a mouth that was always slightly open, a characteristic thoughtfulness in the gestures, which led me to interpret them as a promise of kindness, acceptance, and indulgence?

  In any case, kind she was. And she accepted and indulged me as no one had ever done. Sometimes I had the feeling she let me do as I pleased because she did not care what I did. Not that that would have bothered me: nothing wrong with a relationship based on well-meaning mutual indifference. Then I noticed I could not allow myself to be indulged: I did not want to be in her debt, and I saw the price she would extract from me or at least had the right to extract. Indulgence has an ulterior motive, and that ulterior motive is love. But not even if I had loved Bettina would I have felt I could repay her for so much indulgence.

  4

  I HAD TOO MUCH WORK to be able to do much reading, but The Odyssey lay by my bed. When I was too keyed up to fall asleep or when I awoke in the middle of the night, a few lines of my tried-and-true Odyssey hit the spot.

  In books nine and ten Odysseus reports on the first part of his wanderings. He and his men sail from Troy to the Cicones; they sack the city, kill off the male population, ravish the women, and distribute the spoils among themselves. From the Cicones they move on to the Lotus Eaters, who so indulge Odysseus' men with their honey-sweet lotus fruit that they lose all thought of departure and homecoming. Odysseus and his band have a hard time of it with the one-eyed, man-hating and man-eating Cyclops, but Aeolus, who hosts a daily feast with his wife and six strapping sons and six comely daughters, regales them with food and shelter for an entire month. The Laestrygonians have it in for Odysseus and his company; like the Cyclops, they are giants (though two-eyed) and hate and eat men. With only one ship and few men Odysseus lands on Circe's shores only to have the men turned into swine. Circe would have done the same to Odysseus had he not, forewarned by an emissary from the gods, stood up to her with sword in hand—whereby he wins her love and his men's return to human form. During the rest of his wanderings, in books eleven and twelve, Odysseus meets the shades of his mother and other great women in the realm of the dead; the Sirens, who try to lure him to death with their haunting songs; Scylla, a monster with six heads, countless teeth, and twelve feet; Charybdis, who thrice daily gulps down the dark sea's waters and thrice daily regurgitates them; and the glossy-plaited, fragrantly arrayed Calypso, with whom he takes his ease. The last women Odysseus encounters before returning home to Penelope are Nausicaa and Arete, the chaste daughter and understanding wife of the king of Phaeacia.

  If the ravished journalist was my Ciconian woman and the indulgent Bettina my Lotus Eater, a one-eyed female Cyclops was waiting in the wings. But I wanted none of a giant with one eye in the middle of her forehead or of a monster named Scylla, with all those heads, teeth, and feet, or her sea-slurping-and-spewing companion, Charybdis; and finding a family with six sisters and six brothers was out of the question. One of the popular novels my mother read in the fifties was called Cheaper by the Dozen, but a family with six sons and six daughters was a media story, and if there were any such families in my vicinity I would not know of them. Should I settle for fewer siblings? Should I substitute a group for a family and look for a soprano in a chorus, a harpist in an orchestra, a member of a mixed-doubles team? I already had a candidate for the female giant in mind: a woman at the checkout of the local supermarket. She may not have been a match for the queen of the Laestrygonians, whom Homer compares to a mountaintop, but she was certainly up to her daughter, whom Homer describes as merely sprightly. When one day she arose from her cash register throne to extricate a packet of cigarettes for a customer, her colossal womanhood towered over me by half a head.

  I decided in favor of the chorus. I had enjoyed singing in the school chorus and thought that if I could manage the rehearsal schedule it would provide a good counterbalance to all the work I was doing. I actually chose a choir, the choir of the Church of Peace, which in addition to singing for church services gave highly praised concerts. If the chorus of the secular Bach Society had not had such a long waiting list, I would have chosen it instead: looking for a daughter of Aeolus in a church choir must surely be blasphemous. Not that my project was particularly grandiose: I merely wanted to put a little structure into the eternal game of seeking and signing up and finding and letting go; besides, a church chorister was nothing compared with the classic challenge: a nun.

  My worries were for naught. At the first rehearsal I realized the “choir” could not have been more secular: the two much-courted beauties, the blond soprano and the alto brunette, the young tenor adored by the middle-aged women, the old-timer clique constantly evoking tradition, the elderly basses looking at everything with suspicion—the same as in any chorus. I set my sights on neither the beauties nor the cheerful anesthesiologist and the caustic legal secretary, both altos, whom I liked: the way I saw it, Odysseus, given his status as guest in Aeolus' household, would have been friendly with all the daughters and waited until one chose him.

  The one who chose me was not one I would have chosen. She was an instructor at her father's driving school and consumed by a passion for cars that I knew and despised in men. But the project had taken such a hold on me that as soon as she invited me home I went and bedded her.

  5

  THINGS WERE MORE complicated with the checkout woman. She was suspicious by nature, and I had to modify my courting ritual: I had to buy her but not with money, no; with gifts, gifts that so appealed to her that she no longer cared about the false grounds on which I gave them to her. I went on giving her gifts after we had slept together, and she began to forget her suspicions. It was then I should have left her. But if women do not do what they should—Barbara had not—then why should I?

  Besides, she was such a wild, overwhelming, all-consuming lover that I felt liberated by her. Yes, she was a giant, but instead of tearing me to pieces she tore me free from what had been holding me down and gave me such a shaking that nothing of the old me remained. Until she thought I was in earnest, at which point she turned earnest—and tender.

  Next on my list was a sorceress. I had developed a collector's passion not so much for accumulating individual objects as for filling in the blanks. A plastic surgeon who instead of turning men into swine—not willingly, at least—was adept at making swinish faces look more human? A palm reader and fortune-teller who dealt in prediction rather than transmogrification? An artist, the creator and destroyer of illusions?

  I decided in favor of a cosmetician. The art of cosmetics is to turn ugly ducklings into beauties, not vice versa, but like plastic surgeons, cosmeticians should in theory be able make people ugly if they so desired. There was a cosmetics shop around the corner. It had two cosmeticians: the elder was the owner, the younger, her assistant. I made an appointment with the elder one, but she was out when I got there and the younger one took care of me. She was from Persia and had skin like an apricot and a voice like a shawm, and she massaged my face with such fervor and enthusiasm that I was on the brink of tears. That was the beginning of my problems. I may have gone only to the brink of tears, but nothing remotely like that had happened to me since childhood, and it baffled me. Then the dreams began and baffled me ev
en more.

  I would awake and know I had dreamed of Barbara. I knew it before I remembered the content of the dream: a banal nothing of a scene in which we were riding in a car or making the bed or cooking. I knew it because I awoke with the blissful feeling of intimacy I would have on good days with Barbara. As I grew more awake, the feeling would turn into desire, a desire that at first I thought I could satisfy simply by reaching out for her. Then, in the next stage of wakefulness, I realized I could not satisfy it but kept feeling it for a moment until it turned into disappointment. By then I was totally awake and started searching my memory for the dream.

  I did not desire Barbara by day. My diurnal intimations of desire had long since given way to irony and objectivity. How did the desire in my dream avoid being tainted by them and live its own life?

  I began to dream more than I had dreamed since childhood. I dreamed of chases, flights, and falls, of exam anxiety or day-to-day situations with my mother, and, once, of a train trip with Grandfather during which we unpacked one picnic basket after the other without eating anything. I also dreamed a very different kind of dream. I come back one night from a trip; I get out of the taxi and look up at the house: it has burned down. It must have burned down that day, because there is still smoke coming out of the rubble. I am not upset. I am surprised at first, then filled with a feeling of freedom and bliss. Phew! I am finally rid of the casing I had to fit into, of its furniture surrounding me, eyeing me, of all the things I have to put away, keep clean, and in good repair. I am finally rid of my life and free to live a new one.

  Each time I came back from one of the many business trips I had to take for the publishing house I would remember that dream. Sitting in the taxi, I would picture smoke rising out of the rubble and feel both hope and despair, because I wanted a new life and did not know what it should be like. But each time, the house was there, and my life went on as it was.