Summer Lies: Stories

by Bernhard Schlink

What had Anne said? If you encounter the truth and it tortures you, that isn’t what’s torturing you, it’s whatever the truth’s about. And it always sets you free. He laughed. Truth and whatever the truth is about—he still didn’t understand. And that the truth sets you free—maybe it was the other way around and you had to be free in order to be able to live with the truth. But nothing spoke against trying out the truth anymore. Somewhere up ahead he’d leave the highway and take a room in a hotel, in the Cévennes, in Burgundy, in the Vosges, and write about it all to Anne.

  The House in the Forest

  1

  Sometimes it felt as if this had always been his life. That he’d always lived in this house in the forest, by the meadow with its apple trees and lilacs, and the pond with its weeping willows. That he’d always had his wife and daughter around him. And always received their farewells when he went away, and their happy greetings when he came back.

  Once a week they stood in front of the house and waved goodbye to him until his car was out of sight. He drove to the little town, collected the mail, took things to be repaired, collected whatever had been repaired or ordered, visited the physical therapist to do exercises for his back, and shopped at the general store. Once there he would stand for a while at the counter before the drive home, drinking a coffee, talking to a neighbor, or reading the New York Times. He was never away for more than five hours. He missed the company of his wife. And he missed the company of his daughter, whom he didn’t take along, because she got carsick.

  They heard him from a long way away. No other car took the narrow, rutted road that led to their house through a long, forested valley. They would stand in front of the house again, hand in hand, until he made the turn toward the meadow, Rita tore herself free of Kate and began to run, and flew into his arms almost before he had time to switch off the engine and get out of the car. “Papa, Papa!” He held her, overwhelmed by her tenderness as she wrapped her arms around his neck and nestled her face against his.

  On those days Kate belonged to him and Rita. Together they unloaded whatever he had brought from town, did things in the house or the garden, collected wood in the forest, caught fish in the pond, pickled cucumbers or onions, baked bread. Rita, full of family happiness and exuberance, ran from her father to her mother and from her mother to her father and just talked and talked. After supper the three of them would play, or he and Kate together would tell Rita a story that they’d worked out while they were cooking.

  On other days Kate disappeared in the morning from the bedroom to her study. When he brought her coffee and fruit for breakfast, she would look up from her computer with a friendly smile, and if he had a problem to discuss with her she made an effort to understand it. But her thoughts were elsewhere, as they were when the three of them sat around the table at lunch or supper. Even after Rita’s good-night story and good-night kiss, when she came to sit with him and they listened to music or watched a movie or read books, her thoughts were with the characters she was writing about.

  He didn’t let it weigh on him. He was happy—just knowing she was in the house, seeing her head at the window while he was working in the garden, then hearing her fingers typing on the computer keyboard while he was standing at the door, having her opposite him at supper and beside him in the evening. Feeling her, smelling her, hearing her breathing in the night. And he could not expect any more of her. She had told him she could live only if she was writing, and he had told her he accepted that.

  Just as he accepted that he was alone with Rita day in, day out. He woke her, washed and dressed her, had breakfast with her, and let her watch and help with the cooking, the washing and cleaning, the gardening, the repairing of the roof and the heating and the car. He answered her questions. He taught her to read, far too soon. He romped around with her even though his back hurt, because he knew she ought to romp around.

  He accepted the way things were. But he wished they were together more as a family. He wished the days with Kate and Rita were not a part of life only once a week, but yesterday, today, and tomorrow too.

  Does all happiness yearn to be eternal? Like all desire? No, he thought, what it yearns for is continuity. It yearns to endure in the future, having already been happiness in the past. Don’t lovers fantasize that they already met as children and were drawn to each other? That they played in the same playground or went to the same school or spent their holidays in the same place with their parents? He didn’t fantasize about any early encounters. He dreamed that Kate and Rita and he had put down roots here in defiance of every wind and every storm. Forever and ever.

  2

  They had moved here six months ago. He had started his search for a house in the country in the spring of the previous year and had looked all summer long. Kate was too busy even to look at pictures of houses on the Internet. She said she wanted a house somewhere near New York. But didn’t she want to get away from the demands that were made on her in New York? That kept her from her writing and her family? That she would love to have declined, but could not, because part of life as a famous writer in New York required being reachable and available?

  He found the house with its meadows and its pond in fall: five hours from New York, on the border with Vermont, away from large towns, away from large roads, sitting enchanted in the forest. He went up there alone a couple of times to deal with the broker and the owner. Then Kate came with him.

  She had been through some stressful days, went to sleep as they drove up the highway, and didn’t wake up till they exited onto the country road. The sunroof was open, and above her Kate saw blue sky and brightly colored leaves. She smiled at her husband. “Drunk on sleep, drunk on colors, drunk on freedom—I don’t know where I am and where we’re going. I’ve forgotten where I’ve come from.” The last hour of their journey took them through the glowing landscape of an Indian summer, first along country roads with a yellow line down the middle, then on rural roads with none, and finally on the dirt road that led to the house. When she got out of the car and looked around, he knew that she liked the house. Her eyes swept over the forest, the meadow, the pond, came to rest on the house, and paused on one detail after the other: the door under the front porch held up by two slender columns, the windows, aligned neither with those above them nor with those beside them, the leaning chimney, the open veranda, the addition. More than two hundred years old, despite the ravages of time the house had not lost its dignity. Kate nudged him and signaled with her eyes at the corner windows on the second floor, two of them facing the pond and one of them facing the meadow. “Is that …?”

  “Yes, that’s your room.”

  The cellar was dry, the floors were sound. Before the first snows new shingles were put on and new heating installed so the tiling guy and the electrician, the carpenter and the painter, could work even in the winter. When they moved in in the spring the floors hadn’t yet been polished, the open fireplace not yet bricked in, the kitchen cupboards not yet hung. But the very day after the move he led Kate into her completed study. After all their things had been unloaded and the truck had driven away, he had polished the floorboards that same evening and the next morning had brought her desk and bookshelves upstairs. She sat down at the desk, stroked the top of it, pulled open the drawer and closed it again, looked through the left-hand window at the pond and through the right-hand window at the meadow. “You positioned the desk just right—I don’t want to decide between the water and the land. So when I look straight ahead, I’ll be looking at the corner. In old houses ghosts come out of the corners, not through the doors.”

  Kate’s study was next to their bedroom and Rita’s bedroom; in the rear of the house was the bathroom and a little room that just held a table and chair. On the first floor, the front door opened immediately into the one large space, with its open fireplace and wooden beams, that encompassed both kitchen area, eating area, and living room.

  “Shouldn’t you and Rita swap? She’s only in her room to sleep, and the little room
is far too small for you to write in.” He told himself Kate meant well. Perhaps she had a guilty conscience because in the time they had known each other, her writing career had soared while his declined. His first novel, a best seller in Germany, had found a publisher in New York and a producer in Hollywood. That was how he had met Kate, as a young German author on a reading tour in America, not a success here but full of promise and already planning his next novel. But with all the waiting for the film, which never got made, with all the traveling with Kate, who was soon being invited everywhere in the world, and with all his concerns for Rita, he’d done no more than make notes for his next novel. When asked what he did, he still said he was a writer. But he wasn’t working on anything, no matter what he said to Kate and what he even pretended to himself sometimes. So what would he do in a bigger room? Feel even more strongly that he was just marking time?

  He put off the next novel till later. If it still interested him. What occupied his mind more than anything was whether Rita should start kindergarten. When she did, she’d no longer belong to him.

  3

  Naturally both parents loved Rita. But Kate could have pictured a life without children; he couldn’t. When she got pregnant, she behaved as if it were nothing. He insisted that she go to the doctor and a prenatal gymnastics class. He put the ultrasound pictures up on the bulletin board. He stroked her swollen stomach, talked to it, read it poems, and played music to it, tolerated by an amused Kate.

  Kate’s love was matter-of-fact. Her father, a professor of history at Harvard, and her mother, a pianist who frequently toured, had raised their four children with the kind of efficiency associated with a business. The children had a good nanny, went to good schools, got good instruction in languages and music, and were supported by their parents in everything that came into their heads. They entered life in the knowledge that they would achieve what they wanted to achieve, their husbands or wives would function well in their jobs, in their homes, and in bed, and their children would of course run just as smoothly as they had run themselves. Love was the grease that lubricated this family machine.

  For him love and family were the fulfillment of a dream he had begun to dream when the marriage of his parents, father an administrative employee, mother a bus driver, sank into a morass of spite, screaming matches, and violence. His parents hit him too sometimes. But when that happened, he accepted it as their reaction to some stupid thing he’d done. When his parents began to scream and then came to blows, he and his sisters felt as if the ice were cracking beneath their feet. His dream of love and family was thick ice, solid enough to walk on, solid enough even to dance on. At the same time the bond of love and family was as tight in his dream as the bond between him and his sisters, holding tight to one another when the storm broke.

  Kate was the promise of thick ice. At a dinner at the Monterey book festival, the host had sat them next to each other: the young American author whose first novel had just been sold to Germany and the young German author who’d just arrived in America with his first novel. If I can make it there, I’ll make it anywhere—ever since seeing his book in the bookstores in New York, he felt wonderful and he told his dinner companion enthusiastic stories about his successes and his plans. He was as clumsy as a little puppy. She was amused and moved and gave him a sense of security. He knew and hated that older, successful women felt drawn to him and wanted to look after him. Kate took care of him and was neither quite as old as he was nor quite so successful. People’s opinions didn’t seem to bother her. When, disconcerting his host, he suddenly stood up and invited her to dance, she laughed and accepted.

  He fell in love with her that very evening. She went to sleep confused. When they met again at the book festival in Paso Robles and Kate took him to her room, he wasn’t the awkward boy she had imagined, but a man of passionate abandon. No one had ever made love to her like that. Nor had anyone ever curled against her, holding so tight, when he was asleep. It was an unrestrained, all-consuming kind of love. That was unknown to her, and both frightened and aroused her. When they were back in New York, he stayed and courted her with clumsy determination till she let him move in with her. Her apartment was big enough. Because living together went well, they got married six months later.

  Living together changed. At the beginning they worked with their desks together, whether at home or in the library, and they did appearances together. Then came Kate’s second book, and it was a best seller. Now she did appearances alone. After her third book she went on a world tour. He often went with her, but no longer enjoyed attending the official events. Admittedly Kate always introduced him as the well-known German writer, but no one knew his name or his book and he hated people’s politeness when they met him just because he was Kate’s husband. He sensed her anxiety that he was jealous of her success. “I’m not jealous. You’ve earned your success and I love your books.”

  Their lives intersected less often. “It can’t go on like this,” he said, “you’re away too much and when you’re here you’re too exhausted—too exhausted to talk, let alone make love.”

  “I find all the rushing around hard too. I’m turning almost everything down. What should I do? I can’t turn it all down.”

  “How will it go when there’s the baby?”

  “Baby?”

  “I found the test with the two red strips.”

  “That doesn’t mean anything.”

  Kate didn’t want to believe the first pregnancy test, and did a second one. When she became a mother, she also didn’t want to believe at first that she would have to change her life, and lived the way she had before the baby. But when she came home in the evenings and picked up her daughter, Rita turned in her arms and reached for her father. Then Kate would be overwhelmed with longing for another life, a life with child and husband and writing and nothing else. In the bustle of the following day the longing would dissipate. But as Rita grew older, it returned all the more strongly and each time it did so, Kate was more jolted.

  One evening before he went to sleep he said, “I don’t want to go on living like this.”

  Suddenly she was afraid she would lose him and Rita, and life with the two of them seemed to her the most precious thing there was. “Nor I. I’m sick of the traveling and the readings and the lectures and the receptions. I just want to be with you both and write, that’s it.”

  “Is that true?”

  “If I can write, all I need is you two. The rest of it I don’t need at all.”

  They tried to live a different way. After a year they knew it would never succeed in New York. “Life here eats you whole. You love meadows and trees and birds—I’ll find us a house in the country.”

  4

  After they’d lived in the country for a few months, he said, “It isn’t just meadows and trees and birds. Look how everything is coming along and growing—the house is almost finished, Rita is healthier than she was in the city, and the apple trees that Jonathan and I pruned are going to produce a good crop.”

  They were standing in the garden. He put his arm around Kate and she leaned against him. “The only thing that isn’t almost finished is my book. It’ll be winter or next spring.”

  “That’s soon! And doesn’t your writing go easier than in the city?”

  “I’ll have a first draft in the fall. Do you want to read it?”

  She had always claimed that you mustn’t show anyone what you’re writing or talk to anyone about it—it brings bad luck. He was pleased that she trusted him. He was pleased by the prospect of the apple crop and the fresh cider he would press. He had ordered a big vat.

  Fall came early, and the early frost tinted the maples a flaming scarlet. Rita couldn’t get enough of the colors of the trees or of how on cool evenings paper and logs in the fireplace could make a warming fire. He let her scrunch up the paper herself, and stack the kindling and logs, and strike the match and hold it close. But she still said, “Look, Papa, look!” It remained a miracle to her.

&n
bsp; When the three of them sat by the fire, he served hot cider with a sprig of green mint for Rita and a shot of Calvados for Kate and him. Maybe it was because of the Calvados that she responded more often to his wooing in bed. Maybe it was because of her relief at having finished the first draft.

  He wanted to read a little every day, and explained to Rita that every day she must play by herself for a little while. The first day she knocked proudly on his door after two hours, accepted his praise, and promised to spend even longer alone the next day. But by the next day he had finished. He had got out of bed in the night and read to the end.

  Kate’s first three novels had depicted the life of a family at the time of the Vietnam War, the eventual return of the son from captivity to the love of his life, who had married and had a daughter, and the fate of this daughter whose father was not the man her mother was married to and with whom she had grown up but the returning soldier. Each novel was self-contained, but taken together they formed the portrait of an era.

  Kate’s new novel was set in the present. A young couple, both successful professionals who can’t have children, wants to adopt and goes searching abroad. They go from one complication to the next, are faced with medical, bureaucratic, and political hurdles, encounter committed helpers and corrupt agencies, and find themselves in comic and dangerous situations. In Bolivia, faced with the choice between adopting an enchanting pair of twins or exposing the criminals behind the arrangement and putting the adoption at risk, the man and the woman quarrel. The images they have of themselves and other people, their love, their marriage—none of it holds true anymore. In the end the adoption founders and the future they imagined for themselves lies shattered. But their lives are open to something new.

  It was still dark as he laid the last page on the stack of those he’d read. He switched off the light and opened the window, breathed the cool air, and saw the hoarfrost on the meadow. He liked the book. It was gripping, moving, and written with a lightness that was new for Kate. Readers would love the book; they would share in all the hopes and emotions and enjoy thinking their own thoughts about the open ending.