Homecoming Homecoming Homecoming

by Bernhard Schlink

  “Do you think I didn't notice the route you'd taken?” Her eyes were all scorn and provocation.

  I did not reply. We came to a small park at the confluence of the village pond and the lake. I went to the water's edge and took out a bag of stale bread I had collected, and just as in the old days the birds paddled up before I could throw out the first crumbs, before I had even broken the crusts into crumbs; just as in the old days there was a great to-do when I did toss them in, the faster, stronger birds snapping them up before the slower, weaker ones could get at them, and I did my best to restore justice by aiming carefully.

  Mother laughed when she caught on to what I was doing. “So you want to teach the ducks justice, do you?”

  “Grandfather made fun of me too. ‘That's the way nature is,’ he would say. ‘The strong get more than the weak, the fast more than the slow.’ But I'm not nature.”

  Mother held out her hand, I gave her a piece of dry bread, and she crumbled it up and threw it in the direction of the swans, two white parents and five light-brown offspring. “Only because I prefer swans to ducks.”

  “Weren't you ever curious about where Father grew up?”

  She held out her open hand again and threw the swans more crumbs. “I know what's coming now. What was Father like anyway? How did you meet, fall in love, get married? When did he leave? How did he die?” She shook her head. “Why do you think I haven't told you? I don't like to talk about it. I hate to talk about it.”

  By the end she was in such a frenzy I couldn't say a word. I knew her frenzies: I had to be prepared for the worst: insults, shouts, even violence. Only the disciplinary structure of the words and sentences kept her from going off the deep end. As a child I was sometimes spanked, not so hard it really hurt but enough to throw me off balance. She hit me as if she wanted to push me away, get rid of me. Whenever she threw herself into a frenzy, I would panic. But now I could see that she could turn the frenzy on and off at will: it was all a game. And I was not in the mood for games.

  I gave her a few more scraps of bread, and we fed the ducks and swans until the bag was empty. “Shall we go back to the hotel?”

  After dinner she asked, “What do you know about your father?”

  “I know he grew up here, that he had a hobbyhorse and a tri-cornered paper hat as a child and got a suit and tie and bicycle when he went to the Gymnasium, that he later wore tweed knickerbockers, collected stamps, played handball, drew, painted, read a lot, liked poetry, was nearsighted, was exempted from military service, studied law, went to Germany, and died in the war.”

  She laughed. “You know more than I do!” She waited again, waited for me to laugh and thereby close the issue. But then she took a deep breath. “He was an adventurer. A Swiss law student who one day says to himself he must be crazy spending all his time in lecture halls and libraries tracking life and the law secondhand, when right next door, lives, laws, everything, was going up in smoke. How he got to Silesia I don't know.

  “We met in September 1944 in Neurade. It was a warm, sunny day. I went to a garden restaurant for dinner and, sitting alone at a table waiting for a friend, I must have kept looking over at him: I had forgotten how good a young man can look when he's not in uniform, when he's wearing a suit, a well-cut three-piece tweed suit, a blue shirt, and a red tie with blue polka dots. All of a sudden he stood and came over to my table and asked me with a smile if he could join me or take me for a walk and have dinner with me afterward. I . . .” She stopped.

  “Well . . . ?”

  “We spent the evening together and the night. We had another two days and nights together and got married on the last morning. Then he had to leave, and I didn't see him again until April 1945 in Breslau. One morning there he was in my basement ruins with a Swiss passport for me. His Swiss accent made everything sound so simple. Even the ruins, the misery and death didn't seem so bad. When he saw my stomach, he said, ‘Take good care of yourself, of the two of you.’ A few days later he was in the wrong place at the wrong time and got shot.”

  “You . . .”

  “I saw it. He'd just said goodbye and was walking down the street when he was shot to death. That kind of thing happened all the time: you'd be walking along and suddenly the Germans and Russians would start shooting at one another.”

  Again she clammed up, but when I tried to ask a question she just looked up at me. Until then she had been looking down at her hands. “He was the same height as you, and you have his slant green eyes and his hands.” That was an encore. Her face made it clear that the performance was over and the curtain had fallen.

  Part Four

  1

  WHILE THE BERLIN WALL was falling, I was in bed with a fever. I had gone to bed early: no news, no images of the boys and girls straddling the wall at the Brandenburg Gate, of jubilant East and West Berliners crossing the transit points, of the East German police surprised, even embarrassed, by their own ability to be friendly. The next morning the pictures in the papers were history. Did they document an error soon to be rectified or the start of a new world? The editorials had not a clue.

  I recalled the workers' uprising in East Berlin on June 17, 1953, the Hungarian uprising, the erection of the Wall on August 13, 1961, the Cuban missle crisis, Kennedy's assassination, the moon landing, the Americans' retreat from Saigon, Pinochet's putsch, Nixon's departure from the White House, the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. Each came with its image: workers waving the German flag at the Brandenburg Gate; masons piling up cement slabs under armed surveillance; an aerial view of a rocket site, Jack and Jackie in an open limousine; a man all bundled up posing next to an oddly fluttering American flag in the midst of a wasteland; people crowding into a helicopter on the roof of the American Embassy; Allende ready to defend the presidential palace with machine gun in hand, though the straps hanging from his helmet presage disaster; Nixon on the White House lawn; an aerial shot of the Chernobyl reactor, which bears no outward signs of danger yet looks deadly. Instead of a pictorial image for the Hungarian uprising I had an aural one: my mother and I happened to have tuned in to Budapest Radio as the events drew to a close and it was appealing to the world in English, French, and German for help.

  In addition to watching history from a distance, I could have watched it up close. I could have had more than images; I could have had experiences. But I let it pass me by. When the students took to the streets, I went to my job; instead of mingling with the last hippies and flower children, I studied massage. I did not demonstrate in Bonn against rearmament or in Brokdorf against the stockpiling of fuel rods or in Frankfurt against the expansion of the airport.

  This time I did not want to let history pass me by. I had woken up free of fever. I drove to work, arranged to take some time off, and flew to Berlin that very day. I took a room in a street off the Kurfürstendamm. The pension occupied the third and fourth floor of a once majestic, now shabby apartment house. My room was all plush and kitsch and plastic shower stall. The gloomy breakfast room boasted a jungle of artificial plants. Looking down into the courtyard, you could not tell whether it was day or night.

  I took the S-Bahn to East Berlin and roamed the streets. It was noon. The crowded snack bars, the pedestrians scurrying to get through as much shopping as possible during lunch hour, the flow of Trabants, Wartburgs, and humpbacked vans on the broad streets, the stench of brown coal fumes, here and there a pile of coal waiting on the sidewalk to be shoveled into the basement through the ground-level window, here and there a red banner celebrating the fortieth anniversary of the German Democratic Republic—common, everyday socialism.

  East Berlin had the same grayness about it I had seen on class trips before the Wall was built and afterward as part of a seminar I took on Marxist legal theory. Now as then I found it touching. The outdated lack of efficiency in all aspects of life and the futile attempts at trying to demonstrate up-to-dateness with superfluous traffic lights, dull advertisements, and mirrored glass in the windows of new buildings reminded m
e of the futile solemnity with which children construct their version of the grown-up world and play at being grown-ups. I found it touching, though I knew that the world they had constructed was disturbingly narrow and that their games could be sordid and cruel.

  I went into the Alexanderplatz department store in which Christmas angels were already on sale under that strange communist alias of “winged end-of-the-year figures.” I let myself be carried by the crowds past counters with little to see and nothing to buy. I wanted to do something with the money I had exchanged and decided on stationery: pads, envelopes, folders, which always come in handy. But the pads and even the envelopes were ruled, and the folders looked as if they would come apart as soon as you opened them, so in an Unter den Linden bookshop I bought some chess books I knew I would never read.

  The university no longer boasted the guards it had had when our seminar visited. I went in, inhaled the sharp smell of disinfectant, and found the notice board containing announcements of events and Free German Youth meetings. I slipped unnoticed through an open door and found myself listening to a lecture on contemporary East German literature. I stayed to the end, enthralled by the charmed atmosphere of the nearly empty hall, lit only by a small lamp on the lectern. By the time I was outside again, the lowering gray sky was nearly dark and the streetlamps had gone on. What had I expected from my encounter with history? Demonstrations? Street-corner debates? The occupation of ministries and radio stations? Police intervention? The destruction of the Wall?

  History is clearly in no hurry. It respects daily activities like work, shopping, cooking, and eating; it understands that bureaucratic processes, sporting events, and get-togethers with family and friends must go on. Presumably the same rules applied to the French Revolution: it is all very well to storm the Bastille on July 14, but on July 15 the cobbler must return to his last, the tailor to his needle; they must make up for lost time. After a morning at the guillotine, back to nailing and sewing. What is there to do all day at a Bastille already stormed? Or a Wall already scaled?

  2

  PART OF THE TIME ALLOTTED to East Berliners by daily life they now spent in West Berlin, shopping. They had a lot to learn: how to compare goods, brands, and prices; how to sniff out sales; how to tell imitation schnapps from the real thing; how to ask, bargain, and demand without shame. It took practice.

  I walked through the Kurfürstendamm and Tauentzienstrasse shopping districts, went into department stores, clothes and shoe shops, supermarkets, household appliance shops, and do-it-yourself centers and watched people shopping. Was this the West? Did it show its true face in the behavior of these shoppers, who had not assimilated it gradually but had to swallow it whole from one day to the next? Its face of greed? But then I saw a young couple gazing so tenderly at the display of bras, panties, and slips, handling the articles so reverently, walking away with their purchase so blissfully that it made my anti-consumer-society bias feel arrogant. In Wittenbergplatz, the man hawking bananas, a rarity in the East, could scarcely cope with tearing open the cartons, pulling apart the clusters, handing them over to the customers, and giving change. He would not sell me one banana; I would have had to take at least ten. An East Berliner gave me one of his.

  The next day too I spent hours roaming through East Berlin, but this time I left the center for the residential districts: streets full of potholes, sidewalks whose flagstone paving had been constantly repaired with gravel and tar, fences of gray, crumbling wood, façades with plaster peeling in sheets to reveal the bricks beneath. At first I was puzzled by how homey I found the decay, but then I realized I was passing through the streets of my past, the streets of my hometown in the late forties and early fifties, the streets of my childhood. I was able to crumble a gray, rotten fence slat with my bare hand the way I used to as a child.

  All day the sky had hung low and heavy over the city, and when darkness came it too seemed to weigh heavy on the houses, parks, squares, and streets. I looked longingly at the bright windows with their false promise of security. I felt another rush of longing when, sitting in the U-Bahn, I watched the passengers on their way home, though I did not envy them their homes or families or the evening they were about to spend.

  In the pension I met an American journalist who had just arrived. He tried to debrief me over dinner. Where would things go from here? Did the East Germans want to live in a free German state of their own or did they want reunification? What did the West Germans want? Would there be reprisals against the Communists in East Germany? Would the Russians stay on in East Germany or would they pull out? Would Gorbachev last? Would the military stage a putsch? He was not at all put off by the fact that I had no answers to his questions. Could I tell him what I personally hoped to see happen?

  I went on about the two halves of Germany: the Catholic, Rhinelandish, Bavarian, opulent, life-affirming, extroverted western half versus the Protestant, Prussian, frugal, hard-boiled, introverted eastern half. The eastern half was as much a part of my spiritual world as the western half, and I wanted free access to it, the right to work, live, and love there. Maybe a free East Germany, like an Austria or a Switzerland, would be enough for me. But wouldn't it be more natural for two halves to make a whole?

  He let me have my say, and what I said I did not know I would say until it came out. Yet it sounded perfectly reasonable, as if I had thought about it long and hard. Or as if while making my way through East Berlin I had come across the world of Luther and Bach, Frederick the Great and the Prussian reformers instead of a bunch of tumbledown houses.

  I also told him why there would be no reprisals. “The only reason Odysseus could kill the suitors and string up the women who had reveled with them was that he did not stay on. He kept moving. When you stay on, you have to get along with people, not get back at them. There were no reprisals in America after the Civil War, were there? Because the country had to heal the split if it was going to stick together. Well, Germany too will have to heal the split if it's going to stick together.”

  Was his smile a smile of goodwill or of derision? We had emptied two bottles of wine. But I was just as intoxicated by the two days. Past and present, indulgence and sobriety, joy and rigidity, the outer life and the inner life—everything coming together, the world growing round and full—and I sat nursing my wine in the midst of it all.

  3

  BEFORE FLYING HOME, I went back to the university. This time I climbed the broad red-marble steps past Marx's thesis “Philosophers interpret this world in various ways; what matters is to change it.” The broad corridors were empty; nor did I meet anyone on the stairs or in the corridors on the next floor. The sharp disinfectant smell was everywhere.

  Next to one door I noticed the announcement of a seminar on constitutional law in capitalist countries. As I was reading through the topics under consideration, the door opened and a man came up to me and offered me his hand.

  “Dr. Römer?”

  I shook his hand and said, “Debauer.”

  “Professor Pfister told us to expect a Dr. Römer. Are you here to replace him?”

  “He may still be coming.”

  “In any case, do come in.”

  He made a welcoming gesture and introduced himself as Dr. Fach. He took my coat and led me through another door into a room with lockers along the walls and a long table in the middle. Sitting at the table were several men and women—some young, some old, some in ties and jackets, some in sweaters. Dr. Fach showed me to a place at the narrow end. Additional participants filed in while he spoke.

  I learned that Professor Pfister from the Faculty of Law in Hanover had been one of the few German-German contacts Professor Lummer of Humboldt University had been able to maintain over the years and that the two of them had agreed they should take immediate advantage of the fall of the Wall to organize an exchange whereby a few instructors from Hanover would teach at Humboldt and vice versa. They had been expecting Dr. Römer, and here I was. “Are you at the university?”

 
“I haven't quite finished my dissertation actually. I'm not from Hanover and have had no personal contact with Professor Pfister, but . . .”—here goes!—“. . . it was thought that constitutional law was in special need of attention.” My master's thesis had dealt with basic constitutional rights.

  I was not asked who thought I should teach constitutional law at Humboldt University; I was asked only about the thesis, the dissertation, other publications, future projects, teaching experience, extracurricular and political activities. I tried not to lie, but in the end I had studied comparative constitutional law in America rather than massage, published articles there, directed research here, and all but completed my dissertation.

  An open window notwithstanding, the room was overheated and I was sweating. The lockers, the long table with all those people around it—I felt like a schoolboy called on the carpet. Perhaps that was what had made it increasingly easy for me to lie. When I hinted that I had been a consultant for local governments with Social Democrat majorities in cases before the Federal Constitutional Court, I noticed several heads nodding. I elicited the same reaction by promoting myself from editor to editorial board member at my publishing house and promising to provide their library with scholarly literature free of charge. Dr. Fach thanked me in the name of his department and said, “We hope you can return in December to give a lecture course and conduct a seminar in the constitutional law of the Federal Republic.”

  4

  AND SO IN DECEMBER I started a new regime: I would teach on Mondays and Tuesdays and work at the publishing house during the rest of the week. For one of my days in East Berlin I took the day off; for the other I was given the day off—the house's contribution to German unity. At first I would prepare my lectures at home and fly to Berlin on Monday morning, but before long I took to packing the books I needed and flying in on Friday evening. I stayed at the University Guesthouse, a brick building from the turn of the century, and the courtyard my windows faced was so quiet day and night that the people living and working behind the other windows might as well have been bewitched into a deep sleep. In what looked like a laboratory across the quadrangle I pictured a chemist snoring away before a sizzling Bunsen burner; in the office a floor above the lab, a row of bureaucrats, their heads down on their desks; in the flat to the left, the husband sprawled out in his armchair, a beer bottle at his feet, the wife prostrate on the floor next to the stove.