The Weekend: A Novel

by Bernhard Schlink

“Such nonsense.” Andreas snorted contemptuously. “If society doesn’t suit you, you can go to a nunnery or go and raise bees in Provence or sheep in the Hebrides. That’s no reason to kill people.”

  Karin wouldn’t give up. “Would so many of us have taken the liberty of leaving or changing society if the armed struggle hadn’t existed as an extreme possibility? It wasn’t waged vicariously on our behalf. But it did extend the space in which we were able to act. At the same time, anyone who killed in the struggle crossed a threshold that he shouldn’t have been able to cross. We must not kill. And the way you talk about it, Jörg … Does prison make people like that? So cold? So coarse? I’m sure you’re different inside from the way you appear on the outside.”

  Jörg made several attempts to speak, but couldn’t decide on an answer. Karin didn’t want to say more, and neither did Ulrich, Marko or Andreas. But just as the others were beginning with great relief to ask one another for bread rolls and pass one another the jam and talk about weather forecasts and plans for the day, Jörg said, “I’d like Henner to tell me something, if this is a good time.”

  Henner smiled at Jörg. “Why so formal?”

  “More coffee, anyone?” Christiane got to her feet and went and stood beside Henner.

  “What does that feel like: first putting me in prison and then celebrating my release from prison with me?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You told the cops I had a cabin in the Odenwald—they had only to wait there until one day …”

  “Ouch!” The coffee pot had slipped from Christiane’s hand, and the hot coffee had poured over Henner’s trousers and feet. Henner jumped up, took his napkin and tried to wipe himself down.

  “Come with me.” When Henner hesitated, Margarete took him by the hand and started pulling him toward the kitchen. Then she changed her mind and pulled him toward the garden house. Henner began to protest, but she just shook her head and went on pulling.

  “What are you doing?”

  “I’ll tell you in a minute.”

  “Must we …”

  “Yes, we must.”

  Nineteen

  When Margarete and Henner were standing by the garden house, she let go of his hand.

  “What now?”

  “Take your trousers off and put on a pair of mine. Then we’ll wash your trousers and hang them up.” Henner looked skeptically at her hips and his own. Margarete laughed. “Yes, they’ll be a bit big, but not very. Fat women look fatter than they really are.”

  He followed her into the house and looked around. The hall led from the front door straight into the kitchen. On the left he looked into a big room with a desk, swivel chair and stairs leading upward, and to the right a room with an open fireplace, sofa and armchairs. “Where can I …”

  “Wherever you like. I’ll go upstairs and fetch the trousers.” With a heavy tread she climbed the stairs. He heard her opening and closing a cupboard door, and with heavy footsteps she came back down and gave him a pair of jeans. They were freshly washed and felt rough and unwieldy. He turned away and changed. She was right: the jeans were big, but with a belt they were all right.

  In the kitchen she took a zinc tub out from under the sink, threw his trousers into it, screwed one end of a hose onto the tap and laid the other in the tub. She looked at the cylinder below the ceiling. “I hope I’ve got enough—otherwise you’ll have to get out and turn on the pump.” She let water flow into the tub and added a few squirts of dishwashing liquid.

  “Will that clean my trousers?”

  “No idea. I take my stuff to the Laundromat.”

  She knelt down and pummeled and kneaded the trousers until the water foamed. “What do you say we let them soak for a bit?” She tried to straighten up, but fell back to her knees with a shriek of pain. He bent down, put his arms around her and helped her up. Like a tree, the thought ran through his head, as if I were hugging a tree and lifting it up. When she got up, she smiled at him. “It’s my disc. I forgot about it. It’s slipped out to punish me.”

  Henner’s arm was still around Margarete’s back. When he took it away, he was embarrassed because he had left it there for so long. “Can’t you have an operation?”

  “Yes, but it might make it even worse.” She looked at him searchingly. “What are you going to do?”

  “What about?”

  “About Jörg’s question.”

  “Tell him it isn’t true. I didn’t put him in jail, I didn’t tell the police a thing.”

  “Are you sure?”

  He laughed. “I wouldn’t forget something like that. Yes, back then I wondered what I would do if he turned up at my door one night and asked me to hide him from the police. For a long time I didn’t know. Sometimes I thought one thing, sometimes another. In the end I made up my mind that I would take him in for a night and send him away the next morning. Luckily he never came.”

  “Let’s go for a little walk.” Margarete didn’t wait for Henner’s reaction, but set off, out of the kitchen and across the orchard to the stream. He put on his shoes, which he had taken off to change his trousers, and walked after her. When he caught up with her, she said, “May I?” and took his right arm and leaned on it. They walked slowly along the stream. Sometimes a frog jumped into the water, startled by their footsteps, sometimes the gurgling of the water grew a little louder. Where the forest didn’t reach all the way to the stream, they walked in piercingly hot sunshine. Henner felt his body growing damp with sweat where Margarete leaned against him.

  “Christiane told the police about the cabin in the Odenwald.”

  Henner stopped and looked at Margarete. “Christiane?”

  “I think that was why she poured coffee over your trousers. So that you couldn’t tell Jörg it wasn’t you.”

  “But later I’ll have to tell him what I didn’t tell him before.”

  “Do you?”

  “You mean …”

  “Perhaps that’s what Christiane hopes. Perhaps she wants to talk to you, and ask you to.”

  Henner scratched stones loose with his foot and kicked them into the stream. “What an absurd piece of playacting. The sister betrays her brother to the police. Then she wants her brother’s friend to say it was him. The friend she once loved and then dumped because she didn’t want to betray her brother.” He looked at her. “Has Christiane told you why she betrayed Jörg?”

  “She hasn’t even told me she did betray him. But isn’t it obvious? That she couldn’t stand being so worried about him anymore? That she wanted him to be taken so much by surprise so that he couldn’t shoot or be shot? It was out of fear that she betrayed him, out of love and fear.”

  “And where do I come in?”

  She tried to read in his face whether he felt merely annoyed or harassed. He felt her gaze and smiled at her. “I really don’t know. Do I owe Christiane anything? Do I have to help her because it doesn’t cost me much? What does it cost me if Jörg thinks I’m a traitor?” Her face was first surprised, then scornful. He didn’t see it. He went on seriously thinking and talking. “Or must I denounce Christiane by laying myself bare before him and freeing her of him?”

  “Or must you help Jörg by freeing him of her?”

  Henner heard the mockery in her question. “What’s up?”

  “Stop! You’ll just tie yourself up in knots. Do what you feel—how Christiane and Jörg respond is their business. Right now you’re acting as if they were a calculation you could solve.”

  He walked on, and she walked with him. Although he tried not to feel insulted, he did. As they stood there, she hadn’t taken her arm from his. Now, when he tried to pull his arm away, she held him tight. “You can’t do that. First you have to help me to a bench and then back to the house.” She laughed. “You can do it under protest.”

  Twenty

  After breakfast Ilse wanted to go on writing. She took her notebook and pen and went to the stream, but saw even from a distance that Margarete and Henner were sitti
ng on the bench. She took a broad sweep through the forest. When she came back to the stream it was almost twice as wide; another stream must have fed into it in the meantime. Beneath a willow tree was a row-boat, tied to the trunk with a long chain. Ilse sat down in it and opened her notebook.

  At last it was all over. The undertaker’s employee whom the comrades had bribed liberated Jan from the equipment room and gave him the bag. “You have to get over the wall—the gate is shut.” It was dark. Jan stumbled over gravestones, reached the wall, climbed up on one of the tombstones that were set into the wall and sat down on top. He looked onto a dimly lit road, on the far side of which were gardens, and far beyond, at the next road, houses. His new life started now. He threw the bag down and jumped after it.

  No, Ilse hadn’t written much in the morning before breakfast. But she had made a decision. She wanted to know. Either she would manage to write about the shooting and bombing and killing and dying, or she would abandon the project and look for something else. And with the decision to try, the desire had awoken to do it—not just the writing, but the imagining. With a shudder, Ilse was beginning to enjoy it: the idea of the explosion hurling the car into the air, the bullet flying at the window, piercing the glass, hitting and throwing its victim against the wall, the pistol set to the back of the neck, the trigger pulled.

  He walked along the road, passed several parked cars, found an elderly white Toyota, smashed the window with a stone, hot-wired the ignition and set off. It was his city; he knew his way around. When he was on the highway and swimming in the flow of traffic, he opened the bag and looked in. They had given him a German passport, a bundle of fifty-mark notes, a pistol with ammunition, a piece of paper with a date, a time and a telephone number. He was to ring at seven the next morning; he memorized the telephone number, tore the piece of paper into little scraps and let the driving wind carry them away. At a service area he parked the car at the end of the lot, took a room and asked to be woken at half past six.

  He thought of the life ahead of him. A life as a fugitive without a place to go and hope to rest. But whether the fear of not waking up again after the anesthetic had exhausted his ability to frighten himself, or with the step into his new life the old fears had ceased to be so obvious, he felt light and free. At last the half-truths of his old life were over. At last he was living in the selflessness, absoluteness, uniqueness of the struggle. He was free, was in debt to no one, committed to no love, no friendship, no concern for anyone, only devotion to the cause. What happiness, what a rush of freedom!

  He was woken by his alarm call, showered and at seven o’clock rang the number he had been given. At nine in the evening he was to meet a woman in the bookshop at the Munich railway station, blue coat, shoulder-length dark blond hair, big leather bag over her shoulder and Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in her hand. He had breakfast and found a truck driver to take him along and drop him off at the highway exit for Munich. By early afternoon he was in the city, bought a travel bag and a change of clothes and went to the cinema. They were showing a French film, a laconic and sentimental story about entanglement and parting. Jan came out of the cinema and phoned home from the nearest telephone booth—a low point for which he only subsequently forgave himself by saying nothing and quickly hanging up again.

  At nine in the evening he met the woman. She took him to a flat in Schwabing, a faceless room with a kitchenette and a shower. When she came out of the toilet without wig and makeup, he barely recognized her: a childlike face under brush-short hair. She told him what he had to do the next day. Then they heated up pizza in the oven. Over dinner they didn’t talk—the only important thing was what was to be done, and that had been said. Jan was amazed by the excellent red wine. When it was on his tongue he wanted to ask the woman how she had got hold of the bottle. After swallowing he let it go.

  Then they lay down in bed and made love. Memories of Ulla darted through Jan’s head. “Let’s make love,” she had urged him when she wanted him, and spurred him on with “Love me” when she wanted to come. It had been emotional, emotional and gooey. Now Jan felt as if he and the woman were dancing a perfect dance in bright, cold light. What purity of pleasure, and again: what a rush of freedom!

  They stayed in bed for a long time. That afternoon they took the tram to the suburbs, walked through the streets as naturally as if they were on their way home and went past the chairman’s villa. It all looked as the woman had described it to Jan; the garden gate and wall were not under video camera surveillance. At the end of the property Jan climbed into the garden, slipped to the house under the shelter of the bushes, hid behind the rhododendron by the front door and waited. He heard the bell ring, saw the chairman coming along the garden path, followed by his chauffeur with two briefcases, saw the chairman’s wife walking up to the door and greeting her husband, saw the chauffeur going in and coming back out again. After a while he heard the bell ring again and saw the chairman’s wife opening the door again. His accomplice came along the garden path, waved an envelope. As she handed it over, Jan pulled the ski mask over his face, jumped up, pushed the chairman’s wife into the house, forced her to her knees and held the pistol to her head. As he did so he yelled: “Don’t do anything stupid, don’t do anything stupid!” He yelled at her and yelled at her husband, who stopped at the bottom of the stairs, raised placating hands and said, “Calm down, please, calm down!” Neither resisted as they were tied up. The woman started crying, while her husband went on talking. When Jan couldn’t bear to hear it anymore, he took the scarf that the woman’s husband had just taken off and stuffed it into her mouth. With horrified eyes the husband watched his wife choking and stopped talking. Jan led him upstairs. “The safe is in the bedroom,” said the man, and Jan led him into the bedroom and sat him down on a chair. “Behind …”

  He would have said behind which picture or which piece of furniture or in which wardrobe behind the clothes the safe was to be found and how it was opened. Later Jan thought he should have looked in the safe anyway—beginner’s nervousness. He put the pistol to the back of the man’s head and fired, and as he pulled the trigger he closed his eyes, shut them tight, and he was shaken and he had to control himself not to fire again and again. He opened his eyes and saw the man sinking forward and off his chair. He couldn’t bring himself to kneel down beside him and put his hand to his wrist. He saw the blood flowing, tapped the man with his foot, first gently, then harder, until he slipped from his side onto his back and directed his eyes into the room, to the ceiling, at Jan. Jan stopped and stared at the dead man.

  He didn’t hear the cries of the chairman’s wife or her footsteps on the stairs. He didn’t hear anything until the woman grabbed him by the arm. “What’s up with you? We’ve got to get out of here.” He looked up, looked at her and nodded. “Yes, we’ve got to get out of here.”

  Ilse herself felt as if she were waking up from an anesthetic. That is my work, she wanted to make Jan think with his last glance into the bedroom, and as he passed the weeping chairman’s wife he was to think it coldly and proudly, and at the same time with a shudder of horror. Just as she looked at her work.

  Twenty-one

  When Christiane had cleared up and washed the breakfast crockery and emptied the basins and filled the jugs in the rooms, she went back to the terrace. Everyone had left. Even Karin and her husband, who had helped her in the kitchen and then joined her on the terrace, had disappeared.

  Christiane had made plans; for a boat trip on the nearby lake, a picnic in the park, dancing on the terrace. But, sitting alone on the terrace, she no longer had any confidence that anyone was interested in that. She was also worried about bringing everyone together again. Jörg would accuse Henner of betrayal again, and Henner—what would Henner say? What would Jörg make of it if Henner rebuffed his accusation?

  She caught herself wishing Jörg back in jail. Or at least in a place where he was safe—safe from information that confused him, from contacts that seduced him, from dangers f
or which he was no match. Most of his years in jail had not been a bad time. At first it was bad, when the prison administration wanted to break Jörg’s strength and he fought back with stubborn aggression against them by going on hunger strikes. But then the administration and Jörg learned to leave each other in peace. Jörg was almost happy. And he was never so much hers as during the years in prison.

  She stepped outside the gate. Ulrich’s Mercedes and Andres’s Volvo were gone—all the guests could have gone off on an outing in the two big cars. Disappointed, concerned and relieved, she went into the house, picked up a lounge chair and was about to go lie on the terrace. But there was already someone there; Christiane recognized the voices of Jörg and Dorle. She set the lounge chair down, tiptoed through the room and leaned against the wall next to the open folding door.

  “I was just terribly disappointed. That’s why I was so horrible. I’m sorry.”

  At first Jörg said nothing. Christiane imagined him sobbing a few times and letting his hands rise and fall. Then he cleared his throat. “Of course I can see what a … a gorgeous woman you are. I just can’t.”

  “Don’t be formal—call me Dorle.” She laughed softly. “Dorothea—I’m a gift from the gods. Take me. If you were with men in prison and now … I like that.” She laughed her soft laugh again. “I like being fucked in the ass.”

  “I’m … I’m.…” He didn’t say what he was. He was weeping. He was weeping with the pitiful, halting sounds he had as a child. Christiane recognized them, and was irritated again. If her brother had to weep, it should be powerful, manly weeping. Dorle wasn’t like that. “Weep, little one,” she said, “weep.” When he didn’t stop, she went on talking. “Yes, little one, yes. It would make you weep, everything would make you weep, everything. My brave one, my sad one, my unhappy one, my little boy blue.” At last Christiane was so annoyed by the comforting singsong that she wanted to intervene. Did Dorle, if she couldn’t boast about sleeping with the famous terrorist, want to brag that he had wept with her and she had comforted him? But when Christiane stepped out onto the terrace, she saw Jörg and Dorle. He was sitting stiffly on his chair, eyes closed, shaken with weeping, and Dorle standing behind him bending over him, arms on his chest, rocking him. Jörg in his pain and Dorle in her attempt to comfort him looked so helpless that Christiane didn’t want to intervene after all.