The Weekend: A Novel

by Bernhard Schlink

  “I’d rather you’d … No, I wouldn’t rather anything of the sort. What troubles me is the fact that … If the police kept you under surveillance and followed you, who didn’t they keep under surveillance? When had we last seen each other? It was years before I went into hiding. You weren’t really a promising contact, and even so the police …” Jörg didn’t sound so much disappointed as suspicious.

  “Second-guessing the police was never your strong point. But what do I know—perhaps another of your group brought something to the hiding place or collected something from it, and the police were following him, not me. Don’t you think it’s time for an aperitif?”

  “Just one moment!” Ulrich raised his arms. “I brought a case of champagne to celebrate and, because there’s no electricity, I put it in the stream to cool down. I’ll be right back.”

  Christiane brought glasses, Dorle olives and cubes of cheese, Andreas and Gerd Schwarz arranged the chairs in a circle and Ilse picked thirteen daisies, one for each of them.

  Jörg walked over to Henner, who was standing apart from the others with Margarete, and asked, “What was in the letter?”

  “Your ex-wife had killed herself—I thought you should know.”

  “Oh.” Jörg was still suspicious. But Henner had calculated correctly. Eva Maria had committed suicide shortly before Jörg’s arrest. When Jörg had worked out that this was correct, he said, “Oh,” again and walked off to one side.

  “You lie very well,” Margarete said to Henner. “So well that I find it weird, even if you lie only for good ends. Do you lie only for good ends?”

  Henner looked sadly at Margarete. “I lied so well because back then I actually did consider driving to the cabin and dropping off a letter there. I don’t know if she killed herself because of him; her parents claimed as much, but then again they had rejected Jörg from the start. At any rate, Eva Maria would have had a happier life if he hadn’t become a terrorist.”

  “But you didn’t do it.”

  “No. It wouldn’t have helped. Admittedly I couldn’t have known that at the time. But I was able to think it.” He waited to see if Margarete would say anything. She looked at him with dubious tolerance. “You’re right. It wasn’t important enough to me. It would have been nice if it had been important enough to me, if I’d written a letter and brought it to the cabin. It would have been nice.”

  Twenty-six

  Christiane had shed her anxiety. She was enjoying the champagne, enjoying her friends, and turned to Jörg once more with her familiar, loving attentiveness. After the champagne there was dinner, more formal and delicious than the previous evening, with a white tablecloth, her grandmother’s dishes and cutlery and silver candles, with four courses and, as a highlight, Rhineland Sauerbraten, Jörg’s favorite dish.

  Jörg talked of the time he had spent working in the prison kitchen. “The chef had been a cook in a three-star restaurant—at least that’s what he said, and we believed him—until he got fed up working late and opted for the regular working hours of public service. He had dozens of recipes stored in his computer, with calories and vitamins and minerals and who knows what else, and a program that he used to turn them into the menu for the week. The recipes were standard fare, from Königsberger Klopsen with caper sauce to Nuremberg roasted bratwurst with sauerkraut, and everyone was always complaining about the boring food. But heaven forbid that he cook anything else, anything special—then the complaints really came pouring in. And even though he knew that, the three-star chef in him sometimes came out and he would insist on serving us something Thai or Moroccan.”

  Karin thought that was interesting. “I feel exactly like the prisoners. The dinner dates and invitations that are part of the job, and where the food is always excellent, are torture for me. I’d much rather go out and get a currywurst and fries, sit at my desk, read the paper and shovel it down. I could do that day after day. But all kinds of things happen to me every day, so the more boring the food, the more restorative it is. Isn’t food the highlight of the prison day?”

  “It certainly is. But a highlight isn’t necessarily the same as something exciting. The highlight represents everything that you wistfully remember and miss: the normality of life outside, your childhood, when the world was still all right, if not at your parents’ house, then at your grandparents’, the woman who was kind to you—food is always part of it, something constant and dependable. It’s much the same with the books that are read in jail. In the prison library, I …”

  Ilse looked at Jörg and thought of Jan. How happy Jörg was! Having an everyday conversation, having something to say, winning people’s attention for his experiences and observations, here and there knowing more than the person he was talking to—it did him good. Had his longing for the everyday only grown in prison? Or had it also been dormant during the years outside the law, waiting to be awoken? Did Jan have it too?

  Christiane was also struck by how changed Jörg was. No suspicion, no caution, no detachment. He involved himself in the conversation. Were his strange remarks about revolution and murder and regret only a clumsy reaction that he produced when he felt he was under attack? Was it wrong to let him deliver lectures and give interviews and appear on talk shows? Because it would lead to more attacks? And for the same reason, that press declaration, legally hedged about as it was—was it another mistake?

  As if on cue, Marko appeared. She saw that he had been successful and had found a lawyer who considered the press declaration to be sound. He was so enthusiastic about his success, his project, himself, that he couldn’t wait to be alone with Jörg. He had to interrupt all the others and read them what Jörg was going to give the press on Sunday.

  “We’ve already sorted that one out,” Andreas said coolly. “Jörg isn’t giving a press declaration.”

  “I’ve talked to a lawyer who confirmed that Jörg won’t be running any risks.”

  “I’m still Jörg’s lawyer.”

  “This isn’t a decision for his lawyer. It’s one he has to make himself.”

  Jörg smarted under the subject at hand, the argument and the stares directed at him by the others. He waved his hands and said at last, “I’ll have to think.”

  “Think?” Marko was furious. “What about your responsibility to the people who believe in you, who are waiting for you? Have you forgotten them again? Are you going to stand in front of the world as the one whose spirit was broken, the one who climbed down?”

  “I don’t need any lessons about my responsibility, not from you or anyone else.” But Jörg wasn’t sure he had brought the unpleasant disagreement to an end, and looked over at Christiane, as if she could.

  “Why do you cling to your sister? Cling to the people who want to fight with you. Who don’t betray you, who need you. You …”

  “That’s enough. You’re Christiane’s guest,” said Henner, “and if she’s too polite to throw you out, I’m not. Either apologize or go.”

  “Leave it, Henner,” said Christiane. “Marko thinks I betrayed the revolution—it’s been an issue between us for ages.”

  “What?” Jörg’s face and the tone of his voice were once again filled with suspicion and resistance. “Christiane betrayed the revolution?”

  “The revolution, the revolution.” Marko waved his hand. “Your sister betrayed you. She told the cops they could catch you at the cabin in the forest.”

  “We’ve done that one. No one betrayed Jörg. When I brought him a letter at the cabin, the police must have followed me.”

  Marko grew furious. “That’s not why Christiane poured coffee over you. She was afraid you would say you didn’t betray Jörg. That Jörg would put two and two together and work out that if it wasn’t you, only she could have betrayed him. I know she meant well, but don’t you understand, Jörg? They all mean well, but they’re degrading you. They’re betraying what’s great about you. If you do what they tell you, then your life was nothing and you’re nobody.”

  Confused, Jörg lo
oked from Marko to Henner to Christiane. Karin, who was sitting next to him that evening, put her hand on his shoulder. “Don’t let them drive you mad. Marko is fighting for the press declaration, he’s fighting tooth and nail. You want to think about it, and you have every right. And anyway, the press declaration isn’t due out until tomorrow—or have you overruled Jörg and put it out today?” She looked seriously at Marko. He blushed and stammered and assured her that he hadn’t done anything yet.

  “I hope it’s just my severe expression that’s making you blush.”

  Twenty-seven

  Karin went on talking. “You think Jörg is nothing if he isn’t what he wanted to become? You think everyone who doesn’t fulfill his hopes is nothing? Few people, in that case, are anything. I don’t know anyone whose life has turned out as he dreamed it would.”

  “So what did you want to be? I thought when you didn’t have a pope, bishop was as high as you got.” Andreas couldn’t help it—Karin got on his nerves.

  Eberhard laughed. “Sometimes something you haven’t even dreamed of falls into your lap. That doesn’t alter the fact that most dreams come to nothing. I’m the oldest one here, and even I don’t know anyone who has realized his dreams. It doesn’t mean life is pointless; your wife can be nice even if she isn’t your great passion, your house can be beautiful even if it isn’t surrounded by trees, and your job can be respectable and rewarding even if it doesn’t change the world. Anything can be meaningful and still not be the way you once dreamed it. No reason for disappointment, and no grounds for forcing anything to happen.”

  “No reason for disappointment?” Marko grimaced scornfully. “Are you trying to make everything sound lovely?”

  Henner took Margarete’s hand under the tablecloth and pressed it. She smiled at him and pressed his hand back. “No,” she said, “no reason for disappointment. We live in exile. What we were and wanted to remain and were perhaps destined to become, we lose. Instead we find something else. Even if we think we’ve found what we were looking for, in truth it’s something else.” She pressed Henner’s hand again. “I don’t want to argue about words. If you think it’s a reason for disappointment, I can understand that. But that’s how things are. Unless …” Margarete smiled. “Perhaps that’s what makes a terrorist. He can’t bear living in exile. He wants to bomb his way to his dream of home.”

  “His dream … Jörg wasn’t fighting for his dream, he was fighting for a better world.”

  Dorle laughed out loud. “ ‘Fighting for peace is like fucking for virginity,’ I once read somewhere. You and your fighting!”

  “I like the image. My labs and you two, the women in my life, are my exile. As a child I dreamed of being a great explorer, the first to cross a desert or a jungle, but wherever I went someone had been there before. Later I wanted to be a great lover, like Romeo with Juliet or Paolo with Francesca. That came to nothing too, but I have you and my labs—what else can a man want!” Ulrich blew his wife a kiss with his left hand, and one to his daughter with his right.

  “Is this the moment of truth?” Andreas looked around at everyone. “I wanted to be the lawyer of the revolution, not the legal theorist, but a practitioner who would make revolutionary justice a reality. That came to nothing too, thank God, and I don’t want to go back to the home of that dream.”

  “My dream came late. Or should I say: it took me a long time to realize that I was living in exile. That I didn’t really want to teach, I wanted to write. That I had had enough of the students, whom I would have happily taught something if they’d wanted me to tell them anything, but they wanted nothing from me; I was always the one who wanted something from them. No, I want to get out of my exile and back to my home. I want to live with people and stories that I make up. I want to write well, but if it’s only pulp in the end, that’s OK too. I want to sit by the window looking out over the plain and write, from dawn till dusk, with one cat lying on the desk and the other at my feet.”

  My, my, that Ilse. The others were startled; they had never seen Ilse like that before. She was glowing again, not blond and pretty, but confident and burning for action. And it was infectious—the others grew more cheerful. One after the other they talked about what they had once dreamed and what exile they had been sent to and how they had been reconciled with it. Even Marko joined in; he had wanted to be a driving force, and had instead found himself in the exile of the revolutionary struggle. Jörg said nothing until the end. “The way you’re talking, prison was the exile I learned to live in. But as to being reconciled—no, I’m not reconciled with it.”

  “OK.” Ulrich tried to placate him. “Apart from being reconciled to exile, we still have the memory of our dream and our attempts to turn it into reality. Back then I hiked from the North Sea to the Mediterranean—you can laugh, but it’s still two and a half thousand kilometers and it took me more than six months. I didn’t manage the Sahara or the Amazon, but European hiking trail Number One wasn’t bad, and I’ll never forget climbing the last few kilometers of the Gotthard Pass after a damp night in the tent and then climbing down to Italy in bright sunshine.”

  And by saying this he opened up a round of remember-the-time to follow on the round of dreams. You remember the time we put up the tent on the way to the meeting in Grenoble and the rain washed us down the slope? The time we cooked Indian food at the meeting in Offenburg and everyone got the shits? The time Doris won the Miss University competition and read from the Communist Manifesto? The time Gernot, who had no interest in politics and went along to the Vietnam demonstration only because he fancied Erica, suddenly shouted, “Yanks out of the U.S.A.”? Everyone remembered a harmless event or two.

  They waited awhile before lighting the candles; the gloom allowed the past to slip cozily into the present, like night into day. The memories were of a time that was gone and didn’t overshadow the present. But the memories were vivid, and they made the friends feel both old and young. That feeling was cozy too. When Christiane finally lit the candles and they saw one another clearly again, she was happy to see in the old faces of the others the young faces they had come across in their memories. We store our youth within us, we can go back to it and find ourselves in it, but it is past—melancholy filled their hearts, and sympathy, for one another and for themselves. Ulrich hadn’t just brought a case of champagne, he’d brought a case of claret as well, and they clinked glasses to old friends and old times and watched the flickering of the candlelight in the red wine, as one watches the waves coming in on the water or the darting flames in the fireplace.

  Again and again more events occurred to them. You remember the time we let rats out in Professor Ratenberg’s lecture? The time we switched off the loudspeakers at the President’s speech? The time we blocked the streetcar rails with chisels in protest against the fare increases? The time we hung the poster about solitary confinement from the bridge over the highway? And when the police took it down, how we sprayed the words on the concrete of the bridge? The time we borrowed road signs from the courtyard of the highway department and closed off the main road so that we could hold a demonstration? Karin remembered that one, and as she said it she laughed with embarrassment. She was a little uneasy about it, but once again she felt the thrill of the forbidden that she had felt when they broke into the courtyard of the highway department, the excitement of the atmosphere with night and rain and the flitting flashlight, the good feeling of solidarity.

  “Yes,” said Jörg. “That business with the road signs was a good one. We were able to use it again in our summer kidnapping.”

  Twenty-eight

  Gerd Schwarz burst out laughing. “Remember the time, remember the time …” He hadn’t spoken until now and the others hadn’t been aware of him. No memories were expected of him, but Marko and Dorle, of whom none were expected either, had intervened with occasional amazed or derisive remarks. Gerd Schwarz had sat there in silence all evening. Now he spoke, his articulation excessively clear, his tone acrimonious.


  “In the little town where I grew up, I would play cards in the pub with my friends every few weeks. One evening I learned that the five old men at the locals’ table had all been in the SS. I sat down at the next table and pricked up my ears. Remember the time, remember the time—it was like that all evening. Don’t you remember the time we beat up the Jews in Wilna and shot the Poles in Warsaw, obviously, but: remember the time we drank champagne in Warsaw and fucked the Polish girls in Wilna. And remember the time the barber shaved the old men with the long beards, ha-ha? You’re exactly the same. What about: remember the time you shot that woman during the bank robbery? Or the policeman at the border? Or the head of the bank? Or the association president? OK, we don’t know whether that one was you or someone else. How about that, Dad? Don’t you want to tell your son if it was you?”

  Distressed, Jörg looked at his son. “I …”

  “Yes?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “You don’t remember? You don’t remember whether you shot him or someone else did?” He laughed again. “You really don’t remember, and the old men didn’t remember either, that they had beaten and shot and gassed the Jews.”

  How had they failed to notice? The others couldn’t believe it. Now they saw the resemblance between father and son, his height, his angular face, the shape of his eyes. Christiane couldn’t stop staring at the young man, whom she had last seen when he was two, and all she knew about him was that his name was Ferdinand Bartholomäus, after Ferdinando Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, that he had grown up with his grandparents after his mother’s suicide and that he was studying in Switzerland. Art history? Or had that been part of the trick to get himself invited into the house?

  Ferdinand looked contemptuously at his father. “You don’t remember—since when? When did you forget? Or repress it? Or when did amnesia come like a blow to the head and, bang, wipe it out? Or did it come immediately after he died? Or did you drink so much that you murdered him in a fog of booze? I know them all, the children of the wife and the policeman and the head of the bank and the president. They want to know what you were thinking, and the president’s son finally wants to know what you did, what you all did, which of you murdered his father. Do you understand that?”