The Weekend: A Novel

by Bernhard Schlink

  “Have we any wine left?”

  “Ulrich’s claret is next to the door.”

  There was one bottle left. They filled their glasses and clinked them again. “To the end of the curse,” said Margarete.

  “To the end of the curse,” the others repeated.

  “What curse?” Andreas asked after a while.

  “Isn’t it a curse, what’s being passed on from the generation before Jörg to Jörg and from Jörg to his son? It seems like one to me.” Margarete saw Andreas’s skeptical expression and smiled at him. “We’re a bit backward here. The ghosts still come to us in the autumn with the fog, and when cries are heard in summer it isn’t just the screech owls. We still have witches and fairies, and there are curses that are sometimes lifted from us only after generations.” She got up and the others went with her, and she hugged Andreas and Ilse and said to Henner, “Will you take me home?”

  Thirty-one

  When Christiane followed Jörg into the room, he was sitting on the bed and staring at the floor. She sat down next to him and took his hands in hers.

  “Do you think my son will still be here tomorrow?”

  “Would you like that?”

  “I don’t know. I didn’t know everything would get so difficult. One would think I’d have been able to think thoroughly about everything, and I have thought thoroughly about everything. But it’s like with swimming—do you remember? As a boy I spent a whole summer lying on my belly on the chair and practiced swimming motions, and when I got into the water, with the motions I had practiced correctly, I went under. In prison I was lying on the chair, now I’m in the water.”

  “But one day you could swim—do you remember how that happened?”

  “Do I! In the autumn we went to the Lago Maggiore in the Ticino with Aunt Klara, and you swam in the lake with me, and it worked.”

  “You’ll practice here with your friends for a weekend, and when we go into town it’ll work.”

  “No.” He shook his head. “I have to do it tomorrow, if that isn’t already too late.”

  “Maybe the weekend was a mistake—I’m sorry. I—”

  “No, Christiane, what I’m bumping into, and injuring myself as I do so, are my own boundaries. I have to drag myself out of the bog by my own bootlaces.” He rested his forehead against her shoulder for a moment. “There are lots of things I really can’t remember. I can’t remember who fired the gun. I can’t remember whether I was supposed to meet Jan in Amsterdam and left him in the lurch. I can’t remember what the Palestinian woman who trained us was called, or if there was anything between us. I can’t remember what I did over all those years in prison—I must have done something, but it’s gone.”

  “We can’t store everything in our memory.”

  “I know that too. But I feel as if things have broken out of my memory, not old, unimportant things that have to sink to the bottom so that new things have room, but parts of me. How can I trust myself?”

  “Take your time, Kiddo, take your time.”

  He laughed. “We’ve never been able to do that, Tia. Take our time, let things run, take life as it comes, lie back and enjoy it—we’ve never learned to do that.”

  “The English have a saying about old dogs learning new tricks.”

  “No, Tia. You can’t teach an old dog new tricks—it’s the opposite.”

  They both fell silent. Christiane realized that she was less frightened than she had been the previous evening. She was surprised by that; none of yesterday’s problems had been solved, and neither had today’s. Why was she less worried about them?

  She could hear from Jörg’s breathing that he had gone to sleep. He was sitting on the bed, slumped, bent forward, hands in his lap. She pushed him gently, and he sank sideways onto the bed. She took off his shoes, lifted up his legs, pulled the sheet out from under him and spread it over him. Then she stood by the bed for a while, watching her brother sleeping and hearing the first drops of rain turn into an even rustle.

  She saw everything in her sleeping brother: his seriousness, his good intentions, his eagerness, his lack of detachment—from everything and also from himself, his narrowness, his hubris, his recklessness, his helplessness. Would she have learned to like him if he had met her by chance? He was her brother, the one she had brought up and tended to and looked after. He was her fate, no matter what. She went quietly to her room.

  Everyone was finally asleep. Andreas, after he had walked back and forth in his room for another quarter of an hour, and got annoyed again and calmed down once more and run through legal options all over again. Ilse, after she had considered and rejected the idea of going on writing, and decided to go back to the bench by the stream in the early morning.

  Dorle and Ferdinand had left the bench when the terrace was already empty and dark. It had started raining, and at first it was a mild summer rain that enfolded the two of them like light, warm breath. Then the rain grew colder, Dorle shivered and they went into the house. “I haven’t got a room,” whispered Ferdinand, and Dorle whispered back, “You come with me.” He stopped on the stairs. “I’m … I’ve never …” Dorle took his head in both hands and kissed him. She laughed quietly. “I have.”

  Ulrich and his wife heard their daughter going into her room with Ferdinand and the two of them making love. “Shouldn’t we …”—“No, we shouldn’t,” said Ulrich and held his wife in his arms until the rustle of the rain reached their hearts. Then they too made love.

  Karin lay awake, heard her husband’s breathing and thought of the prayer meeting the following morning. Scheduling it had been a reflex, learned at countless confirmation weekends, retreats and away days, meetings and synods. But she couldn’t give her friends something drilled. Every word had to be right. She could say only what she really knew. But what did she know? She knew she couldn’t have stuck her leg out and tripped Marko as Ilse had done, and she was ashamed.

  Margarete and Henner went to sleep the most happily. They were happy because nothing about the other disturbed them, annoyed them. That’s something one might overlook if it happens in the days and weeks of falling in love, but if it doesn’t happen at all … They were happy because they liked everything they had learned about each other. It wasn’t much; she hadn’t talked much about her translations or he about his reports, they hadn’t introduced their families or friends, or their favorite books and films. But Margarete had liked the way he had helped Christiane, and he had liked the mixture of doubt and concern with which she had looked at him afterward. They were happy because they liked smelling and tasting and feeling each other so much. They lay naked in Margarete’s bed and enjoyed the fact that their bodies liked each other, that they didn’t do it independently of their hearts, but that it was a liking of their own, a treasure of their own. They didn’t hear the rain through the open window, but on the roof above them. They fell asleep in a house of rain.

  Thirty-two

  The rain drenched the sandy ground, collected in rivulets and puddles, washed away everything that wasn’t level, settled in the courtyard, flowed into the cellar. It did the plants good. For a long time the summer had been dry, and everything was withering, the hydrangeas around the courtyard gate and outside the front door, the raspberries and tomatoes beside the garden house, even the oaks, whose leaves had lost their freshness and color. When Margarete woke up in the middle of the night and heard the rustling of the rain, louder than when she had gone to sleep, it seemed, she looked forward to the hydrangeas, which would blossom brighter the following morning, the ripe fullness of the raspberries and tomatoes, the radiant stateliness of the oaks. She went to sleep again, woke up again, and the rain was still rustling outside the windows and on the roof.

  That too is part of this land. That the rain from low gray clouds covers it, that the drops fall in thin trails like the ones in Japanese drawings, that the ground grows wet and heavy and sticks to the shoes. That the rain won’t stop and only your intelligence saves you from the fear that
a great deluge is going to pour over the land. Because that’s what the rain feels like: a deluge that will end only when everything is under water.

  Margarete knew the water would penetrate the cellar, that it would get into the attic through the rusty corrugated iron and, if the stream backed up and swelled between the two houses, into the kitchen. The first time these little disasters had happened, when the next big rain came, Margarete had tried to secure the place with sandbags and sheets of plastic. It hadn’t done much good. She still had to bail out the cellar and swab out the attic. One day she and Christiane might have the money to build drains around the house and mend the roof. If they never did, Margarete was fine about that too. The flood was part of the land she loved. And for Margarete, love of the land included a willingness to yield to whatever it brought: cold, heat, melancholy, drought, flooding.

  Margarete turned onto her side, back to back, bottom to bottom with Henner. She couldn’t work out why their lying together like this was so calming, but it was. How would things go from here? He sometimes at her place in the country, she sometimes at his in town, and sometimes traveling together? She herself didn’t know how she wanted it to be. She loved her freedom and solitude. At the same time that small closeness to Henner had awoken a longing for togetherness that she hadn’t known still lurked within her. But she wouldn’t move to the city. She wouldn’t leave the country.

  She listened to the rustling of the rain. Memories arose. The night in the cabin in the field, when she had run away from home at the age of seven and was caught in the rain and wasn’t yet sure that the rain wouldn’t flood everything and wash it away. The summer spent harvesting, day in and day out, digging potatoes out of the mud and cleaning them. The Saturday when her best friend got married and they had to put planks over the big deep puddle in front of the door to the register office before the mayor, the bride and groom and the guests could get in. The depressions she had fallen into when the rain refused to stop.

  Then she counted through how many buckets there were in the house. Five? Six? Once the rain was over, they would form a chain and bail out the cellar. Marko would pass the bucket to Andreas, Andreas to Ilse, Ilse to Jörg—smiling, she went back to sleep.

  Sunday

  Thirty-three

  Ilse slept shallowly, woke often and was wide awake at dawn. She walked to the window and saw the courtyard, oak tree and barn wrapped in a veil of rain. Writing on the bench by the stream was out of the question. She took the jug and basin off the table and pushed the table and chair to the window. It was just light enough to write.

  Ilse didn’t know where it had come from over the past few days, the certainty that she wanted to write. Had it formed secretly during the months when she had played with the idea of writing? Was it a defiant response to the uncertainty that she thought she sensed in the others? Was it the result of her horror about Jörg, who had lived a false life for high stakes, only to end up standing there empty-handed? Be that as it may, she had her certainty.

  At the same time she was uncertain about how to go on telling Jan’s story and take it to its conclusion. She could use his story to tell the familiar tale of terrorism in Germany—she would have to do some research into that, in any case. She could also tell something she couldn’t research, but had to fantasize: the story of the murders that hadn’t yet been cleared up, the terrorists who hadn’t been caught. Either way—how was she to conclude her story? Does Jan get caught? Does he get shot? Does he blow himself up while assembling a bomb? Does he sit out his time in prison? Does he get himself released? Does he break out? No—then the old story just goes on. He has to sit out his time. But what’s that like for him? Does he feel like a prisoner of the war he’s been waging? Does he feel like a victim? Is he defiant? Does he have regrets?

  What do we want our terrorists to be like? Ilse had to make up her mind about how a person is really supposed to deal with his past as a terrorist. She understood the demand that the terrorist should provide clarification and show remorse. The victims’ relatives want to know what happened, and society needs a sign that the terrorist wants to rejoin the social contract. Nonetheless, she had been moved when Jörg had proudly and defiantly applied for a pardon.

  Or was that not the case? Could it be that she had been moved not by the Jörg who had applied for a pardon, but the proud and defiant young man she remembered? The one she had been in love with as a girl? Had she been moved only by her memory of her love?

  Strange—since Friday she hadn’t thought once about her love for him, let alone felt a hint of it. He had become an object of curiosity to her, one that she looked at with cold eyes and found sometimes surprising, sometimes disconcerting, always interesting. She performed an experiment on herself and remembered the morning many years before, when Jörg had come into the auditorium. As always she was sitting in the fifth row, close enough to the professor to be able to pay attention, far enough away not to be called upon to speak. The lecture on American history had just begun, and Jörg plainly wasn’t one of the usual listeners. After closing the door, he stopped, looked around, studied the professor and the students, at last walked slowly to the front and sat down in the front row. The confidence with which he did that, light-years away from Ilse’s inhibitions, and his cheerful, defiant face and his slim figure in jeans and a blue shirt over a white T-shirt—she fell in love with him. When he got to his feet and demanded a discussion of American imperialism and colonialism, she found brave and vivid what she would’ve otherwise found annoying. With a few others she ran after him at the end of the event, and thus became acquainted with his group and with politics. She clearly remembered how overwhelmed she had been by her feeling for Jörg, how helpless she was and with what stubbornness she tried to be near him, careless of how she might come across, and without any hope of conquering him for herself. Yes, the girl she had been back then touched Ilse, and she was also touched by the boy who would soon lose his cheerfulness and retain only his defiance. But it touched her only because her love had begun with the perception of his cheerfulness.

  Had writing, first in her imagination and then in reality, made her cold? Or had she found her way to writing because she had become cold? Because she had stopped loving? Had she forgotten how to do it? Had she made the cats her companions because she could reflect herself in them as she could in her memory?

  Ilse felt uncomfortable. She had to find out why she had stayed cold where she could have been moved, and whether she had forgotten how to love. She couldn’t possibly be indifferent about it. But she was indifferent. Yes, she needed to find out. But not right now. Right now the story was pressing. How was she to bring it to its conclusion?

  If it wasn’t the fact of being moved by the proud and defiant Jörg who had applied for a pardon, what was it in her that resisted an enlightened, remorseful Jan in prison, one who was willing to tell all? She didn’t think him plausible. She didn’t think it possible that someone could drop out of a bourgeois existence with a wife and children and a good job and social recognition and become a terrorist, before returning purified to a life of bourgeois values after years in prison. However, neither did she think it plausible that someone could cling forlornly to the terrorist project in and after jail. What was left after prison?

  Ilse suddenly understood Jörg’s inner turmoil. But she didn’t want to write about a conflicted Jan. Which meant that Jan couldn’t be arrested, sit out his time in jail and be released.

  Ilse looked out of the window into the rain. How does a terrorist’s life end if it isn’t stopped by police and court and prison? In retirement? With an American passport and a Swiss bank account? In a house in the country? Traveling, in a hotel? With a woman? Alone? Ilse had never yearned for faraway journeys and distant lands, and holidays in the Odenwald or by Lake Constance or on an island in Friesland had always been enough for her. Now she would have liked to know more about the world and send Jan somewhere far away, make him take part in a revolution and die in an attack—an a
ttack in which his life would reveal its truth.

  Ilse heard floorboards creaking in the next room. She looked at the clock; it was six o’clock, but it wasn’t getting light outside, and the dark sky indicated that it was going to go on raining for a long time. Sometimes the raindrops rattled against the house, then ran down the pane. The water forced its way between the new window frame and the masonry and gathered on the windowsill. Ilse pushed the table aside, took off her nightgown, opened the window and offered her face and breasts and arms to the rain. She wished she could run out of the room and out of the house, naked, across the terrace to the park, she wished she could feel the wet grass under her feet and the wet leaves of the bushes on her body, she wished she could jump into the stream and dive below the surface. But she didn’t dare. Then she imagined the slow stream turning into rapids, imagined herself heedlessly jumping in anyway, pulled along and dragged below. She was frightened.

  She closed the window, got dressed and put the table back. She opened her notebook, picked up her pen and wrote.

  Thirty-four

  The maître d’ let Jan in, but showed him to a place at the bar rather than a table. “When Mr. Barnett comes I’ll call you.” Jan deposited his bag in the cloakroom and sat down.

  Even from his seat at the bar he could look through the window at the city, the skyscrapers, streets in between, the rivers and the bridges, behind them the large carpet of little houses, in the distance the Ferris wheel and the airport tower. On the horizon the sea glittered in the sun. The sky was a radiant blue.

  Jan was supposed to deposit the bag in the cloakroom. That was all. A favor asked of him by a Lebanese acquaintance, who had also done him various favors. “If you want to go to Windows on the World in the morning, you have to be a member of the club. You can do that more easily than I can.” The acquaintance smiled. Jan weighed the bag with his hand; it was heavy. The acquaintance smiled again. “It isn’t a bomb.”