The Weekend: A Novel

by Bernhard Schlink

  “What do I do with the cloakroom ticket?”

  “We’ll call you.”

  Jan drank coffee. He had performed his task and could pay and leave. He had only to make sure no one spotted him leaving and brought him the bag.

  The view from the window gripped him. All those houses, all those people, all those lives. The energy with which people drove back and forth and worked and built. With which they owned and shaped and inhabited the earth. And they wanted it to be beautiful. Sometimes they built the tip of a skyscraper like a temple and a bridge like a harp and buried the dead in a green garden by the river. Jan was astonished. Everything looked right. But he was so far away from it that he didn’t feel it was right. He remembered the fairy tale about the giant toy. In the picture in the storybook the giant’s daughter picked up a plow, from which the horse dangled in its harness, and the farmer from the reins.

  He ordered another coffee and a glass of water. He would stay in the city throughout the day, board a plane in the evening and be in Germany the next morning. Every time he felt the temptation to drive to his wife’s house, hide and secretly see his sons. The university was on holiday, and his sons might be at home. Every time he resisted the temptation. He knew the address and phone number. He allowed himself no more contact than that.

  He hears the noise before the other guests look up from their breakfast and their conversations. Loud, dull, grinding, sucking. As if a huge threshing machine were dragging the whole building into its maw and shredding it. In the window the city is crooked, crockery crashes to the floor and shatters, people scream and hold on to the walls, to the furniture, to one another. Jan clings to the bar. The walls creak and groan. The city straightens up and sags again, to the left, to the right, to the left. A few times the tower swings back and forth. Then it stops.

  For a moment it is utterly quiet in the restaurant. Even Jan doesn’t move. When a telephone rings into the silence, he holds his breath before bursting out laughing with all the others. The tower is standing, the phone is ringing, the city is unharmed and the sun is shining. But the relief lasts only a moment. The waiters and waitresses who want to come swarming out to straighten the tables and chairs, the guests who are reaching for napkins to wipe the spilled coffee and orange juice from suits and dresses, see gray smoke outside the windows and stiffen.

  This time the stiffness does not dissolve into laughter. The guests dash to the window, push their way to the door, into the corridor, to the elevators. Chairs tip over, broken crockery crunches underfoot. The maître d’, phone to his ear, assures the guests that he has informed the fire department. Jan looks for his bag in the cloakroom—has someone put a bomb downstairs and is the next one in his bag? In his bag there is a radio. People are calling one another to say a plane has crashed into the tower, and Jan wonders whether the radio guided the plane. The elevators aren’t there yet—you don’t usually have to wait so long for them—someone asks about the stairs, but how are you supposed to get down 106 stories on foot; someone fetches a meat cleaver from the kitchen, forces it between the doors of an elevator shaft, others pull and shove the doors aside. They look into the shaft and see smoke and flames and the rocking cable of the elevator. They go to the next shaft and the third and see the same thing.

  The first people are already on the stairs. The people from the restaurant join a crowd of people from a conference and the staff, and in the stairwells on every floor they are joined by still others. No one pushes—they all act as quickly as they can and help the others who can’t go so fast. The only sound is feet on the stairs; no one feels like saying anything superfluous, and what would not be superfluous in this situation? Until the first group of them cough and come to a standstill and halt the descent. Jan is one of them; he too coughs and comes to a standstill. When the man next to him holds his handkerchief in front of his mouth and walks into the smoke and heat, Jan goes with him. They don’t get far. After half a step it takes their breath away.

  “How far have we come?”

  “Six, seven, eight floors—I don’t know.”

  They go back, and everyone turns around. But their ascent soon falters as well. From above they hear that the other stairwells are also blocked. “Onto the roof! Let’s wait for the helicopters.”

  Jan stays behind. He doesn’t feel good and sits down on a step. The clatter of feet fades away, but the fire is getting noisier, and the smoke is rising higher. Jan stands up, opens the door leading onto that floor and looks into a hall with open doors. He goes from door to door, from office to office; he doesn’t know why he is doing it and why he is staying here. He knows he has to get onto the roof—soon he will run away. He doesn’t run away. He walks into an office, walks between partition walls and desks to the window, and sees that the other tower is burning as well. He nods. He wouldn’t have thought the Arabs were up to it.

  He hears a quiet knocking and calling and follows it to a door. He tries to open it, it jams, he pulls on the handle, pulls the handle off, kicks the door in. It’s a windowless photocopy room in which a young woman is blinking distractedly. She only heard the noise and felt the impact, then the light went out, and the tower swayed, the door jammed. She has no idea what has happened. She thinks she has finally been rescued. Jan takes her by the hand, starts running, pulls her with him. When he opens the door to the first stairwell, the heat and smoke are so powerful that he immediately closes it again. He runs to the other doors, she, holding his hand, asks desperately, What’s happened, why is it burning, who are you? The other stairwells are nothing but smoke and heat as well.

  Jan walks to the window with the young woman and shows her the other tower. She asks, “How will they get us out of here?” He doesn’t know what to say. “Do they know we’re here? Have you called?” She sees his hopeless face. “You haven’t called!” She fumbles for her phone in her pocket, dials 911, gives details of the floor and the office, the smoke and the heat in the stairwell. “So,” she says, “what now?” He feels the floor heating up beneath his feet. The air in the room is sticky and tastes of smoke and chemicals. Jan takes a metal wastepaper basket and smashes it against the window, first with its bottom, then with a corner, and the glass splinters and breaks. He knocks the rest of the window out of the frame.

  “The floor’s getting hot.” She lifts one foot, then the other and gives an embarrassed laugh. He nods. “We’ll have to push a table to the window.” When they do, the floor is already so hot that they hurry—they hop comically from one foot to the other.

  The young woman also knows that the heat will reach the table they are now standing on. “What will we do then?”

  “We’ll jump.”

  She looks at him and wonders if he’s being serious or if he’s joking. She realizes that he’s being serious. “But …”

  “They’ve stretched out huge canopies. You just have to take care you don’t land on your head.”

  She leans out the window and looks down. “I can’t see anything.”

  “You can’t see anything. Modern canopies are made of transparent synthetic material.”

  She looks at him, doesn’t believe him, starts crying. “We’re going to die, I know it, we’re going to die.”

  “We’ll fly. We’ll take each other by the hand and fly into the morning.”

  But even that doesn’t help. She cries, she shakes, as he takes her in his arms and tries to calm her she pushes him back; she wants to go home, she wants her mother, she fumbles for her phone again, gets the answering machine and leaves a message that she loves her mother. Jan listens and wonders whether he should say good-bye to his wife and children, one first and last call home. But the moment quickly passes. He isn’t going to get sentimental just before he dies. He wants to help the young woman. Like the orchestra on the Titanic.

  The floor covering softens, and the table legs sink into it, not all at the same time, not all equally deep. The table tips over and stands at an angle. The young woman loses her balances, cries out, tries t
o hold on, but misses Jan, a partition wall, the window frame, her arms reach into the void. She tumbles out of the window and falls, flails her arms around, pedals with her legs. Jan struggles, but keeps his balance.

  He has to jump. The table is getting warm, it will soon be hot, it will burn, flames are licking at various spots in the floor. Jan knows he won’t scream and wave and pedal. But he doesn’t want to tense his muscles and clench his teeth. He wants to fly. He wants not to be afraid of the quick, brusque, painless end and enjoy the flight. He always wanted to be free, he has slipped all bonds, he has lived in the light of freedom and with its terror. Everything he has done was right, if he flies now.

  Jan jumps and spreads his arms.

  Thirty-five

  At nine Karin rang the bell. She didn’t expect many people to come. She even hoped no one would come and the prayer meeting would be canceled. She had planned to read the verse about the truth making you free, and add a few thoughts about living in truth and the lies of life. But the dreams she had woken with several times irritated her. She had dreamed of the embryo that she had aborted as a young woman, of her husband sitting on a bench and smiling, wobbling his head and not recognizing her, about her former congregation consisting of artificial people, as low-maintenance as the Stepford wives. Her dreams were trying to warn her of lies about a life lived in truth. But why? She hadn’t planned to demand a life lived in truth and condemn life lies. She had never told her husband about her abortion.

  She would have if he had asked. But he hadn’t asked, not even when it turned out that they couldn’t have children and the fault was on her side. Sometimes she thought he guessed; he knew that she had wild years behind her, and wasn’t happy about some of the things she had done back then, and perhaps he wasn’t asking out of love. Was she supposed to devalue that silence born of love by confessing?

  Karin went into the big room, opened the doors, let the air in, stood in the doorway and looked into the park and the rain. She breathed in the cool and damp, forgot for a moment her worries about the prayer meeting and felt beautiful and strong. She enjoyed her strength. She was a disciplined, resilient worker; when others were stressed and excitable she introduced peace and structure and made plans and decisions with a light, safe hand. She was good in her office; she taught her church to live with fewer taxes and fewer believers, when she spoke publicly about the issues of the day she found the right tone and when people sought her advice she looked them in the eye with concern and sympathy. Sometimes she suspected her heart was no longer in it and she enjoyed her job only because she did it well. But should she give it up for that reason? She also enjoyed the fact that she was a beautiful woman. She was slim, she had big brown eyes and a smooth, taut face, which was lent a fashionable finesse by her gray pageboy cut. Even when she frowned she looked younger than her age. When she lost herself in her thoughts and dreams or concentrated as she played the violin or the guitar, her eyes had a gleam that wasn’t childlike and yet, like a child’s beaming smile, it was a gleam that came from another world—her husband had said it so often that she knew it was there, even though she couldn’t see it in the mirror. Sometimes she exploited it.

  She arranged five chairs in a loose circle. If fewer people came, it wouldn’t look empty, if it was more, the circle could be extended. She heard footsteps on the stairs. Her husband greeted her with a kiss, sat down in silence and closed his eyes. Jörg didn’t join the circle but sat down by the wall, propped his arms on his knees and looked at the floor. His son and Dorle also avoided the free chairs in the circle, but pushed two chairs into a second row and looked expectantly at Karin. Ulrich and his wife sat on the empty chairs. “Is there a songbook?” Ulrich asked, and when Karin shook her head, he said, “Do you sing us something and then we sing it back?” Marko leaned against the wall next to Jörg and folded his arms, Ilse and Christiane brought chairs to the second row. Last came Margarete and Henner, who sat down a little apart from the others. With each new arrival Karin’s heart grew heavier.

  Karin sang three verses from the song about the golden sun—her husband and Ilse knew the words and joined in, a few of the others hummed the tune. Then she read out the line.

  “That’s the motto of Freiburg University,” said Ulrich.

  “That’s the motto of the CIA,” Marko added mockingly.

  “It’s the motto of all life,” said Karin, and she talked about seeing and understanding. Who we are—if we see and understand, we have the chance to go beyond it. If not, we are trapped in it. For that reason, however, we mustn’t impose the truth on others. Where truths are too painful and we are not a match for them, we all have our “life lies,” the lies we need to keep on living, and what we must do is see and respect in others the truth of their pain as revealed by their life lies. But life lies do not only reveal pain, they also create it. Just as they stop us from seeing ourselves, they can also stop us from seeing others and letting ourselves be seen by them. Sometimes it is impossible without a struggle for truth, one’s own and everyone else’s.

  “So you impose it,” Andreas interjected.

  “No, I’m talking about a struggle between equals, not one of force and compulsion.”

  Andreas wouldn’t give in. “What about parents and children, husbands and financially dependent women, women and the men in love with them? Equals, or power and compulsion?”

  Karin shook her head. “You get only one or the other. If you don’t meet the other as equals, you may achieve power, but certainly not truth.”

  “If that’s true, you can’t impose truth on someone else. Why did you say we mustn’t if we can’t?”

  Karin explained that she meant it’s not just that you can’t impose the truth, you shouldn’t even try.

  “But why shouldn’t we be able to? Time and again in history truths have been imposed successfully—right truths as well as wrong ones.”

  Karin had got muddled. Does the interpretation of the line work only if truth is seen as the truth of the word of God? But she hadn’t wanted to talk to her friends like that. Could she still go on talking like that? She had always seen the line as consistent in its worldly, analytic, therapeutic wisdom. She wanted to get to the conclusion, and end by saying that truth compelled was unblessed. But Andreas cited the German defeat in 1945 as a successful compulsion to truth, and she let it go. She smiled and said, “I don’t know how to go on. I like the line—it gives me courage. But perhaps I don’t understand it. Perhaps it isn’t even true. Some people turn it around, so that it’s not that the truth makes you free, it’s that freedom makes things true. In that case there are as many truths as people freely living their lives—that idea scares me; I’d like there to be a single truth. But what does my wish count for! And what kind of prayer meeting was that! Thank you for coming and listening and let us say the Lord’s Prayer.”

  Afterward Christiane organized breakfast: Ulrich went to the baker for rolls and took Jörg with him; Dorle and Ferdinand took care of grinding and brewing the coffee; Karin, her husband and Ilse sang hymns as they set the table and put out a plate of ham and a board of cheese; Andreas boiled the eggs and carefully packed them in a bed of towels; Margarete inspected the attic and the cellar with Henner. They were all glad to be active and not to have to talk.

  Thirty-six

  But how were they to escape talking? Only the perfectly happy escape it and the hopelessly despairing. As soon as the friends were sitting around the breakfast table, Jörg sat up in his chair and began.

  “I know we were wrong and made mistakes. We took up a struggle that we could not win, so we should not have taken it up. We should have taken up a different struggle, not this one. We had to fight. Our parents conformed and shirked resistance—we couldn’t repeat that. We couldn’t simply watch children being burned by napalm in Vietnam, starving in Africa, being broken in institutions in Germany. Just as Benno Ohnesorg was shot, an attempt was made on Rudi Dutschke’s life and a journalist who looked like him was almost lynch
ed. While the state, with increasing impunity, showed its hideous mask of power, suppressing dissenters, the awkward, the unusable. While our comrades, before they were sentenced, before they could even stand before a court, were isolated, beaten, silenced. I know we misused violence. But resistance against a system of violence is impossible without violence.”

  Jörg had talked himself into a state of excitement. He had marshaled his speech so carefully that it sounded professorial at first, but he delivered it with growing confidence and passion. Most of them were squirming; Jörg was talking the way people had thirty years ago and simply didn’t anymore—it was embarrassing. His son, for whom the speech was particularly intended, struggled to seem bored and superior, and looked not at Jörg but at the wall or out of the window. Marko was wide-eyed with fascination; this was the Jörg he had been waiting for.

  “I was rebuked for the attack on the American barracks, condemned too, of course, but rebuked by people like you. We couldn’t put the bombs where the Americans committed their crimes, only where they prepared them and recovered from them. If one couldn’t have attacked the SS in Auschwitz, one would have had to do it in Berlin, where they had prepared the extermination of the Jews, or in the Allgäu, where they had recovered from it. And as for the President—our lawyers fought for us to be seen and treated as prisoners of war and were unsuccessful, but he understood, he was with us in the war, he saw himself as a fighter, and us too.”

  Karin found the direction Jörg’s speech was taking dangerous. “Let us …”

  “I just want to say one more thing. I know I have been wrong and made mistakes. I don’t expect you to approve of what I have done, or even think the state and society should have treated us more fairly. I just want the respect due to someone who has given everything for a larger cause and a good one, and who has paid for his errors and mistakes. Who has not sold himself, has asked for nothing and been given nothing. I never struck a deal with the other side, I never applied for special benefits, I never asked for mercy. I only made the applications anyone makes. We talked about it yesterday—I can’t remember everything now, some things I’ve forgotten, but I’ve paid for it all.” Jörg looked around the group. “So, that was what I wanted to say to you. Thank you for listening to me.”