Homecoming

by Bernhard Schlink

  When I left, Grandfather took me to the station as usual; as usual he had found me a seat in the right coach and the right compartment. The coach was in the middle of the train because it would be safer there should a collision take place. The other person in the compartment was an elderly woman to whom he introduced me as his grandson and whom he asked to keep an eye on me. As usual he would not let me accompany him back onto the platform after our farewell embrace. I leaned out of the window and saw him alight and walk toward the exit. At the end of the platform he turned and waved; I waved back.

  Several weeks later my grandparents were run over by a car. They had been shopping in the village and were on their way home. The driver was drunk and drove onto the sidewalk. Grandmother died before the ambulance arrived; Grandfather died in the hospital. He died shortly after midnight, but I decided that their common tombstone should bear the same date.

  Part Two

  1

  I STILL HAVE Grandfather's desk and armchair. I also have Grandmother and Grandfather's book and the picture of the mill. The desk and armchair first took up residence in my room at my mother's house; they came with me to the first place I lived in on my own—a room with a kitchenette, shower stall, and view of the station—and then to the apartment in one of the dilapidated apartment buildings still common at the time, the kind with high ceilings, molding, and double doors, which my girlfriend and I moved into after she had her child. When we separated and I moved out, I stored the desk and chair with the rest of my belongings.

  I had to get away. Away from my beautiful, moody, faithless girlfriend, away from her whining fidget of a son, and away from the city I had grown up in and gone to school and university in, a city where memories lurked around every corner. It took all the courage I could muster, but I quit my job at the university without another prospect in the offing, sold the Swiss bonds I had inherited from my grandparents, and set off.

  Actually there was nothing particularly courageous about quitting the job. I had spent six years sweating over a doctoral dissertation I would never finish. I had known it for ages but could not bring myself to admit it. The uses of justice was the topic, a topic worthy of my grandfather and one that anybody could go on reading and thinking about forever. But my thoughts refused to coalesce into a system; they remained random and anecdotal: grandfatherly thoughts on a grandfatherly topic. I intended to demonstrate that justice is of use only insofar as its claims are formulated and put into practice without concern for social utility. Fiat iustitia, pereat mundus: Justice be done though the world perish. Such was the proper motto for justice in my view, and if the world held that obedience to the claims of justice would lead to doom and destruction, it was free to refuse obedience and take responsibility for the result, but justice was under no obligation to mitigate its claims.

  I collected example after example, from the cases made by Grandfather and the show trials orchestrated by Freisler and Hilde Benjamin to decisions brought down by our Constitutional Court, which, rather than pursuing justice, had attempted to mediate or mollify political conflicts or otherwise serve a socially useful function. Granted, Frederick the Great, Bishop Pierre Couson, Freisler, Hilde Benjamin, and the judges of the German Constitutional Court had different conceptions of justice, but I believed I could demonstrate that given the political nature of their verdicts they were all aware that they were not serving justice alone—whatever they may have meant by it—but other goals as well. These other goals were as different as their conceptions of justice—the good of the king or the Church, racial purity, class struggle, peace—but they were similar in that they were more important to them than the justice in the name of which the proceedings were carried out and the decisions taken.

  So far so good. But how was I to take the good it sometimes did and the damage it caused, the good and damage to justice and society, the good and damage in the short and long run, and balance and weigh them? In the end what I grew tired of was not so much the topic as my thoughts, incapable as they were of constructing the system they needed to construct. I grew tired of the endless words, the words I read, the words I thought and wrote. I wanted to get away from more than my girlfriend and her son and the city; I wanted to get away from all those words.

  Nor was the decision to pick up and go particularly courageous. I intended to spend several months in America, and though I had never been on my own for so long or so far away from home, there were people in New York and San Francisco I could stay with and even the hope of finding relatives in Knoxville and Handsborough on the way to the West Coast. What could go wrong?

  Yet the days immediately preceding my departure were pure torture. I was not afraid of planes plummeting or trains derailing: I would not have minded had my journey met a precipitous end. But being in a foreign country, being deprived of what I was accustomed to and familiar with—which suddenly seemed so right, so suitable, so fitting—now became terrifying beyond measure. I had Grandfather's homesickness even before leaving. I nearly asked my girlfriend if we might not get back together. Then, the moment my travels began, the homesickness disappeared.

  South of San Francisco I found paradise: a place of luxuriant gardens, open fields, and a handful of buildings that merged with the surroundings and were screened from the road by a wooded area, a series of rocky terraces leading down to the Pacific, all sunny and warm and infused with the aroma of flowers and the sea. The buildings housed a dining hall, meeting rooms, and accommodation for about sixty guests. The meeting rooms and fields were used for yoga classes, tai chi, breathing exercises, and meditation. In group therapy sessions, whose names and methods I no longer remember, the meek learned to rage and the furious learned the joys of silence and humility. On one of the rocky terraces you could lie all night in a pool of hot sulfur spring water, gazing up at the stars with nothing but the sound of the ocean in your ears. Before long your thoughts would slow down, then cease; then even your dreaming ceased and you were at total peace with yourself.

  Had it not been so expensive, I would have succumbed and stayed another week, another month, another year. But after laying out half my savings in three weeks, I decided to go to a school I had learned about there, a San Francisco massage institute where in three months I could train to be a masseur. Of all my experiences in paradise I had been most impressed by massage. I had had no idea that contact without words—or sexuality or eros—could reach so deep, that hands could do so much good, that bodies undergoing massage could become so beautiful, and that massaging a happy person could make one happy. I wanted to feel at home in this corporeal world. The fee was moderate. My contact in San Francisco, a painter with a large apartment, let me stay with him free. When I expressed sadness at having to leave paradise, my instructor comforted me by saying that instead of being sad to leave I should be happy at the prospect of returning.

  I put in my three months at the massage institute: I massaged and was massaged; I went to lectures on anatomy and on the ethical and economic aspects of massage as an occupation; I spent the weekends memorizing the Latin names for bones and joints, muscles and tendons, and practicing their American pronunciation; and in the evenings of the last few weeks I studied for the final. I passed. I was happy to have learned what I learned, happy that my bad English kept me from trying to sound clever and witty, that words played no role whatsoever in what I was doing. I had inhabited a new world and found the distance I had been seeking from the old one. Only the jabs of the painter, by the end of my stay a good friend, occasionally spoiled my good mood. The way I went about learning the trade, he said, was all work and discipline. I was a monster: super-German, super-Protestant. What had my mother done to me? What had I done to myself ?

  2

  ON MY FLIGHT BACK to Germany I toyed with the idea of making a life for myself as a masseur in California. But on the train ride from the airport to my hometown, a route that ran through an overdeveloped landscape strewn with tidy cities crisscrossed by sparkling-clean rain-washed street
s of well-tended houses with well-tended gardens and fences, I became painfully aware of how false a world it was, yet how much a part of it I was, so much so that I could never leave it. It was simply out of the question.

  I stayed with my mother for the first few weeks. We hardly saw each other: she left the house early, came home late, and was soon in bed. She was a private secretary. She had started working for her boss when he was an underling and came up in the world with him. She always kept abreast of the latest secretarial techniques, secretarial practices, and secretarial styles. When her boss broke off their affair, which had gone on for barely a year, she went back to being just a secretary, though she was ready to help when a woman's touch was required. That she was always there for him he took for granted. In his own way he was as loyal as she: not only did he take her with him as he climbed the ladder; he made sure she received an off-scale salary.

  That made her proud. She had hoped to study medicine but could not qualify because her education had been interrupted by compulsory labor during the war. After the war she had me to care for and hence a living to earn. Her parents had been well-to-do but were picked off by a low-flying aircraft while fleeing at the war's end. By the time she received her payment for war losses, it was too late for her to study, so she used the money to buy the house in the village we moved to. Did she blame me and my birth for having spoiled her plans? She would have been a good doctor: she was precise, she had a good eye for what mattered and what did not, and she kept on top of things. What she lacked in warmth, she would have made up for in vigilance and commitment: her patients might not have liked her, but they would certainly have felt they were in good hands.

  She lived a life that was all duty, much as if she had been a doctor. Perhaps she hated herself for having devoted all her energy and discipline to the pursuit of money and nothing higher. I grew up with the refrain that school was a privilege and if she had to work so hard for her salary I could do the same or more for the privilege of studying. She was disappointed, even annoyed, that I had given up on my dissertation, but she had never made things easy for me: I had had to go on delivering magazines even after the monthly installments for the house were no longer a burden for her, and to supplement the meager allowance she gave me when I was at university. She had disapproved of my trip to America, and she was unhappy about my taking the first job that came along upon my return.

  Fortunately the job was not long in coming. I found a position as an editor and enjoyed it from day one. The publisher was looking to expand his list of legal titles and also charged me with starting up a journal and a series of textbooks. I had often been frustrated by the existing journals and textbooks, and I could make full use of my teaching experience to better them. I was sure I knew what students needed.

  The publishing house had its office in the neighboring city, and I moved into a place nicer than any I had lived in before. The three stories of a private house built in the twenties had been remodeled into three apartments, and mine, the middle one, had two small rooms and a large one with a balcony overlooking a field lined with fir trees that hid the neighboring houses. I moved in Grandfather's desk and armchair, a bed, the kitchen items my girlfriend had rejected, and a mountain of cardboard boxes. Day after day I came home from work to sit on the floor of the large room and unpack clothes, sheets, towels, dishes, books, various drafts of my dissertation, notebooks and drawings, letters and diaries, stuffed animals, Bakelite cars, papier-mâché cowboys, Indians, and soldiers, plus such other childhood treasures as teeth, marbles, magnets, an oil lamp stolen from a construction site, and an American helmet found in a bombed-out lot. I wanted to make a new start by getting rid of all the dross, keeping only the essentials, the way my grandparents had done.

  In the course of their battles the cowboys, Indians, and soldiers had lost their arrows, feathers, and weapons and even their arms and legs. I reviewed the troops' last parade, and while trying to recall their names and deeds, my hands recognized the thick paper I had wrapped them in years ago. It was printed on one side, and I began to read. After a few sentences I realized I was reading the story of the soldier making his way home. I collected the pages and strips of pages, smoothed them out, and arranged them in order. Sometimes I found a sequence of a few pages, sometimes just a single page. I also went through the paper I had used to pack the Bakelite cars and other items, but came up with nothing more. The first page, the page with author and title, I didn't find.

  3

  I READ THE FOLLOWING:

  faster than he had thought. Karl shouted, “Now!” and they all jumped over the railway embankment with him: the count, the grenadier, Gerd, Jürgen, Helmut, and the two Silesians. Two more jumped after them as they hastened down the slope. They jumped too late. Their cry when the wheels met them was overpowered by the locomotive's whistle.

  The train had come faster than Karl expected, and was shorter. It had passed before they reached the small wood, and the guards were standing on the embankment, shooting. The first bullet hit Helmut; he flew a few meters through the air before falling to the ground. The next bullets hit the two Silesians. Then Jürgen screamed but kept running. Karl tripped and turned a somersault. He rolled until he reached the bushes between the first trees. The others too made for the wood and flung themselves into it.

  The bullets went on whizzing for a while, but the guards were no longer aiming. They could not follow them. To do so they would have had to leave the other prisoners.

  Karl and his companions lay low until they stopped hearing shots, shouts, and commands, until only the birds were singing, the crickets chirping, and the bees buzzing. “Karl,” whispered the want to die? Karl looked at him as if one answer were as meaningless as another, though he did need to know. “If you don't want to die, it's got to go.”

  Jürgen was leaning against the tree, staring at his left hand, which was as thick as a bazooka, had turned a gray-purple green, and stank. He shook his head slowly. Then he looked at the others with his childlike eyes and said with his childlike voice, “Else sings, and if I can't accompany her anymore . . .”

  “But there's no way around it!” Gerd said, he too shaking his head. He stood and went over to Jürgen as if about to pick up his plow and make a long, straight furrow. Then gently stroking his head with the left hand, he gave him a powerful punch in the chin with the right, caught him as he collapsed, and laid him carefully on the ground. “Silly boy.”

  Karl gave the commands. Wood on the fire, one knife in the fire, the other in the boiling water, the shirt torn into strips, Jürgen held down. Then he cut. He drew his lips back and bared his teeth, his eyes gleaming with the desire to make the gruesome but urgent operation as precise as possible. Jürgen came to and let out a squeaky, childlike scream, then fainted again. When the hand fell off, the blood bubbled out as if from a mountain spring. Karl removed the glowing-red knife from the fire and pressed it against the stump. It hissed and smoked and stank. The count threw up.

  “Will he make it?”

  “How should I know?” Karl spat. “I'm no doctor.” He bound the stump.

  “Then how did you know he would die if you didn't . . .”

  Karl looked up. “Did you smell that hand?” he asked, laughing in their faces. “You couldn't have stood that smell much longer. You'd have left him behind. Abandoning him here on the island—would that have been the right thing to do?”

  Something new was gleaming in his eyes, a hardness, a coldness, a disdain that sent shivers down their spines. Then he tossed the knife into the boiling water and said, “In ten minutes we'll be on our only for the eye, only a picture, the bones still cold and stiff. Then the red disc rose slightly higher. The only good minute of the day had arrived.

  Enjoy it. Enjoy it while you can. The sun will turn yellow soon. It will soon start pricking instead of warming. You will soon have to wind rags around your head, leaving only slits for the eyes and the swollen, inflamed, mosquito-bitten eyelids. And the mosquitoes will soo
n be back, a swarm for each of you, with no respite until the cold of night. And neither your clothes nor the rags around your head nor the shoes on your feet will give you shelter. And the bites will not merely itch, they will plague you like a leper's boils.

  Enjoy it. Your bones warm up; the tundra smells its sweetest: the miserable bits of moss, the meager plants and weeds, the stunted conifers emit the bewitching promise of fragrance. The air is full of the aroma of home—its woods and heaths—and of foreign lands: herbs you have never tasted, flowers you have never seen.

  The friends' hearts are heavy with homesickness and wanderlust. They sigh, sigh in blissful yearning. They stretch—amazed, because in the cold of the night they did not think their bones would ever serve them again—and sit up. The grenadier hands out what is left to hand out: a few berries plus perhaps a scrap of dried fish or, as long as they last, half a potato. Then off they go, while they can, before the good time has passed. But even if it has in fact passed, they get under way without a moment's hesitation, without a murmur. They are going home.

  Only the morning after they camped with the Lochen tribe had things been different. Jürgen just lay there. At first Karl thought he was dead, but then he saw him smile. Gerd and the grenadier pulled themselves up and sat back to back, looking around as if luxuriating at a resort. But there was nothing to see. The place where the Lochens had been was empty.

  “They promised to come back and take us with them.” His hand shielding his eyes, the count searched the horizon. “We mustn't move from the spot.”

  “It's so nice here,” Gerd said.