Homecoming

by Bernhard Schlink

  My talk with Mother did not last long. “As far as I'm concerned,” she said, “he's dead.”

  “Did you ever see him again after Breslau? Did he tell you to come here? Did he promise to come here? Did he get in touch with his parents after the war? Did he write to you from America?”

  “As far as I'm concerned, he's dead.”

  Barbara waited a week and a half. Then at Sunday breakfast she asked, “Where do we go from here?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “We're not making love anymore.”

  “There have been times when—”

  “No, we've never gone more than two or three nights.”

  She made it sound as though I had purposely, willfully made her unhappy. Yet she must have known how unhappy I was myself. It made me furious. “We went years without making love.”

  “You're out of your mind,” she said, staring at me.

  “I . . .”

  She stood up. “You have the nerve to blame me for the years we spent apart? You want me to apologize so you can forgive me? You're out of your mind.” She marched out of the kitchen but turned back at the door. I could see she was trying to regain her composure. I also saw the dimple over her left eyebrow. “You don't make love, you don't cuddle, you don't talk; you just lie there like a stick. When I wake up in the middle of the night you're sitting at your desk, and when I ask you what's wrong all I get is a pained look. I've been waiting for an explanation for two weeks now. How much longer am I going to have to wait?”

  “It's only been one and a . . .”

  She was about to say something but gave up and left the room with a wave of dismissal. She also left the flat, but instead of slamming the door she left it open as if wishing to let the wind in, let the rain, snow, dust, and leaves in, let our nice, cozy life together go to rack and ruin.

  I listened to her footsteps fading into the distance, then shut the door and cleared the table. I knew I was in the wrong. It would not be the last time. But I could not get rid of my aggression and vented it on the only people I could: Barbara and myself. I was incapable of a major explosion, so I was simply petty and nasty a lot of the time. Even so, I eventually caused irreparable damage.

  I was at a loss what to do: with Barbara, with myself, with the rest of that Sunday. I had fallen into a trap and saw no way to extricate myself from it. I sat on the balcony, listening to the bells toll the beginning of the service and, an hour later, its end. I fell asleep, woke up stiff after a few hours, and started making dinner, though it was much too early. I wanted it to be dinnertime, for Barbara to come into the dining room and for us to have dinner together.

  She did come back, but late, and she was distant. Still, when I spoke about my hurt, my disappointment, my aggression, and the trap I had fallen into, she heard me out, and when we got into bed and I put my arms around her she did not push me away. True, she was aloof in her lovemaking, but as we were drifting off she put her arms around me. That made me happy. At the same time I knew I was still trapped and had to free myself if we were to get back to normal.

  18

  WE STOPPED ARGUING. I was still seething and fumed at my shoelace when it broke, at the windshield wipers when they did not do their job, at the passengers when they clogged the stairway to the train platform, at my secretary when she forgot to write a letter, at my clumsy hands when they refused to put a new strap on a watch. There were times I was ready to explode over the nasty, malicious minutiae of daily life, yet I never fumed at Barbara. We made love, we cuddled, we talked.

  One day my mother came to see me at work. She had never done so before, and she asked me what such and such a thing was used for and oohed and aahed over something else so as to put off the moment of truth. Finally we were having coffee in my office.

  “Yes, he told me to come here after the war. He said he would come too. Otherwise I would have moved to the country, to a village or farm.” There was a long pause. I did not push her. She had come to fulfill a duty, and fulfill it she would. “He was true to his word: he showed up in the autumn of 1946. How he found me I don't know, but he'd found me in Breslau too. He was good at that sort of thing. Anyway, he offered me a deal: if I confirmed that he was dead, he would leave everything he had to me as his wife and to you as his son and you would get Swiss grandparents. For both your sake and mine I accepted. I wrote to his parents that I had seen him get shot and had found a letter on him. The letter, which I enclosed, said that we had married.” She looked away, trying to preclude any emotional reaction I might have, and to keep her own distance. But I could see the trace of a smile. “Now you see why I didn't want to meet your grandparents.”

  “Why did Father want to get away?”

  “He said he was in danger, he couldn't afford to be caught, he had to hide, he needed to emigrate. I didn't believe him: a man who can parade around in a jacket, blue shirt, and polka-dot tie during the last months of the war knows how to keep out of danger, though he was still wearing bits and pieces of a uniform.” She shrugged. “He stayed three months—ten weeks, to be exact. Then one day I came home from work to find him gone.”

  “So he knew me.”

  “He was the one who took care of you while I was at work. He didn't go out much. He was waiting for false papers, a visa, a ticket, who knows what. He stayed home, looked after you, and wrote novels for me to sell, to provide me with a little extra money.”

  “So he knew me!” I was furious, beside myself.

  “You mean you might have forgiven him for abandoning a pregnant woman, but a son . . .”

  I knew her scorn was justified, but that did not change matters: being abandoned after he had seen me, talked to me, played with me, cared for me, was much more hurtful than being abandoned before birth. Surely I was no less lovable than Max. What I had been unable to do even to a friend's son he had done to his own: deny him a place in his life and his heart.

  I never again made the mistake of directing my rage at Barbara. I controlled myself. Only when a shoelace broke or a letter did not go out or my hands failed to obey me did I realize how much energy it cost me, but I had no idea what I could do, other than control myself.

  That summer another publishing house turned up, but again I lost my chance. It was a good house, an old house, and I liked its list—it ranged from philosophy to poetry—and its Potsdam location, but it too fell to a large chain. The way it happened was similar: negotiations went smoothly at first but hit a snag, after which the man I had been dealing with failed to return my calls, and in the end the secretary was surprised to hear from me because the house had been sold the week before.

  Not that the summer did not have its brighter moments. Barbara still pushed for her weekend excursions, this time to points east, and we went as far as the Ostsee, to Wismar, Rostock, and Greifswald, to the Darss and the Oderbruch, to Görlitz on the Neisse, and up the Elbe. We found much that was monotonous and shabby but also enchanted gardens and strings of houses, even whole streets, that bore the scars of history with dignity. Time had stood still on the tree-lined cobblestone roads, where we met only an occasional tractor, Trabant, or truck, and when we stopped and got out we heard nothing but the birds and the wind. Storks trailed the combines as they moved through the fields.

  For Barbara and me it was also as if time had stood still years before. At first we merely tried out the old rituals, willing to abandon them if they no longer felt right, but they felt just fine. The playful jostling when we used the bathroom together, the dancing on the way there and back, the Gernhardt poems, the long periods of shared silence—they felt right in the way they had felt right then and seemed never to have stopped feeling right.

  19

  ONE NIGHT I BEGAN TO TALK. I had not prepared anything or planned it beforehand. I just did not seem to be able to keep it to myself any longer.

  “It's usually okay when we're off on a trip, but even then there are times when it takes everything I can muster to keep from flying off the handle. Re
member the time we got stuck for a half hour behind a tractor that wouldn't let us pass? Or yesterday, when we couldn't sit at one of the free tables because the waiter was serving only reserved tables? Or just this morning when you opened and closed your bag three times because you forgot something? That kind of thing drives me crazy, and bringing those crazy impulses under control wears me out.” I took her hand. “It began when I found out about my father. I know I'm taking out my rage for him on you. I'm really sorry. Ever since I learned about him, I'm hypersensitive about anything that goes wrong. The publishing house deal would have been a real breakthrough. I could finally have been involved with the world, with the risks of life. I have the feeling I've always lived on the sidelines.”

  I sat up. The moon was shining into our room, and I could see Barbara's face, a bright spot looking over at me.

  “The smartest thing I ever did in my life was to talk to you on that plane. And the most stupid thing I could do now is to leave you and go to America. But I have to go. On the first of September I'm going to resign, move to New York, and confront my father. And I mean not just mumble a few words and let him push me aside; I mean confront him head-on. I'm going to pose as a scholar from Humboldt University who is doing research on some topic or other and who would consider it a great honor to attend his seminar. We'll see what happens then.”

  “And you want me to wait for you here.”

  “Come with me. You resign too and come along.”

  “You know I can't do that.” She sat up. “What am I supposed to do with my desire to come home to a cuddle, a desire you awoke in me? You promised to satisfy that desire.”

  “I'm sorry, Barbara, but I'll be back.”

  “I don't want to wait for my husband. I've had enough of that.”

  “I'll come back as quickly as possible.”

  She shook her head. A while later she started crying, but she let me take her in my arms. If I could cry, I would have cried with her.

  Part Five

  1

  IT WAS DRIZZLING IN NEW YORK. The wipers made streaks on the yellow cab's windshield, and the drops on the side windows wandered into streaks only to peter out or merge with others. The cars had switched their headlights on early, and the light was refracted in the streaks and drops. For a while I could not see much, but then we rode over a bridge and the city suddenly towered sparkling into the rain- and evening-dark sky.

  Barbara had made a few calls and found a cheap Riverside Drive room for me. Even though she told me the room was in the back of the building, I kept fantasizing about a river view until I stood in the door and looked through the window at a wall across a ventilation shaft. I unpacked and put my things away. In Germany it was past midnight, and I was both tired and awake. I walked to the university. It had stopped raining. People were rushing along the street as if trying to make up for the time they had lost because of the rain. The entrance to the campus was bustling as well: students and professors going in and out, people passing out leaflets, selling umbrellas. The campus itself was dark and quiet, the buildings sheltering it from the traffic noise. There was no one on the grass and only a few souls on the paths and steps leading up to a building with columns and a dome. I looked at one of them as he passed under a light coming in my direction. Could it be him?

  I knew that political science was located in a modern high-rise behind the main campus. I found it and found the floor with faculty offices. John de Baur. Why did it hurt me to read his name on the door? Hadn't I come because I would find his name on the door and him behind it? Suddenly another door opened and I bolted. I did not wait for the elevator or the person whose steps I heard coming down the corridor. I took the stairs.

  On the way home I had dinner at a Chinese restaurant and went into a supermarket to stock up. All at once I was so tired that everything seemed unreal: the endless aisles and shelves, the mounds of food, the loud conversations of the customers at the checkout counter, the warm, heavy, humid air outside enveloping me like a cape, the unfamiliar advertisements, the crowded streets, the gigantic trucks, the howling sirens of the police cars and ambulances. Just before entering my building, I gazed up at the sky. It was clear: I could see the stars, I could see the planes blinking red and white, practically on one another's tails. Even the planes seemed unreal to me. Where did all those people want to go? What was I doing here? What ghost was I after?

  2

  THE NEXT DAY HE WAS sitting opposite me. A man in an open-necked blue shirt and rumpled light linen suit ensconced in an armchair next to his desk, his feet on a chair, a book in his lap. The door to his office had been open, so I had had a moment to observe him before he looked up and spoke to me. Tall, slim, white hair, blue eyes, a big nose and mouth, and a headstrong though relaxed expression on his face.

  I saw no similarity. Either with the child in the paper hat on the hobbyhorse, the boy on the bicycle, or the young man in knicker-bockers or with myself: my eyes are a greenish-brownish gray, my nose and mouth are inconspicuous, and I am anything but headstrong, much as I would like to be. My mother claimed to see his slant eyes in mine, but I did not find his eyes particularly slant.

  Though not struck by any similarity, I was overwhelmed by his physicality. Till then he had been an idea, a construct made of the stories I had heard about him and the thoughts he had put down on paper. He had been both all-powerful and powerless: he had stamped my life without my having a chance to react, and I had created an image of him without his having any input into it. Now he was a body—tangible, vulnerable, visibly older and presumably weaker than I was. But the physicality gave him a palpable presence, a dominance that I had yet to come to grips with.

  “Come in!” he said, taking his feet off a chair and nodding invitingly to another. I went into action, telling him, as I had planned, about my teaching at Humboldt University, about the book I wanted to turn my dissertation into after ten years as an editor, and about the role deconstructionist legal theory would play in the revision. Then came the bait: “In addition, my publishing house is thinking of buying your book, and I have been asked to translate it. So the dissertation is only part of my reason for coming. I feel I could do a better job on the translation if I spent a semester attending your lectures and seminar. Would that be possible? I know that tuition in American universities is not free, far from it, and—”

  He stopped me with a wave of the hand. He could arrange for me to become a visiting scholar. I wouldn't have my own office or desk, but I would have library privileges and the right to audit any courses I wished. He would be only too happy to have me in his seminar—I might even give a talk to the students—and he would consider it an honor for me to translate his book. Moreover, it made sense for us to be in touch during the process. “I speak your language, and I will be the one to authorize the translation. I want to make sure that the misunderstandings that inevitably creep into a translation are nipped in the bud.”

  He spoke with animation, using his hands, looking straight at me. His slight accent did not make his words sound wooden as it did in other Americans of German origin and in myself; no, his English was soft, ingratiating, seductive. I remembered Rosa Habe, who had taken his Swiss accent for Viennese and been literally seduced by it. I remembered my one-time playmate's father, who had let himself be taken in by his charm. He too had compared my eyes to my father's.

  “If you are familiar with my book, my lectures will not hold many surprises, but I will go a bit deeper here and there. In the seminar we are reading the classics of modernity. They have a lot to say—to one another and to us.” He stood up, pointed me in the direction of the departmental office, and said he would phone the secretary and let her know I was coming.

  The secretary took my picture and gave me a laminated plastic card identifying me as Dr. Fürst. Such was the name I had used when introducing myself to de Baur and the name he had passed on to the secretary, who did not ask me to prove it was mine, only to spell it.

  I stepped through the
door with a feeling of triumph. I had done more than gain access to his lectures and seminar; I felt that I had him in my power, that I, who knew him inside out, could do as I pleased with him, who did not know me from Adam, that I had finally come into my own.

  3

  THE SENSE OF TRIUMPH lived on even after life assumed a daily routine. At times I felt intoxicated though I hadn't drunk a drop; at times I walked with such zest that I might have been crossing a meadow instead of asphalt streets. I bought a pair of running shoes, and my daily jogging sessions down by the river left me invigorated. I got on more easily with the people I happened to meet.

  For the first time I believed Odysseus when he said he both desired Penelope and enjoyed his peregrinations, if not for all ten of the years—not for the years with Calypso, and not for the year with Circe—then at least for the weeks of adventures and discoveries. I spoke to Barbara every few days. We talked about school, the department, friends, films, a doctor's appointment, a mishap, a dream—a telephonic wrap-up of our daily news. I was occasionally afraid that although she did not show it she would hold my New York stay against me. But while I was convinced that the two of us belonged together, while I loved and desired her, the desire was for her as part of a life that would once again be mine but was not now mine: I was in New York.

  De Baur opened his lectures, like his book, with The Odyssey, but he did not treat it as the prototype for all homecoming stories, as I had thought he would when I first read his book. What he meant to do, in fact, was to deconstruct the idea that The Odyssey is the prototype for all homecoming stories. He claimed that it was readers who desired to view the homecoming as the goal of The Odyssey. Take away that desire and you got a different picture. Odysseus was in no hurry to get home: he was perfectly happy with one woman, then the other, and if he did go home it was not because he himself willed it but because the gods did, not because his situation abroad required it but because his wife's situation at home did. The suitors had seen through Penelope's ruse of unweaving by night what she wove by day and insisted that she complete the shroud and do as she had promised, namely, marry one of them once the shroud was ready. Odysseus did not even truly come home: he had to set off again immediately, and although this departure was meant to augur well for a permanent return, that return was by no means certain.