Homecoming

by Bernhard Schlink

  The reader's hopes and desires played other tricks on him as well, de Baur argued. Readers liked to believe that Odysseus covered the whole of the known world on his journeys, that he faced all the horrors known to man at the time, and that the totality of his experience was what gives the journeys their meaning. But the text said that Odysseus was a liar. All we knew about his journey was what he tells the Phaeacians, and he had every reason to ingratiate himself with them by lying. Sometimes lies and wiles played an instructional role in the narrative: they overcame the magic power of Polyphemus, Circe, and the Sirens. But later Odysseus lied to the goddess Athena and to his wife and son and father simply because the stories he spun around his lies were so engaging. Was he true to himself ? The liar who remains true to himself as a liar embroils us in a paradox and turns fidelity to betrayal.

  The reader could not even be certain what the ending meant. Was it that the insolent suitors are to be murdered, as Aristotle suggests? Was it marital bliss, as a Hellenistic commentator would have it? Was it, as for medieval readers, the re-establishment of the ruler's legitimacy? Or was it the interpretation that surfaced after the great wars, humility in the face of destiny?

  The closer one looked at the ending the more bewildering it was. Were the suitors really murdered as a punishment for their sins? The sins were actually not all that outrageous in the end: they courted a woman they assumed to be a widow, and while they did live off her property they paid her back with gifts. Moreover, the threat to murder Telemachus never materialized. Was the murder of the suitors really a heroic victory in spite of being outnumbered, on the part of Odysseus and Telemachus? The spear meant for Odysseus was deflected not by him but by the goddess Athena. And look at the gods: now they were fair, now unfair; they rewarded and punished, loved and hated at whim, threw dice for men's destinies. So, everything was in flux: the work's entire intent and meaning, its portrayal of truth and lies, loyalty and betrayal. All that remained was that The Odyssey transformed the primordial myth of departure, adventure, and return into an epic, a story set in a specific moment and place, thereby creating the abstract quantities of space and time without which we would have no history and no stories.

  Then de Baur made a wild leap: the same flux was evident in the odyssey of law—its goals, its upswings and downswings, what it saw as good and as evil, as rational and irrational, as truth or falsehood. All that remained of the odyssey of law were the abstract quantities of justice and injustice and the fact that decisions were constantly to be made.

  4

  RELUCTANT AS I WAS to admit it, he was a brilliant teacher. I would have much preferred to find him a good speaker but shallow, a deep thinker but vain, an inspiring flash in the pan. But no, he kindled true passion in his students: he got them to read long and arduous texts with a sensitivity that showed in their questions and answers. He spoke clearly and vividly and was always ready with an example. His body language was so spirited that one day during the seminar, rocking on his chair as he liked to do, he fell back and picked himself up laughing. Otherwise he was not one for laughing, and his students had to go elsewhere for the jokes American professors are fond of making.

  The lecture course took place in an auditorium designed like an amphitheater. It could seat a hundred and twenty students and was always packed. The seminar had eighteen students. We sat in a circle, each with our own desk. If you had something to say, you just said it: de Baur did not use the roster. Two-thirds of the students were young and had entered graduate school in political science directly from college; the other third were older law students who had decided on the law after practicing another profession, and they included a doctor, a psychoanalyst, a French professor, and a former marine. They were trying to do the three-year law course in two and a half years and felt guilty about taking a seminar on political theory rather than a business law class. They liked my proposal that we older students get together for a drink, but were too busy to act on it. All but one. He and I were the only ones attending the lecture course as well as the seminar, and whoever arrived at the lecture first would save a seat for the other in the front row. Jonathan Marvin had sold a profitable business, and the returns made him independently wealthy. He had been attending de Baur's courses for several years and fancied himself more up on him than the others.

  “Did you know that for years he ran a utopian commune in the Adirondacks?” he whispered to me on the day de Baur lectured on The Odyssey as a search for utopia. But when I pressed him for details after the lecture, all he could tell me was that it had been in the seventies and had begun well and ended badly. One of the twenty to thirty participants who stuck it out was said to have written an article. Jonathan had been on its trail for a long time. “It must have appeared in some obscure New Age rag. No library can possibly collect them all.”

  One day I discreetly followed de Baur home after the seminar. It turned out to be a short walk: he too lived on Riverside Drive, where, as I had learned by then, the university had bought up a number of buildings to house its faculty members in comfort. My route to the university or the subway did not lead me past his place, but I took to going out of my way to pass it. And so I met him once taking a rottweiler on a walk and once coming out of the park wearing whites and carrying a tennis racket. I also took to jogging past the tennis courts and saw him playing one day, his strokes so sure and powerful that he could afford to refrain from running after fast balls.

  I still felt I had him in my power. I was stalking him, observing him, sniffing him out. Soon he would have nothing to hide behind.

  But then came the last Sunday in September. It was a bright day with the first red and yellow leaves in the trees and the last warmth of summer in the air. I had rented a bicycle and ridden to the tip of Manhattan to see the Statue of Liberty, and I passed de Baur's apartment building on the ride home. I had had my eye on it since it came into view. I saw a silver Mercedes in front of the entrance, and there was de Baur, standing behind it while the rottweiler jumped into the back through the open tailgate. De Baur shut the tailgate and turned to the building. The doorman was holding the door open, and a young woman with two children came out, a boy of eleven or twelve and a slightly younger girl. I could tell at once from a gesture, a glance: the woman was his wife, the children his children.

  Seeing him with wife and children, I suddenly felt him slipping through my fingers.

  5

  EARLY IN OCTOBER he invited the seminar to his apartment for dinner. “The whole seminar—that's a rarity,” Jonathan told me. “He usually limits himself to a few. The dinner is a test, I think: if you pass, you get invited to the January seminar.”

  “A seminar during the break?”

  “For years he's been holding a week-long retreat in the Adirondacks. You have to be personally invited. I don't know what goes on there. The students who've gone have been very secretive about it. De Baur is too. I'd finance it until his retirement if he let me come.”

  “You mean he pays for it himself ?”

  “It looks that way. It's not an official course, and the students don't fork out a penny.”

  I did not want to arrive too early or too late, so I was standing at his door with a bouquet of daisies—having been announced from below by the doorman and taken the elevator to the eleventh floor—at precisely the hour indicated. His wife opened the door, greeted me, thanked me for the flowers, and took me into a large room with a view of the river and the Palisades beyond. After pouring me a glass of wine, she left the room for a moment and returned with the daisies in a vase. “You're the visiting scholar from Germany, aren't you?”

  My stepmother was a bit younger than me. Tall, blond, slim, fit. She had an open face, probing eyes, and a mocking smile. What did she know about her husband? What had he told her? Was she his second wife? Had she been his student? Did she admire him, despise him, love him?

  “Yes. Are you in political science too?”

  She shook her head. “I'm a stockbroker.”<
br />
  Although I had no idea what that involved and would have liked to ask her about it, I had another line of questioning to pursue, and the other guests could arrive at any minute. “I really admire you. How do you do it? Stockbroker and mother of two. I happened to see you with your son and daughter the other day.”

  They were my half-brother and half-sister. Did we have anything in common? Would we understand one another, accept or reject one another? I could presumably sue them for part of their inheritance, and I would presumably upset them a little by telling them about their father and my mother.

  She smiled. “They're wonderful children, both of them. But they leave for school at seven thirty and more often than not aren't back till five. They don't hold my job against me.”

  “In Germany school is out at noon. My mother had to work when I was their age, but luckily my half-sister from my father's first marriage was able to look after me. An extended family can come in handy. Have you got anyone like that?” I could not come up with anything better.

  She was taken aback. “Excuse me? You want to know whether I have any stepchildren? No, we have . . .” The doorbell rang. She was relieved to get away. Then it rang again, and the guests started arriving in rapid succession. When everyone was there, de Baur emerged from the kitchen with two large bowls, one of pasta, the other of salad. He was wearing an apron and playing a trattoria chef in broken Italian. He beamed at the applause, which Jonathan had initiated. Though I stood out like a sore thumb, I could not bring myself to join in.

  Everyone helped themselves to food and wine and found a seat. The children were there too, eating away, not in the least self-conscious. They happened to be near me for a while, but I must have stared at them too intensely, because they started looking uncomfortable and wandered off before I could strike up a conversation.

  My social deafness is not the only reason I feel ill at ease at large parties. I am no good at small talk: I can never quite find the tone to make the weighty sound trivial and the trivial sound weighty. Either I take my conversation partner's words too seriously and get too involved, or I take them as blather and dismiss them out of hand.

  I should never have let myself in for a discussion of a play I had not seen, but I got carried away because I had not said a word all evening. And because I was furious.

  Jane, the former psychoanalyst, and Anne, the former French professor, had just seen a black comedy in four scenes entitled Mosaic that made a deep impression on them. The play was based on an experiment by a social psychologist, Stanley Milgram, in which the subject is instructed to ask a person a number of questions and punish incorrect answers with electric shocks. The strength of the shocks increases with each incorrect answer until the person screams with pain, then begs for his life, and eventually falls silent. In fact, the shocks are bogus and the subject receives his instructions from a bogus scientist, who explains that the experiment is in the interest of science and encourages him to proceed whenever he hesitates. When the subjects can only hear the other person, about sixty-five percent of them are willing to go all the way; when they can see him as well, the percentage falls to forty; and if they are required to restrain the person physically, it goes down to thirty.

  Jane was shocked by the subjects' behavior. “It shows that Hannah Arendt was right, doesn't it? That evil is banal, that normal people are willing to commit atrocities when egged on by somebody in power.”

  Anne disagreed. “You think thirty to sixty-five percent of the human race are Eichmanns? Well, I don't. I don't believe that Eichmann and all the others were just being obedient either. They enjoyed what they did. They were eager to be cruel. Haven't you read Sophie's Choice?”

  “Nobody is cruel out of obedience alone,” Katherine intervened. She was the one who had been a doctor. “I saw the play too, and the cruelty didn't begin with the shocks; it began with the questions. Didn't you notice? They were questions that had no answers. Anyone willing to ask that kind of question enjoys torturing people.”

  “That's only the way it was in the play. In Milgram's experiment the questions had to do with a topic the scientist had told them about and the subjects were supposed to keep in mind.”

  It made me furious that Jane, Anne, and Katherine did not seem to see that the experiment itself was an outrage irrespective of how the questions were worded or whether they were an additional torture. But before I could say anything, one of the students blurted out, “But you can't just . . . you just can't experiment on people like that!”

  “Is that so?” de Baur chimed in. “Milgram's subjects did not see it that way. They regarded the experiment as an enriching experience, an opportunity to get to know themselves and”—he paused—“fear themselves.” He spoke in a way that implied the matter was settled, and moved away.

  I was still furious. “If everything that offers us an opportunity to get to know ourselves is positive, then everything in the world is positive.”

  De Baur turned around. “Well, what is wrong with that?”

  I could hear the derision in his voice. Clearly the others could too: they looked curious.

  “Just because we can learn from something bad doesn't make it good.”

  “Wouldn't you have us learn? Or are there only instant insights?”

  “An insight doesn't change the thing that occasioned it. We can gain insights from good things, bad things, and things that are neither good nor bad.”

  “These ‘things' you are talking about—they are nothing but the interpretation we give them. Why shouldn't we have an insight that tells us that what at first appeared bad is actually good?”

  “But the experiment itself was bad. It deceived and exploited people and drove them to do what they would rather not have done. Would you like to be treated like that?”

  He raised his arms and let them fall. Then he laughed and said, “There is nothing to like or dislike. I am willing to make a demand on myself for the sake of science and progress. That is all.”

  “And a demand I'm willing to make on myself I can then impose on others, is that it? Is the golden rule too weak for you? Is that why you need an iron rule?” I would never have said it had I not been so worked up at the time. The muffed conversation with de Baur's wife, the failed attempt at contact with his children, the misguided discussion with Jane, Anne, and Katherine, the corner de Baur's questions had driven me into, and his mockery—I was so upset I could no longer observe; I had to attack.

  De Baur nodded. “An iron rule . . .” I had the feeling he was wondering whether to ask me how I had come up with the idea of the iron rule. On the one hand he seemed gratified to have lured me out of my shell, on the other nonplussed by what he had found concealed there. Everyone waited to see how the showdown would progress. But de Baur said nothing more; he just gave me a quizzical look and exclaimed, “Fill your glasses, everybody! I should like to propose a toast! Today, the third of October 1990, is a historical day, the day of German reunification. To our German friend!”

  6

  FROM THEN ON, our relationship was different. After the next seminar de Baur asked me whether I would walk home with him: I lived on Riverside Drive too, didn't I? I expected a question about the iron rule, but instead he inquired about how the translation was coming along, if I had any problems, if I had any suggestions for the next edition. He seemed bent on showing me that he did not need to ask that question. Even after he repeated the invitation and a certain intimacy began to arise from our walks together, he steered clear of questions about why I was interested in this or that, why I maintained this or that, and what my background was.

  During the lectures and seminars he would address me directly with a mixture of complicity and disdain, as if touched by my naiveté. “The world as a community of law, isn't that what you'd like?” Before I could respond, he would explain why it was a beautiful but misguided notion: community presupposed homogeneity, not necessarily ethnic or religious homogeneity but at least a homogeneous vision like the on
e shared by the immigrants to America. “The nation—you don't believe in the nation anymore?” He claimed that globalization might rend the nation-states asunder but would not make all men brothers; no, it would turn them back to their families, to their ethnic or religious communities, to their gangs. Sympathy for the insulted, the humiliated, the slain in the abstract, outside one's personal experience, was mere ritual.

  “The good in evil is something our friend here cannot accept. He cannot even imagine such a thing.” He smiled first at me then at the rest of his audience. “What is the good in evil? That it rouses and sharpens our moral sense? That it enables us to build institutions to subdue it, the institutions that give us our culture? That it lays the foundation for the enmity between good and evil and thereby the enmity among men, without which man would have no identity and lead a life of tedium?” I could see the look of puzzlement in the faces around me. “The good in evil,” he continued, “lies in the fact that it can be made to work for the good.” For a moment the puzzlement turned to relief, but de Baur took pleasure in turning it back into bewilderment. “Poverty and misery make progress and culture possible; power safeguards peace; sacrifices by the innocent help to make just revolutions and wage just wars. Had it not been for the Sirens, Odysseus would not have bound himself to the mast, and by doing so, yet not plugging his ears, he gave us the concept of the Constitution: enjoy power, yes, but bind yourself lest you should fall prey to it. We are the ones to decide whether evil shall overcome good or serve it; we are the ones to decide what is good and what evil. Who if not us?”