Homecoming

by Bernhard Schlink

  I finished as the sun began to rise. I lay down and slept a fitful hour or two, then went to the department to input the text and print it out. I signed it with my own name. I made an appointment with a lawyer I had met at a law school lecture, and he agreed to submit the manuscript to The New York Times with the stipulation that it be published in its entirety or not at all. I could not get a flight out that day but did book a seat on the next flight the day after.

  19

  THE PLANE WAS late taking off. The sun was already going down as it flew north along the coast. The water shimmered and the snow glistened in the evening light. I did not really believe they were the Hudson or the Adirondacks, but I took leave of them as if they were. Then I saw the lights of Halifax. Then it was totally dark.

  I did not call Barbara to announce my arrival: I was afraid. What if she told me there had been some changes during my absence and I had better stay with a friend or my mother. That we would have to see how things went. No, no, she wasn't with anybody, nobody permanent, that is, but she'd met somebody. That, no, no, she still liked me, liked me a lot, but she was a bit confused. Yes, of course she wanted to see me, but in the same apartment? Wouldn't it be a bit claustrophobic?

  I had avoided hearing it over the phone, but that was cold comfort. I could just as easily hear it on the stairs, at the door, in the entrance hall, in the living room, from which my furniture had been moved to storage.

  For Christmas, Barbara had sent me a teddy bear I received as a child and displayed on the bookshelves of every flat where I lived. “Greetings from Home,” she had written, and it made me happy. But how could I be sure she had meant it as a token of her love? What if she had just shrunk from packing it away in one of the cartons she was using to store my things in?

  Surely she would have written to me about it! The reason the men in my stories came home unsuspecting was that there was no postal or telephone service, no contact. Well, not entirely. Agamemnon suspected nothing even though he had established contact with Clytemnestra via a messenger. She disguised herself because she intended to murder him, and murder him she did. Was I crazy? What silly, silly thoughts! My furniture and my things were still in place; of course they were: she would have written otherwise. But that was all she would have written. She would wait with the rest, wait until she could tell me to my face.

  I was grateful for the diversion provided by the meals and the movie and the prattle of the woman next to me, who had four children and twelve grandchildren. When the overhead lights went out and the woman's snoring head drooped onto my shoulder, the wheel of fear began turning again. I tried to stop it and look at my options. Should I insist on staying if she wanted me to leave? At first I could not imagine doing something of the sort, but then I started wondering what kind of statement my not staying would make. Would I be doing it for her sake or mine? Did I want to spare her my presence or spare myself the ignominy of it all? No, I would not make the same mistake twice: this time I would stay. I would be a presence, but an undemanding one; I would woo but not push, I would offer myself; I would not repress my feelings; I would show understanding for her, reveal a tad of self-irony. The longer I played with that option, the more I felt it was the right one and the more I saw it was beyond me. Beyond me.

  What would I do if she stood in the door with another man's arm around her? Fight? I suddenly understood why men used to duel: when two men love the same woman, the world is too small to contain them both. If they truly love her and cannot have her, they would rather die than live without her. Too bad women now stay out of it and sometimes want the wrong one, the one who dies, or even both. Even if I picked a fight with him, I could not predict Barbara's reaction. Let's say he fought back. Let's say I fell down the stairs and lay sprawled out on the landing. She might run and take my bleeding head in her lap. But what if he were the one who fell? Would she take him for the valiant victim and me for the brute?

  I had to put an end to my fear. It was spreading like an ink stain over a sheet of paper. Soon there would be no space for me to write “I love you.”

  It was still dark when the plane landed in Frankfurt, still dark when I got out of the train in my hometown. This was where I would normally have changed trains, but there had been some damage to the wires or tracks or somebody had committed suicide, and there would be no train for another two hours. I took a taxi. I could see the sun coming up over the hills, which I took as a good omen, but there was a bad omen as well: I was coming in on the Autobahn like Karl.

  At last I was in front of the house. The bare, wintry garden made it look more massive and dark than usual, and my heart sank. I opened the garden gate, went up to the entrance, and rang the bell. After a while I heard the buzz of the door-opener, pushed the door open, and went up the stairs. The door to the apartment was still shut. I waited on the stairs.

  I heard the chain being slipped out of the bolt and falling against the door. The door opened. There stood Barbara in her dressing gown, her hair pulled back as it was the first time we met, her glasses down over her nose. She took off the glasses, recognized me, and her face lit up. She leaned against the doorpost, crossed her arms over her chest, and watched me come up the last few stairs, bags in hand. She smiled her crooked, brazen, wonderfully warm smile. “So here you are!”

  20

  IT WAS AS IF I had never left. Barbara had to go to school, and while she showered, put on her makeup, and dressed, I made breakfast. By the time she'd come home from school, I had unpacked, put my things away, and gone through my mail.

  The publishing house wanted to hire me back: they had decided not to keep my successor on after his probationary period. If I accepted, I could go ahead with the new series and the new journal. While we ate, I could tell Barbara that we would be leaving for work together as we used to do. The very next morning. The longer I waited the more work would pile up on my desk.

  None of what I so feared had come about: there was no other man in Barbara's life and she did not hold my long absence against me. She was glad to have me back. And yet I could not completely set aside my fear. Would Barbara eventually tire of the routine of love that was so important to me? To keep her from noticing it, I would make off-the-wall proposals she would laughingly go along with. But what if she saw through me one day? Or did she see through me even now?

  My piece on John de Baur never appeared. The New York Times wanted to have a reporter run through all the facts with me and find out more about my stake in the story, and that I was unwilling to do. I had no desire to stir up the relationship between John de Baur and me.

  A few years later the story did come out. It made all the papers, American and European. I assume the reporter on whose desk the piece landed had gone and done the research himself. That he did not acknowledge me as a source was fine by me. I would not have enjoyed joining in the media hype.

  Most of the articles focused on de Baur's biography, the various names he took and parts he played, what he got involved in or let himself in for, his egoism or opportunism or arrogance or whatever the author had decided to call the key to de Baur's character. On television they interviewed the journalist who had broken the story rather than de Baur himself, but he did go on the radio, where he was his suave, charming self, giving a treatment of his youthful desire for adventure and susceptibility to be led astray that was simultaneously bemused and concerned, voicing his understanding of the media campaign and moving quickly on to his pride in what he had accomplished in America and his pride in America for having given him the opportunity to accomplish it. He was so modest, so sincere, so likable that it was impossible to dig into him afterward. I heard excerpts of the program in Germany. He was truly impressive.

  The scholarly debate centered on his intellectual integrity and whether he was using deconstructionist legal theory to evade responsibility or had intended to formulate a genuine new way of looking at the law—or both. De Baur's friends held a conference in which these issues were aired, and after his Ameri
can colleagues had had their say about the difficult or terrible or blind or cryptic or recalcitrant wartime texts and a French colleague had seen in them “embers under flickering flames,” de Baur took the floor and deconstructed them with such finesse that it was impossible to censure him for them or even censure him for refusing to take responsibility for them. That too was a brilliant performance.

  One paper triggered a minor debate of its own. The author's thesis was that de Baur's attempt to justify his past and integrate it into the present was more intelligent than the traditional attempts by theoreticians and practitioners of the law to talk their way out of such binds: the law is the law, an order is an order, obedience is obedience. It also called the conception behind them something that had long seemed inconceivable: a present-day intellectual fascism. But here too de Baur managed to come out on top.

  Not only did he come out on top of the brouhaha, I imagine he enjoyed it. Things quieted down around him once it had passed—in Europe, at any rate—and I did not run across his name again until the turn of the new century, on the occasion of which he wrote a widely read essay full of presentiment and foreboding. After 9/11 he developed a theory of terrorism. I saw announcements of the book and reviews but had no desire to read them. On his eightieth birthday there was a late-night interview with him on television. I watched and listened for a while, then turned off the sound and finally the picture.

  A few minutes later my mother phoned. “Did you see him on television?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you still want to know how his novel ends?”

  “You told me years ago.”

  She gave a spiteful laugh. “You came up with it on your own.” She paused for a reaction, but I said nothing. “He was a student here before he left for Silesia. He had a girlfriend. He looked her up after the war. She was married and had two children.”

  “Was one of them his?”

  “He would have told me. He never spared me. He based the end of the novel on the meeting he had with her and the arrangement he made with me.”

  “Why are you telling me this?”

  “Maybe you'll finally get your life together. You still don't know if you want to stay Peter Debauer or be Peter Graf or Peter Bindinger. You're not married. It's too late for you to have your own children, but you could still—”

  “You want to be a grandmother?”

  “I don't want a thing,” she said, and hung up.

  It's true. She doesn't want anything from me, which makes things easy and makes me sad. I'm glad I'm still important to Max beyond movies and pizza, beyond school and books. I would like to want more from him than I do now. I will have to work on it.

  Sometimes I feel a longing for the Odysseus who learned the tricks and lies of the confidence man from Wenzel Strapinski, set out restless into the world, sought adventure and came out on top, won over my mother with his charm, and made up novels with great gusto and theories with playful levity. But I know it is not Johann Debauer or John de Baur I long for; it is the image I have made of my father and hung in my heart.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Bernhard Schlink was born in Germany. He is the author of the internationally bestselling novel The Reader, as well as the collection of stories Flights of Love and four prizewinning crime novels—The Gordian Loop, Self's Deception, Self's Punishment, and Self's Murder—that are currently being translated into English. He lives in Berlin and New York.

  a cognizant original v5 release october 08 2010

  ALSO BY BERNHARD SCHLINK

  The Reader

  Flights of Love: Stories

  Self 's Punishment

  Self 's Deception

  ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR

  Michael Henry Heim teaches Slavic Languages and Literatures and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Los Angeles. His many translations include works by Anton Chekhov, Günter Grass, and Milan Kundera. His version of Death in Venice was awarded the Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator's Prize in 2005.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Translation copyright © 2008 by Michael Henry Heim

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in Germany as Die Heimkehr by Diogenes Verlag AG Zürich, in 2006.

  Copyright © 2006 by Bernhard Schlink

  Pantheon Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Schlink, Bernhard.

  [Heimkehr. English]

  Homecoming / Bernhard Schlink ; translated from the German

  by Michael Henry Heim.

  p. cm.

  I. Heim, Michael Henry. II. Title.

  PT2680.l54h4513 2007 833'.914—dc22 2007016121

  www.pantheonbooks.com

  eISBN: 978-0-307-37715-9

  v3.0