Summer Lies

by Bernhard Schlink

  His father leaned back. “Faith is a habit.”

  “It becomes that, but it doesn’t begin as a habit. How did you start to become a believer?” That was an even more difficult question. His mother had once mentioned that his father, who had grown up without religion, had experienced a conversion as a student. But how the conversion had occurred was something she didn’t say, and his father had also never even spoken about it as a fact.

  He leaned even further back and his hands gripped the ends of the chair arms. “I … I always hoped …” He looked into the blue. Then he slowly shook his head. “You have to experience it yourself. If you don’t have it yourself …”

  “Talk to me. Mother once mentioned that you underwent a conversion when you were a student. It must have been the most important thing that ever happened to you—how can you not tell your own children about it? Don’t you want us to know you? And know what’s important to you, and why? Don’t you notice what a distance there is between us? Do you think it was just their jobs that sent your daughter to San Francisco and your elder son to Geneva? How much longer do you want to wait before you talk to me?” He was getting more and more agitated. “Don’t you realize that children want more from their father than measured behavior and silent distance and the occasional argument about politics that’s forgotten by morning? You’re eighty-two and one day you’ll be dead, and the only thing I’ll have of you is the desk I’ve liked since I was a child and which my brother and sister have always said I could have. And one day I’ll catch myself sitting exactly the way you’re sitting now, because I’ll want as little to do with the person sitting opposite me as you want with me now.” He wished he could just get up and leave.

  A scene from his childhood flashed into his mind. He must have been ten when he brought home a little black cat that the brother of a playmate was supposed to drown in the river along with the rest of the litter. He looked after the cat, taught it to keep itself clean, fed it, played with it, and loved it; his father, who didn’t like the animal, tolerated it. But when the family were having supper one evening and the cat jumped onto the grand piano, his father stood up and swiped it away with an urgent gesture, as if banishing dust. He felt as if his father had wiped him away too, and was so upset and undone that he jumped up, seized the cat, and left the apartment. But where could he go? After three hours out in the cold, he came back home, his father opened the door to him silently, and having to face him was as bad as being wiped away by him. After a few weeks the cat gave him asthma and was given away.

  His father looked at him. “I think you know me. It wasn’t like being the young Martin Luther and lightning striking the tree right next to him. You mustn’t think I’ve been holding back something dramatic from you.” Then he looked at his watch. “I should have a little rest. When do we have to leave?”

  8

  He knew he shared his father’s love for Bach, but had only ever been interested in secular music. His Bach was the Bach of the Goldberg Variations, the Suites and Partitas, the Musical Offering, and the concertos. As a child he had gone with his parents to the St. Matthew Passion and the Christmas Oratorio and had been bored, which had led him to the belief that Bach’s religious music was not for him. If they hadn’t fit into the program for his trip with his father, he would never have thought of listening to the motets.

  But when he was sitting in the church listening to the music, it took hold of him. He didn’t understand the texts, and because he didn’t want to distract himself from the music by reading the words, he didn’t follow along in the program, either. He wanted to savor the sweetness of the music. Sweetness was something he had never associated with Bach, nor in his view should it be. But what he was experiencing was sweetness, sometimes painful, sometimes soulful, profoundly at peace in the chorales. He remembered his father’s answer to his question about why he loved Bach.

  During the interval they stepped outside the church and watched the bustle of a summer Sunday afternoon. Tourists wound their way across the square or sat at tables outside cafés and restaurants, children ran around the fountain, smells of frying sausages and a general babble of voices filled the air. The world inside the church and the world outside it couldn’t have been more of a contrast. But this didn’t irritate him. He made his peace with it too.

  Again they didn’t talk, not during the interval, and not on the drive back to the hotel. Over dinner his father became expansive, and lectured about Bach’s motets, their role in weddings and funerals, their performance originally with an orchestra, but since the nineteenth century unaccompanied, and their place in the repertoire of the Thomas Church choir. After dinner his father suggested a walk along the beach, and they went out into the dusk and returned in full darkness.

  “No,” he said, “I don’t know who you are.”

  His father laughed softly. “Or you don’t like it.” Back at the hotel he asked, “When do we leave tomorrow?”

  “I have to be home by evening, and would like to leave here early. Can we have breakfast at seven thirty?”

  “Yes. Sleep well.”

  Again he went to sit on the balcony outside his room. That was it. He could ask his father things about his studies and his work on the way back. But why? He wasn’t going to learn what he wanted to learn.

  He’d lost the desire to question his father. After all their mutual silences, the prospect of an equally silent journey home didn’t bother him anymore.

  9

  They didn’t drive in total silence. There were the signs on the Autobahn announcing this attraction or that, which roused his father to a recollection or a lesson. Or the traffic news came on the radio to report jams or slow-moving traffic, even a horse loose on the highway, and his father noted that these weren’t affecting them. Or his father noticed that he slowed down ahead of a gas station, asked if he needed to gas up, and he explained he was deciding whether to do that here or at the next one. Or he asked his father if he’d like to stop for a coffee, or lunch, or whether he’d like to put the seat back and sleep.

  He was attentive, polite, and obliging to his father, behaving as he would also have behaved if he’d felt a connection to him. But he didn’t feel any connection; he was cold and far away. He thought about what was awaiting him at the newspaper the next day, the column, the series with portraits, and the big article about alimony reform that he was due to deliver next week. Was his father using all his recollections and lectures and statements and questions to try to start a conversation? He no longer cared, and remained monosyllabic.

  When there was still an hour to go before he could deposit his father, they drove into a storm. He turned up the wipers faster and faster, but finally they couldn’t contend with the rain. He drove onto the verge under a bridge and stopped. The drumming of the rain on the car roof stopped from one moment to the next. Other cars’ tires hissed on the wet roadway, but otherwise it was still.

  “I could …” He had a CD player in the car, but usually no CDs. When he was driving alone he worked, making calls and dictating. If he was tired and needed to stay awake, he turned on the radio. But after yesterday’s concert he’d bought one of the choir’s recordings that had Bach motets. He put it in.

  Again he was seized by the sweetness of the music. Now he also heard fragments of the texts. “Thou art mine, because I hold Thee, and let Thee not out of my heart”—he would not have said it in those words, but that was what he had felt when he loved his wife and knew that she loved him. “For all flesh is as grass, and all the glory of man as the flower of grass. The grass withereth, and the flower thereof falleth away.…”—how well he knew that feeling, how often it occurred in his life as he raced from task to task and appointment to appointment. “Beneath thy shelter I am safe from the storms of mine enemies”—that is how he felt, sheltered by the bridge and free from the raging not just of this storm but all the storms to come.

  Wanting to make some comment about the texts, he looked over at his father. He was sitti
ng the way he always sat, legs crossed, arms on the armrests, hands dangling down. And tears were streaming down his face.

  At first he couldn’t take his eyes off his weeping father. Then he felt he was being intrusive, and turned away to look out at the rain. Was his father also looking out at the rain, at the rain and the road and the cars that were driving through a puddle beyond the bridge, covered in flying drops and sending up great sprays of water? Or was everything invisible to his father behind his veil of tears?

  Not just the rain and the road, but everything that didn’t bow to his need for continuity and balance? Had his children, with their changes, their false starts, and their rebelliousness, made him so sad that he didn’t want to see them? “A pity they’ll grow up,” he’d said to his daughter when he met her two-year-old twins at his wife’s seventieth-birthday party.

  They stayed parked under the bridge till the storm was over and the music had come to an end. Then his father wiped a handkerchief over his face and folded it neatly. He smiled at his son. “I think we can drive.”

  The Journey to the South

  1

  The day she stopped loving her children was no different from other days. When she asked herself the next morning what had triggered the loss of love, she could find no answer. Had the pains in her back been particularly tormenting? Had her failure at some domestic task been particularly humiliating? Had an argument with the staff been particularly upsetting? It must have been some such small thing. No big thing happened in her life anymore.

  But whatever the cause, the loss was there. She had picked up the phone to call her daughter and discuss her birthday, the guests, the place, the food, and then she had hung up again. She didn’t want to talk to her daughter. Nor did she want to talk to any other of her children. She didn’t want to see her children, not on her birthday and not before and not after. Then she sat by the phone and waited for the desire to make calls to reassert itself. But it didn’t. When the phone rang in the evening, she picked up only because otherwise her children would have been worried enough to call the receptionist and send the staff to check on her. She preferred to lie and say she couldn’t talk, she had visitors.

  She had no reason to find fault with her children. She was lucky with them. Even the other women in the retirement home told her how good her relations with them were. How successful her children were: one son a high judge, the other the director of a museum, one daughter married to a professor, and the other married to a well-known conductor! How carefully they looked after her! They came to visit, didn’t allow too much time to pass between visits by one or the other of them, stayed for one or two nights, sometimes collected her to come and spend two or three days with them, and brought their families to visit on birthdays. They helped her with her tax returns, insurance and pension issues, went with her to the doctor and to get glasses and hearing aids. They had their own families, their own professions, and their own lives. But they let their mother share in them.

  She went to bed with the feeling of something the matter with her, the way when you have a stomach upset you go to bed with a Rennie tablet or when you’re starting a cold you go to bed with an aspirin, so as to wake up the next morning with nothing wrong. She had nothing to take against loss of love, but she made tea, a mixture of chamomile and mint, and was sure that everything would be back in order the next morning. But the next morning, imagining seeing her children or talking to them on the phone was as alien as it had been the evening before.

  2

  She took the same walk she took every morning: past the school, the post office, the pharmacy, and the greengrocer, through the housing development to the wood, along the slope to the Bierer Hof and back again. The stretch of land always offered a view down onto the plain, which she loved. The plain was flat, and the walk took no more than an hour. The doctor had told her she must walk for at least an hour every day.

  The rain of the last few days had stopped during the night, the sky was blue, and the air was fresh. The day was going to turn hot. She heard the woodland noises: the wind in the trees, sparrows and cuckoos, the creak of branches and the rustle of leaves. She kept a lookout for deer and hares; they were numerous around here and totally without fear. She would like to have smelled the wood, still wet from the rain but warmed by the sun, the way it smelled best. But a couple of years ago she had lost her sense of smell. It had simply disappeared one day, like her love for her children. A virus, said the doctor.

  Her sense of taste had disappeared along with it. Food had never meant much to her, so being unable to taste things wasn’t so bad. What was bad was being unable to smell nature anymore, not just the wood but the fruit trees in blossom, the flowers on the balcony and in the vase, the warm dry dust in the streets when the first raindrops fell on it.

  Aside from this she found the loss of her sense of smell humiliating. Being able to smell is part of a functioning life. Like sight and hearing and walking and reading and writing and being able to count. She had always functioned, and all of a sudden she wasn’t functioning anymore, not because of some external intervention, but because her physical equipment had failed. With it came the fear that she might be stinking. She remembered her visit to her mother in the old-age home. “They can’t smell things anymore,” her mother had explained when she made a remark about the old people’s smell. Did she stink like that too now? She was scrupulously clean, and used an eau de toilette that her granddaughters liked. “How nice you smell, Grandmother!” But you never know, and if you use too much, you can stink of eau de toilette, too.

  Aside from her doctor, no one knew about her loss of the sense of taste and smell. She praised the food when her children took her out, and sniffed the bunches of flowers they brought with them. When she showed them the flowers on the balcony, she said, “Smell them, they’re wonderful.”

  That was how she must deal with the loss of love too. Along with seeing and hearing and smelling and walking and reading and writing and counting you’re also supposed to love your children and your grandchildren. Refusing to make a phone call, the way she had yesterday—no, she wouldn’t permit herself to do that again. The birthday would be celebrated as usual and visits would go on the way they always had. Another memory surfaced. When she was a little girl, she had asked her mother, who had married a widower with two children and difficult, demanding parents, brothers, and sisters-in-law, whether she loved these relatives of the first wife whom she had to take care of.

  Her mother had smiled. “Yes, darling.”

  “But …”

  “Love isn’t a matter of feeling, it’s a matter of will.”

  She had achieved this over years, even decades, and she could achieve it no longer. With sheer willpower you can make a duty into an inclination and a responsibility into a love. But she no longer had any responsibility for her children and no duty to her grandsons and granddaughters. There was nothing in the situation that she could will into becoming love. But there was no reason to offend the children, who’d turned out so well, and to irritate the other women in the home and embarrass herself.

  She had started her walk with elation. The emptiness left by the disappearance of her love for her children had startled her, but had also made her feel light-headed. She was elated the way you are when you have a high fever or after a long fast—it’s a state that must be remedied and yet feels good. As she was sitting on the bench outside the Bierer Hof, she felt herself become heavy and tired and knew that she was coming back down to earth again.

  Should she have her birthday party here at the Bierer Hof? When she was still married, she and her husband had sometimes driven here to take a walk and have a coffee. The hours thus spent were stolen, his from work, hers from the children, to talk about all the things that there was never time to talk about in their daily routine. Until one day he drove her here and confessed that for the last two years he’d been sleeping with his assistant.

  Since then things had been built on, rebuilt, done up. Th
e inn, shabby back then, looked well tended, and the interior would certainly retain nothing of the atmosphere of the little room in which her husband had sat opposite her and squirmed and wanted her sympathy for his heart, which was big enough to love two women. The memory, so hurtful for so long, no longer hurt. Even now, she didn’t feel the sympathy her husband had been seeking, but a sad indifference toward this man who had always found the easy way through life while believing he was doing things the hard way and struggling and fighting. She would gladly have spared herself the later years of her marriage. But he insisted on staying with her until their youngest child had finished school. In the last year he even ended the affair with his assistant. Insufficiently rewarded by his wife for these two sacrifices, he began the next affair with his next assistant.

  She got up and started back. Life would go on as if nothing had happened. If only she could stop living for other people and finally live her own life! But it wasn’t just that she was too old for it. She had no idea what her own life actually was. Finally doing what gave her pleasure? The only pleasure she had ever learned was to satisfy her responsibilities with love and to fulfill her duties. Then of course there was also nature. But she could no longer smell that.

  3

  On the morning of her birthday she made herself look beautiful. Lilac knitted suit, white blouse with white embroidery and a white bow, lilac shoes. The hairdresser she used to go to came and curled her hair. “If I were an older gentleman, I would pay court to you. And if I were your granddaughter, I’d be so proud I’d show you off to all my friends.”

  Everyone came. The four children, their spouses, and the thirteen granddaughters and grandsons. On the way to the Bierer Hof the sons and sons-in-law made one group and the daughters and daughters-in-law another; the elder grandsons and granddaughters joined in conversations about school-leaving exams and university while the younger ones were engrossed in talk of pop music and computer games. She walked with each group for a while, first welcomed and then amiably overlooked as conversation switched back to where it had been interrupted. This didn’t bother her. But whereas she would have been happy before that her loved ones got along so well together amid all the marriages and individual families, now she wondered what it was they had to talk about. Pop music and computer games? Which university degrees led to rich careers? Should they try Botox? How to find a cheap holiday in the Seychelles?