Summer Lies: Stories

by Bernhard Schlink

  He nodded. “Lost years—I can’t tell you how sorry I am. Back then I thought I had to prove to myself and everyone else that I could become rector of the university or get into politics, and because you didn’t take part in any of that I felt you’d betrayed me. But you were right. I look back on those years and they were pointless. All they were was noisy and rushed.”

  “Did you have a lover?”

  “Oh, no. I never let anyone or anything near me outside work. I’d never have got anything done otherwise.”

  She laughed softly. Because she was remembering his craze for work back then? Because she was relieved he’d had no lover?

  He asked for the check.

  “Do you think we still can?”

  “I’m as anxious as I was the first time. Maybe more anxious. I don’t know how it will be.”

  9

  It wasn’t. Pain struck in the middle of things, exploding in his coccyx and sending waves into his back and his hips and thighs. It was worse than the worst pain he’d had thus far. It annihilated his desire, his sensations, his mind, and made him its creature, unable to escape its grip or even to long for it to stop. Without intending to or even being aware of it, he groaned aloud.

  “What is it?”

  He rolled onto his back and pressed both hands against his forehead. What should he say? “I have sciatica like I’ve never had.” He struggled to his feet. In the bathroom he swallowed some of the Oxycontin the doctor had prescribed for crises. He propped his arms on the sink and looked into the mirror. Although he felt different from any way he’d felt in his life, his face was the same as usual. His dark blond hair with streaks of gray and gray sideburns, his gray-green eyes, the deep creases around his nose and from his nose to his mouth, the tiny hairs in his nostrils that he would trim tomorrow, his thin lips—it did him good to share the pain with this familiar face and to reassure it and himself with an obstinate expression that there was life in the old dog yet. When the pain eased, he went back into the bedroom.

  His wife had fallen asleep. He sat down on the edge of the bed, careful not to wake her. Her eyelids trembled. Was she half asleep and half awake? Was she dreaming? What was she dreaming? He knew her face so well. The young face that lived within it, and the old one. The childlike, happy, innocent one, and the tired, bitter one. How did the two faces coexist?

  He stayed sitting there, not wanting to provoke the pain. It had shown him that it was not only at home in his body, but that it now ruled the house. For now it had retreated into a back room, but left the doors open in order to be right there if insufficient respect was shown.

  He was touched by his wife’s hair. Dyed brown, with the gray and the white growing back through it—the battle against age, fought again and again, lost but never abandoned. If his wife didn’t dye her hair, with her aquiline nose, high cheekbones, deep eyes and lines, she’d look like a wise old Indian woman. He had never worked out if her eyes were sometimes unfathomable because her feelings and thoughts were so profound, or because they were so empty. He would never work it out now.

  She apologized the next morning. “I’m sorry. The champagne, the wine, the food, the sex, your sciatica just when it was getting good—it was all a little much. I just went to sleep.”

  “No, I’m the one who should be sorry. The doctor told me that I had to expect sciatica and take pills if I had an attack. I had no idea it would be so strong, and come at exactly the wrong moment.” He was afraid of turning on his side, and stretched out his arm.

  She laid her head on his shoulder. “I have to make breakfast.”

  “No, you don’t have to.”

  “Yes, I do.”

  She was only playing. She wanted what he wanted too. He begged the pain to stay in the back room, at least for this morning, at least for an hour. “Will you sit on me?”

  10

  When they came downstairs, the others had almost finished breakfast. Ariane looked at her grandparents as if she knew why they were late. Twelve-year-old Ariane? But he went red, as did his wife. Then, as if to show the clique that she and he had been having a thing together, she gave him a kiss.

  Around midday he went to the station to collect his old friend. The train pulled in and stopped, and because either the cars were too high for the platform or the platform was too low for the car, his friend had to take a small jump, which he did with a resigned smile, as if convinced he was going to fall and instead of a short visit with an old friend he would be facing a long stay in a provincial hospital.

  Resigned, as if to a game that was lost before it even began, while also in high spirits, because that’s how things were but they just didn’t matter—this was the essence of his charm. That’s how he had been as a student, without great effort or arrogance, friendly toward everyone, loved by everyone, even by those who were his examiners and later by his employers. He became a successful lawyer whose success derived partly from his professional knowledge and partly from his manner with clients, opposing counsel, and judges. He charmed them. He also charmed the wives and children of his friends; they loved him, although even among his friends one or another had married a woman who wanted her husband for herself, regardless of his old friends.

  His son, Helmut, was particularly fond of this friend; when he was a child, he had sometimes gone on vacation with him and his father: male vacations. In the winter they went skiing, and when Helmut had had enough or couldn’t go on anymore, the friend, who hurtled down the slopes in jeans and an overcoat, would put him between his legs.

  For the little boy, the friend with his billowing dark coat who bore him safely and swiftly down the valley was a hero like Batman. Later on he advised him in his studies and his career; without him Helmut would not have decided to become a lawyer himself. He would have liked to have come along to the station too, but the trips from the station to the house and then back again the next evening were the only opportunity the friends would have to be alone together.

  Along the way they talked about retirement, their families, the summer. Then his friend asked, “What’s the cancer doing?”

  “Let’s stop up there”—he pointed to the mountain ahead of them on the road—“and walk a little.” He had asked himself again and again if he should tell his friend about what he’d decided. They had no other secrets from each other, and had been able to talk that much more easily about the cancer because they both faced the same fate; both had been diagnosed years before, with different forms of it, which would take different courses, but both had been treated with an operation followed by radiation and chemotherapy. But knowing of his intentions, how would his friend manage to face the family?

  They went up over the peak. To the right was the beginning of the woods, to the left they had the view of the lake, the mountains, and in the distance the Alps. It was warm, the soft heavy warmth of summer.

  “It’s only a matter of time before the bones give out and they crumble and break and the pain becomes unbearable. Sometimes I get a foretaste, but things are still okay. What’s yours doing?”

  “It’s in remission, has been for the last four years. Last month was supposed to be time for my checkup, and for the first time I just didn’t go.” The friend raised his hands fatalistically and let them fall. “What do you do when the pain becomes unbearable?”

  “What would you do?”

  They walked for a long time and the friend didn’t answer. Then he laughed. “Enjoy the summer as long as it lasts. What else?”

  11

  After dinner he sat in the corner of the sofa and observed the others. They were playing a game that could be played by a maximum of eight people. Without anyone noticing he could keep changing his position and moving the cushions behind his back, then against his hips, then under his thighs. Each change brought relief until pain asserted itself in the new position as it had in the old. He had taken Oxycontin but it didn’t help anymore. What now? Should he drive into the city and ask his doctor for morphine? Or had the time come to
take the bottle out of the wine refrigerator, where it was hidden behind a half bottle of champagne, and drink the cocktail?

  When he had imagined his last evening, he had imagined it as being pain free. Now he realized it wasn’t simple to decide on the right evening. The longer it went on and the worse he got, the less often there would be pain-free evenings, and the more welcome and indispensable they would be. How could he relinquish such an evening to death? On the other hand he didn’t want to go in pain. Was morphine the solution? Would it save the pain-free evenings from being indispensable rarities and allow them to become plausible opportunities?

  The doors and windows stood open, and the mild breeze brought mosquitoes from the lake. When he tried to hit the mosquito on his left arm with his right hand, he couldn’t lift it. The hand would not obey him. When he shifted position things were okay again, and they were still okay when he sat the way he’d been sitting before and his hand wouldn’t obey him. He tried out different positions, and he could lift his hand in each of them, so that finally he wondered if he’d imagined its failure. But he knew better, and he also knew that once again something had happened from which there was no going back.

  The game came to an end, and his friend told stories about his cases. In earlier days his children had never been able to get enough of them, and now his grandchildren couldn’t, either. It made him ashamed. What had he had that he could tell his children? What did he have to tell his grandchildren? That Kant was a good billiards player and earned money for his studies that way, that Hegel and his wife imitated the family life of Martin Luther and Katharina von Bora, that Schopenhauer behaved disgustingly to his mother and his sister, and that Wittgenstein was touchingly protective of his sister—he knew a few anecdotes about philosophers and a few anecdotes from history that his grandfather had told him. Out of his own work there were no stories he could tell—what did that say about him? And about his work? And about analytical philosophy? Was it nothing more than an elaborate waste of human intelligence?

  Then his friend yielded to his family’s requests and sat down at the piano. He smiled at him and played the Chaconne from the Partita in D Minor, which they had heard Menuhin play when they were students and learned to love. A transcription for piano—he hadn’t known that it existed and that his friend could play it. Had he practiced it for him? Was it his farewell present? The music and his friend’s gift of it moved him to tears, which kept on coming even when his friend switched to jazz—which was what his children and grandchildren actually wanted to hear.

  His wife noticed, came and sat beside him, and laid her head on his shoulder. “I’m going to cry too. The day began so beautifully and is ending so beautifully too.”

  “Yes.”

  “Shall we stand up and go upstairs? If the others notice we’re no longer here, they’ll understand.”

  12

  Then it was halftime. He knew the second half of their shared summer would pass more quickly than the first—and the first had passed in a flash. He thought about what more he could tell the children. Dagmar—that she shouldn’t be so concerned about her children? That she was a good biologist and should go on working rather than squander her gift? That she was spoiling her husband and it wasn’t doing either of them any good? Helmut—did it really interest him which company merged with which and which company took over which? Did it really interest him to make the piles of money he was making? Did he not wish that with the example of his father’s friend in front of his eyes, he’d become another kind of lawyer than the one he was now?

  He couldn’t talk to them. Dagmar had gone and married a self-important idiot and he could only hope she wouldn’t notice and would continue to be dazzled by his wealth and his good manners. Helmut had discovered a taste for money and become greedy for it, and his wife enjoyed the fruits of it. Perhaps both children had embarked on a life of externals out of insecurity, and perhaps he had failed to give them that sufficient security. And now he could no longer give them more. He could tell them that he loved them. If parents and children in American movies could say such things to one another with ease, then he could too.

  No matter what wasn’t okay with his children—this summer they were undemanding, good-natured, and affectionate. He wouldn’t be taking such delight in his grandchildren if his children weren’t doing something right. No, he couldn’t give the children any pointers. He could only tell them that he loved them.

  One day the pain was so fierce that he took a train into the city and asked his doctor for morphine. The doctor, after some hesitation, gave him a prescription, along with copious instructions as to dosage and effect. The lady in the pharmacy was friendlier than the doctor; he had been a customer for years and she handed him the box with a glass of water and a sad smile. “So it’s that far along.”

  He missed the afternoon train and took the one in the evening. He had left his car at the station, wondered if he was fit to drive but hadn’t been warned otherwise, and got home safely after a journey along empty roads. The house lay in darkness. If everyone was already asleep, he was in no hurry. He could go and sit on the bench by the lake and enjoy this evening, with the pain not just having retreated into a back room but being safely locked in.

  Yes, morphine was the answer. A pain-free evening was no longer an indisputable rarity, but an achievable opportunity. He felt light; it wasn’t just that his body didn’t hurt, it was pulsating steadily and gently, supporting him, carrying him, on wings. Without moving he could reach for the lights on the far side of the lake and even grasp the stars.

  13

  He heard footsteps and recognized them as his wife’s. He slid along to one side of the bench so that she had room on the other. “You heard the car?”

  She sat down without replying. When he tried to put an arm around her shoulders, she bent forward so that the gesture landed in empty air. She held up the bottle with the cocktail and said, “Is this what I think it is?”

  “What do you think it is?”

  “Don’t play games with me, Thomas Wellmer. What is it?”

  “It’s a particularly powerful pain medication that has to be stored at a cold temperature and mustn’t fall into the grandchildren’s hands.”

  “That’s why you hid it behind the champagne bottle in the wine refrigerator?”

  “Yes. I don’t understand what you—”

  “I’m having particularly bad pains. I’ve had them since I found this while preparing a dish with champagne for the two of us. So why don’t I drink the whole thing?” She unscrewed the cap and raised the bottle to her lips.

  “Don’t do that.”

  She nodded. “One evening when we’re sitting together and enjoying ourselves, you’ll go out, drink the whole bottle, come back in, and go to sleep. Will you say to us first that you’re really tired and you may nod off, and if you do, please will we leave you to sleep?”

  “I haven’t planned it that clearly.”

  “But you wanted to do it without telling me, without asking me or talking to me about it. That much you did plan. Am I right?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know what’s the matter with you. I wanted to go when the pain becomes unbearable. I wanted to go in a way that doesn’t leave anyone else with a problem.”

  “Do you remember our wedding? Till death do us part? Not till you worm your way into death’s affections and run off with him. And do you remember that I didn’t want to get involved in the happiness of a single summer that’s over in a matter of weeks? Did you think I wouldn’t find out the truth? Or that when I did, you’d be dead? And that then I’d be unable to get you to talk? You didn’t have a lover, but the way you’ve betrayed me now is no better, in fact it’s worse.”

  “I thought it wouldn’t come out. I also thought it’s a good way to say goodbye. What would you—”

  “A good way to say goodbye? You go, and I don’t know you’re going? That’s supposed to be a good way? It’s no way to say goodbye, and it’s definitely not o
ne I’m going to accept. And you’re not saying goodbye to me, you’re saying goodbye to yourself, and you want me there to act as a sort of movie extra.”

  “I still don’t understand why you’re so upset …”

  She got to her feet. “That’s right, you don’t understand what you’re doing. I’ll tell the children first thing tomorrow, and then I’m leaving. Do whatever you want here. I’m not going to stay here playing an extra, and I’d be amazed if the children stayed, either.” She set the bottle down on the bench and left.

  He shook his head. Something had gone wrong, he didn’t know exactly what. But there was no doubt something hadn’t gone the way it was supposed to. He’d have to talk to his wife tomorrow morning. He hadn’t seen her that upset for a long time.

  14

  She wasn’t in their bed when he went to lie down, nor when he got up. He made breakfast with his children and woke the grandchildren. When they were all at the table, she arrived. She didn’t sit down.

  “I’m driving to the city. In the course of the next few evenings your father intends to kill himself while surrounded by his loved ones. I only found out by accident; he didn’t intend to say a word to me or to you, just drink the stuff and go to sleep and die. I don’t want anything to do with it. He thought it up on his own, he can do it on his own.”

  Dagmar said to her husband, “Take the children and do something with them. Not just our children—all of them.” She said it so firmly that her husband stood up and went, and the grandchildren went with him. Then she turned to her father. “You want to kill yourself? Like Mother said?”