Self's Murder

by Bernhard Schlink

  12

  Summer

  Suddenly summer was here: not just the odd warm day or mild evening, but a heat as oppressive in the shade as in the sun, a heat that didn’t let me sleep at night but made me count the hours struck by the bell of the Heilig-Geist church. I was relieved when it grew light, though I knew that the morning was not fresh and the new day would turn out as hot as the day before. I got up and had some of the tea I’d made the night before and put in the refrigerator. Sometimes the scrapes and wounds that Turbo brought back from his nightly adventures were so bad that I had to tend them with iodine. He, too, is growing old. I wonder, does he still win his battles?

  It was so hot that everything was less important, less pressing. As if it were not really true, just possible. As if one first had to find out what it was all about, and for that it was too hot.

  But I don’t want to blame the heat. I didn’t know what else I could still do to shed light on Schuler’s death. Perhaps there wasn’t anything to shed light on and never had been. Had I taken a wrong turn? In a sense, this idea had its good side. If he had been attacked, it wasn’t as if I’d have been any less responsible than I first thought. Just the opposite, in fact. Only if Schuler’s bad condition had been triggered by someone else on that fatal day, would his life have been in my hands. In fact, if he only had a hangover, or had been affected by the weather, his accident could have occurred at any time.

  The hot weeks ended with a series of days in which the heat exploded in powerful evening storms. By five o’clock the sky would cloud over, and by six it was as dark as if nighttime had come. The wind rose and whipped the dust through the streets, ripping from the trees branches that the heat had turned dry and brittle. With the first storms the children remained outside, yelping beneath the raindrops, overjoyed when the rain started pouring down like a waterfall, wetting them through and through. But this soon bored them. I sat by the door of my office and watched the water washing in waves over the empty sidewalk, gurgling in a pool over the gutter because the drain couldn’t handle it fast enough. When the storm was over I was the first to go outside, breathing in the fresh air on my way home or to Brigitte’s. During the storm the sun had set. But the sky was clear again, a pale blue glowing violet in the twilight before it turned a darker violet, dark blue, dark gray, black.

  I savored the summer. I savored the heat and the law of lassitude with which it blanketed everything and beneath which I felt free and at ease. I savored the storms, and also the moderate temperatures of the following weeks. Brigitte and I were looking for an apartment, and when I insisted on one with a view of the Rhine or the Neckar she knew that I wasn’t out to sabotage our search. I always would have liked to have a house by the sea, or if not by the sea then by a lake. But Mannheim isn’t by the sea or by a lake. The Rhine and Neckar flow through it.

  “We’ll find a really good apartment, Gerhard.”

  Everything was fine but not fine. The stories life writes demand endings, and as long as a story doesn’t have an ending, it keeps everyone who participates in it in check. It doesn’t have to be a happy ending. The good don’t have to be rewarded and the bad punished. But the threads of fate cannot be left dangling: they have to be woven into the story’s tapestry. Only when that is done can we leave the story behind us. Only then are we free to begin something new.

  No, the story that had started at the beginning of the year in the snow was not yet over. Even if I’d have liked to make peace with Schuler, who’d maybe had one glass too many or been affected by the weather. I didn’t know all the threads that were still waiting to be woven into the carpet, and I knew even less what the carpet’s pattern was or how I could find out. But all I had to do was wait. Stories strive toward their ends, and don’t leave you alone until they reach them.

  13

  Laban’s children

  When the leaves began to turn I got a letter from Georg. He sent me a manuscript that was scheduled to be published in a law journal. “Laban’s children”—Georg had turned his research on Laban’s heirs into an article. Did I have any suggestions?

  He made it clear from the start of the article that Laban did not in fact have any children. No natural children, and no disciples, either. While other professors guard their circle of students like mother hens, Laban saw to it that his students would stand on their own feet as soon as possible and follow their own paths. Georg suspected that an early passion for a colleague’s wife, one that was perhaps reciprocated but that remained unfulfilled, had marked him in a way that kept him from close bonds with students and from deep relationships with women.

  But he did have children. He was as close to his sister’s two children as he might have been had they been his own. He particularly favored his nephew, Walter Brock, who had also become a lawyer and judge.

  Walter Brock. Georg described his path from Breslau to Leipzig, his career from district court judge to judge of the regional high court, the insults, the humiliations, and finally the firing with which his career came to an end in 1933. He described his marriage; his children, Heinrich and Ursula; his and his wife’s suicides after their apartment was ransacked during Kristallnacht. He described how Heinrich had escaped to London at the eleventh hour, and how Ursula hadn’t managed to get out in time and so had gone into hiding when the deportations began. She had disappeared. Laban, who died in 1918, had tenderly loved little Ursula, who was born in 1911.

  There was no need for me to double-check, but I took Ursula Brock’s passport out of my filing cabinet and saw that her date of birth was October 10, 1911. Then I studied her passport photograph. She had had bobbed dark hair and a dimple in her left cheek, and she looked at me attentively with happy, somewhat startled eyes.

  I found Georg at the courthouse. “I’ve got Ursula Brock’s passport.”

  “You’ve got what?”

  “Ursula Brock, Laban’s great-niece. I’ve got her passport. I just read your article, and—”

  “I’ve got a case at two. Can I drop by afterward?”

  “Sure, I’ll be at the office.”

  He came by and wouldn’t take coffee, tea, or mineral water.

  “Where is it?”

  He studied the initial pages with the photograph and the entries and leafed through the rest of the pages slowly and carefully, as if he might be able to elicit hidden information from them.

  “Where did you get this?” he asked.

  I told him about Adolf Schuler, his archive, and his visit. “He gave me an attaché case that had … that had this passport in it—after which he got into his car, drove off, crashed into a tree, and died.”

  “This means that after she went into hiding she sought help in Schwetzingen. Did she find help? Did Weller and Welker get her a new passport? Did they keep this old one for after the war?” He shook his head slowly and sadly. “But she didn’t make it.”

  “In your article you wrote that as a Jew she was expelled from the university in 1936. Do you know what she studied?”

  “All kinds of things. Her parents were very indulgent and didn’t push her. In the end it was Slavonic studies.” He looked at me entreatingly. “Do you need the passport? Can I have it? I’ve got a picture of Walter Brock and his wife with the small children, and one of Heinrich in London, but I haven’t got a picture of Ursula as an adult.”

  He took an envelope out of his briefcase and laid out a series of photographs on my desk. A married couple standing in front of a carefully pruned hedge, the man wearing a suit with a stiff collar beneath his chin and a walking stick in his left hand, the woman in a long dress down to the ground, with a strap in her right hand that harnessed Heinrich around shoulders and chest, like a horse’s bridle. Heinrich was wearing a sailor suit and cap, and Ursula, bigger than her brother and not in a harness, was standing next to her father. She was wearing a summer dress and a wide sun hat. “Don’t move,” the photographer had just called out, and they all were standing still, unblinking. Another picture showed a young
man in front of the Tower Bridge, which had just been raised to let a ship pass through.

  “Heinrich in London?” I asked.

  Georg nodded.

  “And this is the house in Breslau in which Laban was born, this is his villa in Strasbourg, this is a postcard of the main building of the Wilhelm University under construction, and—”

  “Who’s that?” I asked, pulling out a photograph from beneath the postcards. I recognized the large head, the receding hairline, the large ears, and the protruding eyes. I had seen him the first time through a foggy windshield on the Hirschhorner Höhe and for the last time quite close up when we drove from the hospital to the Luisenpark. I had also seen him when we got out of the car and walked into the park. But Samarin’s head had never made as much of an impression on me as when we sat next to each other on the backseat; he looking stoically before him while I peered at him from the side.

  “That’s Laban. Haven’t you seen him before?”

  14

  Zentramin

  So I drove yet again to the retirement home in Emmertsgrund. The first yellow and red leaves were glowing in the green of the mountains. In some of the fields fires were burning, and at one point the fire stretched all the way to the autobahn. I opened the window to see if it still smelled the way it used to, but only wind came roaring through the open window.

  The door to old Herr Weller’s apartment stood open, and the place had been emptied. I went inside and looked out the window at the cement factory from the spot where he and I had sat across from each other and talked. Two cleaning ladies came in and began to mop the floor without paying any attention to me. I wondered why the walls weren’t being painted first. When I asked them what had happened to Weller, they didn’t understand.

  In the main office I was told that he had died of a stroke the week before. I’ve never been interested in medicine, nor will I ever be. I imagined old Herr Weller’s brain at work, driven, sly, evil, propelled by bleating laughter like a stuttering engine. Until the engine suddenly stalled. I was told when and where he would be buried. I could still make it if I hurried. I suddenly remembered Adolf Schuler’s funeral. It had slipped my mind, and again I felt as if I’d failed to hold on to him and stop him from getting into the car and driving into a tree.

  Old Herr Weller had enjoyed talking to me and would have wanted to talk more—to explain how things were during the war, that the great-niece of his silent partner would have died if he and old Herr Welker hadn’t taken her in and given her a new identity; that she’d been insane to have a damn brat on top of everything, as he’d have put it. That he and Welker had done more than enough, raising the brat after she died. The brat’s real identity? What use would that have been to Gregor Samarin if they’d informed him of his real identity? That would just have given him big ideas. Furthermore, the Brocks lived in Leipzig. Wouldn’t the brat have had a better time of it as Gregor Samarin in the West than he would growing up in a Communist orphanage?

  Yes, that’s how old Herr Weller would have spoken to me, one old poop to another. I could picture it clearly. Had I asked him whether a Gregor Brock wouldn’t have a right to claims that a Gregor Samarin couldn’t make because he didn’t know anything about them, old Herr Weller would have waved me away. Claims? What claims? After the inflation, the Great Depression, and the currency reform? Claims, when he himself and old Herr Welker could have been sent to a concentration camp for all they had done for Ursula Brock?

  I could also picture a conversation that would have taken place in the spring between Adolf Schuler and Bertram Welker. Schuler would have been waiting for Welker to fill him in about Samarin, about his identity and his dealings. Schuler had found the money in the cellar, and in his search for documents concerning the silent partner had found the passport: the passport of Ursula Brock, whom he had known only as Frau Samarin. Perhaps he felt obliged to inform Samarin as well. But his foremost loyalty was to the Welkers, so he intended to go to Bertram Welker first with the information. But Welker had come with Samarin, and Schuler couldn’t talk with Welker as openly as he would have liked. Schuler had been secretive, Welker had said, and probably he really had aired a few secrets, not so much about the money as about Gregor Brock. Also, perhaps it wasn’t Welker but Samarin who had diarrhea and kept having to go to the bathroom. Perhaps Schuler was lucky and managed to tell Welker everything he wanted to tell him.

  Or had that been Schuler’s undoing?

  I drove to my office and took out the medicines I had taken with me from Schuler’s bathroom. I took the little bottle of Catapresan pills to the Kopernikus pharmacy, where the four friendly pharmacists have been so helpful and forthcoming over the years that I’ve almost never needed a doctor. I gave the bottle to the head pharmacist. She told me she wasn’t sure when she’d have an answer for me. But when I dropped by my office that evening after a meal at the Kleiner Rosengarten, she had tested the contents and left the results on my answering machine. The pills were not Catapresan, but Zentramin, a benign magnesium-calcium-potassium concoction used for calming the vegetative nervous system and stabilizing the cardiac nerves during arrhythmia. I knew this medication. Zentramin was also among the medications that Dr. Armbrust had prescribed for Schuler, and which I had found in his bathroom. Zentramin pills look remarkably similar to Catapresan pills.

  15

  Not to mention the language!

  I hadn’t yet had the opportunity to consider a plan of action. I was standing in my doorway getting the key out of my bag when I heard “Herr Self!” and Karl-Heinz Ulbrich stepped out of the shadows into the light of the door lamp. He was again wearing his three-piece suit, but his vest was unbuttoned, his collar undone, and his tie crooked. He had stopped trying to play the banker.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “Can I come in?” he asked. When I hesitated a moment, he smiled. “As I’ve told you once before, the lock on your door’s a joke.”

  We climbed the stairs in silence. I unlocked the door and had him sit on one of the sofas, as he had before, while I sat on the other. I felt I was being petty. I got up and brought out a bottle of Sancerre, along with two glasses.

  “Would you like some wine?”

  He nodded. Turbo came over and again rubbed against his feet.

  “The mistakes we make,” he suddenly began. “All the things we don’t know! Of course one can always learn, but for us East Germans to have to learn at the age of fifty what you West Germans learned at twenty is difficult, and a mistake that doesn’t affect a person at twenty can be very painful at fifty. Tax returns, insurance, bank accounts, the contracts you people keep signing about every single thing—we had no idea about any of that. Not to mention the language! I still can’t tell when you people mean something or don’t. It’s not just when you’re lying, but words have a whole other meaning when you present yourselves or are pitching or selling something.”

  “I can imagine that that’s—”

  “No, you can’t. But it’s kind of you to say so.” He picked up a glass and drank. “When Welker offered me the job, I thought at first that you had warned him about me and that he was trying to buy me off. Then I thought: But why? Why do I always think along those lines? Welker and I had a good conversation. It didn’t bother him that I had specialized in financial crimes or that I’d been with the Stasi or that I was from the East. He said he needed someone like me. I told myself that I wanted to believe what he was saying, that I also wanted to believe in myself, that banking wasn’t just some hocus-pocus. I began reading the financial news, even if it’s far from an easy read, and ordered some books about management and bookkeeping. You know, it’s not as if you people here in the West don’t breathe the same air we do. And you don’t even know the local people, while I know the Sorbians like the back of my hand.”

  I don’t know what was wrong with me. I remembered the text and melody of a hit by Peter Alexander from the 1960s: “I know your sorrows like the back of my hand.”

 
; “I really tried hard,” he continued, staring in front of him. “But once again I didn’t understand the language. What Welker had in fact said—a thing you would have understood in a flash—was: ‘I need an idiot who doesn’t know what’s going on here. And Karl-Heinz Ulbrich is just such an idiot.’”

  “When did you realize this?”

  “Oh, weeks ago. Quite by chance. We’ve got a lot of small branches in the area, and I thought I ought to get to know them, so I went to visit them—each time a different one. One day I turned up at one, in the back of beyond, just five little houses, all boarded up as if nobody lived there, on a road to nowhere. The bank itself was in no better shape, and I wondered what it was doing there. Well, what could it be doing there? It was a place to accommodate money. It didn’t take me long to find that out. When I want to know something, I—”

  “I know, when it comes to shadowing you’re an absolute ace.”

  “I didn’t just shadow. I also sniffed around. Welker isn’t Mafia. His men are Russians and he works for Russians, that’s all. Before his men started working for him, they worked for that other fellow, the one he shot. And he doesn’t only work for Russians. He’s independent, makes a profit of four to six percent, which isn’t a lot, but then again that’s all that laundering brings in. Where you make money is when you launder large amounts. Then you really take it in. And what Vera Soboda and I realized is that laundering cash is only an extra. The actual business is the laundering of money on the books.”

  “Did you go to the police?”