Homecoming Homecoming Homecoming

by Bernhard Schlink

  11

  I STOOD OUTSIDE, unable to remember where I had parked the car. I couldn't even remember whether I had planned to go back to work or meet an author or take Max to the movies. It was three o'clock.

  I found the car and drove to my mother's. She was working in the garden. By the time I was standing next to her, she had straightened up and brushed the hair out of her eyes with the back of her hand. “Hello.” She was wearing the jeans and yellow sweater that since childhood she put on whenever she cleaned house, moved furniture, or painted. She looked good—calm and relaxed—and if I was not so well acquainted with the bitter streak in her face I might even have failed to notice it. I could see in her eyes that she had registered the disappointment, frustration, and hurt in mine.

  “I've just come from the register office.”

  “What's wrong? Has Barbara changed her mind?” I had had the two of them to dinner, and they had liked each other, or so they assured me later. They had both been determined to make the encounter a success with the hardness that I knew to be part and parcel of my mother's character and that I learned that evening was part of Barbara's as well.

  “They wrote to Poland. There was no Debauer/Graf wedding celebrated in Neurade in 1944 and no Peter Debauer born in Breslau in April 1945. But there was a Peter Graf. They want me to go by the name of Peter Graf from now on.”

  My mother stuck her trowel in her wicker basket and pulled off her gloves. “Tea?”

  “All these years. What have you been telling me all these years?”

  She gave a derisive laugh. “So now I've been talking too much, is that it? A few weeks ago it was too little.” She preceded me into the house and put some water on to boil. “Tea? Or do you want hot chocolate? Or don't you know what you want? Then I'll make lapsang souchong.” She took the canister out of the cupboard, shook the leaves into the large strainer in the glass teapot, waited for the water to boil, and poured it over the leaves. I could tell she was thinking over what to tell me.

  “Stop thinking. Just tell me.”

  But she said nothing until she had removed the strainer from the teapot, placed the teapot, teacups, and rock sugar on the table, poured out the tea, and sat down. She shook her head. “You act as though I owed you something. If not your father himself, then his memory, a portrait, a life story. But I don't owe you a thing. I did you no harm by telling you your father and I were married; I just made both our lives easier and gave you grandparents who had no problem seeing you as their grandson and loving you. Would you rather have grown up without them? Would you rather have been known as an illegitimate child, a bastard, by your schoolmates? Nobody cares about that kind of thing nowadays, but back then it would have ruined your life. So just be glad it hasn't come out till now.” There was hostility, even contempt in her eyes. “The name thing is annoying, but I don't think they'll hold you to anything. They're not going to initiate legal proceedings to make you use it. If you don't ask anything of them, they won't ask anything of you. Just give your silly bureaucrat a wide berth and take your business elsewhere. You can get married anywhere in Germany, by the sea, in the Alps; you can get married in Las Vegas for all I care!”

  “When women come up with a way of having children without fathers, what you say will be right. But as it is, I don't think it's asking too much to want to know everything you know about my father.”

  “But I've told you: you seem to know more than I do. Cut the part about the wedding out of what I told you and you have it.”

  “How did he get you the Swiss passport with that false married name?”

  “How should I know? I didn't pry into who forged it and how; I was just happy to have it. Not that it helped in the hospital: they wanted to see the marriage certificate. But it impressed the Poles and the Russians. I don't know what I would have done without it. Or you for that matter. No offense meant, but the more I talk about it the angrier I get. I'm not asking you to forgive me; I'm asking you to recognize what I did for you. I brought you out of Breslau, I brought you together with your grandparents, I brought you up. And I always had a net ready for you in case you fell.”

  “What took Johann Debauer, a citizen of Switzerland, to Neurade and Breslau?”

  “I have no idea. I wasn't interested. I was lonely; he was good-looking, charming, and witty, and he had money. I was in love. He must have told me something, but I don't remember. People ended up in all sorts of places back then.”

  “Did you hope he would marry you?”

  “That's the last asinine question I'm going to answer,” she snapped, her eyes narrowing to slits. “I hoped everything and nothing. Yes, I did dream of going through life with a rich ‘citizen of Switzerland’ who adored me and maybe even let me study medicine in Zurich. No, on Friday I did not expect to wake up with him next to me on Saturday and on Saturday that we would spend all of Sunday together. That's how it is when the times are crazy. You don't know today what tomorrow will be like and would probably be happier to forget what yesterday was like.”

  She topped up our cups. Then she sat again and went on with her musings.

  “On the Thursday before the Friday when I met your father I had gone to Neurade to visit Uncle Wilhelm and Aunt Herta. Uncle Wilhelm wasn't a real uncle; he was my godfather, a friend of Mother's since childhood, and a Nazi, yes, but a lot of fun, and I liked him. He's the one who showed me the finger game you always wanted to see. Remember?” She laid her palms one on top of the other, bent the middle fingers, twisted the palms in opposite directions until they and the fingertips touched, then squiggled the middle fingers back and forth. I could not help laughing. I always thought it a miracle that the two fingers ended up swinging together like a single-finger pendulum. “I never stopped laughing when I was with them. Their children were older than me: the son was killed in Poland; the daughter had married and moved to East Prussia. On the day before I went to visit they learned that their daughter and her husband and two children had been murdered by the Russians: raped, beaten, mutilated, burned. When I got to their place, I found Uncle Wilhelm and Aunt Herta in the bedroom. He had shot her and then himself.”

  She looked at me as if she needed to marshal a special resolve to proceed. “It was horrible to find them like that, but it was just as horrible to have to deal with it all: the police, the doctor, the neighbors, the funeral. Father had always been the one to organize things. That night was the worst. Even though the bodies had been removed and I slept in the guest room, I had the feeling they were lying next to me. But the next morning I felt an overwhelming joy at being alive. As I woke up, I thought, I've got the whole day ahead of me and I want to enjoy every minute of it. That evening I met your father.”

  12

  A FEW WEEKS EARLIER I had found a book about the Swiss Red Cross in the Second World War. At that point I was in no hurry to read it, but I went straight to it the moment I got home. It was not so much the survey I expected as a report by a Swiss physician who had worked for the Red Cross with other Swiss nationals in German field hospitals in Russia in 1941, the year my father finished school. But there were other such missions later as well, the physician said. Could my father have entered the fray between the Russians and Germans under the aegis of the Red Cross? True, nearly all the Swiss in the physician's report were either doctors or nurses, and my father had studied law, but perhaps he had been one of the few ambulance drivers. I wrote to the Swiss Red Cross and asked whether a Johann Debauer had worked for them between 1941 and 1945.

  The physician also told about a train carrying Swiss SS volunteers—he had encountered it on his way home—but if the Swiss Army had rejected my father the SS would not have taken him.

  It was evening by then. I put the book down, stood up, opened a bottle of wine, poured myself a glass, put on some Schumann, and sat down again. I suddenly realized I had missed an appointment with an author in Mainz and forgotten to phone my secretary. Nor had I phoned Max, who was looking forward to a movie and pizza. No one answered w
hen I called to apologize, and I couldn't get through to Barbara, who was back in East Berlin and staying with a friend.

  I calmed down. Peter Graf. Why not? Why not Peter Bindinger for that matter? Because I liked my name. It represented the bond between my grandparents and me, and that meant a lot. The bond between my father and me was weaker and less important, but if it broke what would happen to the other one? Then I reconsidered: the bond between my father and me may have been weaker, but it was not less important. My father was a stranger to me, but whether as a child riding a hobbyhorse and wearing a paper hat or as an unsettled young man in knickerbockers or as an adventurer loath to sit out the war at home or as the charmer who turned my mother's head, he was of great interest to me, and I liked seeing myself as his son and him as my father, in the open, not behind closed doors. He was part of me, and our having the same name proved it.

  I suddenly thought of the man whose son had been my playmate for a short time one summer and who had told me I had my father's eyes. I wanted to find out as much about my father as I could, and since I was already neglecting my work I decided to leave the next day for Switzerland.

  It was late morning by the time I arrived. I no longer remembered the man's name, but I remembered the house. There was another family living there, but the neighbors helped. When I reached him on the phone, he said hesitantly that he was willing to meet, but he wanted to make it clear from the start that he hadn't much to tell me.

  Late that afternoon I was sitting on his terrace looking out at the lake and the Alps. He had clearly struck it rich. He was by himself: his wife was running some errands in town, and his son, who would have been only too glad to see me again, was in America. He would have to be off soon too. It all sounded perfectly plausible, though I had the feeling he was glad we could talk without intrusion.

  “In 1940 my father had to give up his job in France because of the war, and when we moved back to Switzerland I entered my final year at school without knowing a soul. The school year had begun and everybody knew everybody else and had their own cliques. You can imagine what it was like. Your father had a clique of his own and was not interested in me, but we shared part of the way home, and even if we didn't always ride together we had interesting talks when we did. At least, I found them interesting. I mostly listened: I didn't have much to contribute. He was way ahead of me, though whether the direction he had taken was right or not is another question.

  “He was a real charmer, your father. Well, maybe ‘charm’ isn't quite the word for his ability to make whoever he was talking to feel he was important, special, and enjoying the privilege of his undivided attention. He would create an atmosphere of trust and intimacy that was terribly seductive, but the next time you saw him all you got was a friendly but formal nod. I don't think he was playacting; I think that when he was with you he was fully there, all of him. It was no façade: he was trying you out. That's a serious business, but one that few people take seriously. Not him. He went at it heart and soul. And if you failed, that was it.”

  He looked at me with a sad, friendly smile I seemed to recall. “You can tell that your father seduced and abandoned me. We got caught in a terrible downpour when we were riding home one day, and took shelter under the eaves of a church. I could show it to you. I still drive by it sometimes. Your father put me through the third degree: what my life had been like in France, what my interests were, what I planned to do with my life. I don't know what I said that made him respond, ‘We're a lost generation; ten years ago there was a spirit of rebellion in Switzerland, an awareness of crisis, a struggle for community, and the willingness to turn the staid, mechanical world of the Enlightenment into an organic, creative world of excitement, to overcome untrammeled egoism and individualism by working together, to bridge the gap between social antitheses, to replace the democracy of acquisitiveness with an aristocracy of achievement and build a new spiritual empire, a Reich of the sons of Switzerland.’ He went on and on about the freethinking, democratic conferences in the years 1928–31, about Julius Schmidhauser, Othmar Spann, Carl Schmitt, and more of the same. He spoke so passionately about events that had taken place ten years before—how much in reality and how much in his imagination, I can't be sure—that he infected even me”—here he laughed—“the most sedate, the most prudent, the most pedantic adolescent there ever was. He had even me dreaming of unqualified commitment, of a life totally dedicated to the cause. But then he said we had been born too late. ‘Ten years ago they'd had their chance and they'd muffed it. What had begun as the dawn of a new day had degenerated into petty squabbling over organizational details and who would get what post, into aping what the Germans were doing, what the Italians were doing, into a caricature of the mechanistic, egoistic mediocrity they'd banded together to bring down.’ ”

  He paused. I waited awhile, then asked, “Then what did he propose?”

  “That's just what I asked. He said we had to forget about movements, parties, organizations. Total commitment, yes, but only for the individual daring enough to seek it out. Or wait for a miracle. He said it as if it were a foregone conclusion, and I didn't dare question it: I didn't want to disturb the intimacy that had grown up between us or that I at least felt. And anyway the storm had passed.”

  “So you just got back on your bikes and rode home.”

  “Right, and when the next day, after a night of tossing and soul-searching, I went up to him, burning to pour out my excitement and doubts, he gave me a friendly nod and turned away.” He smiled that smile of his again. “I never had another serious conversation with your father. He began to study law, but soon left, left for Germany, and when I thought of his call for total commitment and Goebbels' call for total war I had a funny feeling. But it was no more than a feeling, and I'd learned to mistrust my feelings from that talk with your father.” He smiled again. “I still mistrust them.”

  “Could he have been with the Red Cross in Germany or Russia?”

  He looked up at me. I saw a successful businessman: relaxed, well-groomed, gray hair, clear eyes, strong chin. He had the looks of the bankers and magnates in newspaper photographs, men as far removed from the normal lives of normal people as heads of state or cardinals or movie stars. Suddenly I realized how unusual this conversation had been for him, what a favor he had done me to grant it, and also what an impression my father must have made on him. I suddenly saw too that it was not only his smiles that were friendly or sad; his entire face expressed his sympathy. As if embarrassed by this show of emotion, he turned away. “The Red Cross? It's not out of the question, I suppose. Your father wasn't a doctor, but they had use for others, and he . . . Didn't he have a heart defect that exempted him from military service?”

  He stood. “Good luck.”

  13

  BARBARA TOOK THE NEWS from the register office in her stride. “Give it some time. You may come to like the idea of Peter Graf or Peter Bindinger. And if you don't, there's always Vegas. In the meantime, you can move in with me.”

  “Here?”

  “Augie and I never lived together here, if that's what's bothering you. We can change everything; nothing need stay as it is. And the student who's been renting the maid's room has just moved out, so we can use that room too.”

  I was not so sure. A friend of mine had convinced me that a reunified Germany needed a new constitution. Didn't two people who love each other and intend to live together need a new place to live? Neither should move into the other's place.

  “I'll stow all my things in the basement and we'll bring in some carpenters, and when they're done it will be a completely new space with everything just the way we want it.” She could see I was still hesitant. “I love this place. It's a good place. I love its big, bright rooms, I love the balcony I used to take my nap on, even when it rained. You can hear the rain in the trees, hear the birds singing, and the air is cool, but you've got a roof over your head and you pull the warm blanket up over your ears and you feel safe. Try it sometime.”
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  I thought of the daily nap I took during the first few summers I spent with my grandparents. If it was warm enough, I could take it on the balcony, and when it rained they covered me with a blanket, just as Barbara had described. How could I have forgotten?

  The remodeling took two months. Finally all the furniture we had shopped for and chosen for each other was in one place: her art nouveau dining room and my cherrywood bedroom, her leather couch and my leather armchair with matching table, the mirror from her entrance hall and the lamp from mine.

  Barbara's school and school board were willing to send her to Thüringen but not Berlin. Our region was in charge of reconstruction in Thüringen; East Berlin was under the care of West Berlin. So I looked at publishing houses in Thüringen as well, and for a few weeks I was making progress with both the Berliner Verlagssozietät and the Thüringischer Verlag. Then a large Hamburg house grabbed them from under my nose.

  So I was stuck with the daily round of legal handbooks and text-books, commentaries, and journals. From time to time I received doctoral dissertations from at home and abroad, and I was thinking of turning the best of them into a series. I also wanted to start a new journal, a quarterly instead of a monthly, for longer, more theoretical essays, but the publishing house was against it: they feared that the more demanding material would jeopardize the sales of the current practical list, which all but sold itself. The new, improved work situation I had fantasized about on the plane from Berlin to Frankfurt was now dead and buried.

  Not that I cared at first. I was too happy with Barbara, happy to wake up with her, shower with her, happy that we would brush our teeth and hair together, that she would put on her makeup while I shaved. I loved our breakfast conversations about the shopping to be done, the errands to be run, the plans for the evening; I loved coming home to her, seeing her get up from her desk, feeling her arms around my neck or, if I came home first, looking forward to seeing her and spending the evening with her, whether at home or on the town, and then preparing for bed together and knowing that if I happened to wake up in the night I would hear her breathing and it would take nothing at all to touch her or snuggle up to her or wake her. Sometimes she teased me, saying, “What a bourgeois match I've made. You'd be happy just to stay at home and read, listen to music, watch television, and chat, plus an occasional promenade along the river.” But she would laugh as she said it. “What do you mean?” I would say, laughing along with her. “I like walking up the hill too.”