Homecoming Homecoming Homecoming

by Bernhard Schlink

  Because Wenzel Strapinski did more than fail to reveal his identity to Nettchen. In the end he wanted her to take him for Count Wenzel Strapinski. He put it to her outright: He wanted to enjoy a few brief days of bliss with her as the count, then confess his duplicity to her and take his own life. The fact that he was “overcome by the vanity of this world” was not enough to turn him into a confidence man. But then vanity made him her “accomplice,” or rather he himself chose to join her. Wenzel Strapinski did not jump at becoming a confidence man, but he became one in the end.

  He remained one for a short time only. After he was unmasked, he did not move on and try his luck as a confidence man in other places. He stayed where he was and started a family with Nettchen; he became a successful tailor and cloth merchant and built up a reputation. And so his career as a confidence man had a happy ending. It helped him to discover what he was capable of, which he would not have discovered otherwise. He was smart enough to stick to it.

  Wenzel Strapinski was a sympathetic confidence man—moral, modest, cheerful, and eager to learn. He is the best proof I know of that being a confidence man is not necessarily bad. It can simply be a chance to achieve the most one is capable of in life.

  That evening I met de Baur on the street. “Still here?” he said. “I assumed you'd gone back to Germany and would be returning for the retreat.” When I told him I was planning to stay here the whole time, he invited me to Christmas dinner. “Think it over, and give me a ring. We'd be happy to have you.” He smiled the self-conscious smile a child might smile, and suddenly I saw him as a young man in a dark overcoat with the black velvet lining.

  10

  AFTER THE ORIENTATION SESSION for the January retreat, where the participants introduced themselves, received their assignments, and found out about transportation arrangements, my life calmed down. I soon finished the book I was assigned to report on at the retreat. I had been spending less and less time on the translation of de Baur's book and eventually abandoned it altogether. I did occasionally see Jonathan Marvin, though, and learned that de Baur had finally invited him to the retreat.

  Even as it got colder and darker, I stuck to my late-afternoon run in the park, ending up on the terrace with my longing. There were days when the run was the only thing that got me out of the house; otherwise I lay on my bed reading novels, drinking orange or grapefruit juice with vodka, and dozing until at one point in the evening I fell asleep. My room never really got bright. During the day I could distinguish the bricks in the wall opposite and even count them, at dusk they grew fuzzy, and at night the wall varied its countenance according to the light falling on it from the other windows facing the ventilation shaft.

  Lying on the bed, I could see a higher window, in which I would observe a young woman when she opened and shut it and when she brushed her hair at it. She got up either very early or very late, and the rhythm with which she left her place and came back to it led me to believe she was either a doctor or a nurse. She was not pretty, but everything she did she did with such determination, economy, and efficiency that it was a pleasure to watch her. I had declined de Baur's invitation and planned to ask her to have dinner with me on Christmas Day should she be alone, but she was not there. She returned a few days later with a man. Things did not go well between them. I awoke in the middle of the night to a loud quarrel and slamming doors. The next morning I met her for the first and last time in the elevator; her hair was combed down over her face in such a way that it could only have been hiding a black eye.

  I spent a whole week in December making a calendar for Barbara. The view from the terrace of longing, the building my apartment was in, the building she had lived in with Augie, and the school where she had taught at the time—I bought a camera and recorded them all on film. For the rest of the months I used New Yorker covers, and for December I cut a Christmas tree out of green plastic and pasted it on one side of the page, and tiny electric lights powered by a tiny battery on the other. I even found a chip that played “Jingle Bells.” I spent all that time and effort on it first out of love, then out of a perfectionism that had nothing to do with Barbara, and finally out of spite: I was making her a unique gift whether she loved me or not. For Max I bought as many types and brands of chewing gum as I could find, and for Mother a leather cap she could wear while driving with the top down. In her package I enclosed the Political Science Department's brochure: it had a picture of John de Baur.

  My life had calmed down, but I did not feel lonely. I would go to two or three movies one after the other and let myself be carried away by the gigantic images on the gigantic screen. I would go to a restaurant where voice students sang arias accompanied by an old woman, who stoically played whatever was put in front of her. It was not far from Lincoln Center, and when the Metropolitan let out, a real tenor might stray in and sing along. I would rent a bicycle and bike up and down the Manhattan waterfront.

  When ten days before Christmas I sent the packages off to Barbara, Max, and Mother, I had the feeling the year was over. I tried to sort out what it had brought. The longing for Barbara, a feeling of helplessness, of doing what I was doing because I had to but not knowing what made me do it, a feeling of mourning for my mother, as if with her lies she had not merely withdrawn from me but died for me, the aggression against my father and the horror he inspired, though what I despised in John de Baur I had liked in Johann Debauer—it was not a pretty picture.

  On Christmas Eve I bought a Christmas tree, the last to be sold at the stand around the corner, a miserable godforsaken runt. I was suddenly positive that Barbara would turn up on my doorstep, and I wanted to give her a festive reception. Barbara always flew Lufthansa; the last flight into JFK landed at seven thirty; it would take her at least two hours to get to my place. The hours between nine thirty and eleven thirty were the low point of those days in New York.

  On New Year's Eve Jonathan and I made a bar tour of Greenwich Village, and I ended up in bed with a woman who told me her name was Callista. I liked the name.

  11

  WE MET AT NINE A.M. on January 7 in front of the International Affairs building. All the older seminar participants were there: Jane and Katherine, the former psychoanalyst and former doctor, the former French professor Anne, the ex-marine Mark, and Jonathan. The others were participants from earlier seminars whom I had met for the first time at the orientation session. Meg and Pamela were young lawyers with large New York firms; Philip, Gregory, and Michael worked in Washington for congressmen or senators; and Ronald was with a think tank, where he headed a task force studying juvenile criminality. It was cold, and no one felt like talking. When Mark and Pamela took out cigarettes, Katherine told them in no uncertain terms to keep their distance, whereupon they moved away and Katherine launched into a diatribe about why what she had done was right. The rest of us looked on, embarrassed, until Ronald broke in and asked her if he could get her a coffee on the corner.

  At a quarter past nine the van that was to take us to the retreat arrived. The four smokers sat in the back, Katherine next to the driver, and Ronald and Meg, Jane and I, and Philip, Gregory, and Michael in the three rows in between. I would have liked to talk to Jane about the seminar we had just finished and the retreat we were about to start, about her interest in de Baur and her impressions of him, about her switch from psychoanalysis to law, but she still had some reading to do, so I leaned back and eavesdropped on the conversation behind me. For Phil, Greg, and Mike the retreat was a big thing. Once you had been to one, you were in de Baur's inner circle, and that made you part of his informal but influential network in Washington. We had lunch at a rest area near Albany. To make sure I would get that conversation in with Jane, I went to a sushi bar with her. She was the child of two psychoanalysts and had grown up in New York. She had gone to an excellent prep school and done her undergraduate work at Harvard. In the midst of a successful career as a psychoanalyst she had felt a sudden, overpowering need to break out of a world that was all talk and thoug
ht and do something, change something, make a difference.

  “Do what?”

  She looked at me as if the answer were obvious. “Can't you see how the world around us is changing? I want it to be a success.”

  In the bus she went back to her reading and read until her eyes closed. Most of the others were asleep as well. We were passing through a hilly countryside of plowed fields, dirty-green meadows, and leafless woods dotted with an occasional farmhouse and large silos and an occasional small community. The sky was gray and hung so low that when the first few snowflakes fell I thought, This sky could snow on us for days. Then I fell asleep too.

  I woke up when the bus veered off the highway onto a two-lane road. We started bumping over uneven terrain and pulled up in front of a restaurant. It had continued to snow, and the snow was sticking. The world was white, and the cars parked in front of the restaurant had thick bonnets of snow on their roofs and hoods. The sun was going down. I glanced at my watch. It was four. I had slept for two hours.

  The driver got out, and Katherine, Jane, and Meg followed him into the restaurant. Katherine came back first, took her seat, turned to us, and said, “I'm afraid the driver is lost. It's getting dark, and the snow shows no sign of letting up. Maybe we should spend the night in the nearest motel and try to find our way in the morning. What do you think?”

  “Let's ask the driver.”

  “No, we've got to tell him. If we ask him, he'll keep going, because he's getting paid for one day only.”

  A jeep pulled up next to us. Four men got out. They were wearing army green and camouflage fatigues, dark knit caps, and knee-high laced boots. They looked over at the van, laughed, and trudged into the restaurant.

  “Isn't de Baur waiting for us? Didn't he say he'd be up there a few days early?”

  “We should give him a call.”

  We had been given an emergency number at the orientation session, and Ronald went into the restaurant to phone. He was back in no time. “There's only an answering machine, and the message was from an emergency service, not de Baur.”

  “Has anyone got another number?”

  It turned out that no one had de Baur's home number or the number of the place where we were going. Ronald went back into the restaurant and called Information for de Baur's number, but all he got when he dialed was a message saying the family was out of town and could not be reached until the fourteenth.

  “If we don't show up, he'll know why,” Katherine said. “He's smart enough to figure it out.”

  But then out came the driver with Jane and Meg. The women went back to their seats as if nothing had happened, and the driver said with a grin, “Everybody awake? We'll be there between seven and eight. Later than planned, but earlier than you've been thinking. Don't worry. You don't have to push. I've got four-wheel drive.” And off we went.

  “What's up? Katherine thought he was lost.”

  Jane shrugged. “I heard him talking about roads and places with the bartender, but he seems to know where he's going.”

  At first we saw an occasional car, a school bus, a truck with a garland of lights left over from Christmas festooning its cabin; then the streets began to narrow, the traffic coming toward us ceased altogether, and the windows shining across fields or through trees grew fewer and farther between. The bus was completely dark: no one felt like turning on the reading lights; everyone, like the driver, was concentrating on the road, which ran on and on, all white, unsullied by tire tracks, through endless woods of snowladen pines. After two or three hours the snow we had been watching in the light of the headlamps petered out, and the driver said, “At last!” But without the veil of snowflakes the white world engulfing us felt even colder, more forbidding.

  Then there we were. We had seen the light awhile before, first at the far end of a great, white expanse, then on and off around various bends in the road. Finally the van made its way up a few serpentine curves and stopped before a brightly lit old hotel.

  “Chop-chop,” said the driver, jumping out of the van and running back to open the tailgate. “I've got to get back.”

  By the time we were out of the van, knee deep in snow, he had unloaded our luggage and jumped back up into the driver's seat. He turned to us, waved, and was off. We watched as he drove down the curves, appearing on and off around the bends and finally making his way back along the broad, white surface. By then we could hear him no more.

  12

  THE HOTEL WAS A three-story wooden structure with balconies off the upper two stories. The parking lot where we were standing and the stairs leading up to the main entrance were well lit, and there was light shining out of the windows on the ground floor and the floor above it. We waited for a while, but when no one came out to greet us Ronald picked up his bag and climbed the steps. The rest of us followed.

  We waited again in the lobby, but again nobody came—neither de Baur nor the manager nor the staff. Ronald called out, “Anybody home?” but got no response. A few of us took seats in the armchairs dotting the lobby; Ronald, Katherine, and I set out on a ground-floor reconnaissance mission. Mark said, “I'll go upstairs,” and Jonathan went up with him. We walked through a dining room and into a lounge with a fireplace, then returned to the dining room, where we found the door to the staircase leading down to the basement kitchen and a dumbwaiter for bringing food up from below. We went down to the kitchen, crossed it, and walked through some empty rooms until we reached the far end of the building, where we climbed the stairs into a small room behind a bar. One door led to a library with empty bookshelves; another led back to the lobby, where the others awaited us. Everything was run-down, the walls cracked and stained, the upholstery threadbare, the wood scratched. A number of three-legged chairs were leaning against the dining room wall, the hooks for pots and pans in the kitchen were mostly empty, and the giant refrigerators were open and bare, yet everything was more or less clean.

  “There's a suite upstairs where de Baur has set out some materials for us and rooms enough to accommodate us all. The top floor is dark; we couldn't see a thing.”

  “Hey, how about some heat?” Pamela was huddling in an armchair with her arms over her chest. It was cold.

  “Listen to her. You'd think we turned it off,” Katherine said, hands on hips. “I haven't seen a thermostat, but there must be a boiler room. Maybe you can only get to it from outside.”

  “Want to come along?” Jonathan asked me, and we went to have a look around. We found nothing like a boiler room or annex, but we did find a large woodpile and took as many logs as we could hold. We got back to the lobby just in time to find Greg slamming the receiver down on the pay phone. “The damn thing doesn't work.”

  “What's the wood for? Why didn't you turn the heat on?”

  I too was irritated by Pamela's tone, and I was about to say something, but Katherine beat me to it. “Would you stop whining and go and get some wood.”

  “Wait a second,” Ronald said, holding up his hand. “We need a little organization here. How about first laying in a supply of wood for the lounge, where the fireplace is, and then splitting into teams—four of us on this floor, four on the next—to look for food, blankets, candles, anything that might come in handy for a long, cold night.”

  We got to work; only Pamela remained ensconced in her armchair. When enough wood had accumulated next to the fireplace, Phil asked, “Does this thing work?”

  “We'll soon see. Let's go on with the search as long as there's light. Have you noticed the switches don't work? There must be a master switch somewhere, but I haven't found it, and if one of those timer doodads turns the lights off at eight, nine, or ten we're in the dark.”

  This time I went with Greg, Phil, and Mike, and we cased the middle floor room by room. Each of the eighteen beds had a sheet and a thin woolen blanket on it, but the closets and drawers were empty and not a drop came out of the taps. The three of them made light of the whole thing, Greg cursing with wit and passion, Phil and Mike already rehear
sing their versions of the Adirondack caper for the Washington crowd. We hesitated for a moment when we got to de Baur's suite, then searched it as well and came up with a box of candles and half a bottle of whiskey. “It's not enough for everybody, anyway,” Greg decreed, taking a long swig and passing it on to Phil. Mike then polished it off, said “Sorry” to me, opened the window, and tossed the bottle into the night.

  The other search did not turn up much either. Three cans of Campbell's tomato soup and two bottles of water in the kitchen, the remains of a few bottles of whiskey and cognac in the bar, and a box of cigars in the library. No central heating, no master switch, no access to the water main. Anne and Jane went up to the upper story with a candle and found nothing but empty rooms.

  And yet the mood was good. Greg offered to cook, and Katherine, perhaps not trusting him to make the most of our scant resources, followed him into the kitchen. While Mark kindled a fire in the fireplace, we carried the armchairs from the lobby into the lounge. Once we had chased Pamela out of her chair, even she tried to make herself useful by piling the logs into a tower.

  Then we sat around the fire—each taking three gulps from the soup pot followed by swigs from the whiskey and cognac bottles—and stared into the flames. At nine the lights went out. When Katherine announced she was going to bed, we drew lots for the sheets and blankets. The lucky ones got two blankets and one sheet, the unlucky ones one blanket and two sheets. I was one of the unlucky ones.

  Cold as it was in my room, I fell asleep. I awoke at four, my arms and legs numb. I took my blanket and went down to the lounge, where a few others were sitting and sleeping by the fire. Looking into the fire, which burned with a steady, yet always slightly different flame, I thought of my grandfather's love of waves rolling in with a steady, yet always slightly different motion. I thought of the pain my father had caused my grandparents and was gripped by a sudden fear that I had the same hardness, coldness in me.