Homecoming Homecoming Homecoming

by Bernhard Schlink

  Katherine made her apology at the beginning of dinner, and we thought it came off well: she talked about the different expectations they had and we had, about the conflicts that had arisen from them, about our different ways of looking at things and doing things; she was sorry we had insulted them after they had helped us in a time of need, and hoped that the meal would serve as a reconciliation of sorts and that they would enjoy the venison.

  But after we had eaten for a while in silence, Walton's son turned to him and said, “Is she trying to say we don't know how to talk good? What does she take us for, anyways? A bunch of yokels? Country bumpkins?”

  “I don't know what she's trying to say, but they certainly take us for idiots if they think they can get away with apologizing for the small shit and don't say anything about setting traps, sawing holes, and poisoning food.” His voice had been getting louder and louder. “How about some apologizing for that! And this time I don't want to hear no girl neither. Is that clear? You there!” He pointed to me. “Is that clear?”

  I nodded, and when that did not suffice I said yes. What is more, I said yes when after dinner Walton and company were sitting in the lounge and we were sitting in the library and I was designated to deliver our apology the next morning. I tried to wriggle out of it by proposing that we draw lots again. Then I could cheat—the way I had cheated the first time around—but no one listened to me. No one was in the mood for talking. Everyone was wondering who had given away Pamela's proposals. Who could trust anyone anymore?

  “I think I should come out and tell you,” Jane said to Meg after a long pause. “I have no evidence against you—it's only a gut reaction—but . . .”

  Meg shook her head sadly.

  When the lights went out at nine, one of the cousins came in and pointed to Pamela. “You there, you little slut! On your feet and follow me.” He sounded tipsy. Pamela looked around. Katherine, Jane, Ronald, Jonathan, and I got up first. But Walton's son and the other cousin were standing in the doorway, as if having expected something of the sort. Walton's son had a holster draped over his shoulder. It was unbuckled, hanging loose. Pamela looked from them to us and from us to them, then stood and followed them out.

  We waited. We heard laughter, then an exchange of words—Walton's loud voice, Pamela's soft one. We could not make out what was being said, but we did not dare move close enough to eavesdrop. Things died down for a while. Then we heard a loud scream, and another. Jane ran up to the lounge door. She grabbed the doorknob. The door was locked. She started pounding on it. It opened, and there was Pamela. She was pale. There were red spots on her cheeks and fear in her eyes, but she said, “It's all right, Jane. It's all right.”

  16

  WHY DIDN'T I GET the picture until my moment of defeat? Because after defeat there is nothing more to win or lose? Because defeat destroys one's illusions about others along with one's illusions about oneself ? Because the prime post-defeat question—how could it have happened?—puts everything in a clearer light?

  When I got back to my room that evening, I saw that Jane had collected her blankets and sheet. It was Meg she had accused, but she could no longer stand being close to me either. Sitting there on the bed, I realized I was in the same boat: I could not stand any of them any longer—their faces, what they said, the way they moved, their fear. What we were experiencing had not brought us together; it had distanced us from one another. A night without Jane's body and blankets would be terribly cold, and I should have taken my things and gone to the library to lie by the stove, but the thought of hearing the others' deep breathing and smelling their exhalations was so unbearable that I stayed in my room.

  I held out until four, when I awoke and the cold became more unbearable than the breathing and exhalations: I went and lay down in the library. At eight they called us into the lobby. Pamela was the last to appear. She came out of the lounge and sat with us but kept her eyes down. They asked what we had to say. When I stood up, they played a game with me. What did I want? To apologize? For the group? Not for myself ? Wouldn't it be better if I began with myself ?

  And so I apologized. Then I went to my room and put all my clothes on; then I went to the library, picked up my blanket, and wrapped it around myself; then I went outside. The snow was still too deep for me to make out the road, but I didn't care: I just wanted to get away from the hotel and from the others. I trudged along the lake until I could see the hotel jutting out of the slope on the other side of the great, white expanse.

  What had the commune done here? Everywhere I looked I saw trees. There was not enough open land for the members to grow what they needed. Did they manufacture something? How did they get the raw materials and distribute the products?

  Nothing made sense. The commune could not have been an experiment in a new, different, better way of living together, as communes are supposed to be. No, it was de Baur's experiment on the people he gathered here, just as this week was an experiment on us, an experiment whose confrontations, threats, and dangers were as artificial as the promise of a better life proffered by the commune.

  How do students, future politicians, judges, executives, and other people in authority perfom under extreme conditions? As team players, as individuals? Do they stick to their principles or collaborate? What does it take to make them betray one another, turn against their own? At what degree of cold, hunger, pressure, or fear does the layer of civilization start to peel away?

  Of course none of the subjects must freeze to death or starve to death or be seriously injured. There must be just enough blankets and just enough food for the first night, the intruders must bring just enough supplies for everyone, and when they occupy the room with the fireplace there must be a stove that can be set up in another room. If there is violence, it must look bad but not really hurt: Mike fell on the floor, Katherine in the snow, and I was certain Pamela had not been raped, only given a good scare.

  But was this really an experiment? What could our week tell de Baur that he did not know after all the retreats he had staged here? No, he did not want to study us. He did not maintain his distance, as a bona fide experimenter should; he took an active part. Those video cameras did not go back to the days of the commune; he had had them installed so he could spy on us, follow how we behaved. Then he could instruct his accomplices about what to do next. Nobody betrayed Pamela: de Baur had heard what she said, seen her saying it. Steve Walton's son let the cat out of the bag when he derided Greg, Mike, and Phil for thinking only of themselves and not “all for one and one for all,” and we should have picked up on it: how could he have known of our pact the night before?

  De Baur was not interested in studying us; he was interested in molding us. I suddenly recalled passages from his book and lectures that I had been unable to process at the time: that we had simply repressed things like the joy we find in evil, the pleasure we take in hating, fighting, and killing, the satisfaction that comes from the sinister rituals of fascism and communism; that we did not look evil in the eye, that we turned away from it, but it kept coming back. “Do you think these were the only people who did things like that, this the only time in which they happened?” It had come up more than once in the lecture on atrocities of the past.

  The retreat was supposed to teach us to look evil in the eye, the evil in others and ourselves. Each of us had our turn during the week; each of us was meant to experience denying and betraying the principles we professed as good, to experience selling out, doing evil with determination. Anyone who had not fallen yet would fall soon: de Baur would find his weak spot in the videos and give the required nudge.

  I had deceived the others when we drew lots, and myself when I apologized. What was that supposed to teach me? That I was capable of evil? That I could turn that ability to my advantage? Was it de Baur's intention to forge the retreat participants into a community that had looked evil in the eye and was now ready to do its bidding, to use it with determination?

  I wanted no part in such a community;
I wanted nothing to do with it. Nor did I want to wait around until de Baur appeared on the scene to explain and interpret, reconcile and seduce, and send us back into the world convinced that after this very special experience we were very special people. I walked back to the hotel across the lake. In the middle of the great, empty, white expanse I was once more overcome by fear, the fear of the last few days, the fear of falling in and drowning, and a pure, unadulterated fear that needs no object. By the time I reached the shore, however, it was gone.

  I went up to my room, stood in front of the video camera, and told de Baur the time had come for him to make his appearance and put an end to it all.

  17

  THE FOUR OF THEM took me back to New York in the jeep. I went up to them when I saw them climbing in and told them point-blank not that I knew they were leaving not just briefly, as they had told us, but for good, and that they were leaving because they had done their job and de Baur was on his way. They shrugged and let me in.

  They were actors. The one who played the Steve Walton part had been a member of the commune many years before and, when retreats replaced the commune, took charge of casting actors to play the unexpected visitors: hunters or poker players or Vietnam veterans. “One year we were a band of criminals hiding out from the cops.” He laughed. “It was fun, but one of us hammed it up and it got too much like a movie. By the way, the weather isn't always so cooperative.”

  “Where's de Baur?”

  “Oh, he's at the hotel by now. He's real close, in a cottage on the other side of the hill.”

  “Watching a wall of monitors.”

  “Before video we had to do a lot more improvising. John's current dream is that instead of having to phone him now and then we can each have a receiver in our ear and he can tell us exactly what to do. Though he'll have to find somebody to replace me: I'm an actor, not a robot.”

  He was a careful, steady driver. Once we had emerged from the Adirondacks, the road through the darkness grew monotonous and the others fell asleep. It took me a while to get used to a road without snow, a road of speeding cars, and clear my mind of the images of the last few days.

  “What was the commune like?”

  “The commune?” He thought a while. “I wouldn't want to have been one of the regular members. I was staff. And even that got to be too much at times. It wasn't just that you gave up your privacy, which meant that unless you were ostracized as a punishment you were always with everybody when you ate, when you slept, when you made love, when you went to the bathroom—that wasn't so bad. But John kept changing the rules, and he never told anybody, so you'd get up one morning and what had been right the night before was suddenly wrong. We knew what the new rules were because we were staff and we couldn't enforce them if we didn't. But the only thing the regulars could see was that the old rules no longer applied. Everything was in flux, nothing was permanent, there was no relying on anything. Or on de Baur: he was hot one day, cold the next.”

  “What kind of rules are you talking about?”

  “What time you got up, who made breakfast, who did the dishes, who did all the things that had to get done and who took it easy, who could make love with whom—there were rules for everything.”

  “What was the point of all the changes?”

  He laughed. “You're asking me? It had something to do with the truth of the ‘exceptional situation.’ When everything is running like clockwork, we don't really experience who we are: we let ourselves be tricked and trick ourselves. But in ‘exceptional situations' something happens to us . . .” He paused. “I can't remember what it is that happens in exceptional situations, but what happened to the commune members was that they lost their bearings. He never told them anything about exceptional situations and their truth, by the way; they were supposed to experience it.”

  “Why did people stay?”

  “Only half of them stayed. The other half, the stronger ones, left. One of the ones who stayed cracked up, flipped out. And that was the end of the commune.”

  “How many years did it go on?”

  “Years? Months, you mean. Nine months. From spring to winter.”

  “Why did you do it?”

  “John and I had known each other since his days in law school and mine in the theater department. He needed someone; I needed work.”

  “Who funded the commune? Who's funding the retreats?”

  “Some foundation funded the commune. I don't remember its name. And I don't know if it's the one that's funding the retreats.”

  I was having trouble keeping my eyes open, and there were still so many questions I wanted to have answered. What had de Baur been like as a young man? What had he been like as leader of the commune? What had he told Walton about his life in Europe? What was he like with women? And with friends? Did he have any friends? But I didn't get beyond one important question: did the commune members hate him at the end of it all?

  “Hate him? No, the ones who stayed revered him.”

  18

  THEY LET ME OFF AT Time Square. It was after midnight, but the streets were full of cars, the sidewalks full of people, and the neon signs changing color and pattern like nobody's business. It was not cold, and instead of taking the subway I walked.

  I passed neon nudes beckoning me in to a floor show; I passed grocery stores that had sandwiches, beer, and magazines for sale; I passed people sleeping in doorways or pressed against a shop's rolling shutter. The farther north I got, the less traffic I encountered in the streets and on the sidewalks. At 72nd Street I switched over to Riverside Drive and was suddenly alone. On my left I could see the lights on the other side of the river twinkling through the park's bare trees, on my right, the tall buildings dark against the city-bright sky.

  Was the snow thawing in the Adirondacks? Was the ice on the lake cracking? It was certainly not warm enough to do without the fire in the fireplace. Were they sitting up late in the lounge listening docilely to de Baur's explanation of what they had just experienced and what they should learn from it?

  I carried on a mental debate with de Baur. There was nothing to learn, I would argue. Yes, we were capable of egoism and ruthlessness, betrayal and deception, and much else that is heinous. But we knew that anyway. Yes, evil had not been done away with by the wars and crimes of the twentieth century; it lived on. But that was nothing new either. What the mini-artificial, exceptional situation he had set up demonstrated didn't matter. The only thing that mattered was how we established normalcy and how, as time goes on, we became better to one another, more friendly, respectful, and fair.

  De Baur would laugh. Better? If I was counting on progress, he would retort, I didn't understand a thing. About the presence of evil in the world or its presence in me. If we knew what iniquity we ourselves were capable of, why were we so presumptuous as to condemn it in others? If we knew that evil lived on in the world, why did we live as if we did not need to confront it, as if we did not need to decide what it was and accept the responsibility to act accordingly?

  And you, he sneered, you lack the guts to confront even me!You're on your way to your nice warm bed instead of sticking it out in the hotel. You wouldn't be half so overwrought about what I teach if you weren't so overwrought about having a bad father, who didn't find you cute enough to spend his life with you. Get a life!All you do is play with justice as if it were spectator sport and with politics as if it were a picture book of history. If I weren't your father, I'd be as interesting a discovery for you—no, a much more interesting discovery—than whatever you learned back there in East Berlin.

  And you, I sneered back, you have the nerve to invoke responsibility! When it came time for you to accept the responsibility for your decisions, what did you do but run away. And don't talk to me about your responsibility to yourself. Responsibility to oneself doesn't hurt. It's worthless. A joke.

  A man walking a dog was coming in my direction. He was looking at me curiously, and I realized I was talking out loud to myself. I put a halt to
the dialogue. Besides, shouldn't I be confronting him in person rather than in thought? He would take me on. He would enjoy it even. If I took a light, playful approach, it could turn from a father-son confrontation to a father-son encounter. He would enjoy following the road that led me from the Reading Pleasure novel to him, and would tell me the ending of Karl's homecoming—if he remembered it. Then we would open a bottle of red wine and talk about other homecomings: Odysseus’, his, mine . . .

  I might actually have gone through with it had he merely been the playful adventurer I had long taken him for. But that playful, adventuresome levity had never been more than a façade for his demons.

  I was at home by two. The room was overheated. I opened the window and heard soft music playing. I could tell I would not be able to sleep and wondered what other poor soul was in the same situation, but all the windows were dark. I sat at my desk listening to the jazz, a piano solo, quiet, irresolute, ironic. The combination of the heating, which I could not turn up or down, and the open window made for a comfortable temperature, and I took one of those yellow pads I had grown fond of and laid in generous supplies of and began to write:

  THE STORY OF THE YOUTH WHO WENT FORTH

  TO TEACH WHAT FEAR WAS

  Like thousands before and after him he left behind wife and child and a dark past and came to America from Europe with a new name and the dream of a bright future.

  John de Baur made a brilliant career, which eventually took him to Columbia University, where he now teaches political theory. His past is . . .