The Weekend (12 page)
Authors: Bernhard Schlink
“Of course.” Marko reached into his shirt pocket, unfolded two pages and gave them to her. She read about the revolutionary struggle in Germany, which hasn’t ended, but is just beginning, which is global, like
business and politics, which overcomes cultural and religious boundaries, which finds new forms of organization and uses means different from the ones used in the seventies and eighties. The text ended: “The system cannot hide behind its lies in the face of the revolution, it can be wounded, disarmed, overcome. The provocations beneath which the system reveals itself, the explosions that reveal its vulnerability, the attacks that reveal the defenselessness of those who build upon it and live off it, the attacks that spread fear and force people to think and rethink—they do not belong to yesterday. The struggle goes on.”
She saw what Marko had tried to do: come up with a text that stirred people to action and offered leadership, but could also be read as mere analysis and prognosis. Was he successful? Was it legally airtight and watertight? Christiane gave the pages back to Marko. “Andreas won’t do it. So find another lawyer to look at the text. For as long as he doesn’t give it the green light I’ll make sure that Jörg doesn’t give the declaration, whatever the cost. Yes, I know it’s Saturday. But if you set off now, you’ll be able to find a lawyer by tomorrow.”
He looked at her suspiciously. “You don’t want to …”
“… kidnap Jörg or lock him away so you can’t reach him tomorrow?” She laughed. “If it would help. But it doesn’t, so don’t worry.”
“Will you tell …”
“I’ll tell Jörg you’ve gone. That you drove into town and you’re talking to a lawyer about a declaration you’d like to propose to him. That you’ll be back
tonight or tomorrow. OK?” Christiane said it in a deliberately friendly way. They both knew she had won the round.
Marko choked back his annoyance, nodded and got to his feet. “See you later, then.”
Henner was saying good-bye to Margarete, too: “See you later.” He had led her by the arm to the bench, they had sat down on the bench and looked at the stream and he had led her back by the arm to the garden house. By the door she took her arm from his and went in; he turned around and walked away.
But after a few steps he turned back and pulled open the door that she had just closed behind her. “Margarete!” She turned around, and he took her in his arms. She hesitated for a moment, then put her arms around him as well. They didn’t kiss, they said nothing, they stood and held each other. Until he started laughing and laughed louder and louder and she pushed him from her and looked quizzically at him.
“I’m happy.”
She smiled. “That’s nice.”
He pulled her to him again. “You feel good.”
“So do you.”
“And you’re the first woman in my life that I’ve kissed first.” He kissed her, and again she hesitated for a moment before closing her eyes and accepting and returning his kiss.
After the kiss she asked, “The first woman?”
“Women have always kissed me first. Women I didn’t want to kiss or didn’t know whether I wanted to,
or I did want to, but not so quickly.” He laughed. “I’m doubly happy. Because you feel so good and because I’ve kissed you. Triply. Because the kiss was so nice.”
“Come with me!” They went upstairs. The attic was a big room with chimney, cupboard and bed and a single window in the front wall. It was dark, it was hot, the air was stale. “I’ve got to lie down. Do you want to sit down and join me?”
She lay down on the bed in skirt and T-shirt, he sat down on the edge. He looked at her face with its brown eyes, broad nose and wide mouth and brown hair that was turning gray at the roots. She took his hand.
“Until Tuesday I was in New York at a conference on fundamentalism and terrorism. On the second evening I went out for dinner with a woman, a professor from London, and when I had taken her to her hotel and said good-bye, she took my head and kissed me on the mouth. Maybe it didn’t mean anything and it was just a variation on the usual hello and good-bye kiss. But on the way to my hotel I thought about kissing for the first time in my life. Have you ever thought about kissing?”
“Mhm.”
He waited, but she didn’t go on. “At home my parents used to kiss me on the mouth, and I could hardly bear it. Of course they meant it nicely. But when my father and mother picked me up from the station after the holidays and kissed me on the mouth by way of greeting, I went very cold inside. Instead of closeness the kisses created distance. And if on top of that my father, who didn’t take personal grooming very seriously,
smelled, it made me shudder. My father’s been dead for ages now. My mother lives alone—I visit her every few weeks. Every time she kisses me on the mouth by way of greeting, and she does it so … Why am I telling you this? Am I talking too much? Should I stop? No? She kisses me so urgently, so pressingly, so greedily—it reminds me of a vulgar girl throwing herself at a man who isn’t interested.
“My parents’ physicality … When I was a little boy, my father took me to the swimming pool once or twice, and took me into his changing room to get undressed. My father’s nakedness, his soft, white flesh, his smell, his dirty underwear—it repelled me so violently that it made me feel guilty. I never saw his naked body again later on, only my mother’s. Sometimes I took her to the doctor, and she got undressed and revealed her sagging, baggy skin and her crooked bones. Again I was repelled, but I also felt pity. The worst thing is when I’m at her house and she can’t control her bowels and hold in her stools. They go on the bed or her clothes or, if she’s in the bathroom, on the floor and walls—I don’t know with what desperate movements she scatters it like that. Because she’s ashamed, at first she says nothing, but then it smells and there’s no hiding it and I wash off the dried-on shit. I only say kind and comforting things and I don’t stop until everything’s nice and clean again. But there’s nothing inside me but nausea and coldness and gritted teeth. I don’t have the guilty conscience that I had in the changing room with my father. I’m startled. I’m horrified by what I find within me.
“You know those stories about nurses killing their patients? They’re kind and efficient not because they like the patients, but because they’re gritting their teeth. They’re cold. And because the effort is so great that it could only be borne with love, one day they can’t bear it anymore and coldly kill their patients. And they’re not the worst. Think of …”
“You’re not killing your mother. You’re just washing off her shit.” Margarete sat up and ran her hand over his back.
“But the coldness is the same. When I’m walking through the streets or sitting in the café in the square, I watch the people. The way they walk, the way they hold themselves, what they express in their faces. Sometimes I see the effort they make in their posture and expression, the courage with which they meet life, the heroic effort with which they set down one foot after another, and it fills me with deep pity. But it’s just sentimentality. Because I can feel such coldness toward those people that if I had a machine gun and didn’t fear the unpleasantness of court and prison, I could shoot them all.”
“And all that occurred to you when you thought about kissing for the first time in your life?”
“It’s occurred to me since then. Some of it only here, because I want to know whether I, like Jörg …” He looked at her irritably, and she realized he was suddenly wondering whether she was laughing at him.
He had no reason to wonder. “I’ve never thought about kissing. If I did, it wouldn’t lead me where it has led you. I think you’re making great leaps, from washing
off shit to killing people, from doing good to doing evil, from imagination to reality. All people sometimes put themselves in imaginary situations that they would avoid like the plague in reality.”
“Have you never wondered, yesterday and today, how Jörg was able to kill his victims and whether you could do the same thing too? I’ve realized that while I can’t see myself as a credible revolutionary killer, I can see myself as a cold-headed, coldhearted murderer.”
Margarete shook her head and rested it against Henner’s chest. When she drew away from him and sank back down on the bed, he slipped off his shoes and lay down beside her. They went to sleep like that.
Several of the others were asleep as well. Jörg and Dorle in their rooms, Christiane on the lounge chair on the terrace, Ilse in the prow of the boat. Marko was on his way into town, and the two married couples and Andreas were sitting in a pub garden by the lake; enjoying the lassitude of their heads and their limbs, they ordered another bottle of wine and looked at the glitter of the sun on the water. It was hot, in the house, on the terrace, on the stream and by the lake, and the heat made people sluggish and the sluggishness made them conciliatory. At least Christiane hoped that was what would happen to everyone when, just before she went to sleep, the good feeling settled in that everything would turn out all right.
Ilse had gone to sleep because she couldn’t decide whether she should let Jan go to sleep. After the murder she was able to imagine both, a completely exhausted and an insanely elated Jan, one who goes to bed and doesn’t wake up until morning, and one who stays awake all night. When she woke up she decided to let him make a night of it.
But then she couldn’t go on narrating Jan’s everyday life, not now. His car thefts and bank robberies, his escapes, his training with the Palestinians, his discussions with the others, his caches of money and arms, his
encounters with women, his holidays—she could imagine all that, she would be able to write all that. She would have to do research: Did German terrorists, when stealing cars and robbing banks, follow a particular pattern? Where were the camps where they did their training? How long were they there for, what did they learn? When did they stop talking about political strategy and only discuss the details of their attacks? Where did they go on holiday? All those questions were answerable. The one question Ilse couldn’t answer was how to proceed with the murders. Taking hostages, having them around for one to two weeks, driving them from here to there, giving them food and drink, talking to them and maybe even joking with them—and then murdering them? How would you do that?
For the first few days no one exchanged a word with him. He was bound hand and foot, not so that he couldn’t escape, but so that he couldn’t pull the tape from his mouth and shout. The walls were thin. By day he sat on a chair in the middle of the room, by night he lay on the floor. When they took him to the toilet, they untied one of his hands; when they gave him food and drink, one of them took the tape from his mouth, while another stood ready to knock him out if he tried to shout. None of them was ever alone with him, none was ever with him unmasked
.
In all that they did with him they urged him to hurry, when getting up and hobbling to the toilet, when doing his business, when hobbling back to the room, when eating and drinking. Although they
urged him to chew and swallow quickly, he tried to talk to them in between. “Whatever you want to negotiate for me—I can help you,” or, “Let me write to the chancellor,” or, “Let me write to my wife, please!” or, “My legs hurt—could you please tie me in a different way?” or, “Please open the window.” They didn’t react. Even without them talking to him, he knew who they belonged to; he had seen the poster beneath which they had photographed him
.
They didn’t talk to him or with him. Not that they had reached an understanding not to; neither had they agreed to finish him off as soon as possible. They all had the same need to stay away from him. When Helmut, immediately after they had arrived at the apartment, cursed him as a fascist pig, a capitalist asshole, a money-fucker, the others found it embarrassing, and Maren put her arm around Helmut and led him out of the room
.
In the house in the forest, to which they switched after a few days, it was all really supposed to go on like that. But what they hadn’t known was that, apart from the kitchen and bathroom, the house had only one big room. “That isn’t a problem,” said Helmut. He fetched from the car the hood that they had pulled over his head during his abduction and when he was being transported, and pulled it over him again. But there was a problem. Even though he was bound, taped and wrapped up in a blanket, incapable of talking to them and seeing them, he was still there. He was all the more present, the more motionlessly he sat on his chair; when he stretched out his legs, craned
his head and neck and slid back and forth, his presence was more bearable. Because they didn’t want to give away their voices and didn’t speak in front of him, it was silent in the big room, and they heard his heavy breathing. By day they could go into the kitchen or outside the house. At night they couldn’t escape his breathing
.
Then, between chewing and swallowing, he said, “I’m not getting enough air through my nose.” He said it again and again, but they paid no attention. Until he fell from the chair. Maren pulled the hood from his head and the tape from his mouth, and he breathed again. They were all unmasked, and Maren had had the presence of mind to pull the hood back over his head before he came around
.
From then on they stopped putting tape over his mouth, and sometimes he spoke. He discussed politics with them and, because they didn’t join in, he played their part as well. He told them about himself. He began with “You can plainly imagine, that I …” and then with “actually …” he came to the point. So he spoke of his time in the war, his business career, his contacts with politics. He never spoke for more than fifteen to twenty minutes. He was skillful; he wanted to plant some seeds within them, to sprout and force them to see him not as a stereotype for capital or the system, who could be killed, but as a human being. Then he started talking about his wife and his children. “I couldn’t have divorced my wife, however unhappy we were together. When she died unexpectedly, I thought that I too was dead to love and
happiness. But then I met my current wife and fell in love again, first with her and then with our daughter. I didn’t even want to have children, and wasn’t even really pleased when she was born. But then … I fell in love with the little face that had turned toward me, with the chubby arms and legs, the cuddly belly. I fell in love with the baby the way you fall in love with a woman. Strange, isn’t it?”
His voice was loud and resolute. When he spoke questioningly, hesitantly, thoughtfully, Jan said to himself, He’s playing a part for us. Even when his massive form slumped in the chair or his broad, fleshy face collapsed and assumed an anxious, tearful expression, Jan thought he was playacting. The man is fighting with the means that he has. If he is freed, will he give an account in a book or an interview of how he manipulated us? Or is he so put off by the idea of showing weakness that he won’t admit it, even though he did it to manipulate us?
If he is freed—they had granted an extension of the ultimatum and photographed him again beneath the poster holding up a current newspaper. If the comrades weren’t released, they would have to shoot him. How could anyone take them seriously if they let him go?
For the last few days of the ultimatum it rained. It wasn’t cold; they sat under the roof outside the house and looked into the rain. Scraps of fog hung in the trees on the meadow, and behind them the forest and mountains disappeared among deep clouds. Even when the door was closed they could hear what he was
saying. And similarly he heard the news coming from their transistor radio on the hour. When they drew lots for who was to shoot him, they were quiet; he wasn’t supposed to hear that
.
Jan tried to read. But he could no longer establish a connection between what he was reading and the way he was living. The lives he read about in novels were so alien, so false, that he could make nothing of them, and he couldn’t make anything of books about history or politics or society either; he had opted against learning and for the struggle. His inability to read caused him a small pang. It’s only a pang of leaving, he thought, one of the last; I’ve already put the others behind me
.
An hour before the ultimatum ran out the hostage said: “When the time is past, you will act quickly—can I write a letter to my wife?” Helmut sarcastically repeated, “a letter to my wife.” Maren shrugged. Jan got to his feet, fetched paper and pen, took off his hood and untied his hands. He watched him writing
.
“My dearest, we knew I would die before you. I’m sorry I have to go so soon, that I have to leave you alone so soon. I’m going richly endowed; for the past few days, when I’ve had so much time to think, my heart has been full of our years together. Yes, I would still have done lots of things with you, and I would have liked to watch our daughter …”
He wrote slowly, and his handwriting was childishly clumsy. Of course, thought Jan, he hasn’t written himself for years—he’s dictated everything. He dictates and commands and manipulates and
hassles. At the same time he has a young wife and a little child and a good dog, and when he comes home from his dirty tricks, the dog jumps up on him and his daughter cries, “Daddy, daddy!” and his wife takes him in her arms and says, “You look tired—have you had a bad day?” Jan took the gun from his belt, released the safety catch and fired
.
