The Weekend (2 page)

“I’ve taken some time off. Three English classes—my friend stepped in for me, and I’m sure she’ll do a good job, but I’d feel better if she called me or if I had some way of contacting her.” She looked at him as if he might be able to help her. “I’ve never done that before: just take time off.”

“Where do you teach?”

“I stayed. When the rest of you left, I finished my teaching diploma, got my first job and then my second, at my old school. I still have it: German, English, art.” As if she wanted to get it out of the way, she went on: “I have no children. I never married. I have two cats and an apartment of my own on the mountain with a view of the plain. I like teaching. Sometimes I think thirty years is enough, but everybody thinks that about their job. And there isn’t much longer to go.”

Henner waited for a question in return: And how are you? When it didn’t come, he asked another question: “Did you stay in contact with Jörg and Christiane?”

She shook her head. “I bumped into Christiane a few years ago at the Frankfurt station—the railway timetable was in chaos because of the snow, and we were waiting for our connecting trains. Since then we’ve talked on the phone from time to time. She said I should write to Jörg, but for a long time I didn’t dare to.
I did when he made his application. ‘I’m not asking for mercy. I fought against this state, and it has fought against me, and we owe each other nothing. We owe loyalty only to a single cause.’ You remember? The announcement that he’d applied for a reprieve was so filled with pride—all of a sudden Jörg was once again the boy I’d known. The boy I’d fallen in love with.” She smiled. “He didn’t notice at the time, and neither did the rest of you. You were all … I was always afraid of you. Because you knew so precisely what was right and what was wrong and what needed to be done, because you were so resolute, unconditional, unbending, fearless. Everything was easy for you, and I was ashamed that it was hard for me and I didn’t know a thing about capital and the state and the ruling class, and when you talked about pigs …” She shook her head again, lost in her past shame and fear. “And I had to graduate quickly and start earning money, and you had all the money and all the time in the world, and your fathers—Jörg and Christiane’s was a professor, yours was a lawyer, Ulrich’s was a dentist with a big practice and Karin’s was a vicar. My father had lost his little farm in Silesia, which had hardly fed him but which had belonged to him, and was working in a dairy. ‘Our milkmaid,’ you sometimes called me, and I think it was meant nicely, but I didn’t fit in with the rest of you, and it was more that you sort of put up with me, and if I’d disappeared …”

Henner tried to find memories that matched Ilse’s. Had he presented himself as someone who knew everything quite precisely and had all the time in the world? Had he talked about policemen, judges or politicians as
pigs? Had he called Ilse “our milkmaid”? It was all far away. He remembered the atmosphere on those nights when they had talked till dawn over too many cigarettes and too much cheap red wine, the constant feeling of searching for something, of needing to find the correct analysis, the correct action, the excitement of shared plans and preparations, and the sheer intensity of it, the intense enjoyment of their own strength, when the lecture hall belonged to them, or the street did. But there was nothing in his memories of what they had talked about and what they had actually been searching for and why lecture halls and streets needed to be conquered, and certainly nothing of how it had been for Ilse. Had she fetched them their cigarettes and made coffee for them? She was an art teacher—had she made posters for them? “I’m glad you took care of Jörg. I visited him when he was convicted, and couldn’t get a sensible sentence out of him. That was it—until I got that call from Christiane a week ago. Has he changed a lot?”

“Oh, I didn’t visit him—I just wrote to him. He never invited me.” She looked at him quizzically. He didn’t know whether it was his lack of interest in Jörg over all those years that she didn’t understand, or his present interest in how Jörg might have changed. “We’ll soon see, won’t we?”

When Henner had gone, Ilse opened her notebook and read what she had written.

Ilse saw the funeral clearly again. It was the last time she had seen the friends with whom she was about to spend the weekend. Jörg had disappeared shortly afterward. At the funeral he had had nothing but contempt for Jan; you don’t throw your life away over bourgeois
idiocies when there’s a great struggle that it could be used for. Christiane had sensed what was happening to Jörg, hovered around him and confirmed his contemptuous and revolutionary views as if she wanted to show him that he had a place in the world with them, and that he mustn’t disappear on their account. Soon afterward the others also scattered to the four winds. In a way Jörg had done what all the others had also needed to do at the time: he had determined the course of his life.

But it wasn’t the impending meeting with these friends that had made her recall the funeral. It had only prompted her to start writing. She had bought a big, fat hardback notebook and a green mechanical pencil with a long lead of the kind that, it was explained to her—and she was pleased by the fact—was used by architects. On Thursday she had set off after school and come here by train and bus and taxi in order, the next morning, to do in a strange place what she didn’t dare do at home: write.

No, her preoccupation with the funeral had begun years before. She had read about a play that contained an image from September 11 that she couldn’t get out of her mind. Not the image of the airplanes flying into the towers, not the image of the towers smoking, or of them collapsing, not the image of the people covered in ash. What she couldn’t get out of her mind was the image of the falling bodies, some singly, some in pairs, almost touching one another or even holding hands. It was always before her eyes.

Ilse had read everything she could find. That estimates of the number of falling bodies varied between
fifty and two hundred. That lots of people jumped, but that some had fled to the windows and, when the panes exploded, had been forced out by other people jumping out or sucked out by the draft of air. That of those who jumped, some had decided to jump because of their hopeless situation, while the rest were simply driven out by the unbearable heat. That the heat rose to above 550 degrees Centigrade and reached the people before the flames reached them. That the drop was some four hundred meters, and the fall lasted up to ten seconds. That the pictures of the falling bodies were too blurred for faces to be made out. That relatives sometimes thought they could recognize a falling body by its clothes, and were partly comforted, partly terrified by that. And that among the dead, those who had fallen could not be identified.

But no information moved her as much as the pictures did. The falling bodies, always with both arms and often with all their limbs outstretched. Perhaps rather than the individual photographs that she found in books she might also have searched for film clips and seen the bodies actually falling, flailing, twisting, but she was scared to do so. Some of the falling bodies looked in the photographs as if they were floating to the ground or even flying away. Ilse hoped and doubted. Could someone do that? In such a situation could someone jump and then float, fly, even if it was only for the last ten seconds? Could he enjoy those ten seconds, which would end with a sudden and painless death, with all the delight that we are capable of bringing to the enjoyment of life?

In the play a man was supposed to be sitting in his office in one of the Twin Towers on the morning of September 11, but he was late for work and realized he had the opportunity to be dead to everybody, could sneak away from his old life and start a new one. Ilse hadn’t seen or read the play. In her imagination the man had seen the pictures of the falling, floating, flying bodies and that had given him the idea of wanting to fly away—that made sense to her, that was enough. And it filled her imagination and it summoned up the memory of Jan’s funeral and with it the question of whether he had actually killed himself or whether he had abandoned his old life to start a new one. Everything that had preoccupied both her and Ulla in the year after Jan’s death came back to her, from the funeral to the mysterious phone call, the strange clothes, the missing files, the autopsy report.

When Henner came back to the house after taking a wide sweep across the fields, another car was parked outside the gate, a big silver Mercedes with a Hamburg license plate. The door to the house was open. Henner went in, and when his eyes had grown accustomed to the half-light, he saw a staircase on the left leading up to the next floor and a hallway that ended in doors on each side. Both stairs and hallway were supported by a metal scaffolding. Again the plaster was flaking from the walls, and many of the natural stone slabs in the floor had been replaced by blobs of cement. But everything was clean, and opposite the front door a big vase of brightly colored tulips stood on an old table.

Upstairs a door opened and closed, and for a moment talking and laughter rang out from the room behind it. Henner looked up. With slow, heavy steps, her left hand resting on the banister, a woman came down the stairs. As if she had pains in her left hip or her left leg, Henner thought, and she was too fat. He put her at fifty, a few years younger than himself. She was too young to be suffering from arthritis. Had she had an accident?

“Have you just got here too?” He nodded toward where the Mercedes was parked in front of the house.

She laughed. “No.” She too gave a brief nod in the
direction of the Mercedes. “That’s Ulrich with his wife and daughter. I’m Margarete, Christiane’s friend, and I belong here. I have to get back to the kitchen—will you come and help me?”

For the next hour he stood in the kitchen, peeled potatoes and cut them into slices, diced pickled gherkins, chopped chives and received instructions about what needed to be stirred into the salad dressing. “Shaken, not stirred”—he attempted a joke. Margarete’s ease, composure, cheerfulness irritated him. It was the cheerfulness of simple folk, the composure of those lucky devils who are at home in the world without having to work for it—Henner didn’t like either quality. Her physical aura irritated him too. It was an erotic aura that he found doubly incomprehensible; he didn’t like fat women—his girlfriends were always as slim as models—and Margarete, who wasn’t at all impressed by his charm, was possibly more than just a friend of Christiane’s. Possibly, too, she knew more about him than a girlfriend knows. If he thought back to that one night years ago with Christiane, he felt used again, and hurt. At the same time Christiane’s behavior back then still seemed so strange that he felt once more that there was something he hadn’t understood, and the fear that he had failed. Was that what had brought him here? Had Christiane’s call aroused the desire to know at last what had really happened back then?

“Would you like to try the punch?” She held a glass out to him and he could tell that she’d asked him once already. He blushed.

“Sorry.” He took the glass. “Love to.” It was punch
with white peaches, and the taste reminded him of his childhood, when there had been no yellow peaches, only white ones, and how his mother had planted two peach trees in the garden. He gave the empty glass back to Margarete. “I’ve finished the potato salad. Is there anything else I can do? Do you know where I’m sleeping?”

“I’ll show you.”

But Ulrich, his wife and daughter were coming toward them down the stairs. Little Ulrich with his tall wife and tall daughter. Henner let himself be greeted and hugged and taken out onto the terrace. Ulrich’s bumptious, cloddish qualities were too much for him, as they had been years before, and he was unsettled by the way his wife liked to throw her head back when she laughed, and the way his daughter posed around the place, bored and provocative, with her long legs crossed, short skirt, tight top and sulky mouth.