The Weekend (20 page)

The rain had stopped. Jörg looked at the clock. Before his assignment in the cellar he still had time to pack his things. Someone would take him to Berlin, then he would sit in the train, find a room tomorrow and start work in the lab on Tuesday. Perhaps he would even like the work, but at least he would like the people who would leave him in peace and accept him if he did good work.

On the way back to the house he met Margarete and Henner. “You see,” she said, looked to the sky and spread her arms wide.

“I see,” he laughed. “I see.”

“He actually laughed,” Margarete said to Henner as they walked on.

“I think that if you become a terrorist and kill people, you have to be quite a tough character.”

“Are you a tough character?”

“If you become a journalist and report on how people kill one another, you have to … I don’t know, Margarete. And I don’t know whether I should stay a journalist. I don’t know what’ll happen with my
mother. I don’t know what’ll happen with women. I don’t know much this morning.”

“The bench is wet—I could have thought of that and brought a towel.”

Henner sat down. “Sit on my lap!”

Margarete blushed. “You’re insane.”

“No,” he said and laughed cheerfully at her. “I’m not insane. I want to have you on my lap.”

“But the bench …”

He clapped his hands invitingly on his legs. She sat down carefully. “You see,” he said, and put his arms around her. Again he felt as if he were holding a tree or a rock and as if at last nothing could blow him away. Her heaviness held him tight, kept him rooted. When Margarete abandoned her reserve, softened in his arms, pressed herself to him and laid her face in the well of his neck, she asked, “Are you still all right? Am I too heavy?” He shook his head.

She went to sleep in his arms and woke up in his arms. “Do we have to go?”

“You slept for only a few minutes—we still have a bit of time. Would you … do you think you could …” Now Henner blushed.

“What?”

“Will you have me on your lap for a moment?”

She laughed and stood up. “Come on, then!” She sat down and pulled him onto her lap. He couldn’t cuddle up as he would have liked to. Was he too big for her? Was he too heavy for her? Did she despise his childlike need to be sat on her lap? He sighed.

She whispered in his ear: “Everything’s fine.”

He let himself go, big, but not too big, heavy, but not too heavy, and his need to be sat on her lap was the most natural need in the world to her. Everything really was fine.

“How much time do we have?”

“None. Will we see each other again?”

“Yes.”

“Good.” Henner jumped up, stretched a hand out to Margarete and pulled her to her feet.

They all turned up. The two couples arrived together; they had met by the cars as they loaded in their things. Would they see one another again, in Salzburg or Bayreuth? Andreas and Marko stood and argued until Jörg joined them and said he didn’t want any complaints about the press declaration that had been published without his authorization. It had happened, it was over. Ilse asked Christiane whether she could rent a room to write during her next holidays. Dorle stood next to Ferdinand, said something into his ear, stroked his arm, his back, ran her hand over his cheek, and he liked that, and at the same time it was embarrassing, because he wanted to appear implacable in front of his father. They were all ready to set off.

Margarete looked from one to the other. “The water is calf-deep. At the very least you should take off your shoes and socks and roll your trousers up over your knees. It’s dirty and it will splash—haven’t you got anything worse to put on? Dorle? Your T-shirt won’t be pink afterward.”

But they all let it go at bare feet and rolled-up trousers. They stuck their socks in their shoes and put their shoes side by side—lined up like the taxis outside the opera house. Margarete arranged the friends in a row from the cellar up the steps to the garden and back
to the cellar window. “Every ten minutes we’ll move on so that we don’t get bored. I have only seven buckets; so there will always be a moment to pause for breath.”

Marko filled the first bucket and passed it to Andreas at the bottom of the steps. Via Ilse, Jörg and Ingeborg the bucket wandered up the steps, was passed on from Ferdinand to Margarete, from her to Ulrich and from him to Karin, who poured it into the field next to Margarete’s garden house and gave it to Henner, who threw it to Dorle, from whom it was passed to Christiane, who dropped it through the cellar window to Eberhard, who gave it to Marko.

Marko handed Andreas the bucket with such brio that a little water always slopped over the edge and splashed him. Jörg meant well, bent lower to Ilse and stretched higher to Ingeborg than necessary and was soon drenched in sweat. Ferdinand, Margarete and Ulrich stood in the sun that had pierced the clouds, and joked gleefully with Henner, Dorle and Christiane. Full-bucket thoroughbreds versus empty-bucket softies, Stakhanovites versus freeloaders, water carriers versus water throwers, no, bucket throwers. Karin poured out the bucket with a sweeping, benedictory gesture. When, after the twelfth shift of positions, it was Marko’s turn to stand under the window and Andreas’s turn to bail, Marko tried to do the same thing to Andreas again. But Andreas kept his guard up. By then the water level had fallen anyway, the bucket wouldn’t fill, and Margarete shortened the line and sent Christiane and Eberhard downstairs with brooms to sweep the water from the back part to the front.

They were all preoccupied with their buckets or brooms, with their wet feet and damp clothes, with their neighbor or their opposite number, with themselves. Only Ilse looked at the others: Marko and Andreas at odds with each other, Dorle and Ferdinand hesitating about whether or not to fall in love and Margarete and Henner quite ready to do so, the two married couples safe in the self-evident state of belonging together, Christiane relieved that the bombs had either been defused or had exploded without doing any great damage, Jörg happy that he didn’t have to master anything but buckets and water. Ilse looked at the individuals and was fascinated by the whole, by the spectacle of collaboration, by the coordination of bodies and hands, by the dissolution of the individuals, with their sympathies and antipathies, into a common task. Would she let Jan experience anything like that? Was the joint planning and execution of terrorist attacks similar in nature? Or was it, when attacks were being planned, more a matter of coordinating autonomous, independent acts?

As easily as the friends had formed themselves into a whole, they would also fall apart again. Nothing, she thought sadly, would remain of the whole. Then she laughed. The cellar! The cellar was dry.

They sat around the table on the terrace for the last time. Exhausted, cheerful, only half of them there, the other half already en route or already home. It occurred to Ulrich that he could hand around a sheet of paper on which each of them would write their phone number and e-mail address, and pass the list on to everyone. But he didn’t. Karin didn’t deliver a travel blessing, Christiane
spoke no words of farewell and Jörg gave no thanks for being welcomed into freedom. They drank water and didn’t speak much. They looked into the park. A strong wind had blown away the clouds, the sky was a radiant blue and trees, bushes and house glittered fresh with rain. Then everyone left at the same time. Karin and her husband took Ilse and Jörg with them to Berlin. Ferdinand preferred to be driven by Marko. But he gave Christiane a piece of paper with his address and telephone number; if she wanted, she could give it to his father as well. Christiane and Margarete stood at the gate and waved until they could no longer see the cars.

Bernhard Schlink was born in Germany. He is the author of the internationally bestselling novel
The Reader
, as well as the novels
Homecoming, Self’s Murder
and
Self’s Deception, Self’s Punishment
(with Walter Popp) and the short-story collection
Flights of Love
. He lives in Berlin and New York.

Shaun Whiteside’s translations from German include works by Freud, Nietzsche, Schnitzler and Musil. His translation of
Magdalene the Sinner
by Lilian Faschinger was awarded the Schlegel-Tieck Prize in 1997.