The Weekend (7 page)

Ilse should not have been afraid of the silent, dark house. In the kitchen, Christiane sat at the table by the light of a candle, drank one last glass of red wine and one more and wondered how to hold the new day together better than the old one. Nothing had worked as she had planned. Of course Jörg should find the recognition that he had lacked for so long. But not from Marko—Christiane had always kept well away from the supporter scene, and thwarted their contact with Jörg wherever possible. Jörg was to find recognition among his old friends first of all, then through lectures, interviews, talk-show appearances and finally with an autobiography with a renowned publishing house. He had what it took, she knew he did, and she also knew that the public likes people who have been through hell and have thought about it and learned from it. If he relied on Marko, he would forfeit the chance of a lifetime. And why wasn’t he interested in Margarete, who, with her warmth and cheerfulness, was exactly what he needed? Since meeting Margarete nine years before, she knew that she was the right one for Jörg. Margarete had also heard a lot about Jörg over the course of the years and even shown an interest in visiting him in jail. However, Christiane had never taken her to see the imprisoned Jörg; she had wanted to save her up for the free one.
Now Jörg was free and it could finally get going. But nothing had got going. And the nightshirt—it was supposed to make Jörg happy, and instead it had made him ridiculous. He must hate her for it.

How defenseless we are on sleepless nights! Exposed to the stupid thoughts that our waking mind would immediately resolve, the hopelessness defeated by small successes with clothes washing, car parking or the consoling of friends, the sadness from which we wrest victories in the exhaustion of playing tennis, running, or lifting weights. On sleepless nights we turn on the television or reach for a book, just so that, even though we might not fall asleep, our eyes close over the pictures and pages, and we fall victim once again to stupid thoughts, to hopelessness and sadness. Christiane didn’t even have a television or a book. She had red wine, which didn’t help. How was she to get a better grip on the day to come? She had no idea.

But she had to do it. If she didn’t help Jörg better through the new day, how could she hope to bring him into a new and better life? He who had never had a life, a real life with work and colleagues and a regular address, but was always setting off again, always wanting to be somewhere different, wanting to do something different from wherever he happened to be and whatever he happened to be doing. She had to teach him to live.

She shouldn’t have encouraged him to keep leaving back then. It had made her proud how skillfully her little brother dreamed himself into other times and worlds and how vividly he talked of them. She had been moved
by the nobility of the deeds he performed in his fantasy, with Falk von Stauf at the relief of Marienburg, with T. E. Lawrence at the liberation of the Arabs, with Rosa Parks in the fight against racial segregation. Didn’t that show that he was a good boy? Then his fantasy turned to the present and the future and turned from “Oh, if only I had” into “Oh, if only I could” and “I should.” And she had given him her approval in that as well. That he couldn’t accept the badness of the world, that he wanted to fight for justice, confront the oppressors and exploiters and help the hurt and the humiliated—how could she not have given him her approval for that? But she shouldn’t have done it. She certainly shouldn’t have let him realize how she yearned to see him as the hero of great deeds.

She knew that mothers could destroy their sons with their expectations. But she wasn’t Jörg’s mother, she certainly wasn’t one of those mothers who didn’t have a life of their own, who expected nothing of themselves and had to expect everything of their son, and she loved Jörg anyway, whether he performed great deeds or not. No, she couldn’t have harmed Jörg with her expectations. Or could she?

Or had she had too much of a life of her own? Should she have abandoned her medical studies, which she had begun when Jörg was going through puberty? Later, when he drifted out of his studies, she had been working as a specialist and had once again had only a little time for him. For a long time she didn’t notice what was coming. By the time she did, it was too late.

She shook her head. Enough of the past. How can I
give Jörg a future? The best offer he had received was a traineeship in a publishing house. Well-paid traineeship—she didn’t like that. Traineeships were hard to come by, and trainees worked for little money. The publisher only wanted to satisfy his romantic longing for revolution and terrorism, adorn himself with Jörg whatever the cost might be, but he wasn’t really interested in Jörg’s work. Did Henner know of anything for Jörg on a newspaper? Karin in the church? Ulrich in his labs? But Jörg wouldn’t put on white overalls and cast crowns. He wouldn’t have to either, if he played his cards right on his first talk-show appearance. He needed a coach. But would he listen to a coach?

She was anxious about the next few weeks. What would he do when she was at work? Not risk going out among people and into the street and stay at home? Or, avid for life and the world, commit one idiocy after another? She had employed their neighbors’ son to familiarize Jörg with the computer and the Internet. In the guest room, Jörg’s room, she had put the manuscripts and books from over thirty years before, when he was working on his master’s degree. He hadn’t wanted to go on working on it in jail. Maybe now that he was free? But she didn’t believe that. In her anxiety she saw him in one of those shiny synthetic tracksuits, shambling through the streets that the unemployed roamed with dogs and cigarettes and beer cans, aimless, goalless, spiritless.

She knew she should be in bed. How could she do proper justice to the new day if she was tired and hung over? She got up and looked around. She stacked up the
dirty crockery beside the sink; the sticky pots and pans stood on the stove. Christiane sighed, shocked by the extent of the task and relieved because, unlike the Jörg task, it was manageable. She lit more candles, put on water, filled the basin partway with cold water, squirted in dishwashing liquid, scraped the last bits of sausage and lettuce leaves off the plates and set one after the other into the sink. When the water was boiling, she poured it in and put more on to boil. Glasses, plates, bowls, cutlery, then pots and pans—it was no trouble, her head grew clearer and her heart calmer.

Then she felt she was being watched, and looked up. Henner was leaning in the doorway, T-shirt over his jeans and hands in his back pockets.

“How long have you been watching me?” She bent again over the pan, which refused to be cleaned.

“For two pans.”

She nodded and went on rinsing. He stayed where he was and went on watching her. She wondered how she could endure his gaze. Did he recognize in her the woman he had liked back then? How did he recognize her, admiringly or pityingly, or with horror?

“The way you push your hair back behind your ear with your little finger sticking out when you’re working—you used to do it exactly like that back then. And the way you turn from the hip where other people take a little step to the left or to the right. And the way you ask questions, blunt and serious and without any kind of flattery.” So that I immediately start feeling guilty. No, thought Henner, you haven’t changed. And the way I react to you hasn’t changed either.

Henner saw the gray in Christiane’s brown hair, the tear sacs under her eyes, the deep wrinkles above the base of her nose and from her nostrils to the corners of her mouth. He saw the liver spots on her hands and the fact that her freckles had lost their luster. He saw that Christiane did nothing for her figure, no sport, no gymnastics, no yoga. He saw it, and it didn’t bother him. The fact that she was a few years older than him had excited
him back then. The fact that it had excited him back then now made him a few years younger.

“What really happened back then?”

She didn’t interrupt her work and didn’t look up. “What are you talking about?”

Henner couldn’t believe that it was supposed to be a serious question, and didn’t reply. But after a while she asked once more, again without interrupting her work or looking up. “What do you want to know?”

He sighed, pulled away from the door, bent down to the boxes of mineral water, took a bottle and left. “Good night, Christiane.”

She finished rinsing, cleaned the stove, wiped the table and let the water drain away. Then she dried, even though everything could have dried by itself. Then she sat down and poured herself another glass. All the rinsing and drying and preparing hadn’t helped. She had to talk to Henner. He was too powerful as a journalist and too important for Jörg’s future for her to allow herself to alienate him. She had to answer his questions. But what was she supposed to tell him? The truth?

She blew out the candles, walked through the hall, up the stairs and across the corridor to Henner’s room. Light shone from under the door. She didn’t knock. She opened the door quietly and walked in. Henner was in bed, his head and pillow resting against the wall, reading by candlelight. He looked up, calm and willing. Yes, she had liked his calm back then and his willingness to get involved with her, with her desires, thoughts, moods. There was something breezy about his willingness—it was open to everybody. Or did she just fear that? She
found the willingness and calm in his face, in his attentive eyes, his big mouth with its narrow lips, his determined chin.

“You’ll ruin your eyesight.”

He lowered the book. “No, that’s one of the false truths that we were taught as children, like oil on burns and charcoal for diarrhea.”

“What are you reading?”

“A novel. About two journalists, male and female, their rivalry, their love, their separation.” He laid the book on the chair beside the bed, on which the candle stood, and laughed. “The author and I were once together, and I want to know whether she wrote about me before someone mentions it.”

“Did she?”

“Yes, but so far no one will notice apart from me.”

Christiane hesitated before she asked. “Can I sit down on the foot of the bed? Then I can lean against the wall.”

Henner nodded and curled up his legs. “Be my guest.” Then he looked at her in attentive silence.

“I wasn’t just saying that. I really don’t know what you want to know.”

He looked at her incredulously. “Christiane!”

But she looked seriously back. “So much happened back then.”

He couldn’t believe what she was saying. Was her experience of that summer so different from his? Wasn’t it the summer of her love, as it was for him?

Since Henner and Jörg had been friends, Jörg had raved about her—there was no better word—his beautiful,
brittle big sister. She was always kind to Henner, but he sensed that she didn’t perceive him as a person, just as her little brother’s friend, who did him good or harm. Until that summer. Until she suddenly took him seriously. He didn’t know why it happened; he was supposed to bring her home in the car, a breakdown turned a fifteen-minute shared drive into half a night together and after that everything was different. They went together to see Marcuse and Dutschke, Deep Purple and José Feliciano, cuddled in the cinema and the swimming pool and made plans for two weeks in Barcelona, a brief summer of anarchy. Then they slept together, and in the middle of it she pulled away from him, stood up, grabbed her clothes and ran from the room. For weeks he tried to get hold of her and talk to her. She made herself unapproachable to him.

Yes, a lot had happened in that summer. But just one thing still left him asking questions more than thirty years later. Couldn’t she see that herself? All right, then. “Why, when we were making love, did you suddenly leap to your feet and run away?”

Christiane closed her eyes. How she would have loved to present him with a lie. Even one that put her in a bad light. Even one that was embarrassing to her. But none occurred to her. So she had to tell the truth, although she knew he wouldn’t understand it. He wouldn’t understand anything. “It was at our place, you remember? In my room, my bed. I thought Jörg was away for the weekend, but he came home on Saturday and suddenly he was standing in the doorway—you weren’t aware of it, but I saw him and saw his face when
he understood and took a step back and closed the door again.”

Henner waited for a while. “And?”

“And? I knew you wouldn’t understand. Neither can I help you with the fact that Jörg and I … For a while he liked to provoke me with that stupid saying of his, ‘And now, sis, what about a little bit of incest,’ but nothing came of it. Still, I betrayed him, when you and I …” Christiane opened her eyes and looked questioningly at Henner. “You don’t understand anything, do you? What mattered to me was only him, like what matters to a mother is only her son. All right, the mother still has her husband but not the way she has her son. Her husband belongs to yesterday, her son belongs to today—the fact that he alone existed for me kept him in the world, and when I betrayed him with you, he fell from the world, and I ran, but I couldn’t catch up with him. It was too late, I couldn’t make amends for what I had done.”

Henner looked at her, saw the sadness in her face; because he didn’t understand her, saw the hope that he might still understand her. He saw the exhaustion of futility; she had made sacrifice after sacrifice for her brother and achieved nothing, prevented nothing, encouraged nothing. He saw, even now, the obstinacy with which she thought she could catch him, with which she ran and ran to be there at the right moment. “For his sake did you … You did have relationships with men, didn’t you? Were you married? Are you divorced?”

She shook her head. “I always attracted my young
colleagues, in the hospital or at conferences, and eventually they realized that I couldn’t be what they were looking for, and I didn’t want to. Then I sometimes had to send them away, because they were too weak to go; you know, the young ones I attracted were often the soft, weak ones, and sometimes they simply drifted away. I’ve met a few of them years later with their young wives—a nurse will have snapped them up, or a medical technician, and they’ve been a little embarrassed and shown me pictures of their children.” Christiane smiled apologetically at Henner. “You mustn’t think it wasn’t lovely with you back then, or that I didn’t like you. But it wasn’t the most important thing. It was never the most important thing. There was no one I liked more than you.”