The Weekend (13 page)

Ilse got to her feet and jumped from boat to land. No, it hadn’t been hard. The first murder had been hard, even though Jan had made it easy for himself by means of a kind of intoxication. With the first murder Jan had renounced the social contract according to which we don’t kill other people. What could hold him back after that?

When Karin got out of the car in the driveway, a young man came up to her and asked, “Bishop?”

She studied him kindly, as she had become accustomed to doing to everyone who approached her when she was a vicar. He was tall, he had a clear face, an open expression, and with his beige trousers, light blue shirt and dark blue jacket over his arm, he made a tidy, polite impression. “Yes?”

“I’d like to ask you to put in a good word for me. You are a guest here, aren’t you, and I’d like to take a walk through the house and the park. I’m writing a paper on the little manor houses around here, and happened upon this one today. I sit in archives during the week, and on the weekend I drive across the country and look at what I’ve been reading about. Sometimes I don’t find it, but sometimes I come across something there isn’t anything to read about. I haven’t read anything about this house.”

“I can introduce you to the owners.”

“That would be kind of you. You won’t remember me. Nineteen years ago, in St. Matthäi, you confirmed my friend Frank Thorsten and shook my hand when I was leaving the church.”

“No, I don’t remember you or your friend. You’re
studying art history?” She walked up to the house and he walked along beside her.

“I’ve nearly finished. Forgive me, I haven’t introduced myself. Gerd Schwarz.”

They found Christiane in the kitchen with Ulrich’s daughter. Christiane was suspicious at first, then relieved. So this was the young man who’d been looking around in the neighborhood. She instructed Karin about the state of the meat roasting in the oven and walked through the house with Gerd Schwarz. Did she know who had built the house? It reminded him of the houses built by Karl Magnus Bauerfend in the 1760s and ’70s. The wide entrance hall, the stairs to the second floor made of wood rather than, as was customary at the time, stone, the two lost corner rooms that could be reached only through the drawing room—it all bore his signature. Had she checked whether the ceiling and the corners in the drawing room were painted under the white plaster? Bauerfeind had liked to have the corners painted with green foliage, and the ceiling with a light blue sky with delicate clouds. Gerd Schwarz was a good talker, and he was also a good listener. Christiane’s concerns about the mildew in the walls and the worms in the wood, about the roof, the pipes, government subsidies for repair—he had an attentive and sympathetic ear for everything. In the park she showed him the dip that she wanted to fill again with water from the stream. “Where the pond was, there was also a little island.” He sought and found in the middle of the dip a place that was slightly raised, and on it two stones that might once
have supported a bench. He was so benignly modest about everything, and Christiane was soon so trusting that she suggested he go on looking around on his own. She had to go back into the kitchen.

He wasn’t alone for long. Andreas, whom Christiane had told about Gerd Schwarz, found him and wasn’t taken in by his politeness or his modesty. “Have you got a mobile phone? Can I see it?” When Gerd Schwarz, baffled, gave him the phone, Andreas put it in his pocket. “You’ll get it back when you leave. We don’t want people making phone calls from here.”

Gerd Schwarz asked with friendly irony, “Because of the radiation?”

Andreas gave a noncommittally affirmative shrug, and remained by Gerd Schwarz’s side. When they had walked the length of the park and were on their way back to the house, Jörg came out of the drawing room onto the terrace. He stopped, blinked in the late sunlight and was unmistakably the person whose picture had appeared in every newspaper and on every television channel over the past few weeks. The fact that Gerd Schwarz didn’t seem to recognize him, and showed no astonishment, no curiosity, made Andreas highly suspicious. But Christiane overruled him. “Stay awhile!” Gerd Schwarz was happy to stay.

If this new guest had wormed his way in, Andreas had no hope of silencing him with threats of legal action. So if a word was spoken out of place, they had to keep him there until they could be sure he wasn’t going to do any damage.

“How was your outing?” Christiane asked the two
couples and Andreas, and Ingeborg told her about the ruined monastery and the concert rehearsal that they had listened to, which had impressed them. “Then we sat by the lake and got a bit drunk and sleepy and happy, until those three started arguing. The leftist project—they got worked up about it, as if anyone today were still interested.”

“No, my darling.” Ulrich spoke with deliberate patience. “We know no one’s still interested. We were arguing about the question of what killed off the leftist project.” He turned to Andreas. “You and I can agree. It was both: disenfranchisement in the East, terrorism in the West. Both finished off the leftist project. But what you’re saying, Karin … However lovely advances in feminism and commitment to the environment might be—the fact that we sort our rubbish and have a Christian Democrat woman chancellor has nothing to do with the leftist project.”

Jörg had to control himself to let Ulrich finish. “Are you attacking me again? Was I one of the people who brought the leftist project down? The project you worked on in your dental labs, and you in your legal office? What kind of self-righteous …” He choked on the word
assholes
but couldn’t find anything else. “The leftist project means first and foremost that man can resist the power of the state, that he can break it rather than being broken by it. We have demonstrated that with our hunger strikes and our suicides and our …”

“Murders. That the power of the state doesn’t accomplish anything any longer is apparent in all the globally operating businesses that pay no taxes, because
where it should be paying taxes it’s making losses and where it’s making profits it doesn’t have to pay any taxes anyway. You don’t need murders or terrorists to do that.”

Gerd Schwarz listened with interest. If he hadn’t immediately recognized Jörg, wouldn’t he realize now who he was dealing with? Was it possible that he had simply heard nothing about the hype surrounding Jörg’s pardon? Then Andreas reflected that the new guest, if he had recognized Jörg by now, couldn’t possibly blurt it out. No grounds for suspicion, then? A harmless art historian who takes little interest in current events?

Christiane looked helplessly around at the group. In a moment Jörg would once again ask Henner what it felt like to have betrayed him back then, and to be celebrating his release now. And here it came. “You didn’t answer my question. You put me in prison back then and now you’re celebrating my release from prison—how does that feel?”

Henner was standing next to Margarete, not arm in arm, but hip to hip. He took a deep breath. “Yes, I thought you would use the cabin as a hiding place or a store. I once drove to the cabin and dropped off a letter there for you. Perhaps the police followed me—I wasn’t aware of it. Did you find the letter?”

“A letter from you?” Jörg was confused. “No, I didn’t find a letter from you. But how could I have—the cops arrested me right away. Did you mention the letter when I was sentenced and you visited me?”

“No idea. All I remember is that you didn’t talk to
me, you just insulted me. As a ‘half-assed dilettante’—I remember that, because I particularly disliked the ‘half-assed’ bit. I never worked out what it was supposed to mean.”

“Back then I wasn’t keen to talk to the person who’d just betrayed me. So you didn’t …” Jörg shook his head.

“You sound disappointed. Would you rather your old friend the bourgeois dilettante had betrayed you?”

“I’d rather you’d … No, I wouldn’t rather anything of the sort. What troubles me is the fact that … If the police kept you under surveillance and followed you, who didn’t they keep under surveillance? When had we last seen each other? It was years before I went into hiding. You weren’t really a promising contact, and even so the police …” Jörg didn’t sound so much disappointed as suspicious.

“Second-guessing the police was never your strong point. But what do I know—perhaps another of your group brought something to the hiding place or collected something from it, and the police were following him, not me. Don’t you think it’s time for an aperitif?”

“Just one moment!” Ulrich raised his arms. “I brought a case of champagne to celebrate and, because there’s no electricity, I put it in the stream to cool down. I’ll be right back.”

Christiane brought glasses, Dorle olives and cubes of cheese, Andreas and Gerd Schwarz arranged the chairs in a circle and Ilse picked thirteen daisies, one for each of them.

Jörg walked over to Henner, who was standing apart from the others with Margarete, and asked, “What was in the letter?”

“Your ex-wife had killed herself—I thought you should know.”

“Oh.” Jörg was still suspicious. But Henner had calculated correctly. Eva Maria had committed suicide shortly before Jörg’s arrest. When Jörg had worked out that this was correct, he said, “Oh,” again and walked off to one side.

“You lie very well,” Margarete said to Henner. “So well that I find it weird, even if you lie only for good ends. Do you lie only for good ends?”

Henner looked sadly at Margarete. “I lied so well because back then I actually did consider driving to the cabin and dropping off a letter there. I don’t know if she killed herself because of him; her parents claimed as much, but then again they had rejected Jörg from the start. At any rate, Eva Maria would have had a happier life if he hadn’t become a terrorist.”

“But you didn’t do it.”

“No. It wouldn’t have helped. Admittedly I couldn’t have known that at the time. But I was able to think it.” He waited to see if Margarete would say anything. She looked at him with dubious tolerance. “You’re right. It wasn’t important enough to me. It would have been nice if it had been important enough to me, if I’d written a letter and brought it to the cabin. It would have been nice.”

Christiane had shed her anxiety. She was enjoying the champagne, enjoying her friends, and turned to Jörg once more with her familiar, loving attentiveness. After the champagne there was dinner, more formal and delicious than the previous evening, with a white tablecloth, her grandmother’s dishes and cutlery and silver candles, with four courses and, as a highlight, Rhineland Sauerbraten, Jörg’s favorite dish.

Jörg talked of the time he had spent working in the prison kitchen. “The chef had been a cook in a three-star restaurant—at least that’s what he said, and we believed him—until he got fed up working late and opted for the regular working hours of public service. He had dozens of recipes stored in his computer, with calories and vitamins and minerals and who knows what else, and a program that he used to turn them into the menu for the week. The recipes were standard fare, from Königsberger Klopsen with caper sauce to Nuremberg roasted bratwurst with sauerkraut, and everyone was always complaining about the boring food. But heaven forbid that he cook anything else, anything special—then the complaints really came pouring in. And even though he knew that, the three-star chef in him sometimes came out and he would insist on serving us something Thai or Moroccan.”

Karin thought that was interesting. “I feel exactly like the prisoners. The dinner dates and invitations that are part of the job, and where the food is always excellent, are torture for me. I’d much rather go out and get a currywurst and fries, sit at my desk, read the paper and shovel it down. I could do that day after day. But all kinds of things happen to me every day, so the more boring the food, the more restorative it is. Isn’t food the highlight of the prison day?”

“It certainly is. But a highlight isn’t necessarily the same as something exciting. The highlight represents everything that you wistfully remember and miss: the normality of life outside, your childhood, when the world was still all right, if not at your parents’ house, then at your grandparents’, the woman who was kind to you—food is always part of it, something constant and dependable. It’s much the same with the books that are read in jail. In the prison library, I …”

Ilse looked at Jörg and thought of Jan. How happy Jörg was! Having an everyday conversation, having something to say, winning people’s attention for his experiences and observations, here and there knowing more than the person he was talking to—it did him good. Had his longing for the everyday only grown in prison? Or had it also been dormant during the years outside the law, waiting to be awoken? Did Jan have it too?

Christiane was also struck by how changed Jörg was. No suspicion, no caution, no detachment. He involved himself in the conversation. Were his strange
remarks about revolution and murder and regret only a clumsy reaction that he produced when he felt he was under attack? Was it wrong to let him deliver lectures and give interviews and appear on talk shows? Because it would lead to more attacks? And for the same reason, that press declaration, legally hedged about as it was—was it another mistake?

As if on cue, Marko appeared. She saw that he had been successful and had found a lawyer who considered the press declaration to be sound. He was so enthusiastic about his success, his project, himself, that he couldn’t wait to be alone with Jörg. He had to interrupt all the others and read them what Jörg was going to give the press on Sunday.

“We’ve already sorted that one out,” Andreas said coolly. “Jörg isn’t giving a press declaration.”

“I’ve talked to a lawyer who confirmed that Jörg won’t be running any risks.”

“I’m still Jörg’s lawyer.”

“This isn’t a decision for his lawyer. It’s one he has to make himself.”

Jörg smarted under the subject at hand, the argument and the stares directed at him by the others. He waved his hands and said at last, “I’ll have to think.”

“Think?” Marko was furious. “What about your responsibility to the people who believe in you, who are waiting for you? Have you forgotten them again? Are you going to stand in front of the world as the one whose spirit was broken, the one who climbed down?”