The Weekend (6 page)
Authors: Bernhard Schlink
And he was enjoying it. It wasn’t just the wine that loosened his tongue, turned his face red and freed his gestures. It wasn’t just the warm candlelight that softened his wrinkles. What brought him to life was being at the center of things and sensing how important, how precious he was to Christiane and Marko. It rejuvenated him. So much so that he kept spurring them both not to give up their fight over him.
“He’s still little more than a child,” Jörg said soothingly to Christiane, who accused Marko of nearly costing Jörg his pardon with his welcome address at the conference on violence, in response to which Marko had to present himself as the young but alert revolutionary who had every right to woo Jörg.
“You would like to incapacitate me,” Jörg said reproachfully to Christiane, who didn’t want him to meet the organizers of the conference, whereupon she had to assure him how reflective and superior she thought he was.
Marko wouldn’t let go. “I don’t want you to get involved with everything and everyone. But we need you. We don’t know how to fight the system. We argue and argue, and sometimes a few of us organize an action, and there’s a fire outside the state attorney’s office or an alarm in the station, and the trains are late, but that’s kids’ stuff. If we joined forces with our Muslim comrades we could really get things going. They with their power and we with what we know about this country—together we could really strike where it hurts. But then along come people who say, Don’t do it
with them, we might as well be working with the far right; and a few say, exactly, why not work with them, and then there are the old discussions you know so well, whether it should be violence against people or against property or no violence at all—we need someone with authority. The other RAF people ate humble pie and wept and repented and apologized—not you. You have no idea what kind of authority you have.”
Jörg shook his head. But only because he wanted to hear more: about how steadfast he had been in jail and about the admiration of the young members and his authority over them and his responsibility. Yes, Marko assured him, his authority meant responsibility, and he couldn’t leave the young ones in the lurch.
How could Christiane respond to that? By saying he should take his time. “You haven’t been out of jail for twenty-four hours and …”
“Take his time,” sneered Marko. “Take his time? He’s had to take his time for twenty-three years. He has held out for twenty-three years to become the model that he is now. You’d have sent Nelson Mandela from Robben Island to the Bavarian mountains for a spring holiday—am I right?”
Nelson Mandela? Ilse looked at Jörg—he gave a slightly embarrassed smile, but didn’t protest. Was his hunger for recognition so great? How starved would I be after twenty-three years? Could I resist Marko? He was good. When he looked straight at Jörg with his open face, his blue eyes, it was as if he were trustingly placing his youth at Jörg’s feet. She wondered whether or not Jörg believed in a revival of the struggle against
the system, a collaboration with Al Qaeda and himself as a role model—he believed in Marko’s admiration, and believed that Marko was not alone in it.
“Don’t you remember how often you used to talk about your longing for nature? For forests and meadows, the young greenery in spring and the colors in autumn, the smell of freshly mown grass and rotting leaves? And your longing for the sea—sometimes you said that after your release you would walk along the beach and look at the waves until you had the evenness of the waves inside you. And sometimes you dreamed of a big orchard, under which you would lie on a lawn chair in the spring, wrapped in a blanket, protected against the cold—don’t let them take that dream away!”
With Marko at the table, Jörg’s longing and dreams were embarrassing to him. “I was desperate at the time, Christiane. I see more clearly now that I have a twofold responsibility, not just to me, but to those who believe in me. But the storm has passed, and I would like to walk another little way with you, through the forest and across the meadow.” He smiled. “Shall we?”
And again Christiane was immediately reconciled. She had been oversensitive. Jörg had not revealed to Marko his longing for nature, which he had shared with her. She got to her feet before Jörg did so, and when he too was standing, she took his arm and clung to him like a lover.
“Do we need a flashlight?”
“No, I know all the paths.”
“I’m sure you’ll all be in bed when we get back. Empty the bottle, and sleep well.” Jörg waved with his left
hand and put his right around Christiane’s waist. They opened both wings of the door to the garden, stepped onto the terrace and were swallowed by the night.
“Well, then.” Marko filled Ilse’s glass and his own from what was left in the bottle. “Want one?” He offered her a cigarette.
“No thanks.”
Marko took his time lighting his cigarette. “You looked at me all evening as if you were wondering whether I really believed what I said. Or whether I was in my right mind. Believe me, I’m in my right mind, and I believe what I say. On the other hand I wonder whether you and your kind understand what’s happening to the world. You probably think September Eleventh was just some crazy Muslim affair. No, without September Eleventh none of the good things that have happened over the past few years would have happened. The new attentiveness to the Palestinians, still the key to peace in the Middle East, and to the Muslims, still a quarter of the world’s population, the new sensitivity to the threats in the world, from the economic to the ecological, the realization that exploitation has a price that is always rising—sometimes the world needs a shock to come to its senses. Like people—after having his first heart attack, my father is at last living as sensibly as he should always have lived. With some people it takes two or three.”
“Some die of heart attacks.”
Marko stubbed out his half-smoked cigarette, drained his glass and got to his feet. “Ah, Ilse—that’s your name, Ilse?—if anyone dies of a heart attack today, it’s their own fault. Sleep well.”
In her room Ilse sat in the dark for a while before lighting the candle and opening her notebook.
“He’s the best”—she couldn’t get Jörg’s remark about Jan out of her head. Did he mean a different Jan? If he meant their mutual friend, “he’s the best” sat ill with Jörg’s words at the funeral, and would have been peculiar enough. “He’s the best” didn’t fit at all. Unless their mutual friend Jan really hadn’t killed himself back then, but escaped his old life to start a new one, a life as a terrorist, which he was still living today. Then Jörg’s contempt at the funeral had been only playacting and his admiration today was genuine. And then Jan had earned the admiration: a terrorist who hadn’t allowed himself to be caught.
Ilse remembered all her research in those days and imagined how Jan had deceived them all. He must have bribed or blackmailed the undertakers. The undertakers had picked him up in France, brought him to Germany, put him in a coffin and buried him. He was also able to get hold of the other corpse, which the French pathologist had found on the table, the one on which he had performed the autopsy. That the corpse had been presented to him in sweatshirt and jeans rather than a suit was a glitch—perhaps Jan had forgotten to bring a second
suit. Someone else must have helped Jan: a doctor, or a nurse.
The French police had received an anonymous phone call back then. It was six o’clock, after a cold night, the fresh morning of a sunny spring day. A policeman rode his motorbike to the rocky coast and found the car parked in the given place. A
2
CV—out of a mixture of nostalgia and snobbery Jan refused himself a Mercedes like the ones driven by his friends at his firm. The engine had used up all the gas and hadn’t been running for a while, the windows were clear, and the policeman could clearly see Jan, leaning back and against the window, eyes and mouth open, hands in his lap. The policeman could also see what had happened; a tube led from the exhaust pipe to the passenger side and through the carefully sealed window into the car. He opened the door, and Jan slipped from the seat, out of the car and onto the ground. He looked as dead as only a dead person could look, and felt like one too: cold skin, greenish color, no breath. The policeman informed headquarters and called an ambulance and took photographs until it arrived: the car, the tube on the exhaust pipe, the tube at the window, the rock on the accelerator, Jan on the ground beside the car, Jan’s face from above and from the front and from the side.
Ilse and Ulla had looked at them again and again. And they had, when they were in Normandy, heard the story from the policeman. His name was Jacques Beaume, he had three children, he was very sympathetic and willing to tell the story in all its details and patiently
answer questions. Wasn’t it suspicious that the caller had remained anonymous? No, it was Sunday, and the caller didn’t want to waste his time as a witness. Why had a second ambulance come after the first? The emergency services are all switched to the police frequency, and sometimes one snatched another’s mission away. Jacques Beaume sat with Ilse and Ulla, first at the police station and then in the café, until they could imagine everything.
Jan leans against the car and waits until the tank is empty. The night is dark. The clouds shroud moon and stars and reflect no light—there is no town for miles around. In the distance Jan makes out the light of a lighthouse, no brighter than a bright star, with a little beam of light regularly flashing and vanishing
.
A vicar’s son, interested in theology as a schoolboy and philosophy as a student, dedicated throughout his life to doing what is right—Jan’s thoughts pass from the starry sky that he can’t see, to the moral law that he can’t feel, to the step that he will take: leaving wife and children. And as in the past weeks when he thought about it, he again consoles himself with the thought that they will never learn about what he is doing. That he will be dead to them. That anyone who is dead can only be mourned. That anyone who kills himself cannot be reproached, only pitied. That he gives those left behind not the pain of abandonment but the pain of having someone torn from them, a pain caused not by people but by death, not a pain that we resist but one that we have learned to accept. And he goes on thinking about his new life
and the power he will have in it, the power of the phantom whose identity no one knows and whose trail leads nowhere. His deeds can be all the bolder. He will become part of the story, first as someone anonymous, and later perhaps with his true identity when he reveals who has forced the system to its knees and wrested justice from it. From the murky business whose mandate his firm imposed upon him, and whose documents he destroyed, he has already leeched a million
.
Jan shivers, even though the softly ticking, gently vibrating car gives off warmth. He knows that he will soon feel much colder
.
The engine coughs and dies. But the night isn’t quiet. The sea’s waves come rushing in, break crashing against the cliffs and, where they take sand and gravel with them, run hissing back to the sea. Sometimes a gull cries. Jan looks at his watch. It’s three o’clock; the others will be here any minute. Or what if only one comes?
Then Jan hears the car. He hears it getting louder as it drives over the brow of a hill, then he sometimes sees the headlights, switched to parking, and then it’s quieter, when it goes into a dip. Where the path leads off the country road and toward the cliffs, it stops. Jan hears a car door slam. So only one of them has come
.
The French comrades have sent a woman. She’s friendly, matter-of-fact, succinct. “You know if you’re unlucky you’ll die?”
“Yes.” Jan won’t die. He knows it
.
“You have to show me the vein in your arm.”
Jan takes off his jacket and lays it on the car roof, then unbuttons his shirtsleeve and pushes it up. With an encouraging gesture she gives him a flashlight. He grits his teeth and catches her in the beam. She takes out a syringe. “Valium first.” He looks away as she pricks his vein. Even before she’s finished, he looks. She doesn’t take very long; the syringe is unusually large. Then the woman is finished and presses cotton wool to the prick. “Now the Cardiogreen.” No one had mentioned that. But the second injection happens quickly
.
Jan buttons up his sleeve, puts on his jacket and sits down in the car. She runs the beam of the flashlight across the ground and makes sure that no cotton wool, none of the packaging of the syringe or the ampoule has fallen. She stands in the open door and tells him what he is to do next. “In fifteen minutes you’ll be asleep. At six you will be so cold, your breathing so shallow, that the police, if they aren’t very accurate, will think you’re dead. In fact you’ll hardly be breathing. Why should the police be very precise? They’ll call the ambulance.” She laughs. “The Cardiogreen was my idea. It makes really lovely corpses.” She lifts his increasingly heavy eyelids, shines the flashlight into his eyes and strokes his cheek. “At half past six, quarter to seven, our ambulance will collect you
. Bonne chance!”
She closes the door and goes
.
Suddenly he is frightened. Suddenly something that is only supposed to look like death feels like real death. His life is ending, and what comes after is no
longer his life, but someone else’s. If it comes—Jan no longer knows that he isn’t going to die. You can’t play with death. It won’t be joked with. It …
Full of the terror of death, Jan loses consciousness
.
Ilse snapped her notebook shut. She would have liked to drink one more glass of red wine, but she was afraid of the silent, dark house and didn’t dare go to the kitchen. When she was lying in bed she was afraid of going to sleep, as if by sleeping she were cavorting on the face of death. Or do we actually do that every time we go to sleep? And what about taking one’s leave? When we die for others and at the same time want to go on living?
Then she too had fallen asleep.
