The Weekend (8 page)

Apart from Jörg, Henner thought, and what she said to comfort him just made him sad. If only she really had loved someone else! But he said nothing and nodded.

She bent down to him, kissed him on the mouth and stood up. “Sleep well.”

“Why did Jörg say it was brave of me to come?”

“He said that?”

“Yes.”

She stood by the bed and looked at him thoughtfully. “I don’t know. Perhaps he said it to everyone. Perhaps he just wanted to say something kind. Don’t worry about it.”

But she couldn’t help worrying about it. She was sure Jörg hadn’t said it to everyone and hadn’t meant it kindly. There was a challenge in his words, a threat. As if the next day weren’t going to be awkward enough!

In the corridor she leaned against the wall. She could have slept standing, she was so tired. The conversation with Henner had taken more out of her than she had expected. Not being understood can be such an effort! But she had had no choice—she had had to say what she had said. And now she had to talk to Jörg.

No light came from his room. But he wasn’t asleep. When she opened the door a crack, he immediately asked with suspicion and defensiveness in his voice: “Hello?”

She slipped into the room. “It’s me.”

“What’s going on?” The matches he reached for fell from the chair to the floor, and he went on looking for them on the floor, cursing.

“I don’t need any light. I just want to know what you meant when you told Henner it was brave of him to come.”

“I need light, though.” He found the matches, lit the candle and sat down on the edge of the bed. “I think it was brave of him to first make me end up in jail and then celebrate my release.”

“He made you end up in jail?”

“Yes, he made me end up in jail. Apart from Dagmar and Wolf he was the only one who knew about Mother’s cabin in the Odenwald, and both of them, Dagmar and Wolf, were arrested long after I was. When I went to fetch guns and money the cops were waiting for me.”

“You can’t know who Dagmar and Wolf talked to.”

He rolled his eyes and spoke with the controlled patience with which adults react to the nonsensical objections of children. “I know they didn’t talk to anyone, OK?”

“What do you plan to do?”

“Nothing. I just want to ask Henner how he felt back then. Everyone wants to know how I’ve felt about this and that—now I want to know too.”

“Ulrich asked you; no one else did. Henner barely spoke.”

“Then he can speak when he answers my question.” Jörg gave his sister a hostile look. “Don’t keep humiliating me. You tried to humiliate me over Ulrich and Marko, and now you want to humiliate me again over Henner. I answer other people’s stupid questions because I understand why they are curious, but in that case they should answer my stupid questions too. I’m not doing anything to Henner. I’m not accusing him of anything. It was war, he decided which side he was on and he acted accordingly. I like him better than those goody-goodies who understand everything and everyone and never get their hands dirty. Useful idiots, but idiots nonetheless. No, I don’t want to have an argument
with him; I just want to know from him how he felt.”

“But there will be an argument.”

He smiled smugly. “Not from me, Tia, not from me.” He got up, lifted his nightshirt a few inches and bowed ironically. “Be not afraid, your Royal Highness, your servant will cause you no shame. Particularly now that he wears your mantle. You’re a treasure.” He took her in his arms.

She laid her head against his chest. “Don’t screw things up with Henner. He has a lot of influence and goodwill, he can help you. Who cares what happened thirty years ago. You have to live for the future, not in the past.” He had called her Tia, and she wanted to call him Kiddo as she used to, and as their mother had done. But she felt that he had turned away from her as she spoke.

He still kept his arms around her, but the intimacy had gone. Then he rubbed her back. “Don’t humiliate me, Christiane. I don’t need anybody, no Henner, no Karin, no Ulrich. I get by with little—that’s something I learned in jail. OK, I dream of holidays that I can’t afford on Social Security. Do you think you’ll take me with you sometime?” He pushed her from him, so that he could look into her face.

She was crying.

When everyone was asleep, Margarete woke up. When Jörg had left the table early she too had said good-bye to the group, gone to the garden house, where she lived alone, and gone to bed. Now she had been awoken by the pains in her left hip. Memories of an accident many years before. They woke her every night.

She turned onto her side, put her feet on the floor and sat up. Her hip hurt just as much sitting as lying. But the pain no longer spread into her left side and her left leg. She knew she should do exercises, stretch her hip, side and leg. Take the tablets she had forgotten before going to sleep.

Instead she looked out the window. The rain had stopped, the sky was clear, the moon shone on the park. It also shone on her feet. They gleamed quite white on the dark floorboards. She took it as a challenge to get up, go downstairs and walk outside the door. Every footstep was difficult. It wasn’t just her hip. Since a doctor had treated her with cortisone she had grown fat. But losing weight would require more discipline than she had or wanted to have.

The house and the nearby village were in darkness. Only the moon and stars gleamed, the constellations overwhelmingly clear and bright, the Milky Way extravagantly generous, the moon contentedly sedate.
Margarete recalled holidays in the south, when, having grown up under a city-bright night sky, she first saw the starry sky in all its glory. Distance has nothing to do with it, she thought. It’s all here.

On slow, cautious footsteps she set off. She wasn’t afraid of nails or broken glass; she herself had removed rubbish and rubble around the house, and kept the paths clear. But walking on bare feet was unfamiliar and made her insecure—what would her feet feel next? Then it made her curious. Would the next thing be smooth earth, firm as stone, but slightly springy? Or gravel, resistant, prickly, tickling? Or a dry branch, breaking with a crack? Margarete’s favorite path through the park was overgrown with grass, and she was already looking forward to the soft stalks beneath her feet.

She walked past the house. When she and Christiane had discovered the property two years before, she had immediately wanted the garden house for herself. Not because it was dry and the house was damp and moldy—she hadn’t known that at the time. The house had too much history for Margarete, too much stale and wasted life. The damp and the mold only later confirmed to her that it was drenched in too much human smell, and spoiled by it. Now Margarete thought she could also sense the vibration of the guests, as if it were oozing from the house. Their good intentions, their sense of duty, their simultaneous involvement and withdrawal, the lies they served up to themselves and one another, their embarrassment, their helplessness. Margarete didn’t look down on any of the guests; over the years she had experienced the whole spectrum of
reactions to any closeness between Jörg and Christiane, and Christiane was her friend. Perhaps, she said to herself, I’m not being fair to the guests. Perhaps I’m seeing something in them that isn’t even there. But we’ll see tomorrow.

By the time Margarete and Christiane met, Jörg’s trial was already a good few years in the past. At first Christiane didn’t explain why she was away for a whole day every two weeks; she had to get hold of something, sort something out, see about something. Those were the months when both women thought they could be more than good friends to each other, and when Christiane got up and left at five in the morning, Margarete stayed in bed, fearful and sad. Later, when they both knew their love was a mistake and stayed in their shared apartment anyway, Christiane came out with the story of herself and Jörg. “I know he’s my brother and not my lover, but back then I thought I could be open with you only when I’d come clean about him. But I couldn’t do it. I didn’t tell him you and I were together, and I didn’t tell you that he existed. Silly, isn’t it?” She smiled, embarrassed. Sometimes she was equally embarrassed when she returned from her visits to Jörg, embarrassed because once again she hadn’t managed to confess to him about her life outside, just as outside she didn’t confess that her feelings and thoughts revolved around him. Other times she came back stressed, because she had experienced Jörg only as a duty, and she was fed up with lying, which was unavoidable because their different lives, based on different truths, needed the bridge of lies. Then again she suffered from the helplessness she felt
with regard to Jörg, the jail, the state and her own situation, even though she was still racing around and around in the same spot like a hamster on a wheel. No, Margarete didn’t look down on any of the guests because they had problems with Christiane’s closeness to Jörg. But she was looking forward to Sunday, when the house would be empty again, and she would be alone.

The grass beneath Margarete’s feet felt even better than she had imagined. Its stalks were damp, slippery and supple and invited her to slide. Once, she overdid it, lost her balance and fell on her back, which took her breath away for a moment. She lay there, her left side hurt, and she laughed. At the cockiness of her footsteps and the pride that comes before a fall. Had she been looking down on her guests? She liked being alone, and she was alone a lot. When she met people, she often found them deeply strange, their behavior incomprehensible, their confidence unsettling. Was what Margarete experienced as the detachment of strangeness really the detachment of arrogance? Her eyes drifting to the branches and the sky, she saw the leaves trembling in the wind, and she saw a star wandering until she realized it was a plane. Then she heard crows, very near and very loud. Had they spotted an enemy and wanted to drive it away, or were they arguing? Did crows wake up at night and argue? If they cawed any longer, they would wake the whole house.

Margarete got to her feet and walked on. She walked to the bench where Ilse had sat writing, and sat down. She had set up the bench here. She had long dreamed of a house by a lake or a river. Now bench and
stream fulfilled the dream of waterside life, and Margarete was content with it. A lake or river she would not have had to herself; the stream she did.

Sometimes she was irritated by how happy she was to withdraw. How rounded, how light, how serene life was alone. Until the escape suddenly made possible two years before the fall of the Berlin Wall, she had been different, more sociable, more open to contact, more needy of it. But she didn’t feel at home in the West, and when she had the chance to return to the East, it too had become strange to her. Her work as a freelance translator put her in touch with an editor every few weeks, and if she couldn’t find something on the Internet she had to do some research in the state library in Berlin, that too every few weeks, and sometimes she would fall into conversation with another user, sometimes even over a coffee. There was the shared flat with Christiane. But since there had been the shared house in the country as well, Margarete often lived alone in the garden house for weeks on end.

Was she, by withdrawing, losing her capacity to empathize with others? She had tried to go along with Christiane in her concern for Jörg, and she had also set about trying to like Jörg and help him. But even though she understood her friend’s relationship with her brother after stories that went on all night, she thought it was sick and understood it only as one understands an illness. She thought Jörg was sick too. Wouldn’t you have to be sick to kill people not out of passion and desperation, but with a clear head and in cold blood? Wouldn’t someone healthy simply have other and better
things to do? Listening to Christiane and her friends talk about the RAF and Germany’s autumn of terror and the pardoning of terrorists, time and again Margarete had the sense of something sick, a subject in which people were talking about a sickness that had afflicted the terrorists back then and was now afflicting the speakers. How can a person in a healthy mental state discuss whether society is made better by showing mercy to murderers? That showed far too much respect for an ugly, repellent sickness. No, Margarete could feel only the empathy that one has for the sick. Was that too little?

The cool of morning came, and Margarete lifted her legs onto the seat, pulled the nightshirt over her feet and wrapped her arms around her knees. Soon it would be day. With the first gleam of sunlight she would get up, go back, lie down again and go back to sleep. No, the empathy that she had for Christiane and Jörg and the guests was not too little. It wasn’t an almsgiving empathy, which one gives while at the same time seeking distance. She looked forward to being alone again. But now the others were there, and she wanted to do what she could to keep the sick from becoming even sicker. At peace with herself, she nodded off, and her head sank to her knees. When cold and pains awoke her, the sky was brightening in the east.

First the sun bathes the crown of the oak in front of the house in bright light. Now the birds that live there, and that have been chattering since the break of dawn, start getting noisy. The blackbird sings so loudly and insistently that whoever is sleeping in the corner room wakes up and can’t get back to sleep. The sunlight wanders down the side of the house facing the road to reach, around the back, the other oak, the garden house, the fruit trees and the stream. It shines too on the shed to the north of the garden house, which Margarete would like to turn into a henhouse with a chicken run. She would like to be woken by the crowing of a cock.

Apart from the birds the dawns are quiet. The bells of the village church don’t start ringing till seven, the main road is far away and the railway line even farther. The farm co-op, whose vehicles used to set off for work in the early morning and from whose stalls the wind used to carry the mooing of the cows, ceased to exist a long time ago; its stalls and sheds are empty, and its land is leased and run by a farm in the next village. The residents of the village who have work don’t have it here; they leave on Sunday evening and come back on Friday evening. On Saturday and Sunday morning they sleep late.