The Weekend (14 page)

“I don’t need any lessons about my responsibility,
not from you or anyone else.” But Jörg wasn’t sure he had brought the unpleasant disagreement to an end, and looked over at Christiane, as if she could.

“Why do you cling to your sister? Cling to the people who want to fight with you. Who don’t betray you, who need you. You …”

“That’s enough. You’re Christiane’s guest,” said Henner, “and if she’s too polite to throw you out, I’m not. Either apologize or go.”

“Leave it, Henner,” said Christiane. “Marko thinks I betrayed the revolution—it’s been an issue between us for ages.”

“What?” Jörg’s face and the tone of his voice were once again filled with suspicion and resistance. “Christiane betrayed the revolution?”

“The revolution, the revolution.” Marko waved his hand. “Your sister betrayed you. She told the cops they could catch you at the cabin in the forest.”

“We’ve done that one. No one betrayed Jörg. When I brought him a letter at the cabin, the police must have followed me.”

Marko grew furious. “That’s not why Christiane poured coffee over you. She was afraid you would say you didn’t betray Jörg. That Jörg would put two and two together and work out that if it wasn’t you, only she could have betrayed him. I know she meant well, but don’t you understand, Jörg? They all mean well, but they’re degrading you. They’re betraying what’s great about you. If you do what they tell you, then your life was nothing and you’re nobody.”

Confused, Jörg looked from Marko to Henner to
Christiane. Karin, who was sitting next to him that evening, put her hand on his shoulder. “Don’t let them drive you mad. Marko is fighting for the press declaration, he’s fighting tooth and nail. You want to think about it, and you have every right. And anyway, the press declaration isn’t due out until tomorrow—or have you overruled Jörg and put it out today?” She looked seriously at Marko. He blushed and stammered and assured her that he hadn’t done anything yet.

“I hope it’s just my severe expression that’s making you blush.”

Karin went on talking. “You think Jörg is nothing if he isn’t what he wanted to become? You think everyone who doesn’t fulfill his hopes is nothing? Few people, in that case, are anything. I don’t know anyone whose life has turned out as he dreamed it would.”

“So what did you want to be? I thought when you didn’t have a pope, bishop was as high as you got.” Andreas couldn’t help it—Karin got on his nerves.

Eberhard laughed. “Sometimes something you haven’t even dreamed of falls into your lap. That doesn’t alter the fact that most dreams come to nothing. I’m the oldest one here, and even I don’t know anyone who has realized his dreams. It doesn’t mean life is pointless; your wife can be nice even if she isn’t your great passion, your house can be beautiful even if it isn’t surrounded by trees, and your job can be respectable and rewarding even if it doesn’t change the world. Anything can be meaningful and still not be the way you once dreamed it. No reason for disappointment, and no grounds for forcing anything to happen.”

“No reason for disappointment?” Marko grimaced scornfully. “Are you trying to make everything sound lovely?”

Henner took Margarete’s hand under the tablecloth and pressed it. She smiled at him and pressed his hand
back. “No,” she said, “no reason for disappointment. We live in exile. What we were and wanted to remain and were perhaps destined to become, we lose. Instead we find something else. Even if we think we’ve found what we were looking for, in truth it’s something else.” She pressed Henner’s hand again. “I don’t want to argue about words. If you think it’s a reason for disappointment, I can understand that. But that’s how things are. Unless …” Margarete smiled. “Perhaps that’s what makes a terrorist. He can’t bear living in exile. He wants to bomb his way to his dream of home.”

“His dream … Jörg wasn’t fighting for his dream, he was fighting for a better world.”

Dorle laughed out loud. “ ‘Fighting for peace is like fucking for virginity,’ I once read somewhere. You and your fighting!”

“I like the image. My labs and you two, the women in my life, are my exile. As a child I dreamed of being a great explorer, the first to cross a desert or a jungle, but wherever I went someone had been there before. Later I wanted to be a great lover, like Romeo with Juliet or Paolo with Francesca. That came to nothing too, but I have you and my labs—what else can a man want!” Ulrich blew his wife a kiss with his left hand, and one to his daughter with his right.

“Is this the moment of truth?” Andreas looked around at everyone. “I wanted to be the lawyer of the revolution, not the legal theorist, but a practitioner who would make revolutionary justice a reality. That came to nothing too, thank God, and I don’t want to go back to the home of that dream.”

“My dream came late. Or should I say: it took me a long time to realize that I was living in exile. That I didn’t really want to teach, I wanted to write. That I had had enough of the students, whom I would have happily taught something if they’d wanted me to tell them anything, but they wanted nothing from me; I was always the one who wanted something from them. No, I want to get out of my exile and back to my home. I want to live with people and stories that I make up. I want to write well, but if it’s only pulp in the end, that’s OK too. I want to sit by the window looking out over the plain and write, from dawn till dusk, with one cat lying on the desk and the other at my feet.”

My, my, that Ilse. The others were startled; they had never seen Ilse like that before. She was glowing again, not blond and pretty, but confident and burning for action. And it was infectious—the others grew more cheerful. One after the other they talked about what they had once dreamed and what exile they had been sent to and how they had been reconciled with it. Even Marko joined in; he had wanted to be a driving force, and had instead found himself in the exile of the revolutionary struggle. Jörg said nothing until the end. “The way you’re talking, prison was the exile I learned to live in. But as to being reconciled—no, I’m not reconciled with it.”

“OK.” Ulrich tried to placate him. “Apart from being reconciled to exile, we still have the memory of our dream and our attempts to turn it into reality. Back then I hiked from the North Sea to the Mediterranean—you can laugh, but it’s still two and a half thousand
kilometers and it took me more than six months. I didn’t manage the Sahara or the Amazon, but European hiking trail Number One wasn’t bad, and I’ll never forget climbing the last few kilometers of the Gotthard Pass after a damp night in the tent and then climbing down to Italy in bright sunshine.”

And by saying this he opened up a round of remember-the-time to follow on the round of dreams. You remember the time we put up the tent on the way to the meeting in Grenoble and the rain washed us down the slope? The time we cooked Indian food at the meeting in Offenburg and everyone got the shits? The time Doris won the Miss University competition and read from the
Communist Manifesto?
The time Gernot, who had no interest in politics and went along to the Vietnam demonstration only because he fancied Erica, suddenly shouted, “Yanks out of the U.S.A.”? Everyone remembered a harmless event or two.

They waited awhile before lighting the candles; the gloom allowed the past to slip cozily into the present, like night into day. The memories were of a time that was gone and didn’t overshadow the present. But the memories were vivid, and they made the friends feel both old and young. That feeling was cozy too. When Christiane finally lit the candles and they saw one another clearly again, she was happy to see in the old faces of the others the young faces they had come across in their memories. We store our youth within us, we can go back to it and find ourselves in it, but it is past—melancholy filled their hearts, and sympathy, for one another and for themselves. Ulrich hadn’t just brought a
case of champagne, he’d brought a case of claret as well, and they clinked glasses to old friends and old times and watched the flickering of the candlelight in the red wine, as one watches the waves coming in on the water or the darting flames in the fireplace.

Again and again more events occurred to them. You remember the time we let rats out in Professor Ratenberg’s lecture? The time we switched off the loudspeakers at the President’s speech? The time we blocked the streetcar rails with chisels in protest against the fare increases? The time we hung the poster about solitary confinement from the bridge over the highway? And when the police took it down, how we sprayed the words on the concrete of the bridge? The time we borrowed road signs from the courtyard of the highway department and closed off the main road so that we could hold a demonstration? Karin remembered that one, and as she said it she laughed with embarrassment. She was a little uneasy about it, but once again she felt the thrill of the forbidden that she had felt when they broke into the courtyard of the highway department, the excitement of the atmosphere with night and rain and the flitting flashlight, the good feeling of solidarity.

“Yes,” said Jörg. “That business with the road signs was a good one. We were able to use it again in our summer kidnapping.”

Gerd Schwarz burst out laughing. “Remember the time, remember the time …” He hadn’t spoken until now and the others hadn’t been aware of him. No memories were expected of him, but Marko and Dorle, of whom none were expected either, had intervened with occasional amazed or derisive remarks. Gerd Schwarz had sat there in silence all evening. Now he spoke, his articulation excessively clear, his tone acrimonious.

“In the little town where I grew up, I would play cards in the pub with my friends every few weeks. One evening I learned that the five old men at the locals’ table had all been in the SS. I sat down at the next table and pricked up my ears. Remember the time, remember the time—it was like that all evening. Don’t you remember the time we beat up the Jews in Wilna and shot the Poles in Warsaw, obviously, but: remember the time we drank champagne in Warsaw and fucked the Polish girls in Wilna. And remember the time the barber shaved the old men with the long beards, ha-ha? You’re exactly the same. What about: remember the time you shot that woman during the bank robbery? Or the policeman at the border? Or the head of the bank? Or the association president? OK, we don’t know whether that one was you or someone else. How about that, Dad? Don’t you want to tell your son if it was you?”

Distressed, Jörg looked at his son. “I …”

“Yes?”

“I don’t remember.”

“You don’t remember? You don’t remember whether you shot him or someone else did?” He laughed again. “You really don’t remember, and the old men didn’t remember either, that they had beaten and shot and gassed the Jews.”

How had they failed to notice? The others couldn’t believe it. Now they saw the resemblance between father and son, his height, his angular face, the shape of his eyes. Christiane couldn’t stop staring at the young man, whom she had last seen when he was two, and all she knew about him was that his name was Ferdinand Bartholomäus, after Ferdinando Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, that he had grown up with his grandparents after his mother’s suicide and that he was studying in Switzerland. Art history? Or had that been part of the trick to get himself invited into the house?

Ferdinand looked contemptuously at his father. “You don’t remember—since when? When did you forget? Or repress it? Or when did amnesia come like a blow to the head and, bang, wipe it out? Or did it come immediately after he died? Or did you drink so much that you murdered him in a fog of booze? I know them all, the children of the wife and the policeman and the head of the bank and the president. They want to know what you were thinking, and the president’s son finally wants to know what you did, what you all did, which of you murdered his father. Do you understand that?”

Jörg had frozen under his son’s contempt. He
looked at him with eyes wide and mouth half open, unable to think, unable to speak.

“You are as incapable of truth and grief as the Nazis were. You’re not one jot better—not when you murdered people who had done nothing to you, and not later on when you failed to understand what you had done. You got worked up about your parents’ generation, the generation of murderers, but you turned out exactly the same. You could have known what it meant to be the child of murderers, and you became a murderer-father, my murderer-father. The way you look and speak, you don’t feel even slightly sorry about what you’ve done. You’re only sorry that things went wrong and you were caught and put in jail. You don’t feel sorry for anyone else, you just feel sorry for yourself.”

Jörg looked stupid as he sat there frozen. As if he didn’t understand what was being said to him, only that it was terrible. It wanted to smash all his explanations and justifications, it wanted to destroy him. And he couldn’t argue with his accuser. He saw no common ground on which he could meet him, on which he could defeat him. He could only hope that the terrible storm would pass. But he feared this was a false hope. That this storm would stay and only wear itself out when everything was destroyed. So he had to try to protect and defend himself. Somehow. “I don’t have to listen to that. I’ve paid for everything.”

“You’re right there. You don’t have to listen to anything I say. You’ve never listened to anything I’ve said. You can get up and escape to your room or into the park, and I won’t come running after you. But don’t tell
me you’ve paid for everything. Not even twenty-four years for four murders? Is one life worth just six years? You haven’t paid for what you did—you’ve forgiven yourself for it. Presumably even before you did it. But only the others can forgive you. And they don’t.”

It’s appalling, Henner thought. The son sitting in judgment over his father. The son in the right and the father in the wrong. The son escaping into a rant, the father escaping into defiance. The son who won’t admit his pain, the father who won’t admit his helplessness. How is that supposed to work? What are they both supposed to do? What are we supposed to do? Karin was sitting opposite him, and he could see that she too was appalled by what was happening in front of her, and that she didn’t know what was to be done either. Then she tried anyway. “I can imagine …”