The Weekend by Bernhard Schlink

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 betterthings 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.

Saturday

Sixteen
    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.
    The dawns are quiet, and they are melancholy—likethe noontimes and evenings, like the mornings and the afternoons. They are melancholy not only in autumn and winter, but also in spring and summer. It’s the melancholy of the high sky and the wide, empty land. The eye finds no purchase among the trees, the church tower, the electricity supply with its masts and cables. It finds no mountains in the distance and no city nearby, nothing to set boundaries and create a space. The eye