The Weekend by Bernhard Schlink Page A

loses itself. The visitor who lets his eye wander loses himself along with it, and it saddens him and is at the same time so compelling that he is seized by the longing to merge with it. Simply to lose himself.
    Anyone who was born and bred here, and who sets about taking a job and founding a family, has to make his mind up. Stay or go. Staying small under this sky and in this void or growing at the cost of a life away from home. Even those who do not consciously make the decision sense that if they stay, their lives will be small even before they have really begun, and that if they leave, they are leaving behind not just a place but a life. A life whose small format is full of beauty—that’s why the visitors come back and buy themselves a house or a farm and yield to the desire to lose during the weekend. The fact that the small format is also full of ugliness doesn’t bother them. They don’t suffer from the monotony, they don’t feel that whatever they do they might equally well not do, they don’t get tired, they don’t get angry, they don’t lose themselves in alcohol.
    And it was ever thus. There were always those who stayed, those who left and those who lived partly in the big city and partly in the country. It was always a matterof merging or leaving, and some who could afford it always managed to enjoy the melancholy without succumbing to it. Margarete was irritated by talk of the decline of the wide, empty land between the big city and the sea. She didn’t think things were better under socialism or, as far as she could tell, under the rule of the Junkers. She didn’t believe political and social systems were important. The melancholy was important. It more than anything else informed the land and the people.
    Margarete had grown up in a neighboring small town and had left for Berlin, planning never to return. To learn foreign languages, travel far away and stay far away. But in the end she had moved back here, at first only for the weekend, then for months at a time. She had belatedly merged with it—though not entirely, because she still had the flat with Christiane in the city. But her garden house, her bench by the stream, her rambles, her translations, her solitude—it was a version of the little life before she escaped, and she knew it. She hated melancholy when it imposed depression upon her. But mostly she loved the melancholy. She even believed it healed people. Anyone who loses himself in the high sky and the wide, empty land also loses what it is that is making him suffer. Margarete doubted whether meeting up with their friends had been a good idea. But it had certainly been right for Christiane to bring Jörg here first, after his release. Perhaps his sickness would go into remission, along with everyone else’s.

Seventeen
    Jörg woke before all the others. He woke with a feeling that everything was fine: his body, his state of mind, the new day. Then he gave a start—just as he had given a start in prison when he had woken with the same feeling and seen the neon lights, the bright green walls, the basin, the toilet and the small, high window. But now the walls were white, jug and basin stood on a chest of drawers and tulips on a table and fresh air came through the big window. He had given a start only out of habit. Relieved, he crossed his arms under his head and was about to make plans—just as in jail he had liked to start his days with plans for the time afterward. But now that he could not only make plans but also realize them, he found it hard. Putting Henner on the spot for his betrayal—he had done that yesterday. Why couldn’t he think of anything else? He could listen to Christiane’s and Marko’s plans, and perhaps Karin and Ulrich and Andreas had plans for him too. But why did he have none himself?
    Ilse knew what she wanted as soon as the blackbirds in the oak tree woke her up. She got out of bed, got dressed, picked up notebook and pen and crept on tiptoe down the