The Weekend by Bernhard Schlink Page B

corridor, downstairs, through the kitchen and out of the house. In the park she went to the bench by the stream. She opened the notebook and read whatshe had written, three short chapters in a loose sequence that wasn’t right. Should she establish a connection between the chapters? She could go with Jan as he was picked up by his French colleagues in the ambulance and taken to Germany, as he was put in a deathlike state for the second time, laid out and displayed in an open coffin at the funeral. Or should she rework the chapter about Jan at the coast? Jan couldn’t help cursing the swinish system, the assholes in politics and business and the fucking cops. She didn’t want to write it down like that. But if she couldn’t make Jan talk like a terrorist, how could she make him commit murder?
    No matter how quietly Ilse had trodden, the creaking floorboards had forced their way into Karin’s sleep. In her dream she was late, she wanted to creep quietly into the church where the congregation was waiting for her, but the floorboards gave her away and all heads turned toward her. She woke up. Her husband was still asleep, and she let him sleep, even though she would have liked to wake him. She prayed, or perhaps it was a meditation or a moment of truth. Was it true what she had said the previous evening? Did she see the terrorists as her confused brothers and sisters? Did she have fraternal feelings for Jörg? Did she want to have them? Did she think she had to have them?
    Ingeborg too was woken by the creaking floorboards. She listened to Ilse’s fading footsteps and waited to hear whether yet more footsteps would come and go. But it remained silent. She looked at the clock and nudged her husband. “Let’s go, while the others are still sleeping.”
    He shook his head, irritable that she had woken him and wanted to creep off. She’s beautiful, he thought, but if things get hard she always wants to take the easy way out. He looked at her. With her bleary face she wasn’t even beautiful.
    She insisted. “I don’t want the others to make me look ridiculous, not me and not my daughter.”
    “No one wants to make you look ridiculous. The others will be incredibly considerate and emotionally gentle. And your daughter is mine too and she doesn’t take the easy way out—she faces up to things.”
    “And what if there’s another row?”
    “Then there’s another row.”
    Taking the easy way out, facing up to things—when she woke up, their daughter didn’t care. The evening had been silly in the end, but she had slept well, and now it was morning. That was how it was: sometimes things worked out with people, sometimes they didn’t. Life went on. Sometimes they worked out today with a man they hadn’t worked out with yesterday. As to the great terrorist who had panicked in front of her, maybe she would give him another chance. Anyway, that had never happened to her before: she had made a man panic!
    Marko was also concerned about Jörg’s panic. How much political power could you expect from someone who panics at the sight of a naked girl? For four years Marko had been busy trying to turn Jörg, the terrorist who hadn’t distanced himself from the RAF, into the intellectual head of a new terrorist movement. He had hoped Jörg would reply with a political thunderbolt, aninterview, a press declaration, not illegal, but hardhitting. He had imagined that Jörg, once free, would be full of plans and hungry for action. Instead he was tired and panicky. Four years’ work for nothing?
    At first Andreas had suited Marko just fine: a lawyer who could make sure that Jörg didn’t cross the bounds of legality with his thunderbolt. Then they had argued. But Marko was willing to bet that if Jörg wanted to, his lawyer wouldn’t hold him back.
    Andreas saw things differently. He had no time for Jörg’s political nonsense. He had threatened to resign his mandate if anything like that welcome address happened again. In the