The Weekend: A Novel Read online

  Henner saw the gray in Christiane’s brown hair, the tear sacs under her eyes, the deep wrinkles above the base of her nose and from her nostrils to the corners of her mouth. He saw the liver spots on her hands and the fact that her freckles had lost their luster. He saw that Christiane did nothing for her figure, no sport, no gymnastics, no yoga. He saw it, and it didn’t bother him. The fact that she was a few years older than him had excited him back then. The fact that it had excited him back then now made him a few years younger.

  “What really happened back then?”

  She didn’t interrupt her work and didn’t look up. “What are you talking about?”

  Henner couldn’t believe that it was supposed to be a serious question, and didn’t reply. But after a while she asked once more, again without interrupting her work or looking up. “What do you want to know?”

  He sighed, pulled away from the door, bent down to the boxes of mineral water, took a bottle and left. “Good night, Christiane.”

  She finished rinsing, cleaned the stove, wiped the table and let the water drain away. Then she dried, even though everything could have dried by itself. Then she sat down and poured herself another glass. All the rinsing and drying and preparing hadn’t helped. She had to talk to Henner. He was too powerful as a journalist and too important for Jörg’s future for her to allow herself to alienate him. She had to answer his questions. But what was she supposed to tell him? The truth?

  She blew out the candles, walked through the hall, up the stairs and across the corridor to Henner’s room. Light shone from under the door. She didn’t knock. She opened the door quietly and walked in. Henner was in bed, his head and pillow resting against the wall, reading by candlelight. He looked up, calm and willing. Yes, she had liked his calm back then and his willingness to get involved with her, with her desires, thoughts, moods. There was something breezy about his willingness—it was open to everybody. Or did she just fear that? She found the willingness and calm in his face, in his attentive eyes, his big mouth with its narrow lips, his determined chin.

  “You’ll ruin your eyesight.”

  He lowered the book. “No, that’s one of the false truths that we were taught as children, like oil on burns and charcoal for diarrhea.”

  “What are you reading?”

  “A novel. About two journalists, male and female, their rivalry, their love, their separation.” He laid the book on the chair beside the bed, on which the candle stood, and laughed. “The author and I were once together, and I want to know whether she wrote about me before someone mentions it.”

  “Did she?”

  “Yes, but so far no one will notice apart from me.”

  Christiane hesitated before she asked. “Can I sit down on the foot of the bed? Then I can lean against the wall.”

  Henner nodded and curled up his legs. “Be my guest.” Then he looked at her in attentive silence.

  “I wasn’t just saying that. I really don’t know what you want to know.”

  He looked at her incredulously. “Christiane!”

  But she looked seriously back. “So much happened back then.”

  He couldn’t believe what she was saying. Was her experience of that summer so different from his? Wasn’t it the summer of her love, as it was for him?

  Since Henner and Jörg had been friends, Jörg had raved about her—there was no better word—his beautiful, brittle big sister. She was always kind to Henner, but he sensed that she didn’t perceive him as a person, just as her little brother’s friend, who did him good or harm. Until that summer. Until she suddenly took him seriously. He didn’t know why it happened; he was supposed to bring her home in the car, a breakdown turned a fifteen-minute shared drive into half a night together and after that everything was different. They went together to see Marcuse and Dutschke, Deep Purple and José Feliciano, cuddled in the cinema and the swimming pool and made plans for two weeks in Barcelona, a brief summer of anarchy. Then they slept together, and in the middle of it she pulled away from him, stood up, grabbed her clothes and ran from the room. For weeks he tried to get hold of her and talk to her. She made herself unapproachable to him.

  Yes, a lot had happened in that summer. But just one thing still left him asking questions more than thirty years later. Couldn’t she see that herself? All right, then. “Why, when we were making love, did you suddenly leap to your feet and run away?”

  Christiane closed her eyes. How she would have loved to present him with a lie. Even one that put her in a bad light. Even one that was embarrassing to her. But none occurred to her. So she had to tell the truth, although she knew he wouldn’t understand it. He wouldn’t understand anything. “It was at our place, you remember? In my room, my bed. I thought Jörg was away for the weekend, but he came home on Saturday and suddenly he was standing in the doorway—you weren’t aware of it, but I saw him and saw his face when he understood and took a step back and closed the door again.”

  Henner waited for a while. “And?”

  “And? I knew you wouldn’t understand. Neither can I help you with the fact that Jörg and I … For a while he liked to provoke me with that stupid saying of his, ‘And now, sis, what about a little bit of incest,’ but nothing came of it. Still, I betrayed him, when you and I …” Christiane opened her eyes and looked questioningly at Henner. “You don’t understand anything, do you? What mattered to me was only him, like what matters to a mother is only her son. All right, the mother still has her husband but not the way she has her son. Her husband belongs to yesterday, her son belongs to today—the fact that he alone existed for me kept him in the world, and when I betrayed him with you, he fell from the world, and I ran, but I couldn’t catch up with him. It was too late, I couldn’t make amends for what I had done.”

  Henner looked at her, saw the sadness in her face; because he didn’t understand her, saw the hope that he might still understand her. He saw the exhaustion of futility; she had made sacrifice after sacrifice for her brother and achieved nothing, prevented nothing, encouraged nothing. He saw, even now, the obstinacy with which she thought she could catch him, with which she ran and ran to be there at the right moment. “For his sake did you … You did have relationships with men, didn’t you? Were you married? Are you divorced?”

  She shook her head. “I always attracted my young colleagues, in the hospital or at conferences, and eventually they realized that I couldn’t be what they were looking for, and I didn’t want to. Then I sometimes had to send them away, because they were too weak to go; you know, the young ones I attracted were often the soft, weak ones, and sometimes they simply drifted away. I’ve met a few of them years later with their young wives—a nurse will have snapped them up, or a medical technician, and they’ve been a little embarrassed and shown me pictures of their children.” Christiane smiled apologetically at Henner. “You mustn’t think it wasn’t lovely with you back then, or that I didn’t like you. But it wasn’t the most important thing. It was never the most important thing. There was no one I liked more than you.”

  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.”

  Fourteen

  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 bei
ng 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.

  Fifteen

  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.