Bernhard Schlink - Self's Deception

I tried to conjure up the chins and hips of the women I knew.

“Then there's Verena, the night nurse. A hot-blooded woman-but what looks wild now will look ravaged soon enough. In the past I wouldn't have given a damn. Now I see it, and it's like a bucket of cold water.”

“What do you have against ravaged women? I thought you saw Helen of Troy in every woman?”

“I did. That's the way I liked it, and that's the way I'd like it to be again.” He looked at me sadly. “But it doesn't work anymore. Now I only see a shrew in every woman.”

“Perhaps it's just because you're still under the weather. You've never been sick before, have you?”

He had already weighed this explanation, too, but brushed it aside. “I used to fantasize about being a patient in a hospital and being spoiled by the nurses.”

I wasn't able to cheer him up. On the way back to his room, he steadied himself on my arm. Nurse Eva helped him into bed. She wasn't just called Eva, she also looked the part, but he didn't grace her with a single glance. As I was about to leave, he grabbed my arm. “Am I paying now for having loved women?”

I left. But I left too late. His morose brooding had gotten to me. Here was a man who had made women the center of his life. His passion had not been for anything fleeting like fame or glory, nor for something external like money or possessions, nor for deceptive erudition, nor vain power. But it didn't help. The brooding and the life crisis still came, as they did for everybody else. I couldn't even think of a crime with which Philipp could salvage his life's illusion.

I called Frau Büchler. “I know who the murderer is. But I don't know his motive, nor do I have proof. Perhaps Herr Wendt knows more than he realizes. I really must speak to him at this point.”

“Can you please call back in a few hours? I'll see what I can do.”

I went to the Luisenpark and fed the ducks. At three o'clock I spoke again with Frau Büchler. “Could you please wait at your office tomorrow morning,” she said. “Herr Wendt doesn't know yet when he will come by, but he will.” She hesitated for a moment. “He is a man used to having his own way and can be somewhat imperious and gruff. But he is also sensitive. Whatever painful things you have to say to him about his son or his son's death, please say them carefully. And please don't hand him the invoice-send it to me.”

“Frau Büchler, I-”

She had hung up.

At nine o'clock I was at my office. I watered the potted palm, emptied the ashtrays, dusted the desk and filing cabinet, and neatly laid out fountain pens and pencils next to one another.

The phone rang. Herr Wendt's chauffeur informed me over his car phone that Herr Wendt would be at my office in half an hour.

A Mercedes pulled up. The chauffeur opened the car door. Before Herr Wendt got out, he eyed the building and my office, the smoked glass and the display window of the former tobacconist's, and the golden letters GERHARD SELF, PRIVATE INVESTIGATIONS. He got out of the car with difficulty and hesitated, carefully steadying himself, as if with his heavy body he had to find his balance: an elephant swaying his rump, head, and trunk, and one is uncertain whether he has forgotten how to use his power, or if he will stampede and flatten everything in his path. He approached my door with heavy steps. I opened it.

“Herr Self?” His voice boomed.

I greeted him. Despite the summer temperature, he seemed chilled and kept his coat on.

We sat down at my desk facing each other, and he immediately came to the point. “Who killed him?”

“You wouldn't know him. He and your son used to be friends, then for years their ways parted, but their paths crossed again and the two of them clashed. I am not yet sure whether he put pressure on your son, or whether your son put pressure on him; in other words, if he wanted something from your son or if your son wanted something from him. Were you in touch with your son in the days or weeks before he died?”

“I resent that question, we are father and son! He is a man of letters. He has his master's and a doctorate, and I'll be the first to admit that what he does and says is sometimes beyond me. And more often than not he simply doesn't understand how things are done in my world. But he has always respected me! Always!” Old Herr Wendt was blustering, but his face remained set. The bones of his temples were strong and his cheeks and chin square despite the considerable fat, and his eyes peered from beneath a wide forehead and profuse eyebrows, his pupils not vacillating, his eyelids not twitching. Only his mouth moved, letting the words drone out.

“Do you know the area between Viernheim and Lam-pertheim, Herr Wendt? The forest where the Americans have a depot.”

“Why do you ask?”

“Your son was involved in the attack that was perpetrated there. To be precise, he was involved with the people who perpetrated the attack. There was a map of the region in his briefcase. Didn't the police tell you about that?”

He shook his head. “What map?”

“Nothing special. It was a map of the autobahn triangle near Viernheim and a few kilometers around it, with boundary or section numbers. It was a letter-size black-and-white photocopy.”

“Rolf…” He didn't continue.

“Yes?”

“I would have liked to have done more for my son. You know where he lived and how. Ah, Herr Self, the apartments he could have had! Why did I work my fingers to the bone all my life?”

I couldn't tell him why, so I waited.

“I would have given him everything, everything! But that map…”

“What do you mean?”

He stared down at the desk between us, reached for a pencil, and turned and twisted it in his gnarled hands. “I didn't want all of that to start again. Not that I know how deeply involved he was back then. Be that as it may, he didn't break free from it easily, let me tell you. When he started working, all that nonsense caught up with him, and now, when he was on the brink of making something of himself, with his own practice or his own hospital, he couldn't get mixed up in all that again!”

“What's the connection between the political things your son was involved in during the early seventies and the map you mentioned?”

The pencil snapped, and Herr Wendt slammed the two halves onto the desk. “I didn't hire you to cross-examine me!”

I remained silent.

He didn't say anything either and looked at me as if I were a bitter pill. To swallow or not to swallow, that was the question. I made to say something, but he waved his hand dismis-sively and began to talk. “A few days before his death, Rolf had asked for the map I have that indicates where poison gas had been buried at the end of the war in the Viernheim Meadows and the Lampertheim National Forest. He had wanted the map once before. He was still at school then and had just had an accident while driving a stolen car without a license. I moved heaven and earth to patch all that up, and I had just pulled it off when one night I caught him rifling through my desk and my safe, looking for the map. I gave him the hiding of his life. Perhaps…” There was a sudden uncertainty in his eyes. “That was the end of all the trouble. He finished school and passed his exams and his doctorate. So the hiding did him some good, don't you think? I learned to live with the fact that he didn't go on to become a surgeon; a man has to make his own choices. Also that he didn't talk to me much anymore-I don't know what people will have told you, but I was convinced that things would turn out well. At a certain age boys don't get along with their fathers. That's just a phase.” He looked at me hard again.