Bernhard Schlink - The Gordian Knot

People screamed and ran for cover. Buchanan shouted something, Georg couldn’t hear what. The professor, who had been standing above him on the escalator, fell onto him and slid down, collapsing onto a woman who was cowering next to Georg. Georg heard the rasping horror of her shrieks close to his ear.

Then he saw the briefcase, which had slipped out of the professor’s hand. The escalator came to a halt. Georg automatically reached for the briefcase and scurried doggedly, hunched forward, up the escalator. He stepped on hands, pushed people out of the way, and at the top of the escalator elbowed his way through the crowd that had gathered to see what was going on downstairs. All these people had been near the atrium and heard the shots and screams. Those who were farther back hadn’t noticed anything, and Georg casually walked past them and out of the building.

He drove back to San Francisco. He parked at the end of Twenty-fourth Street, took the briefcase out of the car, and slowly walked to a bench near the waterfront. He sat down and put the briefcase at his feet. It was low tide, and rocks, car tires, and a refrigerator were looming out of the water.

He sat there for a long time, watching the sun’s rays dancing on the waves. His mind was empty. Of course, he finally looked into the briefcase. And later, as Jill was asleep next to him, he turned on a table lamp and opened the briefcase again. It didn’t contain two million. It didn’t even contain one. He counted $382,460. There was a disarray of hundred-dollar bills mixed in with fifties and twenties, and between them the tie with the garden gnomes, tied and ready to be slipped on.

The following day all the newspapers featured the shooting at the airport. Georg read that Townsend Enterprises had been involved in industrial espionage for the Russians at Gorgefield Aircraft, and that Benton and a Russian agent had fallen into a trap set by Gorgefield Aircraft. Benton had attempted to shoot his way out, and had been shot dead by Buchanan. The Russian agent had been hospitalized, critically wounded. There was a picture of Richard D. Buchanan Jr., security adviser at Gorgefield, looking grim.

Georg read the newspaper the following morning at the airport. He was wearing sunglasses, and Jill was in the carrier sling. Nobody was paying particular attention. It was shortly before ten. The Pan Am flight from New York was scheduled to land soon. Fran had said that she would pick up Jill and take the one-thirty flight back to New York.

“Come and stay forever,” Georg had told her.

She had laughed, but then had asked him what the weather was like. “Does it get cool there in the evenings?”

THEY DROVE SOUTH AND TOOK A FLIGHT from Mexico to Madrid, and from Madrid to Lisbon. Today they live in a house by the sea. Jill is five, and Fran sometimes tells her a bedtime story about a crazy guy who once upon a time ran off to San Francisco with her when she was a baby. They have two more children. Georg is translating again, because he couldn’t go on doing nothing.

“Why didn’t you write your story yourself?” I asked Georg, as we were sitting beneath the stars on his terrace above the sea. He had read my manuscript and was quibbling over this or that detail.

“Fran didn’t want me to. This might sound strange, but since San Francisco we never talk about any of this. Fran won’t have it.” Georg laughed. “Whenever I bring up the subject she dismisses it as water under the bridge, and says she doesn’t want me to spend weeks on end at my desk mulling over the past.”

Georg poured more wine, Alvarinho from Monçäo, light on the palate but it goes straight to your head. He leaned back. By now he was almost entirely bald; the wrinkles on his forehead and around his mouth had turned into deep furrows, and the groove in his chin had become more pronounced. But he had a healthy complexion, and seemed relaxed and content.

“You know,” he said, “I’ve come to realize that Fran is right. When I read your manuscript, everything was so distant, a faraway echo; you don’t know whether it was your voice or someone else’s. It’s like when someone finds an old photograph of his father, who died young, and knows perfectly well that it’s his father, even though he barely remembers him. When I told you about my final weeks in New York and San Francisco and you came up with the idea of turning it into a book, I was pleased. I thought that if I read what you had written I’d see things more clearly, that I’d see a structure and a pattern where I could… oh, I don’t know. I was a real mess back then. But I guess it’s true that we can never see clearly what we are doing or what happens to us, we can’t even hold on to it. Sooner or later it ends up as water under the bridge-so I guess the sooner that happens, the better.”

The summer after Georg’s return from America, I was sitting at my desk in my apartment in the Amselgasse one evening when the downstairs bell rang. I wasn’t expecting anybody, but buzzed whoever it was in. In our age of telephones, unexpected guests are rare. I looked down the stairwell, but recognized neither the hand that was groping its way up the banister nor the sound of his tread. When he came into sight on the landing below, I was quite relieved: after my visit to Cucuron in September I hadn’t heard from Georg, except for a brief phone call from New York asking me urgently to send him some money. Not to mention that Jürgen had opened the sealed envelope Georg had sent him and had read to me Georg’s predicament in New York, and I was afraid for his safety. His parents had no information about his whereabouts, he hadn’t contacted the Epps again, nor had he been in touch with Larry or Helen, whose addresses the Epps had given me.

Georg and I hugged. I went to get some wine, and he told me all about New York and San Francisco, and about Fran, who was waiting for him in Lisbon. He talked all night. The sun came up, and I prepared a bed for him. He was in the shower, and I stood by the window smoking a final cigarette. Was I just tired? I couldn’t believe his luck. Or was I jealous? He was doing great, he said, and Fran was perfect, Jill a treasure, and the money a blessing. He had fidgeted all night with his sunglasses, turning them about in his hands, putting them on, sliding them down to the edge of his nose, taking them off again, chewing on them, folding and unfolding them.

He had only come to Heidelberg for a short time. He was going to see his parents the following day and fly back to Portugal the day after. He had to be careful: not enough water had flowed beneath the bridge; they might still be after him. It was at breakfast that I told him I wanted to turn his story into a book. He liked the idea. But I should take my time, he said, it would be best for the book not to appear too soon; not to mention that names and places had to be changed. He again put on his sunglasses.

Some years passed. He called me from time to time, and once we met at the airport in Frankfurt. For a long time the notes I had made for the book lay tucked away in my drawer. I completed the manuscript a year ago, but couldn’t send it to him, since he had never given me his address; then I recently got a call from him inviting me to Lisbon.

Fran picked me up at the airport. I didn’t recognize her, but she recognized me. I had only met her once, briefly-in Cucuron, at Georg’s party-and I’m bad at matching faces to photographs. I’d pictured her quite differently. Maybe it was also that she’s changed, become somewhat matronly. He too strikes me as heavier and more settled.

While I was writing the book there were times when I asked myself whether this was a story of amour fou . But I saw the two of them together-with their children, in their house, their garden, cooking, eating, doing the washing up-I realized they were just living the quiet life that Françoise had always wanted to live. Amour fou , perhaps, but a quiet amour fou .