Bernhard Schlink - Self’s Murder

I tried to recall the longings she had sometimes talked of and strove to fulfill them. To say something nice from time to time for no particular reason, to give her flowers, to read something to her, to come up with something fun that we hadn’t done yet, to surprise her with a bottle of wine she had enjoyed in a restaurant, or to buy her a handbag that had caught her eye in the window of a boutique. They were all minor things, and I was ashamed that like an old cheapskate I had withheld them from her for so long.

The days flew by. I had taken some books with me, but didn’t finish any of them. As I lay on the lounger I preferred to watch Brigitte reading instead of reading myself. Or I watched her sleep and wake up. Sometimes she didn’t know right away where she was. She saw the blue sky and the blue sea and was a little confused until she remembered, and then she smiled at me sleepily and happily.

I happily smiled back. But I was also sad. Again I had been too slow-something that shouldn’t have taken more than a few weeks or months had taken me years. And because I have always realized that I’ve been too slow at a point when I’ve irrevocably missed a chance or lost something through my slowness, now, too, I had the feeling that it was too late for our happiness.

Manu returned from his ski trip with a deep tan and delighted Brigitte by saying, “But it’s great to be back again.” He surprised me by announcing that he wanted to go to church the following morning. During the ski trip his father had taken him to mass, as he also used to do in Brazil. His mother had never taken him to church here.

So on Sunday I went with him to the Christuskirche. The sun was shining, and around the water tower narcissus and tulips “bloomed in greater splendor than all the silks of Solomon can render.” The golden angel with the golden trumpet greeted us from the top of the church cupola. I was struck by what the priest had said about the parable in which the servant buries the money that has been entrusted to him instead of putting it to work, thus dodging his responsibility. What was I intending to do with the money I had buried under the potted palm? Drop it in the collection box? It had slipped my mind.

Manu, too, had been listening attentively to the sermon. Over lunch he told Brigitte and me that his friend had a brother who was a few years older and who was increasing his money by buying and selling stocks on the Internet. Manu gleaned from that and from Matthew 25: 14-30, that either his mother or his father ought to get him a computer. Then he looked at me. “Or will you?”

That afternoon we went to Schwetzingen and visited the palace gardens, which I had so often seen from a distance while I was working on my case. We walked down the avenue that looked so new with its young chestnut trees, past the orangerie and to the Roman aqueduct, over the Chinese bridge, and along the lake to the Temple of Mercury. Brigitte showed us where her parents had hidden Easter eggs for her and her brothers and sisters. At the mosque Manu declared, “Allah leads to the light whom He wills!”-which he’d learned at school when the class had an assignment on Islam. Then we sat down in the sun on the Schlossplatz and had some coffee and cake. I recognized the waitress, but she didn’t recognize me. I looked across the way to Weller & Welker.

Locals and tourists were strolling over the Schlossplatz, which was bustling with life. A dark Saab slowly and patiently made its way through the throng. It stopped in front of the bank. The gate swung open and the car drove in.

That was all. A car stops in front of the gate, the gate swings open and stays open for a moment, the car enters, and the gate closes again. This was not the image that had stayed in my mind from the afternoon when I had watched the bank for the first time. Back then the square had been empty, while today it was full. Back then the cars that entered and exited the bank gate were not to be overlooked, while today the dark Saab was almost swallowed up in the hustle and bustle of the square.

But it struck me like an electric shock. You insert the key into the lock of your car or turn on the radio, or you step out onto the balcony, perhaps in your pajamas and dressing gown, to check the temperature and take a look at the sky, and you lean on the metal railing. The static shock barely hurts. What strikes you is not the pain, but the sudden realization that the car, the radio, the railing-everything we are so familiar with and rely on-also has an unreliable, malignant side to it. That things are not as reliable as we suppose them to be. The car entering and the opening and closing of the gate! Just like back then, I had the feeling that something was not quite right in what was happening before my eyes.

A client on a Sunday? I couldn’t rule that out for a small bank and an important client. But the one business that would not rest on a weekend or holiday was money laundering.

When the gate opened again half an hour later, letting the dark Saab out and then closed, I was standing nearby. The car had a Frankfurt license plate. The windows were tinted. A fifty-mark bill that had fallen out during the delivery was peeking out from the edge of the trunk.

When I told Brigitte that evening in bed that I would be out of town for a few days, she asked wryly: “So, the lone cowboy is riding silently into the setting sun?”

“The cowboy is riding to Cottbus, and into the rising sun, not the setting sun. And he isn’t riding silently, either.” I told her about the money laundering at the Sorbian Cooperative Bank and that I wanted to find out if it was still going on. I told her about Vera Soboda. I told her about Schuler and his money. “The money came from the East and has to go back to the East. Perhaps I can find a priest or some institution that can put it to good use. And perhaps I will find something that will help throw some light on Schuler’s death.”

Brigitte rested her head on her hands and looked up at the ceiling. “ I could put the money to good use. What I’d like to do instead of my massage practice, what I would need to expand my practice, things Manu would like-I could definitely put it to good use.”

“It’s drug money, and money from prostitution and blackmail. It’s dirty money. I’ll be happy when it’s gone.”

“Money doesn’t stink-weren’t you taught that?”

I propped myself on my elbow and looked at Brigitte. After a while she turned her eyes from the ceiling and looked at me.

I didn’t like her expression. “Come on, Brigitte…” I didn’t know what to say.

“Maybe that’s why you are what you are. A lonely, difficult old man. You don’t see happiness when it comes your way, so how are you supposed to grab it if you can’t even see it? Here it’s served to you on a silver platter, but you let it slip away. Just like you’ve let our happiness slip away.” She looked back up at the ceiling.

“I don’t want our happiness to-”

“I know you don’t want to, Gerhard, but you do it anyway.”

I couldn’t let that go. I wasn’t ready to roll over and turn my back to her, lonely, difficult, and old. Not after our days in Sardinia.

“Brigitte?”

“Yes?”

“What would you rather do instead of your massage practice?”

She was silent for so long that I thought she wasn’t going to say anything more. Then she wept a few tears. “I would have liked to have had children with you. I had Manu despite my sterilization. I didn’t have any with you, though I didn’t take any precautions. We would have had to try it in vitro.”

“You and me in a test tube?”

“You think the doctor will shake us up in a test tube like a barman with a cocktail shaker? He would lay your sperm and my egg on a glass slide and then let them do what people in love do in bed.”