Bernhard Schlink - Self's Punishment

Then Wilhelmenia came on stage. She’d grown plumper since Diva, but looked enchanting in a glittering sequined evening gown. Best of all was La Wally. With her the concert ended, with her the diva conquered the audience. It was nice to see young and old united in applause. After two hard-fought-for encores, during which the small timpanist brilliantly made my heart turn somersaults again, we stepped lightly into the night.

‘Shall we go on somewhere?’ asked Georg.

‘Back to my place, if you’d like. I’ve prepared snails and the Riesling is chilling.’

Babs glowed, Röschen moaned, ‘Do we have to walk there?’ and Georg said, ‘I’ll walk with Uncle Gerd, you can take the car.’

Georg is a serious young man. On the way he told me about his law studies where he was embarking upon his fifth term, about the grades he was getting and the criminal case he was working on at the moment. Environmental criminal law – that sounded interesting but it was just the usual camouflage for questions of perpetrating, instigating, and abetting that I could have been asked forty years ago. Is it lawyers that have so little imagination, or reality?

Babs and Röschen were waiting by the front door. When I’d unlocked, it turned out that the lighting in the stairwell wasn’t working. We felt our way up, with frequent stumbles and much laughter. Röschen was a bit afraid of the dark and pleasantly mute.

It turned into a nice evening. The snails were good and so was the wine. My performance was a complete success. When I took the cassette player with its small microphone that made pretty good recordings out of my inside pocket, opened it, and slipped the cassette into the tape deck on my stereo, Röschen recognized the reference immediately and clapped her hands. Georg got it when Wally started to sing. Babs looked at us questioningly. ‘Mum, you’ll have to check out Diva next time it’s playing.’

We played Hare and Tortoise, the fashionable board game, and at half past midnight it was at a decisive stage and the wine all gone. I took my torch and went down to the cellar. I don’t recall ever going down the main stairway without light before. But my legs had grown so used to the way over the long years that I felt quite secure. Until the second to last flight of stairs. Here the architect, perhaps to make the belle étage more impressive, and with higher ceilings, had built fourteen steps instead of the customary twelve. I’d never noticed, nor had my legs taken heed of this detail of the stairway, and after the twelfth step I took a large step out instead of a small step down. My legs buckled, I managed to hold on to the banister, but pain shot up my back. I straightened up, took a tentative next step, and turned on the torch. I got a terrible shock. The wall on the second to last section of stair has a mirror with a stucco frame, and in it I saw a man facing me, shining a beam of light right at me. It took just a fraction of a second for me to recognize myself. But the pain and the fright were enough to send me into the cellar with a hammering heart and unsteady step.

We played until two-thirty. When the taxi collected them and I’d mastered the dark stairs once more and cleaned up the dishes in the kitchen, I stood for the duration of a cigarette by the telephone. I felt an urge to call Brigitte. But the old school won.

I frittered the morning away. In bed I leafed through Mischkey’s file and thought again about why he had put it together, sipped at my coffee, and nibbled the pastries I’d bought yesterday in anticipation of Sunday. Then in Die Zeit I read a pastoral Op-Ed piece, a melodramatic political summary, the statesmanlike commentary from our ex-chancellor with the worldwide reputation, and the usual stuff from the owner. Once again I knew the lie of the land and so didn’t feel the need to expose my mind to the food editor’s review of a book on how to cook in a hot-air balloon. Then I smooched with Turbo. Brigitte still wasn’t picking up. At half past ten Röschen rang the bell. She’d come to collect the car. I threw my dressing gown on over my nightshirt and offered her a sherry. Her brush-cut was in rack and ruin this morning.

At last I was weary of my pottering and drove over to the bridge between Eppelheim and Wieblingen where Mischkey had met his death. It was a sunny early autumn day; I drove through the villages, the mist was hanging over the Neckar, and although it was a Sunday, potatoes were being harvested, the first leaves were turning, and smoke rose from the inns’ chimneys.

The bridge itself didn’t tell me anything I didn’t know from the police report. I looked down at the tracks that lay some five metres beneath me, and thought of the turned-over Citroën. A local train went by in the direction of Edingen. When I walked across the car lanes and looked down on the other side I saw the old railway station. A beautiful sandstone building from the turn of the century with three floors, rounded bow windows on the second floor, and a little tower. The station café was apparently still open. I went in.

The room was gloomy, of the ten tables three were occupied, on the right-hand side was a jukebox, pinball, and two video games, on the counter, restored in the old German style, a stunted potted palm and in its shadow the landlady. I sat down at the free table at the window, with a view onto the platform and the railroad embankment, got a menu with Wiener , Jäger and Zigeuner-schnitzel , all served with fries, and asked the landlady what their special was, their plat du jour, to use Ostenteich’s terms. She could offer Sauerbraten with dumplings and red cabbage, and broth with beef marrow. ‘First rate,’ I said, and ordered a wine from Wiesloch to go with it.

A young girl brought me the wine. She was around sixteen, with a lascivious voluptuousness that was more than the combination of too tight jeans, too tight a blouse, and too red lips. She’d have chatted up any man under fifty. Not me. ‘Enjoy,’ she said, bored.

When her mother brought me the soup I asked about the accident in September. ‘Did you hear it at all?’

‘I’d have to ask my husband about that.’

‘And what would he say?’

‘Well, we were already in bed, and then suddenly there was this smash. And shortly afterwards another. I said to my husband, “Something must have happened out there.” He got up straight away and took the tear-gas gun with him, because our game machines are always being broken into. But this time it had nothing to do with the games machines, but with the bridge. Are you from the press?’

‘I’m from insurance. Did your husband call the police?’

‘My husband didn’t know anything at that point. When he found nothing in the dining room he came back up and pulled some clothes on. Then he went out to the platform but he could already hear the ambulance siren. Who else could he have called?’

Her ample, blonde daughter brought the beef and listened attentively. Her mother sent her away to the kitchen.

‘Your daughter didn’t realize what was happening?’ It was obvious they had a problem.

‘She doesn’t notice anything. Just stares at everything in trousers, if you know what I mean. I wasn’t like that at her age.’ Now it was too late for her. Her eyes were filled with hungry futility. ‘Do you like it?’

‘Just like home,’ I said.

The bell in the kitchen rang, and she removed her willing flesh from my table. I wolfed down the Sauerbraten and the Wieslocher.

On the way to the car I heard quick steps behind me. ‘Hey, you!’ The kid from the station café was running after me breathlessly. ‘You wanted to hear something about the accident. Is there a hundred in it for me?’