Bernhard Schlink - Self's Punishment

I took my leave from Professor Kirchenberg and passed Mischkey’s apartment on the way to the castle. And I did spend a little time on the Scheffel Terrace. I was cold. Or was I becoming cold? There was no becoming going on, perhaps I couldn’t expect it without Stefan George.

In Café Gundel their special Christmas cookies, embossed with local sights, were on display already. I purchased a bagful, intending to surprise Judith with them on the journey to Locarno.

Back in the office everything ran like clockwork. From Information I obtained the telephone number of the Catholic priest’s office in Roth; the chaplain was only too happy to interrupt his sermon preparation to inform me that the leader of the Catholic Scout troop in Roth since time immemorial had been Joseph Maria Jungbluth, senior teacher. I reached Senior Teacher Jungbluth immediately thereafter. He said he’d be glad to meet me the next day in the early afternoon to talk about little Siegfried.

Judith had fixed a date with Tyberg for Sunday afternoon, and we decided to travel on Saturday. ‘Tyberg looks forward to meeting you.’

Mannheim to Nürnberg on the new autobahn should take two hours. The Schwabach/Roth exit comes thirty kilometres before Nürnberg. One day Roth will lie on the Augsburg- Nürnberg autobahn. I won’t be around then.

Fresh snow had fallen in the night. On the journey I had the choice of two open lanes, a well-worn one on the right and a narrow one for overtaking. Passing a truck was a lurching adventure. Three and a half hours later, I arrived. In Roth there are a couple of half-timbered houses, a few sandstone buildings, the Evangelical and the Catholic churches, pubs that have adapted themselves to military needs, and lots of barracks. Not even a local patriot could describe Roth as the Pearl of Franken. It was just before one and I picked an inn. In the Roter Hirsch, which had resisted the trend for fast food and had even retained its old furnishings, the proprietor did the cooking himself. I asked the waitress for a typically Bavarian dish. She didn’t understand my request. ‘Bavarian? We’re in Franken.’ So I asked her to recommend a typical dish from Franken. ‘Everything,’ she said. ‘Our entire menu is Frankish. Including the coffee.’ Helpful breed of folk here. Pot luck. I ordered Saure Zipfel with fried potatoes, and a dark beer.

Saure Zipfel are bratwurst, but they’re not fried, they’re heated up in a stock of vinegar, onions, and spices. And they taste like it, too. The fried potatoes were deliciously crispy. The waitress softened enough to point out the way to Allersberger Strasse where Senior Teacher Jungbluth lived.

Jungbluth opened the door in civilian clothes. In my mind’s eye I’d pictured him in long socks, knee-length brown trousers, blue neckerchief, and a wide-brimmed scout’s hat. He couldn’t recall the scout camp at which the young Mencke wore a real or pretend bandage to shirk washing-up duty. But he remembered other incidents.

‘Siegfried liked getting out of chores. In school, as well, where he was in my class in the first and second year. You know, he was a frightened child – and a cringing one. I don’t understand much about medicine, beyond first aid, of course, which I need as senior teacher and scoutmaster. But I would think you need a certain level of courage for self-mutilation, and I can’t imagine Siegfried having that courage. Now his father, on the other hand, he’s made of different stuff.’

He was showing me to the door when he remembered something else. ‘Would you like to see some photos?’ The pictures in the album were of various combinations of scouts, tents, campfires, bicycles. I saw children singing, laughing, and fooling around, but I could also see in their eyes that the snapshots were engineered by Senior Teacher Jungbluth. ‘That’s Siegfried.’ He pointed to a rather frail blond boy with a reticent look on his face. A few photos later I came across him again. ‘What’s wrong with his leg?’ His left leg was in plaster. ‘Right,’ said Senior Teacher Jungbluth. ‘An unpleasant story. For six months the accident insurance tried to stick me with negligence. But Siegfried just had a careless fall when we were in the stalagmite caves in Pottenstein, and broke his leg. I can’t be everywhere at once.’ He looked at me seeking agreement. I was glad to concur.

On the way home, I took stock. Not much remained to be done on the Sergej Mencke case. I still wanted to take a look at Philipp’s young scholar’s thesis, and I’d saved my visit to Sergej in the hospital for last. I was tired of them all, the senior teachers, the army captains, the gay German professors, the whole ballet scene, and Sergej too, even before I’d seen him. Had I grown weary of my profession? In the Mischkey case I’d already let my professional standards drop, and as for my distaste for the Mencke case, it wouldn’t have been there before. Should I call it quits? Did I want to live beyond eighty anyway? I could get my life insurance paid out, that would feed me for twelve years. I decided to talk to my tax adviser and insurance agent in the new year.

I drove westwards, into the setting sun. As far as my eye could see the snow gleamed in a rosy hue. The sky was tinted the blue of pale porcelain. In the Franken villages and small towns I drove past, smoke unfurled from the chimneys. The homely light in the windows rekindled old desires for security. Homesick for Nowhere.

Philipp was still on duty when I looked him up in the station at seven. ‘Willy is dead,’ he greeted me dejectedly. ‘The idiot. To die of a burst appendix these days is just ridiculous. I don’t understand why he didn’t call me; he must have been in terrible pain.’

‘You know, Philipp, I’ve often had the impression in the years since Hilde’s death that he didn’t actually have the will to live.’

‘These silly husbands and widowers. If he’d just said the word, I know women who’d make him forget any number of Hildes. What’s become of your Brigitte, by the way?’

‘She’s running around in Rio. When’s the funeral?’

‘A week from today. Two p.m. at the main cemetery in Ludwigshafen. I had to see to it all. There’s no one else. Would a red sandstone gravestone with a screech owl on it meet with your approval? We’ll pool resources, you, Eberhard, and me, so that he gets planted decently.’

‘Have you thought of the announcements? And we’ll have to inform the dean of his old faculty. Could your secretary do that?’

‘That’s fine. I wish I could join you to have a bite to eat. But I can’t get away. Don’t forget the dissertation.’

And then there were three. No more Doppelkopf. I went home and opened a can of sardines. I wanted to try empty sardine cans on my Christmas tree this year and had to start collecting them. It was almost too late to get enough together before Christmas. Should I invite Philipp and Eberhard next Friday for a funeral feast of sardines in oil?

‘Door-Induced Fractures’ was fifty pages long. The system underlying the work emerged as a combination of doors and breaks. The introduction contained a diagram, the horizontal of which depicted the various fracture-inducing doors, and the vertical the door-induced fractures. Most of the 196 squares contained figures revealing how often the corresponding constellation had cropped up at the city hospital in the last twenty years.

I looked for the line ‘car door’ and the column ‘tibia fracture’. At the point they met I found the number 2 and afterwards in the text the respective case histories. Although all names had been removed I recognized Sergej’s in one. The other dated back to 1972. A nervous cavalier, while helping his lady into the car, had shut the door too swiftly. The study could only cite one case of self-mutilation. A failed goldsmith had hoped to gain heaps of gold with his insured, and broken, right thumb. In the furnace cellar he had placed his right hand in the frame of the iron door and slammed it shut with his left. The affair only came apart because, with the insurance money already paid, he had bragged about his coup. He told the police that as a child he’d attached his wobbly milk-teeth to the door handle with a thread and pulled them out. That’s what had given him the idea.