Bernhard Schlink - Self's Punishment

The decision to call Frau Mencke and enquire about young Siegfried’s methods of tooth extraction was one I put on ice.

Yesterday I’d been too tired to stay up to watch Flashdance , borrowed from the video rental on Seckenheimer Strasse. Now I slid in the cassette. Afterwards I danced under the shower. Why hadn’t I stayed longer in Pittsburgh?

In Basle Judith and I took our first break. We drove off the autobahn into town and parked on Münster-Platz. It was covered in snow and was free of aggravating Christmas decorations. We walked a few steps to Café Spielmann, found a table by the window, and had a view over the Rhine and the bridge with the small chapel in the middle.

‘Now tell me in detail how you set this up with Tyberg,’ I asked Judith over a bowl of muesli, which was particularly delicious here, with lots of cream and without an overabundance of oat flakes.

‘During the centenary when I was assigned to him he invited me to look him up if I was ever in Locarno. I mentioned this and said I had to chauffeur my elderly uncle,’ she placed a soothing hand on mine, ‘to look for a holiday home there. I added that he knew this elderly uncle from the war years.’ Judith was proud of her diplomatic move. I was concerned.

‘Won’t Tyberg throw me out on the spot when he recognizes me as the former Nazi prosecutor? Wouldn’t it have been better to have told him straight out?’

‘I did consider it, but then perhaps he wouldn’t even have let the former Nazi prosecutor over his threshold.’

‘And why elderly uncle, actually, and not elderly friend?’

‘That smacks of lover. I think Tyberg was interested in me as a woman, and perhaps he wouldn’t see me if he thought I was firmly attached to someone else, especially if I brought this someone with me. You are a sensitive private detective.’

‘Yes. I’m perfectly willing to face up to the responsibility of having been Tyberg’s prosecutor. But should I confess to him in one fell swoop that I’m your lover, not your uncle?’

‘Are you asking me?’ She said it abruptly yet playfully, and got out her knitting as though settling down to a longer discussion.

I lit a cigarette. ‘You’ve interested me as a woman time and again, and now I wonder whether I was just an old dodderer to you, avuncular and sexless.’

‘What are you after now? “You’ve interested me as a woman time and again.” If you were interested in me in the past then leave it. If you’re interested in the present then say so. You always prefer taking responsibility for the past rather than for the present.’ Knit two, purl two.

‘I don’t have a problem saying I’m interested in you, Judith.’

‘Listen, Gerd, of course I see you as a man, and I like you as a man. It never went far enough for me to make the first move. And certainly not in the past few weeks. But what sort of agonized first move is this, or isn’t it one? “I don’t have a problem saying I’m interested in you” when you obviously have an enormous problem just squeezing that roundabout, cautious sentence out. Come on, let’s get going.’ She wrapped the started pullover sleeve round the needles and wound more wool round it.

My mind went blank. I felt humiliated. We didn’t exchange a word all the way to Olten.

Judith had found Dvořák’s Cello Concerto on the radio and was knitting.

What had actually humiliated me? Judith had only hit me around the head with what I’d felt myself in recent months: the lack of clarity in my feelings towards her. But she’d done it so unkindly by quoting myself back at me that I felt exposed and skewered. I told her so near Zofingen.

She let her knitting sink to her lap and stared out in front of her at the road for a long while.

‘When I was an executive assistant I so often encountered men who wanted something from me, but didn’t put themselves on the line. They’d like to have something going with me, but at the same time they’d pretend they didn’t. They’d arrange things so they could immediately retreat without getting really involved. It seemed to me that was the lie of the land with you, as well. You make the first move, but perhaps it isn’t really one, a gesture that costs you nothing and has no risk attached. You talk about humiliation… I didn’t want to humiliate you. Oh, shit, why are the only little wounds you notice your own?’ She turned her head away. It sounded as if she was crying. But I couldn’t see.

By Lucerne it was getting dark. When we reached Wassen I didn’t want to drive any further. The autobahn was cleared, but it had started snowing. I knew the Hotel des Alpes from earlier Adriatic expeditions. There, still, in Reception was the cage with the Indian mynah bird. When it saw us, it squawked, ‘Stop thief, stop thief.’

At dinner we had the creamy Zürcher Geschnetzeltes and diced roast potatoes. During the drive we had started to argue about whether success inevitably leads an artist to despise his audience. Röschen had once told me about a concert of Serge Gainsbourg’s in Paris where the more contemptuously Gainsbourg treated the audience, the more appreciatively they applauded. Since then this question has preoccupied me, and expanded in my mind into the larger problem of whether one can grow old without despising people either. Judith put up a lengthy resistance to this argument about the link between artistic success and scorn of others. Over the third glass of Fendant she gave in. ‘You’re right, Beethoven went deaf, after all. Deafness is the perfect expression of contempt for one’s environment.’

In my monastic single room I slept a sound, deep sleep. We set off early for Locarno. When we drove out of the Gotthard tunnel, winter was over.

We arrived toward midday, took rooms in a hotel by the lake, and lunched in the glassed-in veranda, looking out at the colourful boats. The sun beat warmly through the panes. I was nervous thinking about tea at Tyberg’s house. From Locarno a blue cable car goes up to Monti. At the halfway point, where the ascending cabin meets the descending one, there’s a station, Madonna del Sasso, a famous pilgrimage church, not beautiful to look at, but in a beautiful location. We walked that far on the Way of the Cross, strewn with large round pebbles. And then we took the cable car to save ourselves the rest of the climb.

We followed the curving street to Tyberg’s house on the small square with the post office. We were standing in front of a wall at least three metres high that came down to the street, with cast-iron railings running along it. The pavilion on the corner, and the trees and bushes behind the railings, underscored the elevated situation of the house and garden. We rang the bell, opened the heavy door, went up the steps to the front garden, and there facing us was a simple, red-painted, two-level house. Next to the entrance we saw a garden table and chairs, like the ones in beer-gardens. The table was awash with books and manuscripts. Tyberg unwrapped himself from a camel-hair blanket and came towards us, tall, with a slightly bent forward gait, a full head of white hair, a neat, short-trimmed grey beard, and bushy eyebrows. He was wearing a pair of half-spectacles, over the top of which he was now looking at us with curious brown eyes.

‘Dear Frau Buchendorff, lovely that you thought of me. And this is your good uncle. You are also welcome to Villa Sempreverde. We’ve met before, your niece tells me. No, wait,’ he deflected me as I was about to start talking, ‘I’ll work it out on my own. I’m working on my memoirs at the moment,’ he indicated the table, ‘and like to practise jogging my memory.’

He led us through the house to the back garden. ‘Shall we walk a little? The butler will make tea.’