Self's deception - By Bernhard Schlink & Peter Constantine Page 0,13

flesh. Or perhaps …” It was on the tip of his tongue.

“Do me a favor and tell Füruzan that you and I went out,” I said to him, “and I won't pick up the phone tonight if it rings.”

He left, and I sat there looking into the twilight thinking about my case and my friend Philipp. Füruzan didn't call. At ten o'clock Brigitte came over. My curiosity had been piqued: Before she slipped into her nightgown I took a quick, meticulous look. A pumpkin? No, and not a melon either, nor a muskmelon or a watermelon. A Belgian tomato.

10

Scott at the South Pole

Chief Inspector Nägelsbach is always restrained and polite. He was that way when we met during the war at the Heidelberg Public Prosecutor's Office, and this was how he remained toward me when we became friends. We're both well past the age when friendships thrive on emotional outpourings.

When I visited him the following morning at the Heidelberg police headquarters, I could tell right away that something wasn't quite right. He remained sitting at his desk and only shook my outstretched hand when I was about to withdraw it.

“Please be seated.” He waved me to a chair by the filing cabinets, quite a distance from his desk. He frowned when I picked up the chair and brought it closer to his desk, as if I were invading his space.

I came straight to the point. “A case has taken me to the State Psychiatric Hospital. There's something fishy going on there. Can you tell me if the police have been there recently?”

“I am not in a position to provide you with such information. That would be against regulations.”

We have never kept to the regulations, but made each other's work and life easier. He knows I can be trusted with the confidential information he gives me, just as I know I can trust him with the information I provide him. I couldn't figure out what was going on. “What are you talking about?”

“Nothing.” He peered at me hostilely through the small round lenses of his glasses. I was about to say something curt, then I realized that his expression was not one of hostility, but unhappiness. He had lowered his eyes and was looking at the newspaper. I got up and came to his side.

“Cork Monuments of Italy.” It was a newspaper article about an exhibition in Kassel of cork models of ancient buildings, from the Pantheon to the Colosseum, that had been made in Rome by Antonio Chichi between 1777 and 1782. “Read the last bit!”

I quickly ran an eye down the column. The article ended with a quote from a Leipzig art dealer who, in 1786, had proclaimed that these masterful cork models were the best possible medium for conveying a precise and sublime impression of the original monuments. In fact I would have mistaken the picture of the model in the paper for the real thing if it had had the right background.

“I feel like Scott when he reached the South Pole, only to find the tent Amundsen had pitched. Reni wants us to drive over to Kassel this weekend. She says I could see for myself that it's comparing apples and oranges. But I don't know.”

I didn't know either. When he was fifteen, Nägelsbach had begun building models of major monuments out of match-sticks. From time to time he would attempt to build something else, like Dürer's Praying Hands or the golden helmet of Rembrandt's Man in a Golden Helmet, but his mission in life, to which he was going to devote his retirement, was to build a model of the Vatican. I know and value Nägelsbach's works, but to be honest they did not achieve the kind of illusion of reality that those cork models did. What could I tell him? That art was more a matter of creation than an attempt to portray reality? That in life the goal wasn't as important as the journey? That today the world remembered Scott, not Amundsen?

“What are you working on right now?” I asked him.

“On the Pantheon, of all things. For four weeks now. Why didn't I go for the Brooklyn Bridge?” His shoulders drooped.

I waited for a bit. “Can I drop by again tomorrow?”

“It's the State Psychiatric Hospital, right? I'll call you when I have the information.”

I drove back to Mannheim with a deep feeling of futility. My old Opel purred over the asphalt. Sometimes the tires thumped over the yellow bumps marking the shifting of lanes