Self's deception - By Bernhard Schlink & Peter Constantine Page 0,20

place. I'd swum a few laps at the Herschelbad on account of my back, and then, returning from the market, saw Giovanni standing outside the door of the Kleiner Rosengarten restaurant.

I greeted him. “You back? No more Mama-mia and Sole-mio?” But he wasn't in a mood to play our German-con verses-with-immigrant-worker game today. He had a lot to tell me about things back home in Radda, and found it easier to do so in his fluent German than in our bumbling pidgin. Then he brought out my food, which finally was again the way I liked it. He himself had gone shopping in the morning to the market and the slaughterhouse. The veal cutlet was juicy and the sauce had been pureed from fresh tomatoes and seasoned with sage. He brought me espresso and sambuca without my having to ask.

“Do you count in Italian?” I asked him. Giovanni was standing next to my table with his pad, adding up my order.

“You mean, even though I speak good German? I think when people count, they fall back into their mother tongue. Even though numbers aren't really that difficult.”

I thought of the Hopfen family's au pair. One, two, three…she had counted twenty Smurfs. In German, despite her thick accent and her slipping up on nouns and verbs. Brigitte's son, Manu, who had lived for a long time in Brazil with his father but by now speaks good Mannheim German, still counts in Portuguese, even when I'm helping him with his homework and math problems. On the other hand, Lea might have been counting in German just to settle the children's argument.

I wanted to see her. Only I couldn't remember where I'd parked my car. At the Herschelbad? The market square? At home? It's sad when you have to use your detective's nose to make up for the shortcomings of age. The price tag on the shampoo bottle gave me a clue. It came from a drugstore in Neckarstadt. I remembered that I had driven Brigitte to her place in the Max-Joseph-Strasse after breakfast, had bought the shampoo there, and then had crossed the Kurpfalz Bridge and walked over to the swimming pool.

I found my car, took the autobahn to Heidelberg, and drove along the Neckar to Eberbach. I hadn't known that all of Route 37 was under construction, that it was being made wider, straighter, and faster, and that it even tunneled under the mountain at Hirschhorn. Will it one day turn into an autobahn? Will one day a monorail line run through forest and meadow, mountain and valley, replacing the dignified sandstone viaducts over which the Grand Duke sent the first trains across the gorges of the Odenwald? Will a Club Med one day take over the enchanted complex of old guesthouse, hunting lodge, and disused factory in Ernsttal? There, on the road from Kailbach to Ottorfszell, the trees are at their greenest and the sandstone at its reddest, and on the shaded terrace beer tastes like ambrosia. Why does it always have to be coffee and cake in the afternoon? I had a schnitzel with my beer, and a salad with a dressing that didn't come out of a bottle, and blinked in the sunlight that breached the leafy canopy.

In Amorbach I found Dr. Hopfen's office on the market square, and one of his patients told me the way to his home. “Head past the train station, over the tracks, and up toward the Hotel Frankenberg. Keep following the signs for Sommer-berg. The doctor's house is the last one on the left before you get to the driveway of the hotel.”

After I negotiated the steep and narrow lane and made a U-turn in the hotel's driveway, a little girl opened the gate in front of the Hopfen residence, and a Land Rover pulled out. The girl closed the gate again and got into the car. Two other children were romping around in the backseat. A woman was at the wheel. The engine died a few times, and I looked around: I gazed at the fruit trees on the slope, the building supplies warehouse in the valley, and the church of Amorbach with its two onion domes beyond the railway tracks. I followed the Rover back into town. The throng of tourist cars in front of the abbey left only two parking spaces—one for the Rover and one for my old Opel.

I followed the woman and the three children on foot to the market square. I still wasn't certain. But then