Self's deception - By Bernhard Schlink & Peter Constantine Page 0,43

I guess he wanted a baby sister as much as I wanted a big brother.”

“Where did your father know him from?”

“Helmut was a student, and during summer recess he worked as an intern at the ministry. Somehow he caught my father's eye. In 1967, Helmut moved from Bonn to Heidelberg, which kind of loosened the bond a little bit. But he always came back to Bonn and visited us, and he and I always had lots of fun. When my father ended up in prison and nobody wanted anything to do with us, Helmut still kept coming to see us like nothing had happened. But then, about six years ago, he disappeared as if the earth had swallowed him up.”

“When did you see him again?”

“Last summer. Comme ça.” Leo snapped her fingers. He had appeared at her door one day and said “Hi,” just as if they had been together the day before. In the next few weeks they met almost every day. “For us it was…Well, we'd known each other forever, and yet we were now experiencing each other in a completely new way.” Did that mean that they had a relationship? At any rate, they did a lot together: tennis, hiking, theater, cooking. One day he told her of the six years he'd spent in prison. He had been sentenced for an attack on the army recruiting office in Heidelberg.

“He was sentenced to six years?” I asked. I didn't remember such an attack—and spectacular explosions in the Mannheim-Heidelberg area tend to stick in my mind.

“A night guard got the brunt of it. He was badly hurt. But Helmut had nothing to do with this attack. He was politically engaged and was involved with the Communist League of West Germany, and he kept provoking the police and the courts, so they finally framed him and put him away. That's how it was. He told me that a policeman actually said to him that he'd had his fun with the police long enough, now the police would have their fun with him.”

“And all of that sounded plausible to you?” “Sure, and I could see why Helmut wanted to pay them back. In the beginning he'd only considered blowing up the German army recruiting office, but now he was going to do something really big. He realized that what he had to do was target the people who were really behind everything: the Americans. Sometimes we walked down the Bunsenstrasse, and right around the corner from my apartment there's an old villa on the Häuserstrasse where the army recruiting office used to be and where the Americans now have some kind of office. 'You see,' he told me, 'the attack on the army recruiting office wasn't just a waste of time, because a recruiting office isn't just a recruiting office: The fact that the Americans came in and took it over shows more clearly than any bomb can that American imperialism is behind German militarism. It's an insult to my intelligence that they thought me capable of such an idiotic attack in the fight against capitalism and imperialism!'“

Even back in the sixties and seventies I'd had a hard time taking all this political jargon seriously. And the zeitgeist of the nineties doesn't make taking it seriously any easier. In spite of her self-rolled cigarettes I couldn't imagine Leo reading Marx and Engels. I carefully asked her about her own involvement in the fight against capitalism and imperialism.

“That was Helmut's soapbox. When someone has lived with it for such a long time and paid such a price for it, I guess he can't climb off it anymore. We sometimes made fun of him. He just couldn't see that good politics needs to be concrete, to hit the mark, to be fun. But I must say, he did teach us a lot.”

“Us? You mean you and the other two in the police photos?”

“I mean just me. I don't want to drag anyone else into this. I don't even know the people in the newspaper shots.”

I didn't push her any further. She continued talking, and I concluded from what she said that there were two others, a certain Giselher and a certain Bertram, that they had met at a demonstration, got together from time to time, and at first had only ranted and railed against the establishment.

“But there came a point when we had had it up to here! You talk and talk and don't change anything. All the mess goes on: forests dying,