Self's deception - By Bernhard Schlink & Peter Constantine Page 0,45
Giselher, Bertram, and I were in the other.”
“And that was at the beginning of January?”
“Yes, January sixth. I don't even know where the meeting place was. I think somewhere outside Frankfurt. We headed up the autobahn for quite a while, north from the Heidelberg or Mannheim junction, and then drove onto the shoulder and down an embankment and onto a back road. We followed it till we came to the edge of some woods. There we met Helmut and the fifth man. Then we headed off.”
“Did you know the fifth man?”
“We had all blackened our faces. I barely recognized Helmut. After a while we came to a fence, cut a hole in it, and climbed through. My job was to secure the way back. At midpoint I was supposed to keep an eye out in both directions in case a patrol turned up and either warn them or divert the patrol. But I guess you don't want to know all those details. It was quite foggy. I was supposed to wait for twenty minutes and then head back on my own.” She shrugged her shoulders. “I waited twenty-five minutes. Then I heard shots. I ran back to the fence and got out of the compound. When I reached our cars, there was an explosion, followed immediately by another. So I went running to the road. At first nobody stopped. They must have thought I was some dangerous nut, my face all black the way it was. But then I realized that and quickly cleaned up. The third car stopped. The driver was a pharmacist from Schwetzingen who'd had a couple of drinks and hit on me. When I reacted hysterically and told him I wanted to go to the psychiatric hospital, he must have thought that that was where I belonged. He took me straight there and thanked his lucky stars that he wasn't arrested or questioned.” She closed her eyes and leaned her head on the headrest. “Rolf was working the evening shift. He gave me a room and an injection, and I slept all the way through to the following evening.”
33
The Kaiser-Wilhelm-Stein
As we drove through the bright, sunny countryside, Leo's account about dark and gloomy nights, blackened faces, holes cut into fences, bombs, and gunfire struck me as strangely unreal. In Nothweiler I parked the car in front of the church and we climbed up to the ruins of Castle Wegelnburg. The woods sparkled in fresh green, the birds were singing, and an aromatic tang hung in the air after the last few days' rain. Explosions at American installations? What Americans? What explosions? But Leo's thoughts did not leave that night so quickly.
“I felt that that fifth man was somehow fishy. He seemed jittery and all over the place: He'd be walking ahead, then he'd fall back, then he'd suddenly turn up on the side. He had all kinds of equipment with him. I don't know why, or what it was for. After all, we had brought along the explosives.”
The path leading up to Castle Wegelnburg is steep. Leo hadn't let me carry her bag and coat, and I was glad. She was always a good bit ahead of me and would stop and wait. At first she walked as if she'd been wound up with a key. But gradually her steps grew lighter and freer. She took her bag off her shoulder and held it in her hand, swung her arms, threw her head back so that her hair flew, and when she waited for me she pranced backward in front of me. She returned to the subject of Operation Bonfire. An overgrown pile of rotting logs reminded her of the structures the Americans had put up at their installation. “Like garages, but a lot bigger, with slanted sides and covered with earth and grass. Then there were these really long objects, not quite as tall and wide as the garages, but also covered in grass. Who knows what they were.” But the question did not really seem to preoccupy her. When I caught up with her and wanted to discuss the grass-covered garages, she laid her hand on my arm. “Shh.” A rabbit was sitting on the path, watching us.
We stopped for a rest on the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Stein. At the gas station I had bought a kilo of Granny Smith apples and some chocolate with whole nuts. “What are you going to do on the other side?” I asked her. Just beyond the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Stein lies France.