Self's deception - By Bernhard Schlink & Peter Constantine Page 0,5

swimming pool and the zoo. She'd lived in room 408, and after crossing some grungy stairwells and hallways I found three students drinking tea in the communal kitchen on the fourth floor—two girls and a boy.

“Excuse me, I'm looking for Leonore Salger.”

“There's no Leonore here.” The young man was sitting with his back to me and spoke over his shoulder.

“I'm Leo's uncle. I'm passing through Heidelberg, and this is the address I've got for her. Could you—”

“A dear old uncle visiting his dear young niece—how sweet! Hey, what d'you say to that, Andrea?”

Andrea turned around, the young man turned around, and all three of them eyed me with interest.

Philipp, an old friend of mine who's a surgeon at the Mannheim Municipal Hospital, works a lot with young interns and tells me how well behaved the students of the nineties are. My ex-girlfriend Babs has a son who's studying to be a lawyer, and he's polite and serious, too. His girlfriend, a nice girl studying theology, whom I always addressed as “Frau,” as the women's movement has taught me to do, corrected me gently, telling me that she is a “Fräulein.”

These three students seemed to have missed this trend— were they sociologists? I sat down on the fourth chair.

“When did Leo move out?”

“Who says she ever—”

“It was before your time,” Andrea cut in. “Leo moved out about a year ago, to somewhere on the west side, I think.” She turned toward me. “I don't have her new address. But they must have it over at the registrar's office. I'm going there—want to come along?”

She led the way down the stairs, her black ponytail swinging, her skirt swaying. She was a robust girl, but quite pleasing to the eye. The office had already closed, as it was almost four. We stood irresolutely in front of the locked door.

“Do you happen to have a recent picture of her?” I went on to tell her that Leo's father, my brother-in-law, had a birthday coming up, and that we were going to have a party on the Drachenfels, and that all her aunts, uncles, and cousins would be coming from Dresden. “One of the reasons I want to see Leo is because I'm putting together a photo album of family and friends.”

She took me up to her room. We sat down on the couch, and she pulled out of a shoebox a student's life of carnivals and end-of-term parties, vacations and field trips, a demonstration here and there, a weekend work study, and pictures of her boyfriend, who liked to pose on his motorbike.

“Here's one of her at a wedding.” She handed me Leo on a chair, dark blue skirt and salmon-pink blouse, a cigarette in her right hand and her left hand resting pensively on her cheek, her face concentrating as if she were listening to or watching someone. There was nothing girlish about her anymore. This was a somewhat tense, assertive young woman. “In this one she's coming out of the city hall—she was one of the marriage witnesses—and in this one we're all on our way to the Neckar River. The wedding party was on a boat.” I figured her to be about five foot six. She was slim without being thin, and had a nice, straight back.

“Where was this one taken?” Leo was coming out of a door in jeans and a dark sweater, her bag over her shoulder and her coat slung over her arm. She had dark rings under her eyes, her right eye squeezed shut, her left eyebrow raised. Her hair was tousled and her mouth a thin, angry line. I recognized the door and the building, but couldn't place them.

“That was after the demonstration we had back in June. The cops had arrested her and taken her in for fingerprinting.”

I couldn't remember there being any demonstrations in June, but now I saw that Leo was coming out of the Heidelberg police headquarters.

“Can I have these two?”

“You want this one, too?” Andrea shook her head. “I thought you were planning a nice surprise for Leo's father, not trying to get her into trouble or something. You'd better leave this awful photo and take the nice one—the one where she's sitting, that's a good one.” She gave me the picture of Leo on the chair and put the other pictures back in the box. “If you're not in a hurry, you could drop by the Drugstore Bar. She used to hang out there every evening, and I ran into