Self's deception - By Bernhard Schlink & Peter Constantine Page 0,62

put it, by a grenade splinter near Ypers and by a bayonet near Peronne. The third time, his company suffered a gas attack at Verdun. “Mustard gas. It's not a stinking, yellowish-green cloud, like chlorine gas, which you can see and so protect yourself against. Mustard gas is devious. You don't see it and you don't smell it. If you didn't see a comrade grab at his throat or didn't have a sixth sense and quickly slip on your gas mask, then that was it, in the blink of an eye.” My father had had a sixth sense and survived, while most of the men in his company had died. But he had gotten a big enough dose of gas to suffer for months. “The fever went. But that dizziness, even when you weren't moving, and all the retching, retching, retching…and then, mustard gas burns out the eyes. That was the worst part, the fear that it had got you in such a way that you'd never be able to see again.”

I heard the story of the gas attack more than once. Every time my father spoke about putting on the gas mask, he closed his eyes and covered his face with his hand, until he came to the part where he was released from the infirmary.

Had Leo known what her bonfire was capable of? Was that what she had wanted? Was that why she had accused and convicted herself so sternly? As for Lemke, I couldn't imagine that he didn't know what it was all about.

I was now fully awake. Terrorism in Germany. I had read somewhere that all major historical events happen twice, the first time as a tragedy, the second as a farce, and I had always seen the terrorism of the seventies and eighties, the commotion around it and the fight against it, as some kind of farce. Now I had to ask myself if I had been wrong. Poison gas in the air, the water, and the ground was no farce. And there I was, driving with Leo through France and Switzerland as if the world were one long spring.

Now self-recrimination was added to my fear. Whichever way I lay in bed felt wrong. Whether my eyes were open or shut, my thoughts whirled in the same circle. They whirled crazily until the dawn broke, the birds sang, and I showered and was once again my conscious, rational, skeptical self.

8

It makes sense, doesn't it?

I had promised Brigitte and Manu that we would spend Saturday in Heidelberg. Shopping, some ice cream, the zoo, the castle—the works. We took a tram and got off at the Bismarckplatz.

I hadn't been there for a long time. Everything was purple: The tram stops, tram shelters, kiosks, benches, trash cans, lights. The purpleness was disturbed by a yellow mailbox and a pale bust of Bismarck.

“How do you like that! The women's movement has taken over the Bismarckplatz!”

Brigitte stopped. “You and your silly chauvinism. Füruzan is oppressing Philipp, I am oppressing you, and now women have occupied the Bismarckplatz and you, poor man that you are, no longer know—”

“Come on, Brigitte, I was only joking.”

“Ha-ha-ha!” She walked off without beckoning me or Manu with a look or gesture to follow her, and I suddenly felt guilty, even though my conscience was clear. She marched into the Braun bookstore, and I waited outside. Should I have followed her to the Women's Studies section with suppliant eyes, drooping shoulders, and sensitive questions? Manu stayed outside with Nonni and me.

We watched the heavy traffic on the Sophienstrasse. “Where do they come out?” Manu asked, pointing at the cars disappearing down the entrance to the underground garage on the Sophienstrasse.

“Somewhere behind these trees, I think.”

“Can they come out where we parked the other day?”

I didn't understand what he meant. “But that was…Do you mean the underground garage behind the Heilig-Geist Church?”

“Yes, that's how it is sometimes, isn't it?” Manu said. “I mean, you come up somewhere different from where you disappeared. It would be great if you could go under the earth from one underground garage to another whenever all the parking spaces are full or if there's a traffic jam. It makes sense, doesn't it?” He looked at me as if I were a little slow and launched into an intricate explanation.

I stopped listening. His vision of an underground flow of traffic took me back to Peschkalek's poisonous groundwater streams.

“You're not even listening!”

Brigitte came out of the bookstore. I bought her a skirt that flared