Self's deception - By Bernhard Schlink & Peter Constantine Page 0,71
neck. And when you rattle me like this, I can't stop coughing—cough cough cough.”
“It's not the rattling that makes you cough, it's the smoking!”
“No, no, Eva. The cigarettes have hit me in the legs, not the lungs.”
Eva, flushed and sweating, must have been about eighteen; Grandpa in his wheelchair was somewhere between eighty and a hundred and ten. He was a shriveled little man with sparse white hair and a thin beard like that of a Chinese sage. He was hunchbacked and sat crookedly in his wheelchair, his hands gripping the armrests, and the stump of his leg, which had been amputated below the knee, rested against the raised footrest. In their struggle, Eva and Grandpa only saw me when I got up from the rock I was sitting on. They looked at me as if I'd come from another planet.
“Good morning,” I said. “Fine weather we're having.” I couldn't think of anything better.
Eva returned my greeting. “Good morning.”
“Shh!” Grandpa cut into Eva's and my budding conversation. “Can you hear them? I knew it!”
We listened, and now the bulldozers, conveyer belts, and trucks could clearly be heard.
“I suppose they're just back from their break,” I said, and the two of them looked at me, even more surprised. “You meant the construction going on beyond the fence, didn't you? The new fence. Does the construction interest you?”
“Does it… ? You're not from these parts, are you? When I got my pension and still had both legs—cough coughcough—I used to walk along this fence every day. Later I came as often as I could, at least once a week. Now she brings me here whenever she can. If you were from around here, I'd know you. And you'd know me, too—cough cough—No one else ever comes here.”
“I've heard about you, Herr Henlein.”
“What do you say to that, Eva? People have heard about me. Are you with the Green Party? Are you interested in the forest again? I heard about that—cough cough—you're all rearing to go, and then you fizzle out because you can't get quick results. All you guys want to make the world a better place, but you don't even take the time to hear what I've got to say.”
“I didn't know you were still active. Where do you live? Could we meet somewhere?”
“You'll have to come over to Mannheim. I don't live in Viernheim anymore. I live near my children—cough cough— in E 6, in a retirement home. Come on, Eva, off we go.”
I followed them with my eyes. She was dexterous and had a knack for steering the wheelchair clear of roots and stones, but didn't manage to dodge them all. She needed all her strength to push the wheelchair, with Henlein cursing loudly, over some of the obstacles.
I hurried after them. “Would you like me to help you?”
“I can manage, thank you very much—cough cough.”
“You can manage, Grandpa, but I wouldn't mind a little help,” Eva said.
It took us almost two hours to reach the road. Henlein cursed, coughed, and reminisced about his campaigns in the sixties and seventies, with which he wanted to get to the bottom of things. “The Americans' poison gas—that wasn't even the worst of it. You can bet they'd be pretty careful when they handle that stuff. But what about the old stuff …” In 1935, he'd been interned in a concentration camp, and in 1945 put to work moving and burying the Wehrmacht's stocks of poison gas. “Near Lossa, Sondershausen and Dingelstädt in East Germany—I wrote about that later on and even managed to go there and hand out flyers. But the East German authorities deported me back to the West. Ha, there's model Communists for you! Then I did the same thing here in Viernheim. There were rumors that there was poison gas from World War I still buried in Viernheim. Yellow-cross gas, blue-cross gas, mustard gas, and later on we dug in tabun and sarin.” After Hen-lein had been freed from the concentration camp, he'd drifted around for a while, and in 1953 came to Mannheim. There he worked at Brown Boveri & Co., married in 1955, and built a house in Viernheim. He saw it as preordained (if for a Communist there is such a thing) that he ended up here. His calling in life was to fight to defuse the time bomb in the Lam-pertheim National Forest. “Maybe it stopped ticking ages ago. Maybe the Americans dug everything up after '45 and took it all away. But would