Self's deception - By Bernhard Schlink & Peter Constantine Page 0,89

entropy, according to which the world doesn't have much of a prospect to end well. A bearded man of about fifty thanked the speaker. His paper, he said, had extended a hand to us that we would all want to clasp heartily, and we would have ample opportunity to do so during the two-thirty session; now it was time for lunch. Was this the director who had sat with Lemke in the front row at those spaghetti Westerns in '68 and '69? He was immediately besieged by the workshop participants, but when they dribbled away, taking the speaker with them, he remained behind, jotting down notes.

I greeted him and introduced myself. “I have a question that has nothing to do with your workshop. I'm a private investigator and am investigating a murder. I believe that you know, or knew, the main suspect. Were you a student in Heidelberg around'68,'69?”

He was a careful man. He made me show him my ID and had his office call Wendt Real Estate in Heidelberg to ask Frau Büchler to confirm that I had indeed been commissioned by old Herr Wendt to investigate young Wendt's murder. He was pale when he hung up. “This is terrible news. Someone I knew well becoming a victim of a crime. I suppose this is a daily occurrence in your profession, but in my world I experience it as severe aggrievement.”

He seemed shaken, so I refrained from offering him my hand and advising affectedness instead of aggrievement.

“When were you involved with Rolf Wendt?”

“Let me see, when was the Socialist Patient Collective in Heidelberg? When all that ended, Wendt was looking for a new path, a new direction. He met us and for a while was something like a little brother to us. He must have been about seventeen or eighteen back then.”

“You said 'us'—do you mean Helmut Lemke and yourself?”

“I mean Helmut, Richard, and myself—the three of us spent a lot of time together.” He reminisced. “You know, as much as the news of Wendt's death has shaken me, when I think back, I realize that for me Rolf, dead as he now is, is not more dead than the other two, who I imagine are still alive but from whom I haven't heard in years. Though I must say that back then we lived like there was no tomorrow; all our thoughts and feelings were for the present. Despite world revolution—or because of it? As one grows older, a part of one's heart clings to the past while one's head worries about the future, and one no longer believes that friendships are forever.”

I don't know what a man can still believe in when year after year he parcels out questions of fate into topics for workshops. He stood up. “Let's go and sit outside. Nowadays I hardly get out.”

He leaned far back on the bench in front of the building and held his face up to the sun. I asked him if back then Lemke and Wendt had had a particularly good or particularly bad relationship to each other, and found out that everyone had a special relationship with Lemke. “You either admired him or locked horns with him, or both. But you couldn't deal with him as an equal. And when I said we were Rolf's big brothers, that's not quite right. It was Helmut Lemke who Rolf particularly looked up to.”

“Admiration, locking of horns, not dealing with him as an equal—and yet you remember it as a golden time?”

He sat up and looked at me. His forehead was smooth for a man of fifty, but his eyes were tired with age—the eyes of a man who is duty-bound by his profession to love people, although by now they only get on his nerves. As a priest, therapist, or whatever he basically was, he had offered more advice, given more comfort, and granted more forgiveness than he had within him. “I didn't say it was a golden time, nor would I say such a thing. There is a photograph from those days hanging on the wall of my office in which I can see everything: what was golden—if it was golden—compulsions and conflicts, the living in the present. I can show it to you, if you'd like.”

“How long did your gang-of-four last?”

“Until Helmut's career at the Communist League of West Germany took off. Then he no longer had time for tabletop soccer and spaghetti Westerns, and in politics only what had to do with the Communist League.