Self's punishment - By Bernhard Schlink & Walter Popp Page 0,11

the neighbourhood I picked up my week’s provision of Sweet Afton, bought a warm meatloaf sandwich, with mustard, from the butcher on the marketplace, visited my Turk with the good olives, watched the Green Party members at their info-stand on Parade-Platz fruitlessly trying to disturb the harmony between the RCW and the population of Mannheim and Ludwigshafen. Among the bystanders I noticed Officer Herzog being supplied with fliers.

In the afternoon I sat in Luisenpark. It costs something, just like Tivoli. So at the beginning of the year, for the first time, I’d acquired a year’s pass. I wanted to get my money’s worth out of it. When I wasn’t watching pensioners feeding the ducks I read Keller’s Green Henry. Frau Buchendorff ’s first name had led me to the Judith in the book.

At five o’clock I went home. Sewing a button onto my dinner jacket took me a good half-hour with my dodgy arm. I took a taxi from the Wasserturm to the RCW restaurant. There was a banner stretched over the entrance with Chinese characters on it. On three masts flew the flags of the People’s Republic of China, the Federal Republic of Germany, and the RCW, flapping in the wind. To the right and left of the entrance were two Rhineland maidens in folk costume, looking about as authentic as Barbie dolls dressed as Munich beer-maids. The procession of cars was in full swing. It all looked so upright and dignified.

9

Groping the décolleté of the economy

Schmalz was standing in the foyer.

‘How’s your little son doing?’

‘Good, thank you. I would like to talk and thank you later. I’m tied up now.’

I went up the stairs and through the open double-doors into the large reception room. People were clustered in small groups, the waitresses and waiters were serving champagne, orange juice, champagne with orange juice, Campari with orange juice, and Campari with soda. I ambled around a bit. It was like any other reception before the speeches were given and the buffet is opened. I sought familiar faces and found the red-haired girl with the freckles. We smiled at each other. Firner drew me into a circle and introduced me to three Chinese men whose names were made up of various combinations of San, Yin, and Kim, as well as Herr Oelmüller, head of the computer centre. Oelmüller was trying to explain computerized data protection in Germany to the Chinese. I don’t know what they found so funny about that but in any event they laughed like the Hollywood Chinese in a Pearl S. Buck adaptation.

Then came the speeches. Korten was brilliant. He covered everything from Confucius to Goethe, left out the Boxer Uprising and the Cultural Revolution, and touched on the former RCW branch in Tsingtao solely to weave in the compliment to the Chinese that the last head of branch there had learned a new process for the production of ultramarine from the Chinese.

The Chinese delegation leader replied no less elegantly. He recounted his university years in Karlsruhe, took his hat off to German culture and the economy, from Böll to Schleyer, spoke technical jargon I didn’t understand, and closed with Goethe’s ‘The Orient and Occident can no longer be divided’.

After the president of the Rhineland-Palatinate’s speech even a less superb buffet would have seemed exciting. For my first helping I chose the saffron oysters in a champagne sauce. Good thing that there were tables. I hate the stand-up receptions where you have to juggle cigarette, glass, and plate – really you should be spoon-fed at them. I spotted Frau Buchendorff at a table with a free chair. She was looking charming in her raw-silk, indigo-coloured suit. The buttons of her blouse were there in their entirety.

‘May I join you?’

‘You can get another chair, unless you plan on perching the Chinese security expert on your lap straight away?’

‘Tell me, did the Chinese pick up on the explosion?’

‘What explosion? No, seriously, they were up at Castle Eltz first thing yesterday, and then they tried out the new Mercedes on the Nürburg Ring. When they got back, everything was over. Today the press has really been going at it, mainly from the meteorological angle. How’s your arm? You’re something of a hero – that couldn’t get into the papers, of course, though it would have made a lovely story.’

The Chinese lady appeared. She had everything that German men who dream of Asian women could dream of. Whether she was in fact a security expert I wasn’t able to establish either.