Self's punishment - By Bernhard Schlink & Walter Popp Page 0,33

around eleven p.m.’

‘Did they check the car?’

‘The police say everything was fine with the car.’

I didn’t have to enquire about Mischkey. He’d have been taken to the forensic medicine department, and if any alcohol or heart failure or any other failure had been ascertained the police would have told Frau Buchendorff. For a moment a vision of Mischkey on the stone dissection table came to me. As a young attorney I often had to be present at autopsies. I had a sudden image of his abdominal cavity being stuffed with wood shavings and sewn up with large stitches at the end.

‘The funeral was the day before yesterday.’

I considered. ‘Tell me, Frau Buchendorff, apart from the details of the event, do you have any reason to doubt that it was an accident?’

‘In recent weeks I often barely recognized him. He was morose, dismissive, turned in on himself, sat at home a lot, hardly wanted to join me on anything at all. Once he even threw me out, just like that. And he evaded all my questions. Sometimes I thought he had someone else, but then again he’d cling to me with a kind of intensity he hadn’t shown before. I was at a complete loss. Once, when I was especially jealous . . . You’ll think, perhaps, I’m not coping with my grief and am being hysterical. But what happened that afternoon . . .’

I topped up her cup and looked at her encouragingly.

‘It was on a Wednesday that we’d both taken off to spend more time together. The day started badly and it wasn’t the case that we wanted to spend more time with one another; actually I wanted him to have more time for me. After lunch he suddenly said that he had to go to the Regional Computing Centre for a couple of hours. I knew very well that wasn’t the truth and was disappointed and furious and could feel his frostiness and imagined him with someone else and did something that I think is actually pretty lousy.’ She bit her lip. ‘I followed him. He didn’t drive to the RCC, but into Rohrbacher Strasse and up the hill on Steigerweg. It was easy to follow him. He drove to the War Cemetery. I’d been careful to keep an appropriate distance. When I reached the cemetery he’d parked his car and was striding up the broad path in the middle. You know the War Cemetery, don’t you, with that path that seems to lead straight to heaven? At the end of it there’s a man-size, chiselled block of sandstone that looks like a sarcophagus. He went up to it. None of this made any sense to me and I hid in the trees. When he’d almost reached the block two men stepped out from behind it, suddenly and quietly, as if they’d come out of nothingness. Peter looked from one to the other; he seemed to want to turn to one of them, but didn’t know which.

‘Then everything went like lightning. Peter turned to his right, the man to his left took two steps, grabbed him from behind, and held him tightly. The guy on the right punched him in the stomach, over and over. It was quite unreal. The men seemed detached somehow, and Peter made no attempt to defend himself. Perhaps he was just as paralysed as I was. And it was over in a flash. As I started to run, the one who’d punched Peter took his glasses from his nose with an almost careful gesture, dropped them, and crunched them beneath his heel. Then just as silently and suddenly, they left Peter and disappeared again behind the sandstone block. I heard them running away through the woods.

‘When I reached Peter he had collapsed and was lying awkwardly on his side. I . . . but that doesn’t matter. He never told me why he had gone to the cemetery and been beaten up. Nor did he ever ask me why I’d followed him.’

We were both silent. What she’d recounted sounded like the work of professionals and I could understand why she doubted Peter’s death was an accident.

‘No, I don’t think you’re being hysterical. Is there anything else that seemed odd to you?’

‘Little things. For example, he started smoking again. And let his flowers die. He was apparently strange with his friend Pablo as well. I met him once during that time because I didn’t know what else I could do and he was worried,