Self's punishment - By Bernhard Schlink & Walter Popp Page 0,78
to help him. Then come round right now. I’m in the Palais Boisserée all afternoon.’
From the press coverage of a trial involving the German department, I knew it was housed in the Palais Boisserée. The professors considered themselves rightful descendants of the early princely residents. When rebellious students had profaned the palais, an example had been made of them with the help of the law.
Kirchenberg was particularly princely in his professorial manner. He had thinning hair, contact lenses, a gorged, pink face, and, in spite of his tendency to corpulence, he moved with a light-footed elegance. As a greeting he clasped my hand in both of his. ‘Isn’t it simply shocking what has befallen Sergej?’
I replied with my queries about Sergej’s state of mind, career plans, finances.
He leaned back in his armchair. ‘Serjoscha has been shaped by his difficult youth. The years between eight and fourteen in Roth, a bigoted garrison town in Franken, were sheer martyrdom for the child. A father who could only live out his homoeroticism in military power postures, a mother as busy as a bee, good-hearted, utterly weak-willed. And the tramp, tramp, tramp,’ he drummed his knuckles on the desktop, ‘of soldiers marching in and out every day. Listen hard.’ With one hand he made a gesture commanding my silence, with the other he kept up the drumming. Slowly the hand grew still. Kirchenberg sighed. ‘It’s only with me that he’s been able to work through those years.’
When I broached the suspicion of self-mutilation, Kirchenberg was beside himself. ‘That’s so laughable, it’s ridiculous. Sergej has a very loving relationship with his body, almost narcissistic. Amid all the prejudices doing the rounds about us gays, surely this much at least is understood, that we take better care of our bodies than the average heterosexual. We are our body, Herr Self.’
‘Was Sergej Mencke really gay, then?’
‘Such prejudice in your questions,’ said Kirchenberg, almost pityingly. ‘You’ve never sat on the Scheffel Terrace reading Stefan George. Do it sometime. Then perhaps you’ll feel that homoeroticism isn’t a question of being, but rather of becoming. Sergej isn’t, he’s becoming.’
I took my leave from Professor Kirchenberg and passed Mischkey’s apartment on the way to the castle. And I did spend a little time on the Scheffel Terrace. I was cold. Or was I becoming cold? There was no becoming going on, perhaps I couldn’t expect it without Stefan George.
In Café Gundel their special Christmas cookies, embossed with local sights, were on display already. I purchased a bagful, intending to surprise Judith with them on the journey to Locarno.
Back in the office everything ran like clockwork. From Information I obtained the telephone number of the Catholic priest’s office in Roth; the chaplain was only too happy to interrupt his sermon preparation to inform me that the leader of the Catholic Scout troop in Roth since time immemorial had been Joseph Maria Jungbluth, senior teacher. I reached Senior Teacher Jungbluth immediately thereafter. He said he’d be glad to meet me the next day in the early afternoon to talk about little Siegfried.
Judith had fixed a date with Tyberg for Sunday afternoon, and we decided to travel on Saturday. ‘Tyberg looks forward to meeting you.’
9
And then there were three
Mannheim to Nürnberg on the new autobahn should take two hours. The Schwabach/Roth exit comes thirty kilometres before Nürnberg. One day Roth will lie on the Augsburg– Nürnberg autobahn. I won’t be around then.
Fresh snow had fallen in the night. On the journey I had the choice of two open lanes, a well-worn one on the right and a narrow one for overtaking. Passing a truck was a lurching adventure. Three and a half hours later, I arrived. In Roth there are a couple of half-timbered houses, a few sandstone buildings, the Evangelical and the Catholic churches, pubs that have adapted themselves to military needs, and lots of barracks. Not even a local patriot could describe Roth as the Pearl of Franken. It was just before one and I picked an inn. In the Roter Hirsch, which had resisted the trend for fast food and had even retained its old furnishings, the proprietor did the cooking himself. I asked the waitress for a typically Bavarian dish. She didn’t understand my request. ‘Bavarian? We’re in Franken.’ So I asked her to recommend a typical dish from Franken. ‘Everything,’ she said. ‘Our entire menu is Frankish. Including the coffee.’ Helpful breed of folk here. Pot luck. I ordered Saure Zipfel with fried potatoes, and a dark beer.