Self's punishment - By Bernhard Schlink & Walter Popp Page 0,80

can of sardines. I wanted to try empty sardine cans on my Christmas tree this year and had to start collecting them. It was almost too late to get enough together before Christmas. Should I invite Philipp and Eberhard next Friday for a funeral feast of sardines in oil?

‘Door-Induced Fractures’ was fifty pages long. The system underlying the work emerged as a combination of doors and breaks. The introduction contained a diagram, the horizontal of which depicted the various fracture-inducing doors, and the vertical the door-induced fractures. Most of the 196 squares contained figures revealing how often the corresponding constellation had cropped up at the city hospital in the last twenty years.

I looked for the line ‘car door’ and the column ‘tibia fracture’. At the point they met I found the number 2 and afterwards in the text the respective case histories. Although all names had been removed I recognized Sergej’s in one. The other dated back to 1972. A nervous cavalier, while helping his lady into the car, had shut the door too swiftly. The study could only cite one case of self-mutilation. A failed goldsmith had hoped to gain heaps of gold with his insured, and broken, right thumb. In the furnace cellar he had placed his right hand in the frame of the iron door and slammed it shut with his left. The affair only came apart because, with the insurance money already paid, he had bragged about his coup. He told the police that as a child he’d attached his wobbly milk-teeth to the door handle with a thread and pulled them out. That’s what had given him the idea.

The decision to call Frau Mencke and enquire about young Siegfried’s methods of tooth extraction was one I put on ice.

Yesterday I’d been too tired to stay up to watch Flashdance, borrowed from the video rental on Seckenheimer Strasse. Now I slid in the cassette. Afterwards I danced under the shower. Why hadn’t I stayed longer in Pittsburgh?

10

Stop thief

In Basle Judith and I took our first break. We drove off the autobahn into town and parked on Münster-Platz. It was covered in snow and was free of aggravating Christmas decorations. We walked a few steps to Café Spielmann, found a table by the window, and had a view over the Rhine and the bridge with the small chapel in the middle.

‘Now tell me in detail how you set this up with Tyberg,’ I asked Judith over a bowl of muesli, which was particularly delicious here, with lots of cream and without an overabundance of oat flakes.

‘During the centenary when I was assigned to him he invited me to look him up if I was ever in Locarno. I mentioned this and said I had to chauffeur my elderly uncle,’ she placed a soothing hand on mine, ‘to look for a holiday home there. I added that he knew this elderly uncle from the war years.’ Judith was proud of her diplomatic move. I was concerned.

‘Won’t Tyberg throw me out on the spot when he recognizes me as the former Nazi prosecutor? Wouldn’t it have been better to have told him straight out?’

‘I did consider it, but then perhaps he wouldn’t even have let the former Nazi prosecutor over his threshold.’

‘And why elderly uncle, actually, and not elderly friend?’

‘That smacks of lover. I think Tyberg was interested in me as a woman, and perhaps he wouldn’t see me if he thought I was firmly attached to someone else, especially if I brought this someone with me. You are a sensitive private detective.’

‘Yes. I’m perfectly willing to face up to the responsibility of having been Tyberg’s prosecutor. But should I confess to him in one fell swoop that I’m your lover, not your uncle?’

‘Are you asking me?’ She said it abruptly yet playfully, and got out her knitting as though settling down to a longer discussion.

I lit a cigarette. ‘You’ve interested me as a woman time and again, and now I wonder whether I was just an old dodderer to you, avuncular and sexless.’

‘What are you after now? “You’ve interested me as a woman time and again.” If you were interested in me in the past then leave it. If you’re interested in the present then say so. You always prefer taking responsibility for the past rather than for the present.’ Knit two, purl two.

‘I don’t have a problem saying I’m interested in you, Judith.’

‘Listen, Gerd, of course I see you as a man, and I like you as