Self's punishment - By Bernhard Schlink & Walter Popp Page 0,94

see whether I’d kill you, too? Push you over?’ Fifty metres below the sea seethed. He laughed, as though it were a joke. Then he read it in my eyes before I said the words.

‘I’ve come to kill you.’

‘To bring them back to life?’ he mocked. ‘Because you . . . because the perpetrator wants to play judge? Do you feel innocent and exploited? What would you have been without me, without my sister and my parents, before nineteen fortyfive, and all my help afterwards? Jump yourself if you can’t deal with it.’

His voice cracked. I stared at him. Then that grin came to his face, the one I’d known, and liked, since we were young. It had charmed me into shared escapades and out of fatal situations, understanding, winning, superior.

‘Hey, Gerd, this is crazy. Two old friends like you and me

. . . Come on, let’s have breakfast. I can smell the coffee already.’ He whistled to the dogs.

‘No, Ferdinand.’

He looked at me with an expression of utter incredulity as I shoved against his chest with both hands. He lost his balance and plummeted down, his coat billowing. I didn’t hear a cry. He thudded against a rock before the sea took him with it.

19

A package from Rio

The dogs followed me to the car and frolicked alongside, yapping, until I turned off the field-track, onto the road. My whole body was trembling and yet I felt lighter than I had in a long time. On the road a tractor came towards me. The farmer stared at me. Had he been high enough to see me as I pushed Korten to his death? I hadn’t even thought about witnesses. I looked back; another tractor was ploughing its furrows in a field and two children were out on bikes. I drove west. At Point-du-Raz I considered staying – an anonymous Christmas abroad. But I couldn’t find a hotel, and the cliff line looked just like Trefeuntec. I was going home. At Quimper I came to a police roadblock. I could tell myself a thousand times that it was an unlikely spot to be searching for Korten’s murderer, but I was scared as I waited in the queue for the police to wave me on.

In Paris I made the eleven o’clock night train. It was empty and I had no trouble getting a sleeping car. On Christmas Day towards eight o’clock I was back in my apartment. Turbo greeted me sulkily. Frau Weiland had laid my Christmas mail on the desk. Along with all the commercial Christmas greetings I found a Christmas card from Vera Müller, an invitation from Korten to spend New Year’s Eve with him and Helga in Brittany, and from Brigitte a package from Rio with an Indian tunic. I took it as a nightshirt, and went to bed. At half past eleven the telephone rang.

‘Merry Christmas, Gerd. Where are you hiding?’

‘Brigitte! Merry Christmas.’ I was happy, but I could hardly see for weariness and exhaustion.

‘You grouch, aren’t you pleased? I’m back.’

I made an effort. ‘You’re kidding. That’s really great. Since when?’

‘I arrived yesterday morning and I’ve been trying to reach you ever since. Where have you been hiding?’ There was reproach in her voice.

‘I didn’t want to be here on Christmas Eve. I felt very claustrophobic.’

‘Would you like to eat Tafelspitz with us? It’s already on the stove.’

‘Yes . . . who else is coming?’

‘I’ve brought Manu with me. I can’t wait to see you.’ She blew a kiss down the telephone.

‘Me too.’ I returned the kiss.

I lay in bed, and felt my way back to the present. To my world in which fate doesn’t control steamships or puppets, where no foundations are laid and no history gets made.

The Christmas edition of the Süddeutsche lay on the bed. It gave an annual balance sheet of toxic incidents in the chemical industry. I soon laid the paper aside.

The world wasn’t a better place for Korten’s death. What had I done? Come to terms with my past? Wiped my hands of it?

I arrived far too late for lunch.

20

Come with the Wind!

Christmas Day brought no news of Korten’s death, nor did the next. Sometimes I was fearful. Whenever the doorbell rang, I was frightened and assumed the police had arrived to storm the apartment. When I was relaxing happily in Brigitte’s arms, alive with her sweet kisses, occasionally I wondered anxiously if this might be our last time together. At times I imagined the scene with Herzog, telling him everything. Or