Free The Weekend by Bernhard Schlink Page A

cause you no shame. Particularly now that he wears your mantle. You’re a treasure.” He took her in his arms.
    She laid her head against his chest. “Don’t screw things up with Henner. He has a lot of influence and goodwill, he can help you. Who cares what happened thirty years ago. You have to live for the future, not in the past.” He had called her Tia, and she wanted to call him Kiddo as she used to, and as their mother had done. But she felt that he had turned away from her as she spoke.
    He still kept his arms around her, but the intimacy had gone. Then he rubbed her back. “Don’t humiliate me, Christiane. I don’t need anybody, no Henner, no Karin, no Ulrich. I get by with little—that’s something I learned in jail. OK, I dream of holidays that I can’t afford on Social Security. Do you think you’ll take me with you sometime?” He pushed her from him, so that he could look into her face.
    She was crying.

Fifteen
    When everyone was asleep, Margarete woke up. When Jörg had left the table early she too had said good-bye to the group, gone to the garden house, where she lived alone, and gone to bed. Now she had been awoken by the pains in her left hip. Memories of an accident many years before. They woke her every night.
    She turned onto her side, put her feet on the floor and sat up. Her hip hurt just as much sitting as lying. But the pain no longer spread into her left side and her left leg. She knew she should do exercises, stretch her hip, side and leg. Take the tablets she had forgotten before going to sleep.
    Instead she looked out the window. The rain had stopped, the sky was clear, the moon shone on the park. It also shone on her feet. They gleamed quite white on the dark floorboards. She took it as a challenge to get up, go downstairs and walk outside the door. Every footstep was difficult. It wasn’t just her hip. Since a doctor had treated her with cortisone she had grown fat. But losing weight would require more discipline than she had or wanted to have.
    The house and the nearby village were in darkness. Only the moon and stars gleamed, the constellations overwhelmingly clear and bright, the Milky Way extravagantly generous, the moon contentedly sedate.Margarete recalled holidays in the south, when, having grown up under a city-bright night sky, she first saw the starry sky in all its glory. Distance has nothing to do with it, she thought. It’s all here.
    On slow, cautious footsteps she set off. She wasn’t afraid of nails or broken glass; she herself had removed rubbish and rubble around the house, and kept the paths clear. But walking on bare feet was unfamiliar and made her insecure—what would her feet feel next? Then it made her curious. Would the next thing be smooth earth, firm as stone, but slightly springy? Or gravel, resistant, prickly, tickling? Or a dry branch, breaking with a crack? Margarete’s favorite path through the park was overgrown with grass, and she was already looking forward to the soft stalks beneath her feet.
    She walked past the house. When she and Christiane had discovered the property two years before, she had immediately wanted the garden house for herself. Not because it was dry and the house was damp and moldy—she hadn’t known that at the time. The house had too much history for Margarete, too much stale and wasted life. The damp and the mold only later confirmed to her that it was drenched in too much human smell, and spoiled by it. Now Margarete thought she could also sense the vibration of the guests, as if it were oozing from the house. Their good intentions, their sense of duty, their simultaneous involvement and withdrawal, the lies they served up to themselves and one another, their embarrassment, their helplessness. Margarete didn’t look down on any of the guests; over the years she had experienced the whole spectrum ofreactions to any closeness between Jörg and Christiane, and Christiane was her friend. Perhaps, she said to herself,