Free The Weekend by Bernhard Schlink Page B

I’m not being fair to the guests. Perhaps I’m seeing something in them that isn’t even there. But we’ll see tomorrow.
    By the time Margarete and Christiane met, Jörg’s trial was already a good few years in the past. At first Christiane didn’t explain why she was away for a whole day every two weeks; she had to get hold of something, sort something out, see about something. Those were the months when both women thought they could be more than good friends to each other, and when Christiane got up and left at five in the morning, Margarete stayed in bed, fearful and sad. Later, when they both knew their love was a mistake and stayed in their shared apartment anyway, Christiane came out with the story of herself and Jörg. “I know he’s my brother and not my lover, but back then I thought I could be open with you only when I’d come clean about him. But I couldn’t do it. I didn’t tell him you and I were together, and I didn’t tell you that he existed. Silly, isn’t it?” She smiled, embarrassed. Sometimes she was equally embarrassed when she returned from her visits to Jörg, embarrassed because once again she hadn’t managed to confess to him about her life outside, just as outside she didn’t confess that her feelings and thoughts revolved around him. Other times she came back stressed, because she had experienced Jörg only as a duty, and she was fed up with lying, which was unavoidable because their different lives, based on different truths, needed the bridge of lies. Then again she suffered from the helplessness she feltwith regard to Jörg, the jail, the state and her own situation, even though she was still racing around and around in the same spot like a hamster on a wheel. No, Margarete didn’t look down on any of the guests because they had problems with Christiane’s closeness to Jörg. But she was looking forward to Sunday, when the house would be empty again, and she would be alone.
    The grass beneath Margarete’s feet felt even better than she had imagined. Its stalks were damp, slippery and supple and invited her to slide. Once, she overdid it, lost her balance and fell on her back, which took her breath away for a moment. She lay there, her left side hurt, and she laughed. At the cockiness of her footsteps and the pride that comes before a fall. Had she been looking down on her guests? She liked being alone, and she was alone a lot. When she met people, she often found them deeply strange, their behavior incomprehensible, their confidence unsettling. Was what Margarete experienced as the detachment of strangeness really the detachment of arrogance? Her eyes drifting to the branches and the sky, she saw the leaves trembling in the wind, and she saw a star wandering until she realized it was a plane. Then she heard crows, very near and very loud. Had they spotted an enemy and wanted to drive it away, or were they arguing? Did crows wake up at night and argue? If they cawed any longer, they would wake the whole house.
    Margarete got to her feet and walked on. She walked to the bench where Ilse had sat writing, and sat down. She had set up the bench here. She had long dreamed of a house by a lake or a river. Now bench andstream fulfilled the dream of waterside life, and Margarete was content with it. A lake or river she would not have had to herself; the stream she did.
    Sometimes she was irritated by how happy she was to withdraw. How rounded, how light, how serene life was alone. Until the escape suddenly made possible two years before the fall of the Berlin Wall, she had been different, more sociable, more open to contact, more needy of it. But she didn’t feel at home in the West, and when she had the chance to return to the East, it too had become strange to her. Her work as a freelance translator put her in touch with an editor every few weeks, and if she couldn’t find something on the Internet she had to do some research in the state library in Berlin, that too every few weeks,