Free Summer Lies by Bernhard Schlink Page B

are we this way? … I don’t know what to call it. You know what I mean? We’ve changed.”
    “Changed for the better or for the worse?”
    She took her hand out of his, leaned back, and looked at him sharply. “I don’t know that either. We’ve lost something and we’ve won something, haven’t we?”
    “Lost our innocence? Won some kind of sobriety?”
    “And if sobriety is also the death of love, and without some faith, pure and simple, in the other person, things can’t go on?”
    “Isn’t truth, which you said you need as the ground beneath your feet, always sober?”
    “No, the truth I mean and the one I need isn’t sober. It’s passionate, beautiful sometimes, and sometimes hideous, it can make you happy and it can torture you, and it always sets you free. If you don’t notice it at first, you will after a while.” Shenodded. “It can really torture you. Then you curse and wish you’d never encountered it. But then you realize it’s not torturing you, what’s doing the torturing is whatever the truth is about.”
    “I don’t understand.” The truth and whatever the truth is about—what did Anne mean? At the same time he was wondering if he should tell her about Renée, now, because later would be too late. But why would later be too late? And if later was okay, why have to do it at all?
    “Forget it.”
    “But I really want to know what …”
    “Forget it. I’d rather talk about how things are meant to go from here.”
    “You wanted some time to think about getting married.”
    “Yes, I think I should take some time. Don’t you need time too?”
    “Time out?”
    “Time out.”
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    She didn’t want to talk about it. No, he hadn’t done anything wrong. Nothing she could name. Nothing she would want to talk about between the two of them and a couples therapist.
    The food came. She ate enthusiastically. He felt queasy, and poked around the dorade with his fork. When they were lying in bed, she didn’t push him away but she wasn’t hungry for him either, and he had the feeling she didn’t need time anymore, she’d already reached a decision and he had already lost her.
    The next morning she asked if he’d mind taking her to the airport in Marseille. He did mind, but he took her and tried tosay goodbye to her in such a way that she’d see his pain as well as his readiness to respect her decision, and would remember him fondly and would want to see him again and have him too.
    Then he drove through Marseille, hoping he’d suddenly see Renée on the sidewalk, but knew he wouldn’t stop. On the highway he thought about how life in Frankfurt would be without Therese. What he would work on. The contract for a new play that he’d been hoping for hadn’t come. He could set to work on the outline for the movie producer—but he could do that anywhere. Nothing, in fact, was pulling him toward Frankfurt.
    What had Anne said? If you encounter the truth and it tortures you, that isn’t what’s torturing you, it’s whatever the truth’s about. And it always sets you free. He laughed. Truth and whatever the truth is about—he still didn’t understand. And that the truth sets you free—maybe it was the other way around and you had to be free in order to be able to live with the truth. But nothing spoke against trying out the truth anymore. Somewhere up ahead he’d leave the highway and take a room in a hotel, in the Cévennes, in Burgundy, in the Vosges, and write about it all to Anne.

The House in the Forest
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    Sometimes it felt as if this had always been his life. That he’d always lived in this house in the forest, by the meadow with its apple trees and lilacs, and the pond with its weeping willows. That he’d always had his wife and daughter around him. And always received their farewells when he went away, and their happy greetings when he came back.
    Once a week they stood in front of the house and waved goodbye to him until his car was out of sight. He drove to the little