The Weekend by Bernhard Schlink

away the next morning. Luckily he never came.”
    “Let’s go for a little walk.” Margarete didn’t wait for Henner’s reaction, but set off, out of the kitchen and across the orchard to the stream. He put on his shoes, which he had taken off to change his trousers, and walked after her. When he caught up with her, she said, “May I?” and took his right arm and leaned on it. They walked slowly along the stream. Sometimes a frog jumped into the water, startled by their footsteps, sometimes the gurgling of the water grew a little louder. Where the forest didn’t reach all the way to the stream, they walked in piercingly hot sunshine. Henner felt his body growing damp with sweat where Margarete leaned against him.
    “Christiane told the police about the cabin in the Odenwald.”
    Henner stopped and looked at Margarete. “Christiane?”
    “I think that was why she poured coffee over your trousers. So that you couldn’t tell Jörg it wasn’t you.”
    “But later I’ll have to tell him what I didn’t tell him before.”
    “Do you?”
    “You mean …”
    “Perhaps that’s what Christiane hopes. Perhaps she wants to talk to you, and ask you to.”
    Henner scratched stones loose with his foot and kicked them into the stream. “What an absurd piece of playacting. The sister betrays her brother to the police. Then she wants her brother’s friend to say it was him. The friend she once loved and then dumped because she didn’t want to betray her brother.” He looked at her. “Has Christiane told you why she betrayed Jörg?”
    “She hasn’t even told me she did betray him. But isn’t it obvious? That she couldn’t stand being so worried about him anymore? That she wanted him to be taken so much by surprise so that he couldn’t shoot or be shot? It was out of fear that she betrayed him, out of love and fear.”
    “And where do I come in?”
    She tried to read in his face whether he felt merely annoyed or harassed. He felt her gaze and smiled at her. “I really don’t know. Do I owe Christiane anything? Do I have to help her because it doesn’t cost me much? What does it cost me if Jörg thinks I’m a traitor?” Her face was first surprised, then scornful. He didn’t see it. He went on seriously thinking and talking. “Or must I denounce Christiane by laying myself bare before him and freeing her of him?”
    “Or must you help Jörg by freeing him of her?”
    Henner heard the mockery in her question. “What’s up?”
    “Stop! You’ll just tie yourself up in knots. Do what you feel—how Christiane and Jörg respond is their business. Right now you’re acting as if they were a calculation you could solve.”
    He walked on, and she walked with him. Although he tried not to feel insulted, he did. As they stood there, she hadn’t taken her arm from his. Now, when he tried to pull his arm away, she held him tight. “You can’t do that. First you have to help me to a bench and then back to the house.” She laughed. “You can do it under protest.”

Twenty
    After breakfast Ilse wanted to go on writing. She took her notebook and pen and went to the stream, but saw even from a distance that Margarete and Henner were sitting on the bench. She took a broad sweep through the forest. When she came back to the stream it was almost twice as wide; another stream must have fed into it in the meantime. Beneath a willow tree was a row-boat, tied to the trunk with a long chain. Ilse sat down in it and opened her notebook.
    At last it was all over. The undertaker’s employee whom the comrades had bribed liberated Jan from the equipment room and gave him the bag. “You have to get over the wall—the gate is shut.” It was dark. Jan stumbled over gravestones, reached the wall, climbed up on one of the tombstones that were set into the wall and sat down on top. He looked onto a dimly lit road, on the far side of which were gardens, and far beyond, at the next road, houses. His new life started now. He threw