Self's deception by Bernhard Schlink Read Free Book Online Page B

“I was intending to leave this on his doorstep.” She pressed the plate into my hands and unlocked the door. “Perhaps you'd like to try a piece. What did you say you were doing in Heidelberg?”
    “I'm with the Union Bank of Baden.” As a matter of fact I do have an account there, and the old gray suit I was wearing fitted the image of a Baden official who had erred into banking. Frau Kleinschmidt found me sufficiently reputable and kept nodding her head respectfully. Her chin doubled, tripled, and quadrupled.
    It was cool in Wendt's apartment. There were four doors in the hallway. The bathroom was to the left, the living room and the bedroom, which also served as his study, to the right, and the broom closet straight ahead. The kitchen lay beyond the living room. I hurried, as I wanted to be out of there by six. I looked for the telephone, to no avail. Wendt didn't have one. So there wasn't going to be one of those little books with names, addresses, and phone numbers lying next to a phone. In the chest of drawers I found only shirts and linen, in the closet only pants, jackets, and sweaters. In the wooden cabinets that Wendt used as supports for his writing desk there were ring binders, technical books, and a dictionary that was still in its shrink-wrap. Also loose letters, and letters in bundles, bills, reminders, traffic tickets, and thick reams of writing paper, as if he were planning to write a big book and had wanted to make sure that he wouldn't run out of supplies. Pinned on the cork board above the desk were a movie schedule from the Gloria Theater, a brochure for a water pick, a postcard from Istanbul and another from Amorbach, a key, a shopping list, and a cartoon showing two men. “Do you find it hard to make a decision?” one man was asking the other. “Yes and no.”
    I took down the postcards. A thankful former patient and his wife had sent greetings from Istanbul, while Gabi, Klaus, Katrin, Henner, and Lea sent greetings from Amorbach, with the message that Amorbach was beautiful in the spring, that the children and Lea were getting on well together, that the renovation of the mill was almost finished, and that Wendt should come visit them soon. Gabi had been the one who wrote the postcard, Klaus had signed with a flourish, Katrin and Henner had scrawled something in childish letters, and from Lea came: “Hi, Lea.” I looked carefully, but Lea remained Lea, not Leo.
    In the ring binders I found the notes and drafts of Wendt's doctoral dissertation. The letters that were bundled together were ten or more years old; in the loose letters his sister described her life in Lübeck, his mother her vacation, and a friend wrote on professional matters. I rummaged through the pile of books, newspapers, patient files, and papers and found a bank savings book, a checkbook, a passport, travel brochures of Canada, a draft for a job application to a hospital in Toronto, a Wieblingen parish newsletter, a note with three phone numbers on it, and the beginning of a poem.
    Who can tell
    if parallel lines
    meet
    at infinity?
    Who can tell
    if you and I…
    I would have liked an optimistic continuation for that “you and I.” My father, an official with the German railways, with tracks in mind, had answered the question of whether parallel lines meet in infinity with a “no.”
    I jotted down the three phone numbers. On the bookshelf I found a photo album documenting Wendt's childhood and youth. In the bathroom there was a picture of a naked girl stuck to the mirror. Under the mirror was a packet of condoms.
    I gave up. Whatever Wendt might be hiding, his apartment didn't reveal it. I stood a few more minutes with Frau Klein-schmidt by her strawberry patch. I showed her Leo's picture and told her how happy my wife and I were that our son had met this nice young woman. She had never seen Leo before.

14
Twenty Smurfs
    Back at my office I found an envelope with Salger's next payment. Again, fifty hundred-mark bills.