The Weekend Read Online Free

friendliness is due to their job and how much it is based on genuine sympathy, Henner had a sense that she was pleased to see him again too. Her husband, Eberhard, the retired curator of a South German museum, was much older than his wife, and the loving attention with which he fetched a shawl and put it around her shoulders when it grew cooler, and the affection with which she thanked him, made Henner think that this love fulfilled the longing of a daughter and a father. The husband saw through the arrangement of people around the table before sitting down, placing his chair between Ulrich’s wife, Ingeborg, and daughter, Dorle, and managing to draw them both into conversation, even raising the occasional peal of merry laughter from that bored, provocative, sulky mouth.
    As Margarete walked Andreas onto the terrace, she announced that Jörg and Christiane had called and would be arriving in half an hour. At six o’clock there would be an aperitif on the terrace, and at seven o’clock dinner in the drawing room—if anyone wanted to stretch their legs before evening, now was the time. She would summon them with the bell just before six.
    While the others stayed where they were, Henner got up. Andreas wasn’t one of the old friends who had met at school or in the first few terms at university. He had been Jörg’s defense counsel until giving up his mandate because Jörg and the other defendants had wanted to exploit him politically. He became his lawyer again when Jörg requested his support in his bid for an early release a few years previously. Henner had met him before too. If the afternoon’s choreography was designed to allow the guests to meet before everything started revolving around Jörg, Henner could take his leave. And besides, he didn’t know how he would be able to bear so many people for so many hours in such a small space.
    Once again he took a wide arc around the fields. He walked slowly, in a gangly fashion, taking long strides and swinging his arms. He hadn’t phoned his mother from New York—he hadn’t even phoned her since he’d got back, and he felt guilty even though he knew that she wouldn’t remember when he had phoned her last. He hated the ritual of phone calls in which his mother repeatedly demanded that he speak up, before finally giving up and putting down the receiver, so that in the end nothing had been said. He hated the ritual of the visits that his mother looked forward to, but which always disappointed her because she sensed his distance. But without that distance he couldn’t have borne her and her illnesses, laments and accusations. His hand played with the phone in his jacket pocket, snapped it open and shut, open and shut. No, he wouldn’t call until Sunday.
    Just before six he came back to the house, from the side this time, across an orchard, past a greenhouse with a big woodpile beneath a low roof. At the side, too, there was an oak tree, small and bent after being struck by lightning, and a door to the house. As he stood under the tree and looked into the evening, Margarete opened the door, wiped her hands on her apron, leaned against the door frame and looked into the evening, as he was doing. A bell hung beside the door; in a moment Margarete would step away from the door frame, grab the short bell pull with her powerful, bare arms and ring the bell. Henner didn’t know she’d noticed him until she asked him, just loudly enough for him to hear her across the distance between them, and without turning around to him: “Do you hear the blackbirds’ duet?” He hadn’t paid any attention; now he heard it. The evening, the blackbirds, Margarete in the doorway—Henner didn’t know why, but he was close to tears.

Five
    Ilse didn’t hear the bell. She was sitting in her room, on the other side of the house, writing. The room was furnished with a camp bed, chair and table; on the table there were a jug and basin, a candle, a box of matches and a bunch of tulips. It