In Schlinks the Reader
CONTENTS
TITLE Page
ACCLAIM
PART ONE
CHAPTER ONE
Chapter TWO
CHAPTER Iii
Chapter Four
CHAPTER 5
Chapter 6
Affiliate SEVEN
Affiliate EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER Sixteen
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Function 2
Affiliate One
Affiliate TWO
CHAPTER Iii
Chapter Four
Chapter FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER Seven
CHAPTER Eight
Chapter 9
Affiliate TEN
Chapter ELEVEN
Affiliate TWELVE
CHAPTER Thirteen
CHAPTER Fourteen
Affiliate FIFTEEN
CHAPTER 16
Chapter SEVENTEEN
PART Iii
Chapter ONE
Chapter Two
Affiliate THREE
Chapter FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
Affiliate SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER Nine
CHAPTER 10
Affiliate Eleven
Affiliate TWELVE
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
COPYRIGHT PAGE
International Acclaim for Bernhard Schlink'southward
"Arresting, philosophically elegant, morally circuitous. . . . Mr. Schlink tells this story with marvelous directness and simplicity, his writing stripped blank of any of the standard gimmicks of dramatization."
—The New York Times
"The best novel I read this year . . . an unforgettable short tale about love, horror and mercy."
—Neil Ascherson,
Independent on Sunday Books of the Year
"Breathtaking . . . a novel that sucks you in with its ability, and so that once y'all start to read, you lot cannot put it down. Truly exciting."
—Focus Munich
"One of the well-nigh successful, one of the richest, one of the most overwhelming novels I accept read for a very long time . . . entirely new and profoundly original."
—Jorge Semprun, Le Journal du Dimanche
"Superb."
—Le Monde
Part ONE
CHAPTER One
WHEN I was 15, I got hepatitis. It started in the fall and lasted until spring. Every bit the old yr darkened and turned colder, I got weaker and weaker. Things didn't kickoff to improve until the new yr. January was warm, and my mother moved my bed out onto the balcony. I saw heaven, sun, clouds, and heard the voices of children playing in the courtyard. Equally dusk came i evening in February, there was the audio of a blackbird singing.
The get-go time I ventured outside, it was to go from Blumenstrasse, where we lived on the second floor of a massive turn-of-the-century edifice, to Bahnhofstrasse. That's where I'd thrown upwards on the style home from school one day the previous October. I'd been feeling weak for days, in a way that was completely new to me. Every footstep was an effort. When I was faced with stairs either at home or at school, my legs would hardly carry me. I had no appetite. Even if I sat down at the table hungry, I soon felt queasy. I woke upward every morning with a dry out mouth and the sensation that my insides were in the wrong place and as well heavy for my torso. I was aback of existence so weak. I was even more aback when I threw up. That was another thing that had never happened to me before. My oral fissure was all of a sudden full, I tried to swallow everything down again, and clenched my teeth with my hand in front of my mouth, merely it all burst out of my oral fissure anyway straight through my fingers. I leaned against the wall of the building, looked downward at the vomit around my anxiety, and retched something clear and sticky.
When rescue came, it was nearly an set on. The woman seized my arm and pulled me through the dark entryway into the courtyard. Upwardly above there were lines strung from window to window, loaded with laundry. Wood was stacked in the courtyard; in an open workshop a saw screamed and shavings flew. The adult female turned on the tap, washed my hand get-go, so cupped both of hers and threw water in my face. I dried myself with a handkerchief.
"Get that one!" There were two pails standing by the faucet; she grabbed ane and filled it. I took the other one, filled it, and followed her through the entryway. She swung her arm, the water sluiced down across the walk and washed the vomit into the gutter. So she took my pail and sent a second wave of h2o across the walk.
When she straightened up, she saw I was crying. "Hey, kid," she said, startled, "hey, kid"—and took me in her artillery. I wasn't much taller than she was, I could experience her breasts against my breast. I smelled the sourness of my own breath and felt her fresh sweat equally she held me, and didn't know where to look. I stopped crying.
She asked me where I lived, put the pails down in the entryway, and took me home, walking beside me belongings my schoolbag in one paw and my arm in the other. It's no great altitude from Bahnhofstrasse to Blumenstrasse. She walked quickly, and her decisiveness helped me to keep step with her. She said farewell in front of our edifice.
That aforementioned 24-hour interval my female parent called in the doctor, who diagnosed hepatitis. At some point I told my mother about the adult female. If it hadn't been for that, I don't think I would have gone to see her. Only my mother simply assumed that every bit soon every bit I was better, I would use my pocket money to buy some flowers, go introduce myself, and say thank you, which was why at the terminate of February I found myself heading for Bahnhofstrasse.
CHAPTER TWO
THE Building on Bahnhofstrasse is no longer there. I don't know when or why information technology was torn down. I was away from my hometown for many years. The new edifice, which must take been put up in the seventies or eighties, has five floors plus finished space nether the roof, is devoid of balconies or arched windows, and its shine façade is an surface area of pale plaster. A plethora of doorbells indicates a plethora of tiny apartments, with tenants moving in and out as casually equally yous would pick up and return a rented car. There's a computer store on the footing flooring where once there were a chemist's shop, a supermarket, and a video shop.
The sometime building was as tall, but with merely 4 floors, a outset floor of faceted sandstone blocks, and to a higher place it three floors of brickwork with sandstone arches, balconies, and window surrounds. Several steps led up to the first floor and the stairwell; they were broad at the bottom, narrower above, set between walls topped with atomic number 26 banisters and curving outwards at street level. The forepart door was flanked by pillars, and from the corners of the architrave one lion looked up Bahnhofstrasse while another looked downwardly. The entryway through which the woman had led me to the tap in the courtyard was a side archway.
I had been aware of this edifice since I was a little male child. It dominated the whole row. I used to think that if it fabricated itself any heavier and wider, the neighboring buildings would have to move bated and brand room for it. Inside, I imagined a stairwell with plaster moldings, mirrors, and an oriental runner held down with highly polished brass rods. I causeless that chiliad people would live in such a thou building. But because the edifice had darkened with the passing of the years and the fume of the trains, I imagined that the thou inhabitants would be just every bit somber, and somehow peculiar—deaf or impaired or hunchbacked or lame.
In later years I dreamed about the building again and again. The dreams were similar, variations on one dream and one theme. I'g walking through a strange town and I run into the house. It'due south i in a row of buildings in a commune I don't know. I go on, confused, because the house is familiar but its surround are not. And so I reali
ze that I've seen the house before. I'm not picturing Bahnhofstrasse in my hometown, but some other city, or some other state. For example, in my dream I'm in Rome, run into the house, and realize I've seen it already in Bern. This dream recognition comforts me; seeing the house again in different environment is no more surprising than encountering an sometime friend by hazard in a strange place. I turn around, walk back to the house, and climb the steps. I desire to go in. I turn the door handle.
If I see the firm somewhere in the country, the dream is more long-fatigued-out, or I call up its details amend. I'1000 driving a car. I meet the house on the right and continue going, confused at start only past the fact that such an obviously urban building is standing there in the middle of the countryside. Then I realize that this is non the first time I've seen it, and I'thou doubly dislocated. When I remember where I've seen it before, I plow around and drive back. In the dream, the road is always empty, as I tin plow around with my tires squealing and race back. I'm afraid I'll be too belatedly, and I bulldoze faster. So I run across it. It is surrounded by fields, rape or wheat or vines in the Palatinate, lavender in Provence. The landscape is flat, or at most gently rolling. At that place are no trees. The mean solar day is cloudless, the lord's day is shining, the air shimmers and the road glitters in the rut. The fire walls make the building await unprepossessing and cutting off. They could be the firewalls of whatever building. The house is no darker than it was on Bahnhofstrasse, only the windows are and then dusty that you lot tin can't see annihilation inside the rooms, not even the curtains; information technology looks blind.
I stop on the side of the road and walk over to the entrance. At that place's nobody nearly, not a sound to be heard, not fifty-fifty a afar engine, a gust of wind, a bird. The world is expressionless. I go upwards the steps and turn the knob.
Simply I do not open the door. I wake upwards knowing merely that I took hold of the knob and turned it. Then the whole dream comes back to me, and I know that I've dreamed it earlier.
Chapter THREE
I DIDN'T KNOW the woman's proper name. Clutching my agglomeration of flowers, I hesitated in front of the door and all the bells. I would rather accept turned effectually and left, but then a man came out of the building, asked who I was looking for, and directed me to Frau Schmitz on the 3rd flooring.
No decorative plaster, no mirrors, no runner. Whatsoever unpretentious beauty the stairwell might once have had, information technology could never have been comparable to the grandeur of the façade, and it was long gone in any example. The red paint on the stairs had worn through in the eye, the stamped light-green linoleum that was glued on the walls to shoulder peak was rubbed away to nada, and bits of string had been stretched across the gaps in the banisters. It smelled of cleaning fluid. Mayhap I just became aware of all this some time later. Information technology was e'er just as shabby and just equally clean, and at that place was always the same smell of cleaning fluid, sometimes mixed with the smell of cabbage or beans, or fried food or humid laundry.
I never learned a affair about the other people who lived in the building apart from these smells, the mats outside the apartment doors, and the nameplates nether the doorbells. I cannot fifty-fifty remember meeting another tenant on the stairs.
Nor practice I call up how I greeted Frau Schmitz. I had probably prepared two or iii sentences about my illness and her aid and how grateful I was, and recited them to her. She led me into the kitchen.
Information technology was the largest room in the flat, and contained a stove and sink, a tub and a boiler, a tabular array, ii chairs, a kitchen cabinet, a wardrobe, and a burrow with a red velvet spread thrown over information technology. There was no window. Light came in through the panes of the door leading out onto the balustrade—not much low-cal; the kitchen was simply brilliant when the door was open. Then you heard the scream of the saws from the carpenter's shop in the thousand and smelled the smell of wood.
The apartment too had a pocket-sized, cramped living room with a dresser, a table, four chairs, a wing chair, and a coal stove. It was about never heated in winter, nor was it used much in summer either. The window faced Bahnhofstrasse, with a view of what had been the railroad station, only was at present being excavated and already in places held the freshly laid foundations of the new courthouse and administration buildings. Finally, the apartment besides had a windowless toilet. When the toilet smelled, so did the hall.
I don't remember what we talked well-nigh in the kitchen. Frau Schmitz was ironing; she had spread a woolen blanket and a linen cloth over the table; lifting one piece of laundry after another from the basket, she ironed them, folded them, and laid them on one of the two chairs. I sat on the other. She also ironed her underwear, and I didn't want to look, but I couldn't help looking. She was wearing a sleeveless smock, blueish with little stake ruby-red flowers on it. Her shoulder-length, ash-blond hair was attached with a clip at the back of her neck. Her bare arms were stake. Her gestures of lifting the fe, using information technology, setting it downwards over again, and then folding and putting away the laundry were an practise in boring concentration, as were her movements as she bent over then straightened up over again. Her face up equally it was then has been overlaid in my retentiveness by the faces she had afterwards. If I see her in my heed's centre as she was then, she doesn't have a confront at all, and I have to reconstruct it. High forehead, high cheekbones, pale blue eyes, full lips that formed a perfect curve without any indentation, foursquare chin. A broad-planed, potent, womanly face up. I know that I plant it cute. But I cannot recapture its dazzler.
Chapter Four
"Wait," SHE said equally I got upward to go. 'I have to leave too, and I'll walk with you.
I waited in the hall while she changed her clothes in the kitchen. The door was open up a crack. She took off the smock and stood there in a bright green sideslip. Ii stockings were hanging over the back of the chair. Picking ane upwardly, she gathered it into a scroll using i hand, so the other, so counterbalanced on one leg equally she rested the heel of her other foot confronting her articulatio genus, leaned forward, slipped the rolled-up stocking over the tip of her foot, put her foot on the chair every bit she smoothed the stocking up over her calf, genu, and thigh, and so bent to one side as she attached the stocking to the garter belt. Straightening upwards, she took her human foot off the chair and reached for the other stocking. I couldn't have my eyes off her. Her neck and shoulders, her breasts, which the skid veiled rather than concealed, her hips which stretched the slip tight equally she propped her foot on her knee and and so gear up it on the chair, her leg, pale and naked, then shimmering in the silky stocking.
She felt me looking at her. Every bit she was reaching for the other stocking, she paused, turned towards the door, and looked straight at me. I tin can't describe what kind of wait it was—surprised, skeptical, knowing, reproachful. I turned red. For a fraction of a second I stood there, my face burning. So I couldn't have it any more. I fled out of the apartment, downwardly the stairs, and into the street.
I dawdled along. Bahnhofstrasse, Häusserstrasse, Blumenstrasse—it had been my way to school for years. I knew every building, every garden, and every fence, the ones that were repainted every yr and the ones that were so grey and rotten that I could crumble the forest in my mitt, the iron railings that I ran along every bit a child banging a stick against the posts and the loftier brick wall behind which I had imagined wonderful and terrible things, until I was able to climb information technology, and see row after boring row of neglected beds of flowers, berries, and vegetables. I knew the cobblestones in their layer of tar on the road, and the changing surface of the sidewalk, from flagstones to little lumps of basalt ready in moving ridge patterns, tar, and gravel.
It was all familiar. When my heart stopped pounding and my face was no longer reddish, the run across betwixt the kitchen and the hall seemed a long way away. I was angry with myself. I had run away like a kid, instead of keeping control of the state of affairs, as I idea I should. I wasn't ix years former anymore, I was fifteen. That didn't mean I had any idea what keeping control would have entailed.
The other puzzle was the bodily encounter that had taken place between the kitchen and the hall. Why had I not been able to take my eyes off her? She had a very stiff, feminine body, more voluptuous than the girls I liked and watched. I was sure I wouldn't even have noticed her if
I'd seen her at the pond pool. Nor had she been any more naked than the girls and women I had already seen at the swimming pool. And too, she was much older than the girls I dreamed about. Over xxx? It'southward hard to guess ages when yous're not that old yourself and won't be someday presently.
Years later it occurred to me that the reason I hadn't been able to take my eyes off her was not just her body, only the mode she held herself and moved. I asked my girlfriends to put on stockings, simply I didn't want to explain why, or to talk about the riddle of what had happened between the kitchen and the hall. Then my request was read every bit a desire for garters and high heels and erotic extravaganza, and if it was granted, it was done equally a come up-on. There had been none of that when I had found myself unable to wait away. She hadn't been posing or teasing me. I don't remember her ever doing that. I think that her body and the fashion she held information technology and moved sometimes seemed bad-mannered. Not that she was specially heavy. It was more as if she had withdrawn into her own body, and left it to itself and its own quiet rhythms, unbothered by whatsoever input from her mind, oblivious to the outside world. It was the aforementioned obliviousness that weighed in her glance and her movements when she was pulling on her stockings. But so she was not awkward, she was slow-flowing, graceful, seductive—a seductiveness that had zero to do with breasts and hips and legs, but was an invitation to forget the world in the recesses of the body.
I knew none of this—if indeed I know whatever of it at present and am not just making patterns in the air. But as I thought back and so on what had excited me, the excitement came back. To solve the riddle, I fabricated myself remember the whole encounter, and and so the distance I had created by turning it into a riddle dissolved, and I saw it all again, and again I couldn't have my optics off her.
CHAPTER Five
A WEEK Later on I was standing at her door once more.
For a week I had tried not to recall nigh her. Merely I had nothing else to occupy or distract me; the doctor was not gear up to let me go back to school, I was bored stiff with books after months of reading, and although friends even so came to see me, I had been sick for so long that their visits could no longer span the gap between their daily lives and mine, and became shorter and shorter. I was supposed to go for walks, a little farther each day, without overexerting myself. I could accept used the exertion.
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