The Weekend Read Free

as good as dead anyway?” A third one stops him. “Here comes Ulla.”
    In the church Jan’s father speaks. He talks about the incomprehensibility of what has happened: beloved Jan suddenly disappearing and a few days later found dead in Normandy poisoned by the exhaust fumes that he had piped into his car, the car parked with a view of the sea, near a place where he had once been particularly happy years before. He speaks of the incomprehensible violence of the depressive impulse that not only drove Jan to flee his family and his job, but drove him to his death. He is the white-haired head of a family of many children and grandchildren, a retired vicar, and he speaks of the depressive impulse with an authority that impresses even the friends who can’t remember ever having known Jan to be depressive. Do they know better than his father?
    Ilse saw the funeral clearly again. It was the last time she had seen the friends with whom she was about to spend the weekend. Jörg had disappeared shortly afterward. At the funeral he had had nothing but contempt for Jan; you don’t throw your life away over bourgeoisidiocies when there’s a great struggle that it could be used for. Christiane had sensed what was happening to Jörg, hovered around him and confirmed his contemptuous and revolutionary views as if she wanted to show him that he had a place in the world with them, and that he mustn’t disappear on their account. Soon afterward the others also scattered to the four winds. In a way Jörg had done what all the others had also needed to do at the time: he had determined the course of his life.
    But it wasn’t the impending meeting with these friends that had made her recall the funeral. It had only prompted her to start writing. She had bought a big, fat hardback notebook and a green mechanical pencil with a long lead of the kind that, it was explained to her—and she was pleased by the fact—was used by architects. On Thursday she had set off after school and come here by train and bus and taxi in order, the next morning, to do in a strange place what she didn’t dare do at home: write.
    No, her preoccupation with the funeral had begun years before. She had read about a play that contained an image from September 11 that she couldn’t get out of her mind. Not the image of the airplanes flying into the towers, not the image of the towers smoking, or of them collapsing, not the image of the people covered in ash. What she couldn’t get out of her mind was the image of the falling bodies, some singly, some in pairs, almost touching one another or even holding hands. It was always before her eyes.
    Ilse had read everything she could find. That estimates of the number of falling bodies varied betweenfifty and two hundred. That lots of people jumped, but that some had fled to the windows and, when the panes exploded, had been forced out by other people jumping out or sucked out by the draft of air. That of those who jumped, some had decided to jump because of their hopeless situation, while the rest were simply driven out by the unbearable heat. That the heat rose to above 550 degrees Centigrade and reached the people before the flames reached them. That the drop was some four hundred meters, and the fall lasted up to ten seconds. That the pictures of the falling bodies were too blurred for faces to be made out. That relatives sometimes thought they could recognize a falling body by its clothes, and were partly comforted, partly terrified by that. And that among the dead, those who had fallen could not be identified.
    But no information moved her as much as the pictures did. The falling bodies, always with both arms and often with all their limbs outstretched. Perhaps rather than the individual photographs that she found in books she might also have searched for film clips and seen the bodies actually falling, flailing, twisting, but she was scared to do so. Some of the falling bodies looked in the photographs as if they