The Weekend Read Free Page A

were floating to the ground or even flying away. Ilse hoped and doubted. Could someone do that? In such a situation could someone jump and then float, fly, even if it was only for the last ten seconds? Could he enjoy those ten seconds, which would end with a sudden and painless death, with all the delight that we are capable of bringing to the enjoyment of life?
    In the play a man was supposed to be sitting in his office in one of the Twin Towers on the morning of September 11, but he was late for work and realized he had the opportunity to be dead to everybody, could sneak away from his old life and start a new one. Ilse hadn’t seen or read the play. In her imagination the man had seen the pictures of the falling, floating, flying bodies and that had given him the idea of wanting to fly away—that made sense to her, that was enough. And it filled her imagination and it summoned up the memory of Jan’s funeral and with it the question of whether he had actually killed himself or whether he had abandoned his old life to start a new one. Everything that had preoccupied both her and Ulla in the year after Jan’s death came back to her, from the funeral to the mysterious phone call, the strange clothes, the missing files, the autopsy report.

Four
    When Henner came back to the house after taking a wide sweep across the fields, another car was parked outside the gate, a big silver Mercedes with a Hamburg license plate. The door to the house was open. Henner went in, and when his eyes had grown accustomed to the half-light, he saw a staircase on the left leading up to the next floor and a hallway that ended in doors on each side. Both stairs and hallway were supported by a metal scaffolding. Again the plaster was flaking from the walls, and many of the natural stone slabs in the floor had been replaced by blobs of cement. But everything was clean, and opposite the front door a big vase of brightly colored tulips stood on an old table.
    Upstairs a door opened and closed, and for a moment talking and laughter rang out from the room behind it. Henner looked up. With slow, heavy steps, her left hand resting on the banister, a woman came down the stairs. As if she had pains in her left hip or her left leg, Henner thought, and she was too fat. He put her at fifty, a few years younger than himself. She was too young to be suffering from arthritis. Had she had an accident?
    “Have you just got here too?” He nodded toward where the Mercedes was parked in front of the house.
    She laughed. “No.” She too gave a brief nod in thedirection of the Mercedes. “That’s Ulrich with his wife and daughter. I’m Margarete, Christiane’s friend, and I belong here. I have to get back to the kitchen—will you come and help me?”
    For the next hour he stood in the kitchen, peeled potatoes and cut them into slices, diced pickled gherkins, chopped chives and received instructions about what needed to be stirred into the salad dressing. “Shaken, not stirred”—he attempted a joke. Margarete’s ease, composure, cheerfulness irritated him. It was the cheerfulness of simple folk, the composure of those lucky devils who are at home in the world without having to work for it—Henner didn’t like either quality. Her physical aura irritated him too. It was an erotic aura that he found doubly incomprehensible; he didn’t like fat women—his girlfriends were always as slim as models—and Margarete, who wasn’t at all impressed by his charm, was possibly more than just a friend of Christiane’s. Possibly, too, she knew more about him than a girlfriend knows. If he thought back to that one night years ago with Christiane, he felt used again, and hurt. At the same time Christiane’s behavior back then still seemed so strange that he felt once more that there was something he hadn’t understood, and the fear that he had failed. Was that what had brought him here? Had Christiane’s call aroused the desire to know at last what had really