“I felt that that fifth man was somehow fishy. He seemed jittery and all over the place: He'd be walking ahead, then he'd fall back, then he'd suddenly turn up on the side. He had all kinds of equipment with him. I don't know why, or what it was for. After all, we had brought along the explosives.”
The path leading up to Castle Wegelnburg is steep. Leo hadn't let me carry her bag and coat, and I was glad. She was always a good bit ahead of me and would stop and wait. At first she walked as if she'd been wound up with a key. But gradually her steps grew lighter and freer. She took her bag off her shoulder and held it in her hand, swung her arms, threw her head back so that her hair flew, and when she waited for me she pranced backward in front of me. She returned to the subject of Operation Bonfire. An overgrown pile of rotting logs reminded her of the structures the Americans had put up at their installation. “Like garages, but a lot bigger, with slanted sides and covered with earth and grass. Then there were these really long objects, not quite as tall and wide as the garages, but also covered in grass. Who knows what they were.” But the question did not really seem to preoccupy her. When I caught up with her and wanted to discuss the grass-covered garages, she laid her hand on my arm. “Shh.” A rabbit was sitting on the path, watching us.
We stopped for a rest on the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Stein. At the gas station I had bought a kilo of Granny Smith apples and some chocolate with whole nuts. “What are you going to do on the other side?” I asked her. Just beyond the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Stein lies France.
“I'll take a vacation. As long as my money lasts. These past few weeks with the children were really exhausting. I think after that I'll find myself another au-pair job.” She was sitting on the ground with her back to the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Stein. She bit loudly into her apple, her eyes blinking in the sun. The question of what would come after her au-pair job was on the tip of my tongue, of how she expected to live a normal life again. But why ask someone the kind of worrying questions they could easily ask themselves, but don't?
Then I had an idea. “We could make our way to the Tessin. I have friends there I've been wanting to visit for a long time. If you can see yourself working as an au pair in the Tessin, my friend Tyberg has all kinds of connections.”
She nibbled at the core of her apple and threw it away. She looked up at the sky and then at the trees, and wrinkled her nose. “Comme ça?” She snapped her fingers again.
“ Comme ça.”
The path that went by the ruins of the Hohenburg and Löwenburg castles to Château Fleckenstein in France was relatively short, and Leo could take her time. I hurried back to Nothweiler and drove across the border by Wissembourg. A young border guard asked me where I was coming from and where I was heading, and an hour later I was at Château Fleckenstein. Leo was talking and laughing with a young Frenchman. She was engrossed in the conversation and didn't see or hear me approach. I was worried that she would give me the kind of look Manu gives Brigitte when he is playing with one of his friends and is ashamed that his mother is keeping an eye on him. But Leo greeted me quite unself-consciously.
That evening we didn't drive very far. At the Cheval Blanc restaurant in Niedersteinbach she ate oysters for the first time in her life and didn't like them. But she did like the champagne, and after the second bottle we felt like Bonnie and Clyde. If the pharmacy had still been open we'd have pulled up in front, wielded a gun, and gotten me a toothbrush and some razor blades. At ten I called Brigitte. She could hear I was tipsy and telling her only half the truth, and she was hurt. I didn't care, though I was still sober enough to register how unfair my indifference was. With Brigitte, who was generous, I was belatedly fighting for my independence-a fight I hadn't even started with my grouchy and whining wife, Klara, in all the years of our marriage. When I said good night to Leo at the door to her room, she gave me a kiss.
It took us two days to get to Locarno. We meandered through the Vosges and the Jura mountains, crossed from the French side to the Swiss, spent the night in Murten, and drove through passes the names of which I had never heard: Glaubenbüelenpass, Brünigpass, Nufenenpass. Even up in the mountains it was warm enough for us to spread out a blanket at noon and have a picnic.
As we drove, Leo talked about a thousand things: studying and interpreting, politics, even about the children she had looked after in Amorbach. She liked sitting with her legs on the dashboard or sticking her right foot out the window. She chose programs on the radio ranging from classical music to American pop, and in Switzerland included the farming broadcasts. From nine till ten, Jeremias Gotthelf's Uli, the Farmhand was broadcast in Swiss dialect. In Uli, the Farmhand all was still well with the world, while in the American pop songs the world was on its head: Men crooned and women had metal in their voices. Leo whistled along. She studied the countryside and the cities we drove through. On both days, after lunch she fell asleep in the car. Occasional periods of silence between the two of us made neither of us uncomfortable. I let my thoughts roam. Sometimes I would ask Leo a question.
“When you got to the psychiatric hospital, did you manage to find out what had gone wrong that night, and what happened to the others?” In our shared early-morning hangover we had began talking informally.
“I kept trying to find out. You can't imagine how happy I'd have been to hear that it was just a false alarm. But I could never reach Giselher or Bertram whenever I called, and it would have been too dangerous to try to get in touch with their friends.”
I reminded her that two casualties had been announced. “And they're only searching for the three of you, even though five took part in the attack.”
“Three of us? That's me in one of the pictures, but I don't know who the other two are.” She immersed herself in the Bote vom Untermain newspaper. “Take a good look at that guy,” she said, pointing at one of the two men whose pictures were next to hers. “Something about him reminds me of Helmut. It's not him, but he reminds me of him. Weird, isn't it?”
She was right. There was a vague similarity. Or does every picture start to resemble somebody if one looks at it long enough? Also, some of the features of the second of the two men suddenly seemed familiar.
Somewhere in the Jura Mountains, she asked me if Rolf Wendt's death could not have been an accident.
“Are you worried Helmut might have killed him?”
“I can't imagine anyone killing Rolf. I'd swear Rolf didn't have any what you would call enemies. He was far too cautious to lock horns with anyone. He was clever that way: He could always fend off a person and deflect tricky situations. I saw him do it a couple of times, both at the hospital and outside. Are you sure it couldn't have been been an accident?”
I shook my head. “He was shot. You don't know where Helmut and Rolf knew each other from?”
“It was only that once at the Weinloch Bar that I was with the two of them, and they only said a quick hi. I didn't ask Helmut or Rolf how they knew each other. At the hospital I told Rolf about Helmut-Rolf was my therapist and stuck to protocol as closely as possible. Of course he didn't always stick to protocol, but if he hadn't treated me as a regular patient, I'd have been exposed.”
“Eberlein said something about… something about a depressive veneer, but that deep inside you were a cheerful girl.”