“What about the chemists?” Leo asked.
“What about them?”
“The chemists of the Third Reich-I wonder what, in your view, their business was and if they stuck to it?”
Tyberg looked at Leo with a frown. “I have been asking myself that question ever since I started working on my memoirs. I incline to the opinion that a laboratory is a chemist's business. But that would mean that others always bear the responsibility, and that we scientists are never responsible, and I can see the snag in that, especially when it comes from the mouth of a chemist.”
For a while nobody spoke. The butler knocked, and then cleared away the plates. Leo asked him to compliment the cook for the corn biscuits with oxtail and green peppers that had been served as an appetizer. “Polenta medallions,” he corrected her, flattered, as he himself was the cook, and the reintroduction of polenta as a culinary delicacy was a cherished objective of his. He proposed that we step into the drawing room for a liqueur.
Leo got up, came over to me, and looked at me question-ingly. I nodded. “You don't have to come upstairs, Gerhard. I'll pack your things, too.” She gave me a quick kiss and I listened to her steps as her bare feet pattered on the stone slabs of the stairs. The floorboards upstairs creaked.
Tyberg cleared his throat. He stood behind his chair, his shoulders drooping, his arms resting on the chair back. “At our age we don't get to know and treasure that many people that we can afford to lose them. Please don't leave now.”
“I'm not leaving in anger, and I'd be happy to come back another time. But Leo and I-we really belong in a hotel.”
“Let me have a word with her.” He left the room and returned a little while later with Leo. She looked at me ques-tioningly again and I smiled at her questioningly. She shrugged her shoulders.
We spent the evening on the terrace. Tyberg read to us from his memoirs, and Leo found out how his and my paths had crossed during the war. The candle, by the light of which Tyberg was reading, flickered. I could not interpret the expression in Leo's eyes. At times bats rustled over our heads. They flew toward the house, and right before the wall their flight veered off abruptly into the emptiness of the night.
The following morning I was alone. Leo's things were no longer in the room. I looked in vain for a note. It was only later that I found one in my wallet in place of the four hundred francs I had changed in Murten. “I need the money. You'll get it back. Leo.”
PART TWO
1 A final favor
I set out on my homeward journey with a hangover. The three days of sun, wind, and having Leo beside me had gone to my head.
I closed the book of my journey with Leo and put it away. It was at any rate only a thin little book. I had met her Tuesday morning in Amorbach, and by Friday evening I was back in Mannheim, though I felt I had been away for weeks. The traffic, the jostling pedestrians, the din of construction all around, the big, bleak palace in which there's supposed to be a university, the renovated Water Tower that looks as peculiar as Frau Weiland from next door when she comes back from the hairdresser, my apartment with its smell of stale smoke- what was I doing here? Wouldn't I have done better to head from Locarno down to Palermo, even without Leo, and swim from Sicily to Egypt? Should I get back in my car?
I quickly read through the newspapers that had piled up during my absence. They reported a terrorist attack on an American military installation, Leo's hiding in the State Psychiatric Hospital and the part Wendt had played in it, and an account of Wendt's life and death. There was nothing that I didn't already know. The Saturday edition reported that Eberlein had been temporarily suspended and that someone from the ministry had provisionally assumed his duties. I took note of that. I also took note of the fact that I had disappointed Brigitte.
A wanted poster with Leo's face on it had been put up at the post office, just as she had predicted. Ever since wanted posters, which I only knew from Westerns, had been reintro-duced with the rise in terrorism, I have been expecting some roughneck with clanging spurs to come marching into the post office with a saddle bag slung over his shoulder and a Colt at his hip, stop in front of the poster, eye it, snatch it off the wall, roll it up, and put it in his bag. As the door falls shut behind him the dumbfounded customers hurry to the window to watch him swing himself up onto his horse and go galloping down the Seckenheimer Strasse. This time, too, I waited in vain. Instead, I came up with a few questions and answers. If the two dead men had belonged to the terrorist group, how did the police know that they had to search for Leo? For them to know about Leo, they had to have caught one of the terrorists and made him talk. And then, how come the police knew about Leo but not about the other members of the group? They must have caught one of them, and only one: the guy who Leo said had just come back from Tuscany, Bertram. He could have provided the police with only vague descriptions of Lemke and the fifth man, which was why the police had not managed to come up with particularly good composites. The other guy, Giselher, had to be dead.
But what really preoccupied me that weekend was my wanderlust and homesickness. Wanderlust is the longing for anew country that we don't yet know, and homesickness is a longing for an old country that we no longer know, even if we think we do. Why did I have this longing for the unknown? What did I want-to leave or to return? I puzzled over these thoughts until a toothache suddenly drove the nonsense away. It started Saturday evening with a slight twinge during the late movie, just as Doc Holliday rode out from Fort Griffin to Tombstone. By the end of the broadcast, as the camera passed above and beyond Helgoland, the pain, to the sound of the national anthem, was pulsating all the way up to my temples and my left ear. When the picture faded out at Helgoland's eastern tip with its crumbling tooth-shaped rock, I felt utterly demoralized. If only we could trade in Helgoland for Zanzibar again!
I haven't been to a dentist since my old one died ten years ago. I looked in the phone book and chose one two blocks away. The pain kept me awake all night. At seven thirty I started calling the dentist every five minutes. At eight on the dot a woman's cool voice answered. “Ah, Herr Self? Is your tooth bothering you again? Would you like to drop by now? We've just had a cancellation.” I went over right away. The cool voice belonged to a cool blonde with flawless teeth. She sent me in right away, though I was not the same Herr Self who was already a patient there. I hadn't been aware that there was another Herr Self in the area. From what I know of our family tree, I'm the last twig to have sprouted.
The dentist was young, with a sure eye and a calm hand. The dreadful moment when the syringe approaches, fills your field of vision, and disappears because it has entered the oral cavity in search of a place to puncture, then the wait for the puncture, and finally the puncture itself-the doctor was so quick that I barely suffered. He managed to keep me calm, do his job, and flirt with his assistant. He explained to me that he wasn't sure if he could save tooth three-seven. It was deeply decayed. But he'd give it a try. He would remove most of the cavities, apply Calaxyl, seal it with Cavit, and put in a temporary bridge. A few weeks would show if tooth three-seven would hold. Was that all right?
“What are my options?”
“I could extract the tooth right away.”
“And then?”
“Then we wouldn't opt for a permanent bridge, but we'd do something removable for three-five to three-seven.”
“Do you mean I would be getting dentures?”