He seemed shaken, so I refrained from offering him my hand and advising affectedness instead of aggrievement.
“When were you involved with Rolf Wendt?”
“Let me see, when was the Socialist Patient Collective in Heidelberg? When all that ended, Wendt was looking for a new path, a new direction. He met us and for a while was something like a little brother to us. He must have been about seventeen or eighteen back then.”
“You said 'us'-do you mean Helmut Lemke and yourself?”
“I mean Helmut, Richard, and myself-the three of us spent a lot of time together.” He reminisced. “You know, as much as the news of Wendt's death has shaken me, when I think back, I realize that for me Rolf, dead as he now is, is not more dead than the other two, who I imagine are still alive but from whom I haven't heard in years. Though I must say that back then we lived like there was no tomorrow; all our thoughts and feelings were for the present. Despite world revolution-or because of it? As one grows older, a part of one's heart clings to the past while one's head worries about the future, and one no longer believes that friendships are forever.”
I don't know what a man can still believe in when year after year he parcels out questions of fate into topics for workshops. He stood up. “Let's go and sit outside. Nowadays I hardly get out.”
He leaned far back on the bench in front of the building and held his face up to the sun. I asked him if back then Lemke and Wendt had had a particularly good or particularly bad relationship to each other, and found out that everyone had a special relationship with Lemke. “You either admired him or locked horns with him, or both. But you couldn't deal with him as an equal. And when I said we were Rolf's big brothers, that's not quite right. It was Helmut Lemke who Rolf particularly looked up to.”
“Admiration, locking of horns, not dealing with him as an equal-and yet you remember it as a golden time?”
He sat up and looked at me. His forehead was smooth for a man of fifty, but his eyes were tired with age-the eyes of a man who is duty-bound by his profession to love people, although by now they only get on his nerves. As a priest, therapist, or whatever he basically was, he had offered more advice, given more comfort, and granted more forgiveness than he had within him. “I didn't say it was a golden time, nor would I say such a thing. There is a photograph from those days hanging on the wall of my office in which I can see everything: what was golden-if it was golden-compulsions and conflicts, the living in the present. I can show it to you, if you'd like.”
“How long did your gang-of-four last?”
“Until Helmut's career at the Communist League of West Germany took off. Then he no longer had time for tabletop soccer and spaghetti Westerns, and in politics only what had to do with the Communist League. What is strange is that none of us went over to the Communist League with him, even though he had been so dominant in our group that without him we scattered to the winds. Maybe he didn't want us there with him. Anyway, he didn't proselytize us. I'd say, one day he was simply gone.”
“Did he also drop Rolf from one day to the next?”
“Yes, I think they had a fight or something. Richard was the only one who kept in touch with Helmut and whom Helmut seemed to want to keep in touch with. I don't know how long that lasted. The last time I saw Richard was when I passed my exams and was heading to Pforzheim for my internship as vicar, and was waiting in the Heidelberg station for my train. Richard was no longer working as a laboratory assistant, which is what he'd trained for, but was now working for a lawyer. A divorce lawyer, he said, though I wondered if it was really a divorce lawyer or a terrorist lawyer-you know, I mean one of those who are in cahoots with terrorists. Richard had always been frustrated that we could only watch those spaghetti Westerns and not actually live them: On one side large-scale landowners, corrupt generals, greedy priests, and on the other poor Mexican farmers in white pajamas and revolutionaries with ammunition belts crossed over their chests, and then lots of ripe mangoes, wine, and mariachis. He'd have loved to import all that over here.”
Lunch was over. The participants of the various workshops had walked their legs off in the park. When one group caught sight of us and started heading over, he got up. “They think you are the next speaker, or they want to corner me. The workshop's starting up again in a few minutes. Come along, I'll show you the photograph.”
It was hanging in his office. I had expected a photo the size of a postcard, but it had been enlarged to poster size and placed behind glass in a black frame. It showed a picnic in black and white: a lawn, a white cloth spread with fruit, bread, and wine, and Wendt and Lemke lounging across from each other. Behind them, the current director of the academy, already sporting a beard, was bending over picking flowers, and a few steps away was a Borgward with its sunroof pulled back. Instead of a number on its license plate it had the letters “R. I. P.” Lemke was talking at Wendt, gesticulating wildly, and Wendt had been listening to him with his head resting on his hand and his hand resting on his knee, but now he looked up, and the flower-picking future director of the academy had also raised his head and was looking up, bent forward as he was. They had planted a presumably red flag on a thin, glittering stick: At this instant a magpie was flying off with the stick and the flag.
“Is that… no, it's not a snapshot, is it?”
“You mean because of the Manet motif? No, we didn't arrange ourselves like that on purpose. We didn't arrange for the magpie either, though it had already stolen a silver fork from us, and Richard had planted the flag lightly enough so the bird could snatch it away. Richard had been hovering around us all afternoon with his camera, shooting us from a distance, in closeup, with a telephoto lens and without one. He took hundreds of pictures. This was the last one. Do you like it?”
It was an attractive picture. But at the same time it made me sad. Lemke in his dark jacket, white shirt, and dark, narrow tie looked boyish in an old-fashioned way, energetic and self-confident. Wendt's face was already showing the overtaxed quality I had seen. A fearful, childlike face eager to be excited about the bird flying off but not quite daring to.
“Why should that beautiful Borgward automobile rest in peace?” I asked.
He didn't understand.
“R. I. P., requiescat in pace. Wasn't that meant for the car? Was it meant for capitalism, or…”
He laughed. “That wasn't on the car. Richard retouched the picture later. He always smuggled his initials into photos that he thought were particularly successful. R. I. P.-that's short for Richard Ingo Peschkalek.”
24 After Fall Comes Winter
Shouldn't I have realized it? This was of course a futile question. But it preoccupied me all the way to Gättingen. I remembered the conversation in prison, when Peschkalek had spoken of Leo and me: the old man and the young girl. I hadn't ever told him anything about her. Had he got that from Lemke? It also struck me now that he had turned up at Brigitte's place, even though I'd never mentioned her. Had he been spying on me? Had our first meeting on the autobahn not been a coincidence, but set up by him? Had he been spying on me at that very moment?
Everything became even more confused. That Peschkalek might have heard about me and Leo from Lemke, but had come to me wanting to dig up the facts about the attack Lemke had launched, didn't pan out. Had he heard about Leo and me and the case I was investigating from the police, and not from Lemke? Let's say he'd read the article in the Viernheimer Tage-blatt, his curiosity was aroused, he started investigating, found out from a police source that I, too, was investigating, and fastened onto me… And then, as coincidence would have it, his old comrade Lemke turned out to be behind everything? There was a little too much coincidence in all of this for my liking.