I had to return to my room, where the lady doctor handed me a release to sign absolving them of all responsibility. I thought that was all she wanted, but then she checked my heart, took my blood pressure, and examined my behind.
The following morning one of the nurses shaved my chest, stomach, pubic hair, and thighs, which had been already shaved for the angiogram. Brigitte had to leave the room, as if this ultimate nakedness might reveal something dreadful. When I sat up and looked down at myself, I was moved by my hairless, defenseless organ. I was so moved that I was on the brink of tears. I realized that they had put a sedative in my drip.
Brigitte walked next to me as far as the elevator, and the male nurse wheeled me in at an angle from which I could still see her until the doors closed. She blew me a kiss.
In the elevator I grew sleepy. I can still remember being wheeled out of the elevator through a corridor into the operating theater and being lifted onto the operating table. The last thing I remember is the harsh light of the lamp overhead and the doctors’ faces with masks and caps, with peering eyes whose expressions I couldn’t figure out. Perhaps there wasn’t anything to figure out. The doctors began their work.
21 In the end
In the end I did head back there.
Why? I knew all there was to know, and if I hadn’t, the Schlossplatz would not have told me anything. I already knew that Welker had fired half his staff and sold the Sorbian bank. That he had dissolved Weller & Welker. That his house in the Gustav-Kirchhoff Strasse is up for sale and that he’s moved away with his children-to Costa Rica, Brigitte says, and that his wife is still alive and waiting for him there.
I also knew that Ulbrich hadn’t breathed a word to the police or the public prosecutor. Not a word. Brigitte had asked me: “Weren’t you a public prosecutor once? Can’t you defend him?” I made inquiries and found that I could get licensed as a lawyer. The fact that Welker had left town would make the defense easier.
What was I looking for on Schwetzingen’s Schlossplatz? The end of this story? It had come to an end. None of the threads of fate had been left dangling. But though I knew at the end of a story justice didn’t always have to win out, I could not accept as an ending that Welker would get away with what he’d done while Ulbrich was in jail and Schuler and Samarin were dead and buried. Again I was tortured by the powerlessness of not being able to do anything anymore, not being able to fix things.
Until I realized that it was my decision whether I would interpret the ending as unjust and unsatisfactory and suffer because of it or decided that this, and only this, was the fitting ending. In either case it was my decision. Even Welker dead or Welker in prison, and a happy Karl-Heinz Ulbrich, and a Schuler who went on cultivating his files, and a Samarin who went on laundering money were not entirely just and satisfactory. I was the one who would have to decide. So I tried. I didn’t accept the end without question. But wasn’t there something fitting about Samarin, a warrior, being killed in action, and Schuler having died for the truth that lay hidden in his beloved archive? It could be arranged that Ulbrich wouldn’t have to stay in prison for too long. As for Welker? Brigitte and I could go to Costa Rica on vacation.
If the doctor allows it. He’s an old friend of Philipp’s and was a colleague of his in Mannheim before Philipp took over the department at the Speyerer Hof Clinic. The doctor shakes his head and shrugs his shoulders when I ask him about my condition and what I am to expect.
“What can I say, Herr Self? Your heart is worn out.”
Worn out. I’m quite aware that the operation wasn’t a success. Otherwise they would have told me. And I wouldn’t have been so tired. Sometimes I feel as if my tiredness is out to poison me.
I was happy when the taxi arrived.
Bernhard Schlink
Bernhard Schlink was born in Germany. He is the author of the internationally best selling novels The Reader and Homecoming, as well as the collection of short stories Flights of Love and four prizewinning crime novels-Self’s Punishment (with Walter Popp), The Gordian Loop, Self’s Deception, and Self’s Murder. He lives in Berlin and New York.
