new books in german

Sample Translation

From
Hausaufgaben (Homework) by Jakob Arjouni

Sample translation by Anthea Bell

Joachim Linde, German teacher at the Schiller Grammar School, Reichenheim, looked at the time.

"… So in the twenty minutes left to us - and with the passage from Walser that we've just read in mind - try to say how you think the Third Reich affects your lives today, almost sixty years on."

Linde folded his arms, leaned against the blackboard, and let his eyes travel over the faces of the school students preparing for their finals and taking his course on "German Post-War Writers In Confrontation With The Third Reich". Twenty-two young people aged seventeen to twenty who just now, Linde thought, had nothing in mind but the best way to spend the long weekend. Like him. It was Thursday, a warm, sunny spring day, and in two hours' time he planned to be boarding the train for Berlin, ready to set off next morning on a three-day hike in the Brandenburg Mark. He had cherished this wish for a long time, more or less since the Wall came down fourteen years ago: he wanted to explore the cradle of Berlin on foot, the Mark around it which was also the home of Fontane, and not least the region where Linde's own father came from, he wanted to "experisense" it (this was how he had often put it, and when asked what he meant by "experisense" he would reply: "I want to experience the countryside with all my senses, touch it, smell it, taste it." Linde prided himself a little on his unusual phrases, his neologisms, his reinterpretation of familiar words. The longer his audience took to find out what he really meant the happier he was.) He had bought his train ticket to Berlin three times already, but something always happened at the last moment to stop him going. Once his wife Ingrid had suffered one of her nervous breakdowns the evening before, another time his nineteen-year-old son Pablo was appointed Regional Group Consultant for Amnesty International and had thrown a barbecue party, and six months ago his eighteen-year-old daughter Martina had to be rushed to hospital with her wrists cut. But it looked as if there was nothing to prevent the trip this time: Ingrid was in hospital, Pablo was in Mannheim demonstrating against Israel's settlement policy, and three months after her suicide attempt Martina had left home and was now living with a photographer in Milan. Linde had asked the headmaster for leave of absence from the evening staff meeting, and the weekly get-together of the Martin Luther Discussion Group on modern interpretations of the New Testament was cancelled this Saturday because of the Reichenheim Wine Festival.

"Yes, Alex?"

"Well … um …" Alex lowered his arm and grinned uncertainly. Linde had told him, three days ago, that if he didn't speak up more in class he could forget about this course.

"I don't know, but …" Alex's knees were slowly beating time. "Like you just said, I mean, it's almost sixty years ago. What's it got to do with me?"

"Well, yes, Alex, as it happens that was the question."

Teresa and Jennifer in the back row giggled. Teresa was top of the class, and Jennifer, so Linde thought - and he kept checking up on it - had a remarkably curvaceous and taut behind.

He reacted to the giggling with a smile and a murmured, "There, there!" Then he turned back to Alex. "It would be good if you could contribute a little more than just repeating my question."

"But suppose it really doesn't have anything to do with me?" Alex's expression had darkened at the giggles. "I mean, you can't force me to think something or other's had some kind of influence on me."

"No, but perhaps you could force yourself to think with a little more precision. For instance, when you go abroad on vacation to a foreign country, and you tell people there that you're German, how do they react?"

"What does it matter? Anyway, even if it did, people in foreign countries speak foreign, so I wouldn't understand what they say."

More giggling in the back row.

Linde frowned and scrutinized Alex with exaggerated despair. At the same time, and out of the corner of his eye, he appreciated the way Teresa and Jennifer were grinning at his histrionic expression. Finally he said, sighing, "As we all know, you've been learning English since Year Five, and although your mastery of the language may be modest, you should have learned enough to talk to someone in a train or on a campsite, at least in simplamental terms."

"Simpla-whattle?"

"Simplamental." Linde glanced briefly at Teresa and Jennifer, expecting a smile, but the girls were whispering to each other. "As in 'fundamental', but with 'simple' instead. For instance, you could say: how are you, where do you come from, what's the weather like at home …"

Alex nodded, and drawled in English, in a tone of mild derision: "How do you do?"

"Well, yes. And then people often ask questions back. Like: Where do you come from?"

"Sure they do. And I say Germany, and then they say: Oh wow! Bayern Munich, Mercedes, Linde ..." Alex paused.

Linde didn't get it straight off. "I beg your pardon?"

"Yes, I was surprised too at first, but by now … honest, I swear every other person I meet abroad, they're mostly professors, artists - really clever guys - and of course those pretty young women with gigantic great bums …"

At the mention of "gigantic great bums" Alex glanced briefly over his shoulder at Jennifer, and Linde exclaimed, furiously, "Alex, what's the idea of all this?"

Alex raised his arms defensively. "Do you or don't you want me to tell you what happens when I tell them abroad that I'm German? They say," and here he broke into English again, "Germany! Isn't that the homeland of Joachim Linde, the wonderful word-inventor? Let's say it simplamentally: the greatest guy who …"

"Alex, stop this nonsense at once!"

There was more giggling now, but this time among the whole class, and Linde remembered his position as the person who handed out marks.

"Right, that's enough fooling around! We're discussing an extremely serious subject, so I'll ask you to try to concentrate for the last fifteen minutes."

The class fell silent. Linde looked round at the students' faces, leaving out Alex, Teresa and Jennifer. Finally Oliver spoke up.

"Yes, Olli?"

"Well, things like that quite often happened to me when I was still going on vacation with my parents. Oh, so you're from Germany, people said, and then it was all 'Heil Hitler', 'Schneller, schneller', 'Jawohl, mein Führer', and all that guff, like in Hollywood movies. I generally try to avoid the subject these days. I even sometimes say I'm Swiss."

After a short and almost solemn pause, during which Linde's expression lit up in a manner visible to all, he said: "And that brings us to one of the most enduring repercussions the Third Reich has had on our lives today: the denial - or rather the blurring, the veiling over - of our origins. We still can't emulate the French or the English, telling people proudly and happily where we come from. We still have to be careful what we say if we're not to be indiscriminately lumped in with the Nazis. Even if we're self-proclaimed humanists and internationalists, if we support Greenpeace and Amnesty International, for instance, if we see the world as a single entity to be saved and preserved for all humankind - even so, we have difficulty in ridding ourselves of the associations of that tribal guilt for which other nations have held us to blame over nearly sixty years, to such an extent that …"

"Why?" someone in the second row interrupted, and Linde, who had prepared this little speech in advance and was nowhere near the end of it yet, looked up in annoyance. Sonja. As usual. If he asked questions and called for oral contributions, not a word out of Sonja. But if he was addressing the whole class, explaining something with the aid of the blackboard or getting someone to read aloud - you could bet your life Sonja would interrupt. Often nonsensically. What, for instance, did she mean by "Why?" in this context?

"Sonja, would you please put up your hand if you want to say something, and then wait until I ask you."

"But if you go on and on like that, linking everything together, and I don't believe any of it right from the start - I mean, Germany's a country with its own history, right? And if I was born here then I do have something to do with it. So I needn't deny anything. I didn't pick where I'd be born on purpose."

"Ah, you see!" Linde smiled triumphantly. On this particular point he would have no trouble in refuting Sonja, which wasn't always the case. "But all the same you're thought to deserve punishment by association with Germany's tribal guilt."

"No, I'm not! Punishment by association! Tribal guilt! I don't know what you're talking about. And when I think of Oliver's parents, well, what springs straight to my mind is sausages and Heil Hitler."

"You dumb hippie slag!"

"Olli!"

"Well, she started it!"

"Calm down. Now then, Sonja, please explain the contradiction in your saying just now that you do have something to do with this country, and then claiming you don't know what I mean when I speak of tribal guilt."

So what must she do now but stare at him as if he were missing a few of his marbles?

"By contradiction, do you mean contradiction in the usual sense, I mean that something's contradictory, or is this another witty bit of wordplay?"

Linde looked at the now totally expressionless eyes scrutinizing him. Controlling his voice, he said: "I mean contradiction as defined in the dictionary."

"Okay then … Everyone has something to do with the country where they're born, and Germany has a particularly lousy history, you can't just wave a magic wand and make that go away, and people do talk about it, and I don't think sixty years is long enough to get over something that was so dreadful and destroyed so much. I mean, in America they don't just think about Madonna and all the wonderful opportunities open to everyone now, they think about native Indians and slavery too, and they're right, because the effect of all that is still felt today."

Sonja paused, and Oliver took advantage of the moment to murmur in a tone clearly audible to everyone: "Sonja Kaufmann - our sensitive black soul."

Linde said nothing.

Unmoved, Sonja went on: "All the same, if I meet a white American I don't see him as a slavedriver - well, not unless he acts in a way that makes me think: that's just how people will have been back then. And the less he claims to know about it the better he suits the part, because why would someone who isn't afraid of himself, I mean isn't afraid he could do those horrible things, why would he mind talking about them …?"

Linde interrupted. "Please, Sonja, America and your theories are all very interesting, but would you kindly come back to my question?" He hadn't the faintest idea what Sonja was really talking about. The long weekend would begin in ten minutes' time, and he wanted to end the lesson with a clear-cut hypothesis and set a subject connected with it for homework.

Sonja's mouth twisted in annoyance, and she said nothing. Linde thrust his head forward and once again furrowed his brow histrionically. He often made use of this expression. "Sonja?"

"Oh, okay," she said without looking up. "Then to put it simply, when people like Oliver and his parents stick a German flag on their car and look at everyone they don't care for as if they'd like to shoot them, and all they can say about the country they claim to love so much is that it's beautiful and it's clean, we really work hard here, and you can throw in Goethe and Schiller too for all I care - right, when people like that go to France or so on, acting as if there was never any Auschwitz, and they meet someone who let's say never knew his grandparents, because maybe Oliver's grandparents murdered them, then it means people like Oliver and his parents have decided of their own accord to be part of a tribe that I'm glad to say does deserve punishment - although punishment is a pretty funny word for living in one of the richest countries in the world, buying a new car every other year, and being able to stay as stupid and horrible as you like without actually being put behind bars for it."

"You know what you are?" Oliver had leaned over the desk in Sonja's direction, and he was bright red in the face. "You're a revolting leftie tick, and I am not a Nazi, but if you ask me they'd have been welcome to gas your grandparents and then we wouldn't have to listen to all this shit today!"

"Hold on, Olli!" Linde looked dismayed.

"She wants to put me in jail!"

Linde looked from one to the other of them, not sure how to deal with this, and then burst out: "That's totally irrelevant! No one in my class wants anyone else to be gassed! This is outrageous! I've never heard anything like it!" And raising his hands imploringly, he repeated; "Outrageous! So you will now leave the room at once. We'll talk later! You certainly haven't heard the last of this!"

There was silence for a couple of seconds. Linde's furious gaze was fixed on Oliver, Oliver was staring at the floor, and most of the students were at a loss. Then Oliver stood up, and the class watched as, stony-faced, he put his books and notes in his bag, did up the zip of his sports jacket, and walked stiffly to the door. Holding the door-handle, he turned round once more.

"I don't think that's very fair, Herr Linde. I mean, I only said it because she said my grandparents were murderers. She brought it down to that. So I just reacted on the same level. I didn't mean it seriously."

"I should hope not, Olli. All the same, we must have a very serious talk about this."

"Sure."

"Oliver?"

Linde turned round. Sonja! Oh, for heaven's sake, no more trouble now. But before he could say anything, she asked, "What were your grandparents, then?"

Oliver looked at Sonja for a moment in silence. Then he said: "My grandpa was killed in Russia, he was a perfectly normal soldier, and my granny had to bring up four children on her own." He paused, before adding bitterly: "And my father's youngest brother starved to death." So saying, and without waiting for any reaction, he pushed the door open and went out into the corridor. The door closed, and the eyes of all the students, except Sonja, who was staring ahead of her, turned to Linde. Linde pursed his lips, rubbed his chin, looked at the floor, took a couple of steps, looked up again, nodded in silence, folded his arms and finally turned to the class. "Let's get this clear: Olli's remarks are the worst I've ever heard in a classroom, and nothing excuses them. And I hope that all of you who know Olli will make him aware that such conduct is not, under any circumstances, to be tolerated." Linde sighed deeply and shook his head. "I am really shaken."

Most of the students nodded. Lucas, an excellent musician who had difficulties with every other subject and was in danger of failing his final exams, said just quietly enough to let it be thought he might be talking to himself: "And that stuff about 'coming to terms with the past' has been going so well all this time."

Linde ignored him. He stood there for a moment longer, then went back to his table, sat down heavily, folded his hands on the table top and leaned slightly forward. His glance fell on Sonja. Hesitantly, he said: "All the same, we have to understand that the story of Oliver's grandparents shows how complicated this subject is."

"What's so complicated about it?" asked Sonja, in surly tones. "Soldiers die in war and people starve to death. What matters is how wars start."

Linde moistened his lips with his tongue. "But you can hardly deny the existence of individual suffering."

"Well, no." Sonja scratched her ear with a ballpoint pen. "But I'd call individual Nazi suffering rather a good idea."

A ripple of laughter ran through the rows of students. Everyone was glad that the awkwardness had passed over. Teresa, top of the class, snapped her fingers to indicate that she had something to say. Linde nodded to her.

"You know, Sonja, what you refuse to understand is that naturally we're all against Nazis. Even Oliver. He just said that stupid thing to provoke you. All the same, we have to draw distinctions. You make it so easy for yourself: bad people here, good people there. But that's not how it works. If we really want to understand something we have to try to see all sides of the question. And one side - however long you go on saying it's different for you - one side is that the Germans and even our own generation, people who really don't have anything to do with Fascism, have to face the way a large part of the world still sees them mainly as representatives of a nation that killed six million Jews."

"And gypsies, homosexuals and the disabled," said Jennifer, shaking her head like a football manager seeing his team make the same mistake for the umpteenth time.

"But … " began Sonja, looking at the end of her ballpoint, "… ever since the beginning of this course I've only heard how one side gets to be seen, and it's the side of the poor misjudged Germans. Apart from which, if you didn't all keep saying how you're not, definitely not Nazis, then people might even believe you."

Linde frowned - what was coming now? - and surreptitiously looked at the time.

Teresa said: "You act as if there could be people like the Nazis again. That's crazy."

Sonja looked at Teresa. "Because human beings learn from disasters, so they're getting better and wiser all the time?"

This is purely rhetorical, thought Linde. And in view of the time still left for this lesson and the homework he was going to set, he said: "Wait a moment, please."

Teresa and Sonja looked up. Linde smiled at them both. "This is certainly a fascinating discussion, but I'm afraid it's taking us a little too far from the point. In spite of that incident with Olli, I'd like to ask you to consider our subject again for the last five minutes of the lesson: what influence do you think the Third Reich has on your lives today?"

But after the heated exchanges, and with the weekend just about to begin, the class's concentration was gone. None of the students reacted. Many of them looked at their watches, began putting books and notes in their bags, or switched on their mobiles. Teresa shook her head, while Jennifer whispered something to her. Sonja was tickling her ear with her ballpoint again.

"Well …" Linde compressed his lips. Nothing to be done about it now. All the same, he didn't want to end the lesson on this note; it left him with a faintly unclean feeling. As if he were to blame for Oliver's ill-advised attack. And it might be said afterwards that the whole thing had happened only because he couldn't control the class. Yet who had been hell-bent on provocation and set the ball rolling in the first place?

"Very well," he said, giving in, "you're all keen to start the weekend, and to be honest so am I. However, since tempers have been running so high, I'd be very glad to hear a few final conciliatory words." He looked from one student to another until, as if obeying sudden inspiration, he turned to Sonja. "And since you have taken part with such commitment today, Sonja, I'd like to leave it to you to say them."

Sonja, ballpoint in her ear, looked surprised. Linde gave her a friendly smile and gestured imperatively. "Go ahead, please."

Without taking her eyes off Linde, Sonja took her ballpoint out of her ear and put it on her desk. "What do you mean by conciliatory?"

"Conciliator as defined in the dictionary." Linde's smile became a trace friendlier still. He didn't want to single Sonja out, but in a way this had been her lesson, he thought, and he would like it to stay that way in the students' memories.

"Ah." Sonja lowered her gaze, and for a moment it seemed that she was simply going to say nothing. "I know what conciliatory means, but I don't know what you want me to say now. Still, I can give you an answer to your real question, about the influence of the Nazi period on our lives, at least as far as I'm concerned."

"Carry on," said Linde, wondering if it wouldn't have been better simply to end the lesson.

"As some of you know, I want to be a movie director."

There were groans or giggles at several desks. One boy whispered, "Sonja Home Alone." Another added: "Some Like It Rot."

Sonja's hands clutched the seat of her chair, and her eyes stared at a point on the desk in front of her. "And the more I think about it, the more I realize how I miss the German teachers I haven't had. And the friends and the people I'd probably have worked with, but they couldn't even be born here because their parents had either emigrated or been murdered. Because the things that interest me - moves, books, music, the people who work with them - they've been just rubbish in Germany ever since the Nazis."

"Oh, come on, Sonja!" Linde had not been expecting such a nonsensical theory. What went on inside this girl's head? "You can't say that. I mean, the German cinema has had quite a history since 1945. From Fassbinder to Wenders and all the new young directors who've made such a stir with their wonderful comedies these last few years."

"Ghastly, yes," said Sonja, "but you wanted to know about the influence of the Nazi period on my life, and I can see that anywhere I am or anywhere I want to go, Germany's empty where before 1933 it was full."

"Because everyone's careful not to go anywhere you are," someone in the corner whispered.

Linde cleared his throat. "Well, if that's how you feel. It's difficult to argue with that." He suddenly wondered whether Sonja was Jewish. But surely he'd have heard if she was. Kaufmann - did that sound Jewish? She had come to the Schiller Grammar School only six months ago, and this was her first course with him. For God's sake, he mustn't drop any bricks now.

"Anyway, what you said is very interesting, and to a certain extent I even agree with you. Not entirely, but there's certainly something in it, and we should discuss it further in one of our next lessons. But now I'd like to move on to homework …"

"It's total shit!"

Linde turned his head, startled. By the window, Cornelius had got to his feet. A friend of his own son, a gifted essay writer, a member of the school students' council, good at handball, worked with Amnesty International, two cautions for smoking pot, father a lawyer.

"I'm not listening to stuff like that!"

"Please, Conni, don't shout!" Linde found his own voice rising against his will. What a lesson! He just wanted to get started on the weekend as soon as possible.

"But it's enough to drive you crazy!" Cornelius jabbed his outstretched forefinger in Sonja's direction. "You carry on about some kind of imaginary friends and teachers you miss having because their grandparents may have been killed over half a century ago! How about people's friends and teachers who are getting killed today? And what do you do about it? I mean, you should watch the news some time! See what's going on in Israel, for instance! Families get massacred every day, children, women, whole villages! It's just incredible to hear people still going on about the poor Jews, when Jews are committing shocking acts of state terrorism at the same time! Ask a Palestinian what he thinks about the cultural smart set you miss so much!"

Sonja stared at him, open-mouthed. Linde looked back and forth between her and Cornelius, who stood there in a challenging pose as if he were playing the part of a French revolutionary in a school play. Finally Linde said, "I've had enough of this! The subject I want you to think about for next Wednesday is: How can Germany shake off the Nazi legacy? You can answer the question in an essay or a paper, in a short story, even a speech. The form you choose is entirely up to you. I'm relying on your imagination. And have a good weekend."

"Same to you, Herr Linde," said several voices, while the first young people hurried to the door.

Linde bent down under the table to retrieve his leather case, hoping that Cornelius and Sonja would have left the classroom when he came up again. He took his time, rummaged around in the case, listened to footsteps, remarks, laughter, until the last student seemed to have gone out into the corridor, then closed his bag, raised his head and looked over the top of the table. He breathed a sigh of relief. The room was empty.

Linde put the Toyota away in the garage and locked the door. He'd walk the short distance to the station. Then he went into the house and made haste to get out of his clothes and under the shower. After that he put on jeans and a clean T-shirt, bent over his sock drawer, hesitated for a moment and then, with a mischievous smile, took out a red and white striped pair. Why not? This was the first time in months he'd be away from home overnight without any of his family. Three whole days unobserved, no one checking up on him, not accountable for anything. A touch of daring in his wardrobe couldn't hurt. He felt ready for any adventure.

His daughter had given him the striped socks for his birthday four years ago. It had been Martina's circus phase: clown posters, black tailcoats from the flea market, juggling balls, she wanted to be an animal-keeper. At the time Linde thought the socks expressed Martina's wish that he would be her circus ringmaster. So far he had worn them only twice. Once on Martina's birthday, the second time when he went to see a student's single mother. The student risked not going up into Class Twelve because of poor work. A good mark for German would have helped him over the worst of his problems, and Linde had often noticed his young single mother at parents' evenings and waiting in the school yard. He thought the striped socks would lend their meeting a light, playful note. But instead of the boy's mother a man opened the door of the apartment, unshaven and with a cigarette between his lips, said he was afraid Illona had had to go to work, but Linde could discuss Adam's school problems just as well with him. Which Linde did, constantly pulling and tugging at his trouser legs. In another man's company, he felt the striped socks were ridiculous. But all his pulling and tugging did no good; in the end the man asked, with amusement, why he was wearing those funny socks. On the way home Linde decided that Adam's problems at school were the result of a feckless home background, so he couldn't agree to moving the boy up to Class Twelve; better fire a warning shot at the right time than see Adam fail his final exams because of his mother's way of life, thus perhaps jeopardizing his whole future.

Linde put the socks on and slipped into a pair of brightly coloured American trainers. When he looked at himself in the wardrobe mirror, he thought he could still pass quite easily for a man in his mid-thirties.

He went into the living-room, did up his backpack, looked at the time - he must be off in half an hour - wrote a note for his son - Dear Pablo, hope you had a good demo, live it up a bit at the weekend, will be back around six Sunday evening, all the best, Joachim - went into the kitchen, attached the note and a 10-Euro note - or was that too much? - to the fridge with a magnet, stood there a moment undecided - should he start out for the station? - went back to the CD player in the living-room and put on the new Buena Vista Social Club. At the moment it was his favourite CD. He'd listened mainly to Cuban music even as a university student, and to this day he collected Cuban disks and CDs. At the beginning of their relationship Ingrid had thought that was really unusual, and they often went to a Cuban club in Frankfurt in the evening to drink mojitos and dance the night away. They were even to have gone to Cuba on honeymoon. But then Ingrid's parents, who owned a pharmacy in Darmstadt, had threatened so vehemently to break off all contact if their daughter flew to that Communist island that Linde finally let himself be persuaded to opt for Venice instead.

By now Ingrid hated Cuban music. Like everything else, so it seemed to Linde, that was even remotely connected with pleasure and the enjoyment of life. Crispbread, piano concertos, enriched face cream, pullovers that would have fitted a cow, and feature films on TV about women with cancer - that had been more or less the sum of Ingrid's life for the last few years. Or the hospital. Linde had taken her there on Tuesday after he had been woken around four in the morning by the sound of Ingrid packing suitcases. Not with clothes and books, as if to go away for a few days, but with crockery and pots and pans, cans of soup, sofa cushions, candlesticks, rugs, the TV set. When Linde spoke to her she did not react, and when he took hold of her shoulders and tried to shake her she began screaming, lashing out, getting hold of everything near enough for her to grab it and flinging it on the floor. After the fit was over she huddled in the corner of the sofa for the next two hours, chain-smoking. Around six-thirty Linde called a colleague, asked her to take his early classes for him, loaded the now entirely weak and passive Ingrid into the car, and drove her to the hospital. Only when Dr Bauer appeared in the entrance hall did life return to her for a moment. Without pausing for breath and also, as Linde registered with a slight shake of his head, without any meaningful sentence structure, she began talking away to Dr Bauer. Her husband had terrorized her all evening with his music, she said, he had danced around the living-room several times singing at the top of his voice, he had drunk strong liquor and done all he could in this exuberant mood to make her feel even feebler and more wretched than she did anyway.

"And all just so that I'll go crazy," she hissed in Linde's face, "and you can get me committed here and then go off to Berlin alone at the weekend while I'm locked up, you … you monster!"

Linde sighed, smiled sadly and told Dr Bauer, "She started packing up the entire contents of the apartment at four this morning."

"You'd like that, wouldn't you? Get rid of me but keep all the stuff! It's mine!"

Linde continued to smile sadly and shrugged his shoulders.

"Well now, Frau Linde, come with me and we'll give you something to help you sleep. You must be very tired after all that packing."

"Yes, I'm tired, but not from the packing. I only stay for Pablo's sake. So that monster won't destroy him too!"

Then Ingrid made for Linde, and Linde, not wishing to see this new evidence of Ingrid's instability deprived of any of its obvious import, almost willingly let her slap his face. Until Dr Bauer took hold of Ingrid's arms and pulled her away. He nodded briefly to Linde over his shoulder before he disappeared into the stairwell with her.

On the way home Linde told himself that of course he hadn't planned it that way, but at the same time he felt relieved that nothing now stood between him and his long weekend in Berlin. What about Ingrid's accusation that he had been particularly full of the joy of life yesterday evening, so as to make her lack of it even clearer? Well, he did sometimes feel tempted to show her a bit of fun. But that was only an attempt to remind her that there were ways of life other than lethargic depression. And Dr Bauer hadn't gone into the matter. Anyway, it was a fact that he'd been in an excellent mood that evening. The beginning of his letter to the press, on the current controversy about the harmful influence on young people of computer games, was so good that he thought he must celebrate with a bottle of wine. He was going to do some more work on it next evening. Perhaps he'd finally get a letter to the press printed again. The last time he'd had one published was over a year ago. However, it had been in . "Looking at your photo series in the last issue on the latest bathing fashions, I felt that Michelangelo might have been standing behind the camera - well done!" Or something like that. Nothing world-shaking - the subject didn't lend itself to that anyway - but all the same, published. His contribution to the discussion of computer games was of course a very different matter. After all, he saw the problem presented by such games - a big problem, and it was going to get much bigger - at close quarters every day. Twelve-year-olds walking down the school corridors in black combat gear, parents who didn't know how to talk to their killer children, conversations in break that made his hair stand on end. "I took out those ten characters with my last grenade", or "That's a game where you can really put the knife in and twist it around and so on, and then it makes this kind of scraping sound."

And this in a grammar school! Linde hated to think what went on in secondary moderns and technical schools. Anyway, he was confident that with his experience, a good analysis of the situation and an original proposition - he was going to plead for computer- game courses in schools, the class and the teacher would play the games together and then discuss their content - with all this he would write a letter that might make it to the pages of the Frankfurter Allgemeine or the Süddeutsche Zeitung, if not Der Spiegel itself.

But then on Tuesday evening he'd had to devote his attention to Pablo, who had been thrown over by a girl yet again, and on Wednesday he had been preparing for the German Post-War Writers course, so the opening of the letter was still in his backpack. Linde hoped that he would find the peace and quiet he needed to finish it in some comfortable Brandenburg country inn.

He looked at the time - he had another twenty minutes - and turned up the volume. Humming along with the music, he began swaying his hips and dancing round the living-room, taking small steps. That was the way! Cha-cha-cha! And then for the señoritas! His son surely had to get the idea some time. But no, Pablo stayed on the edge of the dance-floor, an apple-juice spritzer in his hand, grinning uncertainly, legs as if knotted together. Linde had seen him like that at various school parties. "Have a beer," he had advised him a hundred times. "It'll loosen you up a bit."

"I don't like the taste of alcohol."

"Then drink it as medicine."

"I'm not sick."

What could he say? That he personally thought it was sick for a young man of nineteen never to have had sex yet? No, he couldn't. Luckily there was Amnesty International. They valued Pablo there. At least as a worker and an organizer. No one else stood about so long in pedestrian precincts, collected so many donations, went to so many demonstrations. That was why he had been chosen as Regional Group Consultant at the age of sixteen. But as for his private contacts against that background … It had been the same old story on Tuesday, Pablo had had his eye on a certain Isabella for weeks, often mentioned her name at supper - "I'm going to print leaflets with Isabella later", or, "We were talking about Iranian internal politics, and Isabella said …", and so on - and after one discussion he had finally ventured to ask if she'd go for a drink with him. She agreed at once. (Pablo announced this news as if it had been a huge surprise. For God's sake, what was so surprising about it? Pablo was good-looking, a nice lad, intelligent, reliable - okay, so he was a little short on a sense of humour, and he wasn't exactly the original charmer either, but of course he was the sort girls would like. To the best of his ability, Linde had tried to tell Pablo so that evening: "Look at me, after all, you're my son. I'm no Robert Redford either, but when I was your age I'd have…".) Anyway, then Pablo and the girl had gone to the café in the marketplace to drink hot chocolate. (Wrong place, Linde had thought at once, full of pensioners, he wouldn't go there himself, not even with Ingrid.)

"But somehow we couldn't find anything to talk about. I thought we'd start by discussing our Amnesty projects, and then maybe go on to what we do after school. But she only wanted - well, really she only wanted to make snide remarks about the others in the group. And I think snide remarks are shit. And at some point or other I told her so, I said: 'Listen, why don't you say all these critical things when the others are around? It's silly just to sit here going on about them.'"

Was it actually normal, Linde had thought at that moment, for a nineteen-year-old to tell his father all the details of his meeting with a girlfriend? What was going to happen when Pablo finally did end up in bed with a girl? Of course he was pleased to have his son's confidence. All the same, he knew boys of nineteen who didn't even tell their parents where they were going to spend the summer vacation. And their summer vacations were certainly more exciting than Pablo's. This year he was planning to take a four-week practical training course in a joiner's workshop. Even Ingrid, who was usually in favour of such things - working with your hands, natural materials, woodwork - had asked if he wouldn't rather go away with a few friends. Well, Pablo had replied, he'd realized more and more clearly recently that he didn't actually have a real friend, or not the way he imagined a real friend: someone you could talk to, exchange opinions and share experiences with, someone with whom you could reach new horizons, someone you could count on in any situation. Not just the usual stuff: discussing who'd pulled more girls at the weekend and who'd taken more drugs.

At this, to Linde's surprise, Ingrid looked up from her tapestry work (her latest hobby, making sofa cushions with butterflies, beetles, grasshoppers on them) and said: "But at your age - I mean, maybe you should get a girlfriend. Then you could go away together."

Get a girlfriend, thought Linde, if I'd put it like that we'd have had instant trouble, along the lines of: come off it, a woman is not a beer or a plate of schnitzel.

Whereupon Pablo, very much his mother's son, said: "It's too important to me. I couldn't just get some girl or other."

Oh, too important to him, was it? So important that when going out with a lively, sassy young woman (or so at least Linde imagined someone called Isabella) he first clamped down hard on any idea of fun (telling her not to criticize people except to their faces - what well-meant nonsense!) and then didn't even pay for her hot chocolate.

"… I mean, while I was paying for mine she suddenly looked surprised, as if it was all settled that I'd pay for her too. If you ask me that's exactly the old idea of gender roles that we none of us want any more."

"But Pablo, naturally a girl would like to be treated nicely by a young man who fancies her."

"Not on that level, though. Money! Money doesn't count."

"Well, if it doesn't count …"

"I mean it has no spiritual or emotional value. That's what matters to me in a woman."

As so often before, Linde wondered where his son got this uptight attitude to money from. You could accuse Ingrid of all sorts of faults, but avarice was not among them. On the contrary; in the old days, when they still went out together to see friends, Ingrid often wanted to take two or even three bottles of wine as a present to their hosts, or sometimes a whole cake, and he had had to point out reasonably that one bottle or half a cake would do just as well, they could easily be suspected of trying to show off.

"… And anyway," Pablo concluded, "she goes to raves at the weekend, and I don't want to know how many people she's been to bed with already. And she was wearing make-up today, and she'd painted her nails."

It was not the first time that Pablo had expressed distaste for make-up and nail varnish, and once again Linde, who had been briefly aroused by the idea of this young girl Isabella with her painted fingernails, knew better than to reply. For a while they sat in silence eating the vegetable gratin that Linde had brought back from lunch in the school canteen. Finally he asked how Amnesty's work in Israel was getting on. There was a kind of golden rule in the family that if you were at a loss for any other subject, you talked politics. These days that usually meant Israel and Palestine. (Linde, still dancing around the living-room, briefly remembered Cornelius's outburst just now in the German class, and felt a little uncomfortable at the idea that the tenor of the family's political conversations might not be anything out of the ordinary.) Even Ingrid used to join in, and these were the few times when the Lindes were not only in agreement but even shared a kind of hilarity. For instance, Pablo might say: "Those Israelis have shot another child." To which Ingrid replied: "Terrible!" And Linde (with a bitter smile):"Probably in self-defence." Then all of them would nod and laugh ironically. "Oh dear me, yes…"

However, when a press report on this case, two days later, said that the boy had gone out to buy milk with his father and was caught in the middle of an exchange of fire between Palestinians and Israelis, and ballistic investigation showed that the fatal bullet must have been fired by the Palestinians, political conversation turned out, for the first time, not to be a panacea for all family conflicts. Unusually, it was Ingrid who dissociated herself from the otherwise unanimous reaction at the Lindes' breakfast table, which was to ask who had carried out the ballistic investigations. The Israelis, of course. So it was a put-up job.

"But," said Ingrid, "the way it looks in that photo, the Israelis would have had to be firing round a corner. Anyway, what kind of father takes his son out to buy milk in the middle of a combat zone? They'd been firing at each other for hours."

"Well, first … ." Pablo put his cup down and looked severely at his mother. "Of course the photo distorts dimensions, and I wouldn't be at all surprised if an Israeli took it."

"It says here dpa."

"There we are, then."

"What do you mean, there we are?"

"That could be a cover for all sorts of things."

"It's the initials of the German Press Agency, the Deutsche Presseagentur, it's not some Israeli outfit."

"But Mama!" Pablo sighed. "I mean: the German Press Agency! We know how the Germans are still motivated by their guilty conscience."

"Hm," said Ingrid, doubtfully.

Linde remembered how he himself had been briefly torn between his basic conviction, which was the same as his son's, that most pro-Israeli reports were manipulated by the Israelis themselves, or by the Americans or heaven knows who else, and a feeling that Pablo's argument lacked objectivity. But before he got around to deciding exactly how it lacked objectivity, Pablo was going on. "And second, do you know about the circumstances in which the Palestinians have to get their food every day?"

Ingrid didn't know.

"And have you any idea what a litre of milk means there in terms of survival?"

Ingrid had no idea about that either.

"And small-scale gun battles like that happen every day."

"Well, I don't know about every day …," Linde objected, less as a contribution to the conversation or to contradict his son than to keep the peace at the family breakfast table. Since Martina had left home, it was unusual enough for the three of them to sit together in anything but a brooding silence. And if for once his wife was joining in without trying to score off him … "I think you're exaggerating a little."

Pablo seemed to have been just waiting for this objection. "It's how they feel," he lectured his parents. "They feel it happens every day. Even if there isn't actual daily gunfire, people feel they're being shot at every day. There've been scientific studies done, and psychologists have written about it. I mean, you can easily imagine what it's like: if soldiers could start shooting whenever you're walking down the street, then you feel inside almost exactly as if they were shooting all the time."

Oh please, thought Linde, let's not have any psychological theories about something being virtually real just because someone feels that way. He was strongly reminded of Ingrid's regular accusation that where she was concerned he was absolutely bursting with subliminal aggression and cruel desires, and as a sensitive person she sensed it and felt almost worse than if he let his aggression and his desires rip. If Pablo went on talking like this it probably wouldn't be long before Ingrid came up with one of her deranged comparisons again. What hadn't he been compared with to date? The husband at the scene of a crime, a danger to the public; the male of some species of animal given to brutal behaviour; the father of an alcohol-dependent girlfriend of hers; and a dozen other sinister figures. Any moment now he'd probably be the Israeli army, while Ingrid was the Palestinian people feeling that they were being shot at all the time.

So he was quick to say: "I don't think that makes any difference to Ingrid's reasonable objection: a caring father doesn't lead his son into the middle of an exchange of fire …" Here Linde paused, knowing that what he was about to say would destroy the breakfast truce, but all the indications were that the subsequent hostilities would not be between him and Ingrid. "Unless the father is accepting the fact that his son's death will not be ineffective as publicity. And I'm afraid we do see the Palestinians sending their children into the danger zone strikingly often."

"Sending them?" Pablo's voice cracked. (Yet again Linde thought of Cornelius. The same fanatical tone.) "Palestinians sending their children into the danger zone? That's just incredible!" Pablo didn't seem to know which gesture of shock to make first. His hands somehow managing to flap in all directions, he shouted at Linde: "And suppose the children are so wretched they run into the danger zone of their own accord? But of course a complacent old Central European literary connoisseur can't understand that! It's not in Goethe, after all!"

Oh Lord! Linde surreptitiously cast a quick glance of alarm at Ingrid, but she was watching her son with curiosity, and perfectly calmly. A complacent old Central European literary connoisseur? Was that the way his son thought of him? What a joke! Pablo, of all people, accusing him of being out of touch with life and lacking in youthful verve! A mischievous grin flickered over Linde's face: let's see our super-Palestinian get to grips with real life for once, have a few of a young man's natural experiences! And not on the sly in the Darmstadt Sex Center's video cubicles. He had once seen Pablo there by chance, and since then he'd known what his son's frequent "I just have to nip into Darmstadt" meant. No doubt there was any amount of natural eroticism there, no make-up and nail varnish! The little prig!

But not for the first time Linde suppressed an impulse simply to tell his son straight out where he was going wrong, in the hope that a salutary shock might yet make Pablo the younger reflection of himself that Linde wanted. Instead he gave a conciliatory smile and said: "I take Central European literary connoisseur as a compliment, my dear fellow. And if you knew all there is to be found in Goethe you wouldn't get on your high horse. But never mind that …," Linde spread his arms wide, and looked amicably from Ingrid to Pablo and back again. "None of this is any reason to spoil our breakfast. On the whole, after all, we agree in condemning Israeli policy."

Pablo did not seem sure how to deal with this offer of peace, while Ingrid, in curiously good spirits, went on scrutinizing her son with a gleam in her eye.

"So are we all friends again?" asked Linde.

"I think Pablo's quite right. You have no idea of real hardship."

"Please, Ingrid." Linde was still smiling, but now he looked a little weary too. "We were talking about Israel."

"Don't let your father fool you. 'Complacent old Central European literary connoisseur, that's him all over. Even though he'd love to be a rumba-dancing Casanova, eternally young."

Linde, who had been standing by the window looking out on the garden for some time, now swaying only very slightly at the knees to the music, stood motionless for a moment, and then shook his head bitterly. Sheer lunacy! They'd been having breakfast together, discussing world events, and what came of it? First his son, then his wife called him names, and he was the one who had to make sure the situation didn't run entirely out of control.

"Right: if that's how you two see me, well, I'm sorry. For me but especially for you. After all," he had added, adopting a slightly ironic tone, "after all we live together, and I'm afraid you'll just have to put up with a rumba-dancing old fogey - for now, anyway."

"Oh, Joachim," sighed Pablo (the Lindes had got their children out of the habit of saying Mama and Papa early, no one was quite sure why, but it was usual in their social circles at the time). "Oh, Joachim, don't go taking offence again."

"Again", "the same as usual", "all the time" - Ingrid had done a good job on her son. If Pablo's voice hadn't broken some while ago, thought Linde, and if I closed my eyes, I'd have a hard time deciding which of them was talking to me.

Once more he suppressed the urge to tell Pablo a few things straight. Instead, he adopted a conciliatory tone.

"I am not taking offence, and certainly not again. If you could both stop putting every accusation - or if you like, every justified criticism, I don't mind -" Linde raised his arms as if to say: come on, attack! - "if you could stop putting every accusation in a way suggesting that whatever I've done wrong is just the latest chapter in a constant, on-going series, well, I'd be very grateful to you. I think it would help us all if we were more constructive in our relationships with each other. In particular where our faults are concerned - and who has none of those? In my view dancing the rumba and liking Goethe are pardonable failings. As for political discussion, Pablo, I hope you will develop a rather more thoughtful and tolerant attitude. If your mother's opinion differs from yours, and your father is trying to reconcile the two of you, you don't want to fly off the handle, you want to muster your arguments and defend your own point of view. You may succeed in persuading your mother, or you may not. Human beings are all different - I'm glad to say - and what matters in the end is whether what we say is genuinely interesting."

And having given them a moment for thought, looking down at his clasped hands on the table, he glanced up again, gave a friendly smile, and concluded, "I hope we can all concede that."

That was the end of the argument. Well, except for a snide "Amen" from Ingrid, but he was used to such comments. And when Pablo had left for some meeting, and Ingrid had gone back to bed, he had even washed the breakfast dishes.

Linde nodded at his reflection in the window-pane: they could say what they liked about him, but who kept this whole show on the road?

For a moment longer he relished the feeling that in general he was doing his best. Then he looked at his watch. Time to go to the station. As he pressed the Stop button on the CD player, he heard someone knocking at the front door of the house. It was probably the postman.

"Just coming!"