“He was sentenced to six years?” I asked. I didn't remember such an attack—and spectacular explosions in the Mannheim-Heidelberg area tend to stick in my mind.
“A night guard got the brunt of it. He was badly hurt. But Helmut had nothing to do with this attack. He was politically engaged and was involved with the Communist League of West Germany, and he kept provoking the police and the courts, so they finally framed him and put him away. That's how it was. He told me that a policeman actually said to him that he'd had his fun with the police long enough, now the police would have their fun with him.”
“And all of that sounded plausible to you?” “Sure, and I could see why Helmut wanted to pay them back. In the beginning he'd only considered blowing up the German army recruiting office, but now he was going to do something really big. He realized that what he had to do was target the people who were really behind everything: the Americans. Sometimes we walked down the Bunsenstrasse, and right around the corner from my apartment there's an old villa on the Häuserstrasse where the army recruiting office used to be and where the Americans now have some kind of office. 'You see,' he told me, 'the attack on the army recruiting office wasn't just a waste of time, because a recruiting office isn't just a recruiting office: The fact that the Americans came in and took it over shows more clearly than any bomb can that American imperialism is behind German militarism. It's an insult to my intelligence that they thought me capable of such an idiotic attack in the fight against capitalism and imperialism!'“
Even back in the sixties and seventies I'd had a hard time taking all this political jargon seriously. And the zeitgeist of the nineties doesn't make taking it seriously any easier. In spite of her self-rolled cigarettes I couldn't imagine Leo reading Marx and Engels. I carefully asked her about her own involvement in the fight against capitalism and imperialism.
“That was Helmut's soapbox. When someone has lived with it for such a long time and paid such a price for it, I guess he can't climb off it anymore. We sometimes made fun of him. He just couldn't see that good politics needs to be concrete, to hit the mark, to be fun. But I must say, he did teach us a lot.”
“Us? You mean you and the other two in the police photos?”
“I mean just me. I don't want to drag anyone else into this. I don't even know the people in the newspaper shots.”
I didn't push her any further. She continued talking, and I concluded from what she said that there were two others, a certain Giselher and a certain Bertram, that they had met at a demonstration, got together from time to time, and at first had only ranted and railed against the establishment.
“But there came a point when we had had it up to here! You talk and talk and don't change anything. All the mess goes on: forests dying, chemicals in the air and in the water, nuclear power plants, rockets, and the way they destroy the cities and arm the police. All you accomplish is that the papers and the media sometimes give these things a bit more coverage, but then the stories dry up, there's no more coverage on the forest, and people think that everything's A-OK, while things only keep getting worse.”
So they decided to act instead of talk. They aimed fireworks at the nuclear plant in Biblis, set off stink bombs in Heidelberg and Mannheim sex shops, stuffed bananas in the exhaust pipes of police cars, tried but failed to stop a car race on the Hockenheim Circuit one night by blasting potholes in the track, and brought down a power pylon between Kirch-heim and Sandhausen. Then Helmut Lemke joined them and convinced them that their tactics were just childish pranks.
“What role did Rolf Wendt play in all this? I know you don't want to drag anyone else into it, but after all…”
“I know, he's dead. As I've told you already, he wasn't part of any of this. We were just friends. He and Helmut somehow knew each other from before. We ran into Rolf at the Wein-loch Bar, and Helmut introduced him to me. That's how I met him.”
“The papers mentioned an attack on an American military installation.”
“That was the result of our new tactics.” Lemke had put them up to it. Their operations should not try to prevent the unpreventable, but simply expose all the terrible things that were going on. This made sense to Leo and her friends, so they planned to break into the Rhineland Chemical Works at Ludwigshafen and tamper with the plant's emissions so that the air and the water, which were already poisoned, would end up brightly colored, too. The poison would reveal itself in violet clouds and a yellow Rhine. They also planned an attack on the traffic network at Römerkreis, Bismarckplatz, and Adenauerplatz. They would disable the traffic lights during rush hour, bringing Heidelberg to a standstill that would underline the traffic overload. None of their plans panned out, so Helmut Lemke came up with Operation Bonfire.
“Why bonfire?”
“We wanted to set fire to an American installation so that the public would finally realize what it was the Americans were storing there. Normally they don't let anyone into such installations, but when there's a fire, all hell breaks loose and Germans appear on the scene: police, firemen, reporters. Of course it would have to be a big fire. But when a munitions depot goes up in flames …”
I was dumbfounded and looked at her dumbfounded. She defended herself against my accusations faster than I could come up with them. I realized that for weeks she had been her own prosecution, defense, and judge.
“Of course nobody was supposed to get hurt. We were unanimous about that and kept saying so to Helmut, who swore on a stack of Bibles that he agreed with us wholeheartedly. But even if people did get hurt—you mustn't get me wrong, we didn't take that into account—I just mean, even if people …” Her words trailed off.
I looked over at her.
She bit her lip defiantly, and one hand gripped the other so firmly in her lap that the skin beneath her nails gleamed white. “How can you expose something terrible without creating a terrible mess? If something happened, I mean if something had happened, then that would have still been better than if…”
I waited, but she didn't continue. “What did happen, Frau Salger?”
She turned and looked at me intently, as if it were I who was supposed to be offering her the key to a secret. “I'm not sure,” she said. “I hadn't really been that involved in the preparations. The others did all of that, Helmut and Giselher. Bertram only came back from Tuscany the evening before. I knew I was going to be part of things, that I was going to participate. We always carried everything out together. Helmut was utterly opposed to me participating, but he didn't get his way. As it was, even with me there we were still missing one person. Helmut had initially tried to plan the operation with four people instead of five, but then he looked for a new, fifth person and found him. For his safety and for ours, Helmut didn't actually bring him into the group. We met only once the operation was under way. He was with Helmut in one car, while Giselher, Bertram, and I were in the other.”
“And that was at the beginning of January?”
“Yes, January sixth. I don't even know where the meeting place was. I think somewhere outside Frankfurt. We headed up the autobahn for quite a while, north from the Heidelberg or Mannheim junction, and then drove onto the shoulder and down an embankment and onto a back road. We followed it till we came to the edge of some woods. There we met Helmut and the fifth man. Then we headed off.”
“Did you know the fifth man?”
“We had all blackened our faces. I barely recognized Helmut. After a while we came to a fence, cut a hole in it, and climbed through. My job was to secure the way back. At midpoint I was supposed to keep an eye out in both directions in case a patrol turned up and either warn them or divert the patrol. But I guess you don't want to know all those details. It was quite foggy. I was supposed to wait for twenty minutes and then head back on my own.” She shrugged her shoulders. “I waited twenty-five minutes. Then I heard shots. I ran back to the fence and got out of the compound. When I reached our cars, there was an explosion, followed immediately by another. So I went running to the ro
ad. At first nobody stopped. They must have thought I was some dangerous nut, my face all black the way it was. But then I realized that and quickly cleaned up. The third car stopped. The driver was a pharmacist from Schwetzingen who'd had a couple of drinks and hit on me. When I reacted hysterically and told him I wanted to go to the psychiatric hospital, he must have thought that that was where I belonged. He took me straight there and thanked his lucky stars that he wasn't arrested or questioned.” She closed her eyes and leaned her head on the headrest. “Rolf was working the evening shift. He gave me a room and an injection, and I slept all the way through to the following evening.”
33
The Kaiser-Wilhelm-Stein
As we drove through the bright, sunny countryside, Leo's account about dark and gloomy nights, blackened faces, holes cut into fences, bombs, and gunfire struck me as strangely unreal. In Nothweiler I parked the car in front of the church and we climbed up to the ruins of Castle Wegelnburg. The woods sparkled in fresh green, the birds were singing, and an aromatic tang hung in the air after the last few days' rain. Explosions at American installations? What Americans? What explosions? But Leo's thoughts did not leave that night so quickly.
“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 Wei
nloch 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.”
“I am a cheerful girl, inside and out. When I feel fear coming on, I say 'Hello, fear!' and let it do its thing for a while, but I don't let it get the better of me.”
“Fear of what?”
“Don't you ever have that feeling? It's not a fear that something bad will happen, but just like when you have a fever, or when you feel cold, or sick.” She looked at me. “No, you don't ever have that feeling, do you? But I think Rolf did. He didn't get it just from his patients or from books. That's why he could help me a lot.”
“Was he in love with you?”
She took her feet off the dashboard and sat up straight. “I'm not really sure.”
I don't believe women when they say that they're not sure if they're attractive. Leo was sitting next to me in her jeans and a man's checked shirt, but I felt the woman in her voice, in her scent—even in the nervous movements with which she rolled her cigarettes. And she didn't know if Rolf Wendt was in love with her?
She could tell I didn't believe her. “OK, so he was in love with me. I didn't want to face up to it; I had a bad conscience. He'd done so much for me and got nothing in return, didn't even expect anything, but I'm sure he hoped I'd fall in love with him.”