Bernhard Schlink - The Gordian Knot (Vintage Crime Black Lizard Original)

Bernhard Schlink was born in Germany. He is the author of the internationally bestselling novels The Reader and Homecoming, as well as The Weekend and the collection of short stories Flights of Love and four prizewinning crime novelsThe Gordian Knot, Selfs Punishment, Selfs Deception, and Selfs Murder. He lives in Berlin and New York.

ALSO BY BERNHARD SCHLINK

The Reader
Flights of Love: Stories
Homecoming
The Weekend

Selfs Punishment (with Walter Popp)
Selfs Deception
Selfs Murder

A VINTAGE CRIME/BLACK LIZARD ORIGINAL, DECEMBER 2010

Translation copyright 2010 by Peter Constantine

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in Switzerland as Die gordische Schleife by Diogenes Verlag AG, Zurich, in 1987. Copyright 1987 by Bernhard Schlink.

Vintage is a registered trademark and Vintage Crime/Black Lizard and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to Walter Popp for his consultation on the translation.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Schlink, Bernhard.
[Gordische Schleife. English]
The Gordian knot / by Bernhard Schlink; translated from the German by Peter Constantine.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-74267-4
1. TranslatorsFiction. 2. Spy stories. I. Constantine, Peter, 1963 II. Title.
PT2680.L54G6713 2010
833.914dc22
2010017488

www.vintagebooks.com

v3.1

GEORG WAS DRIVING HOME . He left the highway by Aix and took a back road. From Marseille to Aix there are no tolls, from Aix to Pertuis there is a charge of five francs: thats a pack of Gauloises.

Georg lit one. The trip to Marseille hadnt panned out. The head of the translation agency that sent him jobs now and then had had no work for him this time. I said Id give you a call if anything came up. Things are a bit slow right now. Monsieur Maurin had assumed an anxious expressionwhat he had said might in fact be true. It was his agency, but he lived off jobs from the aircraft factory in Toulon, the Industries Aronautiques Mermoz. When the joint European venture for a new fighter-helicopter in which Mermoz was involved stalled, there was nothing for Monsieur Maurin to translate. Or else he had once again tried to get better terms and Mermoz was teaching him a lesson. Or the factory had made good its long-standing threat and hired its own translators.

The road rose steeply beyond Aix, and the engine stuttered. Georg broke out in a sweat. This was all he needed! He had bought the old Peugeot only three weeks agohis parents had come to visit him from Heidelberg and given him the money. I think you really need a car for your job, his father had said, and dropped two thousand marks in the box on the kitchen counter in which Georg kept his money. You know Mother and I like to help all we can. But now that Im retired and your sister has a baby

Then came the questions Georg had heard a thousand times: Couldnt he find himself a better job nearer home? Why had he left his job as a lawyer in Karlsruhe? Couldnt he come back to Germany now that hed broken up with Hanne? Was he going to abandon his parents in their old age? There was more to life, after all, than finding oneself. Do you want your mother to die all alone? Georg was ashamed, because he was happy enough for the two thousand marks, but didnt care in the least what his father was saying.

The gas tank was almost full, and he had changed the oil and filter not too long ago, so there couldnt be anything wrong. As he drove on, he listened to the engine the way a mother listens to the breath of a feverish child. The car wasnt jerking anymore. But wasnt there some kind of thumping? A grinding, crunching noise? Georg had driven the car for three weeks without experiencing any problems. Now there was that noise again.

At noon Georg parked in Pertuis, did some shopping at the market, and had a beer at a pub. It was the beginning of March; the tourists hadnt yet arrived. The stall with herbs of Provence, honey, soap, and lavender waterswamped during the summer months by Germans and Americans until late in the afternoonhad already been taken down. In other stalls, the merchandise was being put away. The air was warm and there were heavy clouds. A gust of wind rattled the awnings. It smelled of rain.

Georg leaned against the wall near the entrance of the bar, glass in hand. He was wearing jeans, a frayed brown leather jacket over a blue sweater, and a dark cap. His posture was relaxed; from a distance he could have passed for a young farmer who had finished his business at the market and was now unwinding before lunch. Close up, his face showed hard lines on his forehead and around his mouth, a deep groove in his chin, and a nervous fatigue around the eyes. He took his cap off and ran his hand over his hair. It had gotten thin. He had aged in the last couple of years. Before, he had had a beard and could have been anywhere between twenty-five and forty. Now one could see his thirty-eight years, and might perhaps guess him older.

The first raindrops fell. Georg went inside, and bumped into Maurice, Yves, Nadine, Grard, and Catrine. They too were struggling to get by, taking on odd jobs, living off wife or girlfriend, husband or boyfriend. Grard and Catrine were managing best: he had a small restaurant in Cucuron, and she was working in a bookstore in Aix. Outside, the rain was drumming, and as they ordered round after round of pastis, Georg began to feel better. He would make it. They would all make it. In any case, it had been two years since he had left Karlsruhe. He had survived. And he had also survived splitting up with Hanne.

As Georg drove up into the mountains bordering the valley of Durance to the north, the sun broke through. The view opened out on to a broad valley with vineyards, orchards, vegetable fields, a pond, and single farms, with the mountains of Luberon diminishing toward the south. There were a few small towns not much bigger than villages, but they all had castles, cathedrals, or the ruins of fortresses: the kind of miniature world one dreams of as a child and builds with toy blocks. Georg loved this view in the fall and winter too, when the land lies brown and smoke drifts over the fields, or rises from chimneys. Now he was enjoying the green of spring and the light of summer. The sun flashed on the pond and the greenhouses. Ansouis appeared, a defiant little town on a lonely rise. A road lined with cypress trees led to a high stone bridge and a castle. Georg drove under the bridge, turned right, and a few miles later, right again onto an overgrown gravel path. His house lay by the fields outside Cucuron.

GEORG AND HANNE HAD MOVED in together two years ago. His departure from Karlsruhe had been problematic: a quarrel with his boss at the law firm, recriminations and tears from Hannes ex-boyfriend, a fight with his parents, and a nagging fear that he was burning all his bridges. What should have been a liberating escape had almost become an all-out flight. Georg and Hanne couldnt find work in Paris, where they had first wanted to settle down. They lived in a run-down tenement, and their relationship seemed to be at an end. Cucuron offered them a new beginning. Georg had fallen in love with the little town on a vacation, and he was hoping he would find a job in Aix or Avignon. The first few weeks were bad. But then Georg got a part-time job as a projectionist in Avignon, and they had found the house.