Passage I

PROSE FICTION: This passage is adapted from the novel Homecoming: A Novel by Bernhard Schlink (©2006 by Bernhard Schlink).

Once the supper table was cleared, the dishes washed, and the flowers in the garden watered, my grandparents would set to work on the Novels for Your Reading Pleasure and Entertainment series. They worked at the dining table, pulling the ceiling lamp down and reading and editing the manuscripts, the page proofs, and the bound galleys. Sometimes they did some writing as well: they insisted that each volume conclude with a brief didactic essay, and when none was forthcoming they supplied it themselves. They wrote about the importance of toothbrushing, the battle against snoring, the principles of beekeeping, the history of the postal system. They also rewrote passages in the novels when they found them awkward, unbelievable, or immodest or when they felt they could make a better point. The publisher gave them a free hand.

When I was old enough to stay up after the blackbird had finished its song, I was allowed to sit with them. The light of the lamp just above the table, the dark of the room surrounding it—I loved it. I would read or learn a poem or write a letter to my mother or an entry in my summer diary. Whenever I interrupted my grandparents to ask a question, I got a friendly answer. I was afraid though to ask too many: I could sense their concentration. The remarks they exchanged were sparse, and my questions sounded garrulous. So I read, wrote, and studied in silence. From time to time I lifted my head cautiously, so as not to be noticed, and observed them: Grandfather, his dark eyes now riveted on the work before him, now gazing out, lost, into the distance, and Grandmother, who did everything with a light touch, reading with a smile and making corrections with a quick and easy hand. Yet the work must have been much harder on her than on him: while he cared only for history books and had a neutral, objective relationship to the novels they dealt with, she loved literature, fiction as well as verse, and had a sure feeling for it; she must have suffered from having to spend so much time on such banal texts.

I was not allowed to read them. If I grew curious when they talked about one or another novel, I was told in no uncertain terms I was not to read it: there was a better novel or a better novella on the subject by Conrad Ferdinand Meyer or Gottfried Keller or another classic Swiss writer. Grandmother would then get up and bring me the better book.

When they gave me the extra copies of the bound galleys to take home as scrap paper, they made a point of reminding me not to read them. They would not have given them to me at all had paper not been so expensive at the time and my mother’s income so low. Everything I did not have to hand in to the teacher I wrote on the back of the bound galleys: Latin, Greek, and English vocabulary words, first drafts of compositions, plot summaries, descriptions of famous paintings, world capitals, rivers and mountains, important dates, and notes to classmates a few desks away. I liked the thick pads of thick paper, and because I was a good boy I refrained from reading the printed sides of the pages for years.

During the first few summers my grandparents found the life I was leading with them too isolated, and tried to bring me into contact with children my own age. They knew their neighbors and by talking to a number of families arranged for me to be invited to birthday parties, outings, and visits to the local swimming pool. Since it took a lot of doing and they did it out of love, I did not dare resist, but I was always happy when the event was over and I could return to them. Friendships might have grown out of these contacts had we seen one another more often, but the Swiss children’s summer holidays began soon after I arrived, and they would disperse, returning only shortly before my departure.

So I spent my summer holidays without playmates my own age; I spent them taking the same walks to the lake and hikes through a ravine, around a pond, and up a hill with a view of the lake and the Alps; I spent them going on the same excursions to the Rapperswil fortress, Ufenau Island, the cathedral, the museums. These hikes and excursions were as much a part of the summer as harvesting apples, berries, lettuce, and vegetables, hoeing beds, weeding, snipping wilted flowers, trimming hedges, mowing grass, tending the compost, keeping the watering can filled, and doing the watering. Just as these operations recurred naturally, so the recurrence of the other activities struck me as natural. The never-changing evenings at the table under the lamp thus belonged to the natural rhythm of summer.