The Gordian Knot - Bernhard Schlink [57]
“Things have changed.”
“Is the KGB footing the bill?” she asked, with a touch of irony.
“Don’t worry, this is honest money we’re squandering here. I got money from Germany.”
“Have you given any thought to going to the CIA or the FBI?”
She was getting on his nerves. “To be honest, no. Is the cross-examination over?”
“Well,” she said hesitantly, “if you didn’t want my opinion, you shouldn’t have told me anything. Now it’s too late. I thought about all this, and the more I thought about it, the less I understand you. Unless you’re cynical.”
“What?”
“Cynical. I mean … in my definition, cynicism is contempt for everything that holds our world together: solidarity, order, responsibility. I’m not saying that law and order should reign supreme. But you Germans don’t understand that. When I was an exchange student in Krefeld, I saw how in class you all copy one another. No sign of a bad conscience, as if it were the noblest deed.” She shook her head.
“But if the students are all copying one another, then that’s surely a prime example of solidarity,” Georg said.
“Solidarity in the face of order imposed from above. For you guys, order is still imposed from above, and either you worship it or you try, like naughty children, to bamboozle it.”
He laughed. “Perhaps you’re right, but that’s not being cynical, not in your definition either. Contempt is missing.”
“You think it’s funny, but it isn’t a laughing matter. Contempt comes later, when the children have grown up.” The eggs Benedict arrived. “Do you understand what I’m saying?” Helen insisted.
“I’ve got to think about it for a moment,” he replied.
He savored every bite. As he relaxed, he thought the matter over. He wasn’t sure if Helen was right or not, but it was true that he didn’t care about solidarity, order, and responsibility. He didn’t think of himself as immoral. One didn’t trample on the weak, exploit the poor, or cheat the simpleminded. But that had nothing to do with solidarity, order, and responsibility. It was a question of instinct, and reached only so far as one can perceive the consequences of one’s actions. There were certain things one simply didn’t do, because one wouldn’t be able to face oneself in the mirror. One doesn’t like to face oneself in the mirror when one has pimples either, but one’s complexion is not a question of morals. Could it be that I’m not immoral but amoral? Can I tell Helen that?
“What you’re saying would mean that we have still not left our authoritarian state behind us,” he said. “You have a point there. It’s like what you told me the other day about the fairy tales in the nineteenth century, which I wanted to ask you a few more questions about—”
“You want to drop the matter,” she cut in. “Fine, I’m dropping it. What shall we do after brunch? Can I have another Bloody Mary?”
They left Julia’s and strolled through Central Park to the Metropolitan Museum. A new annex had been built, and one could step out onto the roof. They stood above the trees in the park. Like on a jetty above a green lake of swaying treetops surrounded by a mountain range of buildings.
34
GEORG WAS ALWAYS SURPRISED by the speed with which construction jobs were carried out in New York, work that in France or Germany would have taken days or weeks to complete. One Saturday morning he was awakened by the noise of construction machinery breaking up the sidewalk the whole length of 115th Street. By evening the new pavement was ready, light gray cement divided into large squares, and the soil around the trees was framed by dark red bricks. Farther down Broadway he saw a building of forty or fifty stories going up. The first time he had gone past there were only cranes towering into the sky, then steel went up, and now the skeleton of the building had turned into a massive body. But at Townsend Enterprises things were not moving ahead. On Monday morning Georg was awakened by a phone call telling him to be at the office by ten, and as he climbed the stairs, the painters were still at work.
He waited in front of the map of the world, and was