Olga, page 16
He wrote to me and visited me. He was self-pitying in the letter, and self-righteous when he visited. When I first saw him, his skinny frame, his emaciated face, his white hair, I felt sorry for him and took him in my arms. Then we spoke, and all he talked about was the injustice that had befallen him and Germany. He was a stranger to me, even more of a stranger than before the war. He has a son and will soon have another child; his wife is pregnant, and I would like to get to know her, but he said I would only be allowed to do so if I didn’t interfere in the children’s upbringing and the affairs of the family. He could manage without me, he said; he had managed without me for fifteen years. And he didn’t let anyone speak to him anymore the way I used to speak to him.
He won’t try to see me again. I won’t try either. I have remained lonely, and I have gotten used to it. I’ve become sort of friendly with the youngest child in one of the families I sew for. He’s called Ferdinand; he reminds me a little of you and the young Eik. I tell him about your adventures, but I make sure he doesn’t think life is an adventure.
Sociable people live in the present, lonely people in the past. I often think of you, and our time together could not be more present if you and I had grown old together side by side. But it would be nice to reminisce together, you and me on a bench in front of the house: you think of something, I add something else, then I think of something, and you carry on.
I often think of you while going about my daily chores as well. Then I talk to you; it’s better than just talking to myself.
You are my partner. You became so early on and always have been. I get cross with you and argue with you, but that’s why you are my partner, my husband, and I am glad that you are.
Your Olga
July 4, 1971
Herbert, my dear, loyal husband,
I have read about artists who create something that doesn’t bear their name, that no one recognizes as their work, that perhaps no one sees or hears. They find a stone basin eroded by a mountain stream and place an ornament of pebbles on the basin floor. They find a crack in the rock around which the wind blows, one that can fit a small glass pipe, or two or three, allowing the wind to whistle a note or a chord. They draw a pattern in the sand at low tide that’s destroyed by the high tide a few hours later. Or is it not destroyed, but carried away?
A few weeks ago they blew up the water tower I could see from my balcony. It was as tall as a tall house, a slim outline rising up to the bulge of the container; it was made of brick and had a domed roof over the bulge and on top of that a little tower with another domed roof, and the roofs were made of slate. It was beautiful. It wasn’t needed anymore.
I’d read in the paper that they planned to blow it up, and when they started preparations I went over and spoke to the demolition foreman. People don’t refuse an old lady anything, so he explained to me how he was going to bring the tower down. The tower would not fall over; it would collapse in on itself and swirl up dust, but it wouldn’t cause any damage. I went back again the next day, and again on the day of the explosion. The demolition foreman and workmen recognized me, were pleased that I was interested, and weren’t suspicious when I walked past the open crates with the sticks of dynamite.
So now I have three sticks of dynamite, and all I have to do to make the fuse is soak a woolen thread in lighter fluid. I have everything I need.
I’m going to blow up Bismarck. It all started with him. You think it was good, but it was wrong. Perhaps people will think about it if he’s blown up. But perhaps no one will pay any attention if all that’s left of him is a heap of debris and rubble. Just as no one notices the decoration in the mountain stream or the chord in the mountains or the pattern in the sand. Things don’t have to be noticed in order to be beautiful and true. Nor do deeds.
Who should I share this with, if not with you? Ferdinand is a good boy, and I’m fond of him, but he’s a bit boring. They’re all like that. They’re always quick to pass moral judgment, on the past and on the present, and although their lives are sheltered and it costs them nothing to be moral, they think they’re courageous and give themselves airs. I wanted Ferdinand to do better than you and Eik. But his generation also wants everything too big.
You didn’t think I had it in me to steal dynamite and blow up monuments? You think what I’m doing is mad? You’re happy that I’m doing something mad and that you’re no longer alone? I don’t yet know when I’ll do it. But ever since I’ve known that I will do it, I feel good.
And I am close to you.
Your Olga
I sat with the letter in my hand and pictured her in my mind’s eye: her figure, upright even in old age, slowly making its way through the lamplit streets under the dark sky, the handbag with dynamite, fuse, and matches on her arm. I pictured her tampering with the monument. I sensed the silence around her and heard her talking to herself, her restrained humming. I heard the explosion.
I was proud of her. What a great thing when the life someone lives and the act of madness they commit harmonize like melody and counterpoint! And when the two don’t just fit together, but are put together by the person herself!
The melody of Olga’s life was her love for Herbert and her resistance to him, as fulfillment and as disappointment. After her resistance to Herbert’s madness, the mad gesture, a loud bang at the end of a silent life. She set the counterpoint to the melody of her life.
I won’t pretend I wasn’t hurt, at first, by Olga’s last letter. I was boring? But she didn’t write that she was bored when she was with me. She wrote of my sheltered life, and I know that my life was sheltered. Perhaps too sheltered, but that’s an idle thought.
These are the last lines. They are not a farewell to Olga. I will never bid her farewell. When Adelheid comes, we’ll drive to my hometown and go to the Bergfriedhof to visit Olga’s grave. Of course, I now know that the granddaughter reminded me of the grandmother. How wonderful that I can see Olga’s face in Adelheid’s!
A Note from the Translator
One of the most striking things about Olga, from the translator’s point of view, is the apparent simplicity of the text. Bernhard Schlink chooses to write plainly; it’s very important to him that his books should read easily, that the reader should not have to struggle to understand them. In the first section of Olga, the style and tone are so matter-of-fact that the narrative almost resembles a report—which, in a way, it is.
When I started translating the book and engaging with Schlink’s language in more detail, I could see that the text was scrupulously constructed. He creates specific effects by deliberately repeating a word or phrase, or punctuating in a certain way. Sometimes his sentences are short and punchy. Sometimes they are long, full of comma splices and repeated, simple conjunctions, allowing him to keep a thought tumbling forward, or to wrap one subject up in a single sentence before moving on to another.
Comma splices are more prevalent in German than in English. We are more likely to break a long sentence into orderly sections by inserting semicolons, perhaps even full stops. But this creates a different rhythm; and while the effect is tidier, more familiar, it doesn’t always convey the feel of the original. The author’s occasional long, rolling sentences were a deliberate stylistic decision, and so I chose to retain their breathless commas and conjunctions wherever I felt that English could stretch to accommodate them.
Words recur, sometimes in close proximity, sometimes as an echo of an earlier reference. Herbert, for example, becomes obsessed with “die Weite ohne Ende”—“die Weite”—a noun that also appears as an adjective (“das weite Land”). “Die Weite” is not just the thing Herbert longs for; it also evokes the longing itself. “Weite” encompasses the abstract concepts of breadth, distance, vastness, extent, immensity, unattainability. But here it is also a landscape, a place. How best to translate it into English?
It wasn’t possible always to use the same word. Faithfully echoing Schlink’s repetition would highlight this stylistic element, but it would also compromise the English text. The landscape of Herbert’s dreams required a term that could variously be applied to the Namibian desert, the snowbound Arctic, or a vista of the Andes. I opted for “the great expanse.” Elsewhere, “das weite Land,” as seen by Olga, is simply “the wide-open countryside”; but Herbert, in keeping with his later, grandiose yearnings, sees “the great expanse of the landscape and the great expanse of the sky.”
“Gross” also proved unexpectedly tricky. Olga uses this word repeatedly, in different and sometimes slightly peculiar ways, as a criticism of German political and colonial ambition. “Gross” may mean big, or grand, or great, and each of these worked in some contexts but was quite wrong in others. Olga complains that Bismarck set Germany on a horse that was “zu gross” (too big) for it to ride, and that, ever since, Germans “hätten alles zu gross gewollt” (had wanted everything too big). Even the postwar economic miracle, she feels, has become “zu gross.”
There is an uncomfortable, implied association here with “Grossdeutschland”: the Nazis’ Greater Germany. In English, though, the horse cannot be “too great.” It can only be “too big” (large). In the second phrase, “big” sounds awkward and banal, while “great” could seem inappropriately positive. German fantasies, the author and I agreed, were “too grand.” Repeated emphases like these are still present in the translation at the conceptual level, and words are echoed wherever possible—but, for the reader, clarity must take precedence.
Charlotte Collins
About the Author
BERNHARD SCHLINK was born in Germany in 1944. A professor emeritus of law at Humboldt University, Berlin, and Cardozo Law School, New York, he is the author of the internationally bestselling novels such as The Reader, which became a multimillion-copy international bestseller and an Oscar-winning film starring Kate Winslet and Ralph Fiennes, and The Woman on the Stairs. Other notable works available in English include Homecoming, Summer Lies, The Weekend, Guilt about the Past, Flights of Love, and the Gerhard Self series. He lives in Berlin and New York.
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About the Translator
Charlotte Collins studied English literature at Cambridge University, and was an actor and radio journalist in Germany and the U.K. before becoming a literary translator. She was awarded the Helen & Kurt Wolff Translator’s Prize in 2017 for her translation of A Whole Life by Robert Seethaler. Other work includes Seethaler’s The Tobacconist and The Field, Marrow and Bone by Walter Kempowski, and a co-translation, with Ruth Martin, of The Eighth Life: for Brilka by Nino Haratischvili.
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Copyright
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
OLGA. Copyright © 2018 by Diogenes Verlag AG. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
English translation © 2020 by Charlotte Collins.
Originally published as Olga by Diogenes Verlag AG, Zurich, in 2018.
Cover design: Stephen Brayda
Cover art: © Tyne & Wear Archives & Museums/Bridgeman Images
FIRST HARPERVIA EDITION PUBLISHED IN 2021
Digital Edition SEPTEMBER 2021 ISBN: 978-0-06-311294-0
Version 08072021
Print ISBN: 978-0-06-311292-6
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Bernhard Schlink, Olga
