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Finally Karin sent Andreas in one direction and Marko in the other to look in the garden for lounge chairs.
    Then the first drops fell. Karin peered around, looking for the two squabblers, then said to herself that they would find their way to the house without her and went inside. She would have liked to go to bed with her husband, would have liked to lay her head in the crook of his arm and her arm over his chest, open the window and listen to the rustle of the rain. But she couldn’t run away from her mission to pacify and reconcile and heal. Ulrich was right in what he said about my mission, she thought, and she thought of Christiane, who had taken on an even greater one when only a child. She had been nine years old when her mother had died, and she had tried to take the place of her mother for her brother, three years younger than she, loving and punishing, comforting and distracting, cheering and urging. Karinwas annoyed with herself for making the remark about Jörg being brought up without a mother; she had hurt Christiane. She would apologize to her, and perhaps by doing so entice her out of her nervous tension and into a conversation.
    Then she heard, they all heard, the scream.

Eight
    Ulrich and his wife knew immediately that their daughter had screamed. They looked around searchingly—where had the scream come from? Seeing the puzzled parents, the others also realized that they hadn’t seen the daughter for quite some time. “When did she leave?”—“Where did the scream come from?”—“From the park?”—“From the house?”
    Then they all heard the clamor in the hall. Ulrich tore open the door, his wife and the others following him. Standing in the upstairs hallway were the daughter, naked, and Jörg in his white nightshirt.
    “You wuss. Fucking is fighting—wasn’t that your motto? Fighting is fucking? Why are you always looking at my breasts when you can’t get it up? You’re not a man. You’re a joke. You’re probably a joke as a terrorist too, and they locked you up to stop you looking at women’s breasts all the time. You’re a voyeur. You’re a joke and a voyeur.” She put as much rejection, contempt and disgust into her voice as she could. But she sounded more despairing than disgusted, and then she burst into tears.
    “I didn’t look at your breasts. I want nothing of you. Leave me alone, please, leave me alone.”
    What a picture, Henner thought. The hall was only faintly lit by candles, shadows twitched on the walls, Dorle and Jörg’s faces were indistinct, her nakedness andhis nightshirt all the more present. Neither said anything; they were still facing each other, but antagonistically. It was a mysterious, ludicrous, wordless scene on a stage, with everyone craning his neck to see.
    Christiane snapped at Ulrich. “Get your daughter off his back!”
    “Don’t make such a big deal of it!” But he went up the stairs, taking his jacket off, laid it around his daughter’s shoulders and led her to the door at one end of the hallway.
    Jörg looked around as if waking from a dream, staring after the man in his shirtsleeves and the naked young woman with the man’s jacket thrown around her, as if he didn’t know who they were, looked down into the hall and into the embarrassed faces of the guests, said nothing, slowly shook his head and walked, with the dragging gait that Christiane had already noticed that morning, to the door at the other end of the hallway. The stage was empty.
    Christiane and Ingeborg looked as if they were about to run up and take care of their brother and daughter. Karin, feeling that this would make everything even more awful, put her arms around both of them and led them back to the table. “It’s all a bit much this evening. For everyone and all the more for Jörg and our youngest. Things won’t look so bad tomorrow.”
    “We’re leaving tonight.”
    “Let her sleep it off. She may not even want to leave. She may not want to leave things like