Sorry

She points across the Wannsee as if the lake belongs to Tamara. Tamara goes on rowing and grins. Astrid doesn’t find that at all funny and kicks Tamara’s leg.

“Ouch!”

“Did that hurt?”

“Of course it hurt.”

“Good. So what was up?”

“I was busy.”

“Busybusybusy.”

“You could say that.”

Astrid lights a cigarette and looks at Tamara through narrowed eyes. They drift past the tram depot and approach the brightly lit hospital.

“Do I have to worm it out of you?”

“I was working.”

“Aha.”

“I’ve made some money, Astrid. A lot of money.”

Astrid’s mouth opens.

“You haven’t robbed a bank or something, have you?”

“Nothing like that,” Tamara says, holding the oars in the water to stop the boat, then points to the shore.

“Look, over there.”

The house is overgrown with ivy, and looks unassailable. The garden seems like a botanic experiment, but that’s just the first impression. If you look more closely you can see the paths and the plan behind them. The garden is thought-out down to the last details, even the terrace is part of it. There is a wooden table and two chairs covered with a plastic sheet.

“That’s where the Belzens live,” Tamara goes on. “They’re both about seventy and very nice. Once a week they walk along the promenade, take the ferry, and have a coffee on the Pfaueninsel. That’s what I’m going to do when I’m that age.”

Astrid tilts her head.

“Tamara, what’s going on?”

Tamara points to the opposite shore.

“And that’s where we live.”

The opposite shore is a good fifty yards away. Through the dense trees an old villa can be seen. It’s two stories high, and there’s a tower on the left-hand side. There are lights on in three windows.

If fireworks went off now, Tamara would find that very suitable. The view always reminds her of the beginning of winter, and what it was like going down to the shore late at night and looking back at the villa. As if it were all just a dream and the villa could disappear at any moment. Tamara has the deep and certain feeling of having arrived.

“You’re joking, aren’t you?”

“Shall we go ashore?”

Astrid puts a hand on Tamara’s arm to stop her rowing any further.

“Tell me you’re joking.”

“I’m not joking.”

Astrid looks across at the villa, then back at her sister.

“Who have you landed for yourself?”

“Nobody.”

“Nobody with loads of money? Just stop right now.”

“No, really,” says Tamara and can tell by her voice that even she herself hasn’t really quite understood. Six months have passed since they founded the agency, and she still finds it hard to believe that they’ve come this far.

“Kris had an idea,” she begins, and tells her sister what has happened.

At first they were contacted only by companies with internal problems. Next came companies that wanted to apologize to other companies. There were also private requests, but they were quickly excluded. The agency has no interest in patching marriages together or apologizing on behalf of people who had accidentally run over a cat. At first they were limited to Berlin, but over the weeks that followed requests from the south and west of Germany started piling up, Kris said.

“Either we go beyond Berlin or someone else will do it.”

Thus Wolf became a representative of forgiveness and traveled all around Germany. He likes the change and the anonymity that goes with it—night after night another hotel room, day after day another town.

The brothers are responsible for the apologizing. Tamara tried and failed. She makes everything personal, and if she’s honest she doesn’t think much of apologizing for somebody she finds unsympathetic. Kris said:

“You don’t take sides; you do your job, that’s the only way it works.”

And because it only works like that, Tamara let it go. Apologies were out of the question for Frauke as well. She opted for office work, putting timetables together, coordinating commissions, writing bills, things like that. That’s her world, while Tamara sits by the phone and is responsible for the requests. Because anyone who doesn’t get along with Tamara can go hang as far as the agency’s concerned.

“Why haven’t you told me any of this?” Astrid wants to know.

“We didn’t want anyone else muscling in on us. We wanted to be able to go our own way. We had no idea how it would go.”

The machinery was set in motion without any help from them. Apart from the advertisement in two big newspapers there was no other promotion. Frauke said it would be tacky. The companies heard about them and reacted. Guilt-stricken company directors phoned up; managers explaining their problems in the third person, and secretaries who, pushed forward by their bosses, wanted to find out how the thing actually worked.

Often it’s endless phone conversations with embarrassing confessions, and of course there are also customers who don’t want to talk at all and send their ideas by post. They are Tamara’s favorites. Cool and matter-of-fact, they ask for the agency’s help. Tamara’s job is to separate the serious from the non-serious cases. Of every ten commissions three are usually a waste of time.

Of course there are complaints, too. Customers who can’t get their heads around how the agency works. It goes too far for them, and it’s not how the customer would have imagined it. Kris insists that there’s no such thing as “too far.”

“If they don’t know what that means,” he explained to Tamara, “tell them forgiveness knows no bounds, that always sounds good.”

Many people see this as a Bible quotation. Frauke has taken it as a motto and incorporated it into the questionnaire.

Forgiveness knows no bounds.