“The desire to come home”

“The desire to come home” is Michael Berg’s recognition that his longing for Hanna has become a longing for home rather than a realistic wish to resume their relationship. The phrase joins a private grief to the novel’s larger suspicion of homecoming: what seems like a return may instead expose the impossibility of recovering an earlier life.

The Train Dream

After Hanna’s death, Michael travels by train from Boston to New York to carry out her instructions and bring money to the daughter of one of the women from the trial. Autumn woods pass in a blaze of brown, yellow, orange, tawny red, chestnut, and scarlet maples; their colors recall the autumn pictures Hanna made in her prison cell. The landscape turns the journey into an occasion for memory, but not a simple return to the past.

As the train’s rocking and rhythm tire him, Michael dreams of himself and Hanna living in a house among the autumn-colored hills along the route. In the dream she is older than when he first knew her, younger than when he saw her again, and older than he is. She seems more attractive and more at ease in her body. He imagines her arriving with shopping bags, crossing the garden, setting the bags down, and going upstairs ahead of him. The ordinary domestic sequence gives the dream its force: for a moment, a life together appears settled and tangible.

Recognition and Loss

The imagined home cannot withstand the circumstances of their actual lives. Michael struggles against his longing by recalling their difference in age and situation, and the practical impossibility of Hanna living in America: she spoke no English and could not drive. These details do not merely interrupt a romantic fantasy; they mark how far it is from the life Hanna and Michael actually shared.

When Michael wakes, he knows Hanna is dead. He also recognizes that, although his desire had fixed on her, she was not its true object. The recognition turns the dream from a possible reunion into an account of bereavement: Hanna gives the longing its shape, but the longing reaches beyond her. Its name is “the desire to come home.”

Homecoming and the Past

The phrase resonates with Michael’s earlier reading of the Odyssey. He had remembered it as a story of homecoming, but came to understand it instead as a story of motion: Odysseus returns not to remain at home but to set out again. Michael connects that pattern to the history of law, whose course seems to reach its own beginning only to depart from it once more. Against this background, the dream’s home is not a destination that can restore what has been lost.

The train journey also carries Michael toward the daughter, a living consequence of Hanna’s past and of the trial he has spent years remembering. Yet the longing he recognizes on the way cannot be satisfied by reaching New York or by completing Hanna’s instructions. The expression holds together desire and impossibility: a homecoming can be imagined, and its pull can be painfully real, without making the past recoverable or Hanna’s return possible.