Guilt

by Ferdinand von Schirach

  Next day Holbrecht brought the documents from the old trial. The young woman’s address was in the phone book. I wrote to her and asked if she would talk to me. It was the only possibility we had. I was surprised when she actually showed up.

  She was young, training in the hospitality business. Freckled, nervous. Her boyfriend came with her. I asked him to wait in another room. When I told her Holbrecht’s story, she went quiet and looked out the window. I told her we couldn’t win the right to a new hearing unless she testified. She didn’t look at me, and she didn’t answer. I wasn’t sure if she would help Holbrecht, but when she held out her hand to say goodbye, I saw that she had been crying.

  A few days later, she mailed me her old diary. It was pink, with horses and hearts printed on the cloth cover. She had started to write it a few years after the events; it really had a grip on her. She had stuck yellow Post-its on some of the pages for me. She had come up with the whole plan when she was eight. She wanted to have Miriam, her teacher, all to herself: she was jealous of Holbrecht, who sometimes came to pick up his wife. It was a little girl’s fantasy. She had persuaded her girlfriend to back up her story. That was all.

  A new trial was granted, the girlfriend admitted what the two of them had done back then, and Holbrecht was exonerated at the new hearing. It wasn’t easy for the young women to testify. They apologized to Holbrecht in open court. He didn’t care. We managed to keep the press out of it. He was awarded damages for the time he’d spent in prison as an innocent man. They amounted to a bit more than thirty thousand euros.

  Holbrecht bought a little café in Charlottenburg; it sells homemade chocolates and good coffee. He lives with an Italian woman who loves him. Sometimes I drink an espresso there. We never discuss the affair.

  Anatomy

  He sat in the car. He had fallen asleep briefly, not a deep sleep, just a dreamless nodding-off for a few seconds. He waited and drank from the bottle of schnapps he’d bought in the supermarket. The wind blew sand against the car. The sand was everywhere here, a few centimeters under the grass. He was familiar with it all; he’d grown up here. At some point she would come out of the house and walk to the bus stop. Maybe she’d be wearing a dress again, a thin one, preferably the one with yellow and green flowers on it.

  He thought about how he’d spoken to her. About her face, her skin under her dress, about how tall she was and how beautiful. She had barely looked at him. He had asked if she would like something to drink. He wasn’t sure if she’d understood. She’d laughed at him. “You’re not my type,” she’d yelled, because the music was too loud. “I’m sorry,” she added. He’d shrugged, as if it didn’t matter. And grinned. What else was he supposed to do? Then he’d gone back to his table.

  She wasn’t going to make fun of him today. She would do what he wanted. He would possess her. He imagined her fear. The animals he’d killed had felt fear as well. He’d been able to see it. They smelled different just before they died. The larger they were, the more fear they felt. Birds were boring. Cats and dogs were better; they knew when death was coming. But animals couldn’t talk. She would talk. It would be crucial to do it slowly so as to get the most out of it. That was the problem. Things mustn’t move too fast. If he was too excited, it would go wrong. The way it did with the very first cat. He’d lost control right after he’d amputated the ears, and he’d stabbed it convulsively much too soon.

  The set of dissecting instruments had been expensive, but it was complete, including bone shears, a Stryker saw to split open the skull, the knife for cutting through cartilage, and the knife for severing the head. He’d ordered it on the Internet. He knew the anatomical atlas almost by heart. He’d written everything down in his diary, from the first meeting in the nightclub until today. He’d taken photos of her secretly and glued her head onto pornographic pictures. He’d drawn in the line where he wanted to cut, with black dashes, like in the anatomical atlas.

  She came out of the front door, and he got ready. As she shut the garden door behind her, he climbed out of the car. This would be the hardest part. He had to compel her to come with him, but she mustn’t cry out. He had written down all the possible variants. Later the police found the notes, the pictures of the young woman, the slaughtered animals, and hundreds of splatter films in his parents’ cellar. The officers had searched the house when they found his diary and the dissecting tools in his car. He also had a small chemistry lab in the cellar—his attempts to make chloroform had been unsuccessful.

  The right side of the Mercedes hit him as he got out of his car. He flew over the hood, slammed his head onto the windshield, and landed on the ground on the left side of the car. He died on the way to the hospital. He was twenty-one.

  I defended the driver of the Mercedes. He got an eighteen-month suspended sentence for negligent homicide.

  The Other Man

  Paulsberg stood next to his car. As he did every evening, he had turned off on the way home and driven up the little hill to his old ash tree. He had often sat here as a child in the shadow of the branches, carving figures out of wood and playing hooky. He lowered the window; the days were already getting shorter again and the air was cooler. It was quiet. For the only moment in the day. His cell phone was switched off. From here he could see his house, the house where he had grown up, built by his grandfather. It shone brightly, the trees in the garden lit by the sun; he could see the cars parked by the road. He would be there in a few minutes, his guests would already be waiting, and he would have to talk about all the idiocies that go to make up social life.

  Paulsberg was forty-eight now. He owned seventeen major retail businesses in Germany and Austria that sold expensive men’s clothing. His great-grandfather had established the knitwear factory back there in the valley; Paulsberg had already learned everything about fabric and cut when he was a child. He had sold the factory.

  He thought about his wife. Slim, elegant, enchanting, she would make conversation with everyone. She was thirty-six, a lawyer in an international firm, black suit, hair loose. He had met her in the airport in Zurich. They had both been waiting for their delayed flight in the coffee bar and he’d made her laugh. They made a date. Two years later they got married. That was eight years ago. Things could have gone well.

  But then the thing in the hotel sauna happened, and it changed everything.

  Every year since their marriage, they had spent a few days in a mountain hotel in Upper Bavaria. They liked this way of unwinding, sleeping, walking, eating. The hotel was much cited for its “wellness environment.” There were steam baths and Finnish saunas, indoor and outdoor pools, massages and mud packs. The garage was full of Mercedeses, BMWs, and Porsches. Everyone belonged.

  Like most men of his age, Paulsberg had a paunch. His wife had kept herself in better shape. He was proud of her. As they sat in the sauna he observed the young man staring at her. A southerner, black hair, Italian perhaps, good-looking, smooth skin, tanned, around twenty-five. The stranger was looking at his wife as if she were some beautiful animal. It irritated her. He smiled at her; she looked away. Then he stood up with his penis half-erect, walked towards the exit, and stopped in front of her, turning so that his member was right in her face. Paulsberg was about to intervene when the young man wrapped a towel around his hips and nodded to him.

  Later, when they were back in their room, they made jokes about it. They saw the stranger at dinner; Paulsberg’s wife smiled at him and blushed. They talked about him for the rest of the evening, and during the night they imagined what it would be like with him. They had sex for the first time in a long time. They were afraid, and they were turned on.

  Next day at the same time they went back to the sauna, and the stranger was already waiting there. She opened her towel while she was still at the door, and walked slowly past him, naked, knowing exactly what she was doing and wanting him to know too. He got to his feet and stood in front of her again. She sat on the bench, and looked first at him, then at Paulsberg. Paulsberg nodde
d and said “Yes” in a loud voice. She took the stranger’s penis in her hand. Paulsberg saw the rhythmic motions of her arm through the steam in the sauna, he saw the young man’s back in front of his wife, olive-skinned and shining wet. Nobody spoke; he heard the stranger panting; the movements of his wife’s arm became slower. Then she turned to Paulsberg and showed him the stranger’s sperm on her face and body. The stranger picked up his towel and left the sauna without saying a word. They stayed behind in the heat.

  First they experimented in public saunas, then in swinger clubs, and finally they advertised on the Internet. They established rules: no violence, no love, no encounters at home. They would stop it all if either of them started to feel uncomfortable. They never stopped once. At the beginning he was the one who wrote the copy, then she took over; they posted masked photos on websites. After four years they had it down to a science. They’d found a discreet country hotel. There they would meet men on weekends who’d answered their ads. He said he was making his wife available. They thought it was a game, but after so many encounters it wasn’t a game any more, it had become a part of them. His wife was still a lawyer, she was still radiant and unapproachable, but on weekends she became an object used by other people. That was how they wanted it. It had simply presented itself; there was no explanation.

  The name in the e-mail had meant nothing to him, nor could he connect the photo with anyone; he had stopped looking at the photos the men sent a long time ago. His wife had written back to the man and now he was standing in front of them in the hotel reception area. Paulsberg knew him fleetingly from school thirty-five years before. They had had nothing to do with each other there. He was in the parallel class. They sat on the barstools in the lobby and told each other the things people who’ve been at school together always tell each other; they talked about former teachers, the friends they’d both known, and tried to ignore the situation. But it didn’t get any better. The other man ordered whiskey instead of beer and spoke too loudly. Paulsberg knew the firm he worked for; he was in the same business. The three of them ate dinner together, and the other man drank too much. He flirted with Paulsberg’s wife, saying she was young and beautiful and Paulsberg was to be envied, and he kept on drinking. Paulsberg wanted to leave. She began to talk about sex and about the men who sent her pictures and whom they met. At a certain point she laid her hand on the other man’s hand, and they went to the room they always booked.

  While the other man was having sex with his wife, Paulsberg sat on the sofa. He looked at the picture that hung over the bed: a young woman standing on the seashore. The artist had painted her from behind, in a blue-and-white bathing suit of the kind worn back in the twenties. She must be beautiful, he thought. At some point she would turn around, smile at the artist, and they would go home together. Paulsberg thought about the fact that they had been married for eight years now.

  Later, when they were alone in the car, neither of them said a word. She stared out of the passenger window into the darkness until they reached home. During the night he went to the kitchen to drink a glass of water, and when he came back he saw the display on her phone light up.

  She had been taking Prozac for a long time. She thought she was dependent on it and never left the house without the green-and-white pills. She didn’t know why she satisfied men. Sometimes in the night, when the house was still and Paulsberg was asleep and she couldn’t stand the bright green numbers on her alarm clock, she got dressed and went out into the garden. She would lie down on one of the lounge chairs by the pool and look up at the sky, waiting for the feeling that she’d known ever since her father died. She could hardly bear it. There were billions of solar systems in the Milky Way and billions of Milky Ways. And in between, nothing but cold and the void. She had lost control.

  Paulsberg had long since forgotten about the other man. He was at the annual association conference in Cologne, standing at the buffet in the breakfast room, when the man called his name. Paulsberg turned around.

  Suddenly the world slowed down and became viscous. Later he would remember every image, the butter floating in ice water, the colorful yogurt cartons, the red napkins and the slices of sausages on the white hotel plates. Paulsberg thought the other man looked like one of those blind amphibians he’d seen as a child in caves in Yugoslavia. He’d caught one once back then, and carried it all the way back to the hotel, wanting to show his mother. When he opened his hand, it was dead. The other man’s head was shaved bald; watery eyes, thin eyebrows, thick lips, almost blue. The lips had kissed his wife. The other man’s tongue moved in slow motion, pushing against the inner surface of his front teeth as he said his name. Paulsberg saw the colorless threads of spittle, the pores on his tongue, the long thin hairs in his nostrils, the larynx pressing hard against the reddened skin from the inside. Paulsberg didn’t understand what the other man was saying. He saw the girl in the blue-and-white bathing suit from the picture in the hotel; she turned around towards him, smiled, then pointed to the thin man kneeling over his wife. Paulsberg felt his heartbeat stop; he imagined himself falling over, dragging the tablecloth down with him. He saw himself lying dead between the sliced oranges, the white sausages, and the cream cheese. But he didn’t fall. It was only a moment. He nodded at the other man.

  There were all the usual speeches at the association meeting. They looked at presentations, and there was filter coffee out of silver vacuum jugs. After a few hours nobody was listening any more. It was nothing special.

  That afternoon the other man came to his room. They drank the beer he’d brought with him. He also had some cocaine and offered Paulsberg a line; he tipped the powder onto the glass table and inhaled it through a rolled-up banknote. When he went to the bathroom to wash his hands, Paulsberg followed him. The other man was standing at the basin, bent over to wash his face. Paulsberg saw his ears and the yellowed edge of his white shirt collar.

  He couldn’t help himself.

  Now Paulsberg was sitting on the bed. The hotel room was like a thousand others he had slept in. Two slabs of chocolate in the brown minibar, vacuum-packed peanuts, yellow plastic bottle opener. A smell of disinfectant, liquid soap in the bathroom, the sign on the tiles saying please support the environment by reusing your towels.

  He closed his eyes and thought about the horse. He had walked across the bridge that morning and then to the stone steps leading to the water meadows by the Rhine in the early mist that was rising from the river. And suddenly there it was, right in front of him, steam coming off its coat, its nostrils soft and bright red.

  He would have to call her at some point. She would ask him when he was coming back. She would tell him about her day, the people in the office, the cleaning lady who banged around the garbage cans too noisily, and all the other things that made up her life. He would say nothing about the other man. And then they would hang up and try to go on with their lives.

  Paulsberg heard the other man in the bathroom, groaning. He threw the cigarette into a half-full glass of water, took his traveling bag, and left the room. When he was paying his bill at reception, he said it would be a good idea for the room to be made up quickly. The girl behind the counter looked at him, but he didn’t say anything else.

  They found the other man twenty minutes later. He survived.

  Paulsberg had done it with the ashtray in the bathroom.

  It was a 1970s piece, thick and heavy, made of dark smoked glass. The medical examiner later categorized it as blunt-force trauma; the edges of the wounds could not be clearly distinguished. The ashtray was identified as the weapon.

  Paulsberg had seen the holes in the other man’s head as the blood poured out of them, brighter than he had expected. He’s not dying, he thought as he kept hitting the skull. He’s bleeding but he’s not dying.

  Paulsberg finally jammed the other man in between the bathtub and the toilet and laid him facedown on the toilet lid. He’d wanted to hit him one last time, and raised his arm to strike. The other man’s hair had c
lumped together; it looked stiff with blood, black wires like pencils on the pale skin of his head. Suddenly Paulsberg found himself thinking about his wife, and the way they’d said goodbye for the first time, in January ten years ago; the sky was made of ice and they’d stood on the road outside the airport, freezing. He thought of her thin shoes in the slush, and of her blue coat with the big buttons, and the way she’d turned up the collar, holding the lapels together with one hand. She’d laughed; she was lonely and beautiful and wounded. After she’d got into the taxi, he’d known she belonged to him.

  Paulsberg set the ashtray down on the floor. The officers found it later among the red smears on the tiles. The other man had groaned quietly again as he left. Paulsberg no longer wanted to kill him.

  The trial began five months later. Paulsberg was accused of attempted murder. According to the prosecutor, he’d tried to kill the man from behind. The indictment stated that cocaine was at issue. The prosecutor couldn’t have known better.

  Paulsberg gave no reason for his act and said nothing about the other man. “Call my wife” were his only words to the policeman after his arrest. Nothing more. The judges were looking for a motive. Nobody simply batters another man in his hotel room. The prosecutor had been unable to find any connection between the men. The psychiatrist said Paulsberg was “absolutely normal”; no drugs were found in his system and nobody believed he’d tried to kill out of sheer bloodlust.