At Christmas, Tackler gave the children soap and pullovers. There was only one time when a business friend, who’d made a lot of money with Tackler in the course of the year, gave Leonhard a toy gun and Theresa a doll’s kitchen. Etta took the toys down to the cellar. “They don’t need that sort of thing,” she said, and Tackler, who hadn’t been listening, agreed.
Etta considered their upbringing complete when brother and sister could behave themselves at table, speak proper German, and otherwise keep quiet. She told Tackler she thought they’d come to a bad end. They were too soft, not real Tacklers like him and his father. It was a sentence he remembered.
Etta got Alzheimer’s, slowly regressed, and became gentler. She left her birds to a museum of local history, which had no use for them and ordered the stuffed creatures destroyed. Tackler and the two children were the only ones at her funeral. On the way back, he said, “So, now that’s out of the way.”
Leonhard worked for Tackler during the vacations. He would rather have gone off with friends, but he had no money. That was how Tackler wanted it. He took his son to one of the building sites, handed him over to the foreman, and told him to “really let him have it.” The foreman did what he could, and when Leonhard threw up at the end of the second day from exhaustion, Tackler said he’d get used to it. He himself had sometimes slept on building sites with his father when he was Leonhard’s age and shat in the open air like the other bar benders. Leonhard shouldn’t get any ideas he was “better” than the others.
Theresa had vacation jobs, too; she worked in the company bookkeeping department. Like Leonhard, she received only 30 percent of the average salary. “You’re no help; you actually create work. Your pay is a gift, not something you’ve earned,” said Tackler. If they wanted to go to the movies, Tackler gave the two of them a total of ten euros, and since they had to take the bus, it was only enough for one ticket. They didn’t dare tell him that. Sometimes Tackler’s driver took them into town secretly and gave them a little money—he had children himself and knew his boss.
Other than Tackler’s sister, who was employed in the company and had always given up every one of her secrets to her brother since her own childhood, there were no relatives. The children began by fearing their father, then hated him, until finally his world became so alien to them that they had nothing more to say to him.
Tackler didn’t despise Leonhard, but he loathed his softness. He thought he had to harden him; “forge” him was the way he put it. When Leonhard was fifteen, he put up a picture in his room of a ballet production he had gone to with his class. Tackler tore it off the wall and roared at him that he’d better be careful or he’d be turning gay. He was too fat, Tackler said to Leonhard; he’d never get a girlfriend like that.
Theresa spent every minute with her cello and her music teacher in Frankfurt. Tackler didn’t understand her, so he left her in peace—with one exception. It was summertime, shortly after Theresa’s sixteenth birthday. She went skinny-dipping in the pool. When she came out of the water, Tackler was standing at the edge. He’d been drinking. He looked at her as if she were a stranger, picked up the towel, and began to dry her. As he touched her breasts, he smelled of whiskey. She ran into the house. She never used the pool again.
On the rare occasions they all had dinner together, conversation revolved around Tackler’s themes of watches, food, and cars. Theresa and Leonhard knew the price of every automobile and every famous make of watch. It was an abstract game. Sometimes their father showed them financial statements, stock market and business reports. “This will all belong to you someday,” he said, and Theresa whispered to Leonhard that he was quoting from a movie. “The inner self,” he said, “is nonsense.” It gained no one anything.
All the children had was each other. When Theresa was accepted at the conservatory, they decided they would both leave their father together. They wanted to tell him at dinner and had rehearsed it, working out how he would react and what their responses should be. When they began, Tackler said he didn’t have time today, and disappeared. They had to wait for three weeks; then Theresa took the lead. The two of them thought that if she were the one, Tackler would at least be unable to hit her. She said they were both going to leave Bad Homburg now. “Leave Bad Homburg” sounded better, they thought, than saying it directly. Theresa said she was going to take Leonhard with her, that they would make their way somehow.
Tackler didn’t understand, and kept eating. When he asked Theresa to pass him the bread, Leonhard screamed, “You’ve tortured us enough,” and Theresa, more quietly, said, “We don’t ever want to become like you.” Tackler let his knife drop onto his plate. It echoed. Then he stood up without a word, went to his car, and drove to his girlfriend. It was almost 3:00 a.m. when he returned.
Later that same night, Tackler sat alone in the library. A silent home movie was running on the screen he’d had built into the bookshelves. It had been transferred to video from a Super-8 camera. The footage was overexposed.
His first wife is holding the two children by the hand; Theresa is probably three years old and Leonhard two. His wife says something; her mouth moves soundlessly. She lets go of Theresa’s hand and points into the distance. The camera follows her arm; there is the ruin of a castle in the blurry background. Pan back to Leonhard, who hides himself behind his mother’s leg and cries. Stones and grass blur in the foreground; the camera is passed to someone else while it’s still running. It pans upward again, showing Tackler in jeans and an open shirt, his chest hair exposed. He roars with soundless laughter, he holds Theresa up to the sun, he kisses her, he waves to the camera. The image flares and the film breaks off.
That night, Tackler decided to arrange a farewell concert for Theresa. His contacts should suffice; he would “put her right on top.” Tackler didn’t want to be a bad person. He wrote each of his children a check for 250,000 euros and put them on the breakfast table. He felt that was enough.
The day after the concert, there was an article in the regional newspaper that bordered on the euphoric. The great music critic certified that Theresa had a “brilliant future” as a musician.
She didn’t register at the conservatory. Theresa believed her gift to be so great that she could still take her time. For now, it was something else that mattered. The two of them spent most of the next three years traveling through Europe and the United States. She gave a few private concerts and otherwise played only for her brother. Tackler’s money made them independent, at least for a while. They remained inseparable. They took none of their love affairs seriously, and there was scarcely a day in those years that either of them spent away from the other. They seemed to be free.
Almost two years to the day after her concert in Bad Homburg, I encountered the two of them again at a party near Florence, in the Castello di Tornano, a ruined castle from the eleventh century, surrounded by olive trees and cypresses amid the vineyards. The host described them both as “gilded youth” when they arrived in a 1960s open sports car. Theresa kissed him and Leonhard doffed his idiotic Borsalino straw hat with studied elegance.
When I told Theresa later that I had never heard the cello suites performed with more intensity than in her father’s house, she said, “It’s the prelude to the first suite. Not the sixth, which everyone thinks is the most important and is the most difficult. No, it’s the first.” She took a mouthful of wine, leaned forward, and whispered in my ear, “D’you understand, the prelude to the first. It’s all of life packed into three minutes.” Then she laughed.
At the end of the following summer, the two of them were in Sicily. They spent a few days with a commodities trader who had rented a house there for the summer and was somewhat infatuated with Theresa.
Leonhard woke up with a light fever. He thought it was due to the alcohol of the previous night. He didn’t want to be ill, not on a glorious day like this, not when they were having the time of their lives. The E. coli bacteria colonized his body at great speed. They had been in the water
he’d drunk at a gas station two days before.
They found an old Vespa in the garage and were headed toward the sea. The apple was lying in the middle of the asphalt; it had fallen off one of the harvest trucks. It was almost round and glinted in the noonday light. Theresa said something, and Leonhard turned his head to hear her properly. The front wheel went over the apple and slid sideways. Leonhard lost control. Theresa was lucky; she only sprained her shoulder and had a couple of abrasions. Leonhard’s head got wedged between the back wheel and a boulder and burst open.
During the first night in the hospital, his condition deteriorated. Nobody tested his blood; there were other things to do. Theresa called her father and he used the corporate Learjet to send a doctor from Frankfurt; the man arrived too late. Leonhard’s kidneys had released their poison into his bloodstream. Theresa sat in the waiting area outside the operating theater. The doctor held her hand as he spoke to her. The air-conditioning was loud, and the pane of glass Theresa had been staring at for hours was clouded with dust. The doctor said it was a sepsis of the urinary tract, engendering multiple organ failures. Theresa didn’t understand what he was telling her. Urine had spread through Leonhard’s body, and the chance of survival was 20 percent. The doctor kept talking, and his words gave her some distance. Theresa had not slept for almost forty hours. When he went back into the operating room, she closed her eyes. He had said “Decease,” and she saw the word in front of her in black letters. They had nothing to do with her brother. She said, “No.” Just “No.” Nothing else.
On the sixth day after Leonhard’s admission to hospital, his condition stabilized. He could be flown to Berlin. When he was admitted to the Charité Hospital, his body was covered with black, leathery, necrotic patches that indicated the death of cellular tissue. The doctors operated fourteen times. The thumb, forefinger, and fourth finger of the left hand were amputated. The left toes were cut off at the joint, as was the front half of the right foot and parts of the back. All that remained was a deformed lump that could barely support any weight, with bones and cartilage pressing visibly against the skin.
Leonhard lay in an artificially induced coma. He had survived, but the effects of the injury to his head could not yet be measured.
The hippocampus is Poseidon’s pack animal, a Greek sea monster, half horse, half worm. It gives its name to a very ancient part of the brain within the temporal lobe. It’s where the work is done that transforms short-term memories into long-term ones. Leonhard’s hippocampus had been damaged. When he was revived from the coma after nine weeks, he asked Theresa who she was and then who he was. He had lost all power of recall and couldn’t hold on to any perception for longer than three or four minutes. After endless tests, the doctors tried to explain to him that it was amnesia, both anterograde and retrograde. Leonhard understood their explanations, but after three minutes and forty seconds he had forgotten them again. He also forgot the fact that he forgot.
And when Theresa was tending him, all he saw was a beautiful woman.
After two months, they were able to move together into their father’s Berlin apartment. Every day a nurse came for three hours and otherwise Theresa took care of everything. At first, she still invited friends to come for dinner; then she ceased to be able to bear the way they looked at Leonhard. Tackler came to see them once a month.
They were lonely months. Gradually, Theresa deteriorated; her hair turned to straw and her skin lost its color. One evening, she took the cello out of its case; she hadn’t touched it for months. She played in the half darkness of the room. Leonhard was lying on the bed, dozing. At a certain point, he pushed off the bedclothes and began to masturbate. She stopped playing and turned away to the window. He asked her to come to him. Theresa looked at him. He sat up, asked to kiss her. She shook her head. He let himself fall back and said at least she could unbutton her blouse. The scarred stump of his right foot lay on the white sheet like a lump of flesh. She went to him and stroked his cheek. Then she took off her clothes, sat down on the chair, and played with her eyes closed. She waited until he fell asleep, stood up, used a towel to wipe the sperm off his stomach, covered him up, and kissed his forehead.
She went into the bathroom and vomited.
Although the doctors had ruled out any possibility that Leonhard could recover his memory, the cello seemed to move him. When she was playing, she seemed to feel a pale, almost imperceptible connection to her former life, a weak reflection of the intensity she missed so much. Sometimes Leonhard actually remembered the cello the next day. He talked about it, and even if he couldn’t make any connections, something did seem to remain captured in his memory. Theresa now played for him every evening, he almost always masturbated, and she almost always collapsed in the bathroom afterward and wept.
Six months after the last operation, Leonhard’s scars began to hurt. The doctors said further amputations would be required. After doing a PET scan, they told her he would also soon lose the power of speech. Theresa knew that she wouldn’t be able to bear it.
The twenty-sixth of November was a cold, gray autumn day; darkness came early. Theresa had put candles on the table and pushed Leonhard to his place in his wheelchair. She had bought the ingredients for the fish soup in Berlin’s best market; he had always liked it. The soup, the peas, the venison roast, the chocolate mousse, even the wine were all laced with Luminal, a barbiturate she had no problem obtaining to treat Leonhard’s pain. She gave it to him in small amounts so that he wouldn’t vomit it up again. She herself ate nothing and waited.
Leonhard grew sleepy. She pushed him into the bathroom and ran water in the big tub. She undressed him. He barely had the strength anymore to haul himself into the tub by using the new handles. Then she took off her own clothes and got into the warm water with him. He sat in front of her, his head leaning back on her breasts, breathing calmly and steadily. As children, they had often sat in the bath this way, because Etta didn’t want to waste water. Theresa held him in a tight embrace, her head on his shoulder. When he had fallen asleep, she kissed his neck and let him slide under the surface. Leonhard breathed in deeply. There was no death struggle; the Luminal had disabled his capacity to control his muscles. His lungs filled with water and he drowned. His head lay between her legs, his eyes were closed, and his long hair floated on the surface. After two hours, she climbed out of the cold bath, covered her dead brother with a towel, and called me.
She confessed, but it was no mere confession. She sat for more than seven hours in front of the two investigators and dictated her life into the record. She rendered an account of herself. She began with her childhood and ended with the death of her brother. She left nothing out. She didn’t cry; she didn’t break down. She sat as straight as a die and spoke steadily, calmly, and in polished sentences. There was no need for intervening questions. While her statement was being typed up, we smoked a cigarette in an adjoining room. She said she wasn’t going to talk about it anymore; she had said all there was to say. “I don’t have anything else,” she said.
Naturally, she was ordered to be detained because of the murder charge. I visited her almost every day in prison. She arranged for books to be sent in, and didn’t leave her cell even when the prisoners had their yard exercise. Reading was her anesthetic. When we met, she didn’t want to talk about her brother. Nor did the imminent trial interest her. She preferred to read to me from her books, things she’d sought out in her cell. It was like a series of lectures in a prison. I liked her warm voice, but at the time I didn’t understand: It was the only way she had left to express herself.
On the twenty-fourth of December, I was with her until the end of visiting time. Then they locked the bulletproof glass doors behind me. Outside, it had been snowing. Everything was peaceful; it was Christmas. Theresa was taken back to her cell; she sat down at the little table and wrote a letter to her father. Then she tore the bedsheet, wound it into a rope, and hanged herself from the window handle.
On the twenty-fifth of Dece
mber, Tackler received a call from the attorney on duty. After he’d hung up, he opened the safe, took out his father’s revolver, put the barrel in his mouth, and pulled the trigger.
· · ·
The prison administration placed Theresa’s belongings in the house vault for safekeeping. Under our powers of criminal procedure, we as lawyers have the right to receive objects on behalf of our clients. At some point, the authorities sent a package with her clothes and her books. We forwarded it to her aunt in Frankfurt.
I kept one of her books; she had written my name on the flyleaf. It was F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. The book lay untouched in my desk drawer for two years before I could pick it up again. She had marked the passages she wanted to read to me in blue, and drawn tiny little staves of music notes next to them. Only one place was marked in red, the last sentence, and when I read it, I can still hear her voice:
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
The Hedgehog
The judges put on their robes in the conference room, one of the jury arrived a few minutes too late, and the constable was replaced after he complained of a toothache. The accused was a heavily built Lebanese man, Walid Abu Fataris, and he was silent from the very beginning. The witnesses testified, the victim exaggerated a little, and the evidence was analyzed. The case being heard was that of a perfectly normal robbery, which normally carries a sentence of five to fifteen years. The judges were in agreement: Given the previous record of the accused, they would give him eight years; there was no question about his guilt or his criminal responsibility. The trial babbled on all day. Nothing special, then, but there had been no expectation of that anyhow.
Crime Page 4