Guilt Read online

  ALSO BY FERDINAND VON SCHIRACH

  Crime

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  Translation copyright © 2012 by Carol Brown Janeway

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  www.aaknopf.com

  Originally published in Germany as Schuld by Piper Verlag GmbH, Munich, in 2010. Copyright © 2010 by Piper Verlag GmbH, Munich.

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Schirach, Ferdinand von, [date]

  [Schuld. English]

  Guilt : stories / Ferdinand von Schirach ;

  [translated by] Carol Janeway.—1st American ed.

  p. cm.

  “Originally published in Germany as Schuld by

  Piper Verlag GmbH, Munich, in 2010”—T.p. verso.

  Summary: “A new collection of stories from the critically

  acclaimed author of CRIME”—Provided by publisher.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-95767-2

  I. Guilt—Fiction. 2. Innocence (Psychology)—Fiction.

  3. Responsibility—Fiction. I. Title.

  PT2720.173S3813 2012

  833′.92—dc23 2011024227

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Jacket design by Barbara de Wilde

  v3.1

  Things are as they are.

  —Aristotle

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Funfair

  DNA

  The Illuminati

  Children

  Anatomy

  The Other Man

  The Briefcase

  Desire

  Snow

  The Key

  Lonely

  Justice

  Comparison

  Family

  Secrets

  A Note About the Author

  A Note About the Translator

  Funfair

  The first of August was too hot, even for the time of year. The little town was celebrating its six-hundredth anniversary, the air smelled of candied almonds and candy floss, and greasy smoke rose from the grills to settle in people’s hair. There were all the stands you usually find at annual fairs: a carousel had been put up, you could go on the bumper cars or shoot an air gun. The older people spoke of “the Emperor’s weather” and the “dog days,” and wore bright-colored pants and open shirts.

  They were respectable men with respectable jobs: insurance salesman, car dealer, skilled carpenter. You would have no cause to find fault with them. Almost all of them were married, they had children, they paid their taxes, their credit was good, and they watched the news on television every evening. They were perfectly normal men, and nobody would have believed that something like this could happen.

  They played in a brass band. Nothing exciting, no big events, Queen of the Grape Harvest, annual Rifle Club outing, Fire Department picnic. They had once played for the president of the Republic, out in his garden; there had been cold beer and sausages afterwards. The photo now hung in their meeting hall; the head of state himself was nowhere to be seen, but someone had stuck the newspaper article up next to it to prove it was all real.

  They sat on the stage with their wigs and their fake beards. Their wives had made up their faces with white powder and rouge. The mayor had said that everything was to look dignified today “in honor of the town.” But things didn’t look dignified. They were sweating in front of the black curtain and they’d had too much to drink. Their shirts were sticking to their bodies, the air smelled of sweat and alcohol, and there were empty glasses between their feet. They played nonetheless. And if they hit false notes it didn’t matter because the audience had drunk too much too. In the pauses between the pieces they played there was applause and more beer. When they took a break, a radio announcer acted as a DJ. The wooden floor in the front of the curtain was giving off clouds of dust because people were dancing despite the heat, so the musicians went back behind the curtain to drink.

  The girl was seventeen and still had to ask permission at home if she wanted to stay the night at her boyfriend’s. In a year she would sit her school-leaving exams, then she would be off to study medicine in Berlin or Munich. She was looking forward to it. She was pretty, with blue eyes and an open face, and she laughed as she served the drinks. The tips were good; she wanted to travel across Europe with her boyfriend during the summer vacation.

  It was so hot that she was only wearing a T-shirt with her jeans, and sunglasses, and a green hair band. One of the musicians came out in front of the curtain, waved at her, and pointed to the glass in his hand. She crossed the dance floor and climbed the four steps up to the stage, balancing the tray that was too heavy for her small hands. She thought the man looked funny with his wig and his white cheeks. He smiled, she remembered that; he smiled and his teeth looked yellow against the white of his face. He pushed the curtain aside, letting her into where the other men were sitting on two benches, all thirsty. For a moment her white T-shirt gleamed with an odd, bright flash in the sun; her boyfriend always liked it when she wore it. Then she slipped. She fell backwards, it didn’t hurt, but the beer spilled all over her. Her T-shirt became transparent; she wasn’t wearing a bra. She felt embarrassed, so she laughed, and then she looked at the men, who had suddenly gone silent and were staring at her. The first man reached out a hand towards her, and it all began. The curtain was closed again, the loudspeakers were blaring a Michael Jackson song, and the rhythm on the dance floor became the rhythm of the men, and later nobody could explain anything.

  The police came too late. They didn’t believe the man who’d called from the public phone booth. He’d said he was one of the band but didn’t give his name. The policeman who took the call told his colleagues, but they thought it was a joke. Only the youngest of them thought he should maybe take a look, and went across the street to the fairground.

  It was dark and dank under the stage. She was lying there naked in the mud, wet with sperm, wet with urine, wet with blood. She couldn’t speak, and she didn’t move. She had two broken ribs, a broken left arm, and a broken nose; splinters from the glasses and the beer bottles had gashed her back and arms. When the men had finished, they had lifted one of the boards and thrown her under the stage. They had urinated on her as she lay down there. Then they had gone out front again. They were playing a polka as the policemen pulled the girl out of the muck.

  “Defense is war, a war for the rights of the accused.” The sentence appeared in the little book with the red plastic cover that I always carried around with me back then. It was the Defense Attorney’s Pocket Reference. I had just sat my second set of exams and been admitted to the bar a few weeks earlier. I believed in that sentence. I thought I knew what it meant.

  A friend I had studied with called up to ask me if I’d like to work with him on a defense; they still needed two lawyers. Of course I wanted to; it was a big case, the papers were full of it, and I thought this was going to be my new life.

  In a trial, no one has to prove his innocence. No one has to defend himself; only the prosecutor has to provide proofs. And that was also our strategy: all of them were simply to keep silent. We didn’t have to do anything more than that.

  DNA analysis had only recently been admitted at tri
al. The policemen had secured the girl’s clothing at the hospital and stuffed it into a blue garbage bag. They put the bag in the trunk of their patrol car, to be delivered to the medical examiner. They thought they were doing everything right. The car stood in the sun for hour after hour, and the heat caused fungi and bacteria to grow under the plastic wrapping; they altered the traces of DNA and no one could analyze them any more.

  The doctors saved the girl, but destroyed the last of the evidence. As she lay on the operating table, her skin was washed. The traces the perpetrators had left in her vagina, her rectum, and on her body were rinsed away; nobody was thinking of anything except her emergency care. Much later the police and the medical examiner from the state capital tried to locate the waste from the operating room. At some point they gave up: at 3 a.m. they sat in the hospital cafeteria in front of pale brown cups of filtered coffee; they were tired, and had no explanations. A nurse told them they ought to go home.

  The young woman couldn’t name her attackers; she couldn’t tell one from another; under the makeup and the wigs they all looked alike. At the lineup she didn’t want to look, and when she did manage to overcome her aversion, she couldn’t identify any of them. Nobody knew which of the men had called the police, but it was clear that it had been one of them. Which meant that any one of them could have been the caller. Eight of them were guilty, but each of them could also be the one innocent party.

  He was gaunt. Angular face, gold-framed glasses, prominent chin. At that time, smoking was still permitted in the visitors’ rooms in prisons; he smoked one cigarette after the other. As he was talking, spittle built up in the corners of his mouth which he wiped away with a handkerchief. He had already been detained for ten days when I saw him for the first time. The situation was as new for me as it was for him; I gave him too elaborate an explanation of his rights and the relationship between lawyer and client, too much textbook knowledge as a form of insecurity. He talked about his wife and his two children, about his work, and finally about the Funfair. He said it had been too hot that day and they’d drunk too much. He didn’t know why it had happened. That was all he said—it had been too hot. I never asked him if he’d joined in; I didn’t want to know.

  The lawyers were staying in the hotel on the town’s market square. In the taproom we discussed the file. There were photos of the young woman, of her maltreated body, of her swollen face. I had never seen anything like this. Her statements were confused, they gave us no clear picture, and on every page of the file you could read fury, the fury of the policemen, the fury of the DA, the fury of the doctors. None of it did any good.

  In the middle of the night, the phone rang in my room. All I could hear was the caller’s breathing; he didn’t say a word. He hadn’t dialed a wrong number. I listened to him until he hung up. It took a long time.

  The court was on the same square as the hotel, a classical building with a small flight of steps in front, a celebration of the might of the law. The town was famous for its winepresses, merchants, and the winegrowers who lived there; it was a blessed piece of land, sheltered from all wars. Everything radiated dignity and upright behavior. Someone had planted geraniums on the window ledges of the court.

  The judge called us into his room one by one. I wore a robe, because I didn’t know you don’t wear robes to such meetings. When the review of the remand in custody began, I talked too much, the way you talk when you’re young and you think anything’s better than saying nothing. The judge only looked at my client; I didn’t think he even listened to me. But something else was standing between the judge and the man, something much older than our code of legal procedure, an accusation that had nothing to do with the laws as written. And when I had finished, the judge asked once again if the man wished to remain silent. He asked quietly, with no inflection in his voice, while he folded up his reading glasses and waited. The judge knew the answer, but he asked the question. And all of us in the cool air of the courtroom knew that the legal proceedings would end here and that guilt was another matter entirely.

  ——

  Later we waited out in the hall for the examining magistrate to render his decision. We were nine defense lawyers; my friend and I were the youngest. The two of us had bought new suits for this hearing. Like all lawyers we were exchanging jokes; we didn’t want the situation to get the better of us, and now I was one of them. At the end of the hall a sergeant was leaning against the wall; he was fat and tired and he despised every one of us.

  That afternoon the judge vacated the warrant; he said there was no proof, the accused had remained silent. He read out the decision from a sheet of paper, although it was only two sentences long. After that, everything was still. The defense had been the right one, but now I didn’t know if I should stand up until the woman recording the court proceedings gave me the decision and we left the room. The judge could have rendered no other verdict. The hall outside smelled of linoleum and old files.

  The men were released. They left by a rear exit and went back to their wives and children and their lives. They paid their taxes and kept their credit good, they sent their children to school, and none of them spoke of the matter again. But the brass band was dissolved. There was never a formal trial.

  The young girl’s father stood in front of the court; he stood in the middle of the flight of steps as we went past to right and left; nobody touched him. He looked at us, red-eyed from weeping. It was a good face. The town hall opposite still had a poster advertising the anniversary celebration. The older lawyers spoke to the journalists, the microphones glittered like fish in the sun; behind them the father sat down on the courthouse steps and buried his head in his arms.

  After the remand hearing, my study partner and I went to the station. We could have talked about the defense victory or about the Rhine right there next to the rail tracks, or about anything at all. But we sat on the wooden bench with its peeling paint, and neither of us felt like saying a word. We knew we’d lost our innocence and that this was irrelevant. We remained silent as we sat in the train in our new suits with our barely used attaché cases beside us, and as we journeyed home, we thought about the girl and the respectable men, and we didn’t look at each other. We had grown up, and when we got out, we knew that things would never be simple again.

  DNA

  For M.R.

  Nina was seventeen. She sat outside the subway station at the zoo, a paper cup with a few coins in it in front of her. It was cold; there was already snow on the ground. She hadn’t imagined things would be this way, but it was better than any alternative. The last time she had phoned her mother had been two months ago, and her stepfather had answered. He had cried and told her she should come home. And it all came back to her: his sweaty old man’s smell, his hairy hands. She hung up.

  Her new friend Thomas also lived in the station. He was twenty-four, and he looked after her. They drank a lot, the hard stuff that warmed you up and let you forget everything. When the man came toward them, she thought he was a john. She wasn’t a prostitute and she got furious if men asked her how much it cost. One time she spat in someone’s face.

  The old man asked her to come with him, he had a warm apartment, and he didn’t want sex. He just didn’t want to be alone at Christmas. He looked respectable, he was maybe sixty or sixty-five, thick overcoat, polished shoes. The shoes were always the first thing she checked. She was freezing.

  “Only if my friend can come too,” she said.

  “Of course,” said the man; in fact he’d like that even better.

  Later they sat in the man’s kitchen. There was coffee and cake. The man asked if she’d like to take a bath, it would do her good. She felt uneasy, but Thomas was there. Nothing can happen, she thought. The bathroom door had no key.

  She lay in the bathtub. It was warm and the bath oil smelled of birches and lavender. She didn’t see him at first. He had closed the door behind him, dropped his trousers, and was masturbating. It was nothing serious, he said, smiling uncertainl
y. She could hear the television in the other room. She screamed. Thomas pushed the door open and the handle caught the man in the kidneys. He lost his balance and fell over the edge of the bathtub. He landed next to her in the water, his head on her stomach. She lashed out, pulled her knees up, trying to get out, away from the man. She hit him on the nose, and blood ran into the water. Thomas grabbed him by the hair and held him under the surface. Nina was still screaming. She stood up in the bath, naked, and helped Thomas by pressing on the man’s neck. It’s taking time, she thought. Then he stopped moving. She saw the hairs on his ass and punched his back.

  “Swine,” said Thomas.

  “Swine,” said Nina.

  They didn’t say anything more after that; they went into the kitchen and tried to think clearly. Nina had wrapped a towel around her. They smoked. They had no idea what to do.

  Thomas had to get her things out of the bathroom. The man’s body had slid onto the floor and was blocking the door.

  “You know they’re going to have to lever the door off its hinges with a screwdriver?” he said in the kitchen as he handed her her clothes.

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “Otherwise they won’t get him out.”

  “Will they manage?”

  “It’s the only way.”

  “Is he dead?”

  “I think so,” he said.

  “You have to go back in. My wallet and my identity card are still in there.”

  He searched the apartment and found 8,500 deutschmarks in the desk. It said “For Aunt Margret” on the envelope. They wiped away their fingerprints, then left the apartment. But they were too slow. The neighbor, an elderly woman with strong glasses, saw them in the arcade.

  They took the suburban train back to the station. Later they went to a snack bar.

  “It was terrible,” said Nina.

  “The idiot,” said Thomas.