Guilt

by Ferdinand von Schirach

  “I love you,” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “What is it? Do you love me too?”

  “Was he the only one doing something?” asked Thomas, looking straight at her.

  “Yes. What are you thinking?” Suddenly she was afraid.

  “Did you do something too?”

  “No, I screamed. The old swine,” she said.

  “Absolutely nothing?”

  “No, absolutely nothing.”

  “Things are going to get tough,” he said after a pause.

  A week later they saw the poster on a pillar in the station. The man was dead. A policeman knew them from the squad room in the station. He thought the neighbor’s description might fit them, and they were taken in for questioning. The old lady wasn’t sure. Adhesive tests were done on their clothing and compared to fibers from the dead man’s apartment. The results were inconclusive. The man was recognized as a john; he had two previous convictions for sexual assault and intercourse with minors. They were released. The case remained unsolved.

  They had done everything right. For nineteen years they had done everything right. Using the dead man’s money they had rented an apartment; later they moved into a row house. They had stopped drinking. Nina was a salesgirl in a supermarket; Thomas worked as the stores supervisor at a wholesaler. They had gotten married. Within the year she’d given birth to a boy, and then twelve months later a girl. They made their way; things went well. Once he got into a fistfight at the company. He didn’t defend himself; she understood.

  When her mother died, she relapsed. She started smoking marijuana again. Thomas found her at the station, in her old spot. They sat on a bench in the Tiergarten for a couple of hours, then drove home. She laid her head in his lap. She didn’t need it any more. They had friends and were close to his aunt in Hannover. The children were doing well in school.

  When the science had advanced sufficiently, the cigarettes in the dead man’s ashtray underwent molecular genetic analysis. All those who had been under suspicion back then were summoned for a mass screening. The document looked threatening: a shield, the inscription “President of Police of Berlin,” thin paper in a green envelope. It lay on the kitchen table for two days before they could bring themselves to talk about it. There was no avoiding it; they went, nothing more than a cotton swab in the mouth, it didn’t hurt.

  A week later they were arrested. The chief commissioner said, “It’s better for you.” He was only doing his job. They admitted everything, they didn’t think it mattered any more. Thomas called me too late. The court could not have ruled out an accident if they had kept quiet.

  Six weeks later they were released from custody. The examining magistrate said the case was utterly unusual, the accused had integrated themselves fully into society in the meantime. They were under the gravest suspicion and a conviction was certain, but they were not a flight risk.

  No one ever found out where the gun came from. He shot her in the heart and himself in the temple. Both of them died immediately. A dog discovered them the next day. They were lying on the shore of the Wannsee, side by side, sheltered in a sand pit. They hadn’t wanted to do it in the apartment; they’d painted the walls only two months before.

  The Illuminati

  The Order of the Illuminati was founded on May 1, 1776, by Adam Weishaupt, an instructor in canon law at the University of Ingolstadt. Only the students of the Jesuits had access to the libraries, and Weishaupt wanted to change this. The professor had no organizational talent; perhaps at the age of twenty-eight he was simply too young. Adolph von Knigge, a Freemason, took over the leadership of the secret society in 1780. Knigge knew what he was doing; the Order grew until it began to pose a threat to the Crown because of its sympathy for the ideas of the Enlightenment, and this finally led to both him and it being banned as enemies of the state. After that, theories abounded. Because Adam Weishaupt looked a little like George Washington, it was claimed that the Illuminati had murdered the president and replaced him with Weishaupt—for Weishaupt means whitehead and the national symbol of the United States, the white-headed or bald eagle, was proof of this. And because people loved conspiracy theories even back then, suddenly everyone became a member of the Illuminati: Galileo, the Babylonian goddess Lilith, Lucifer, and eventually even the Jesuits themselves.

  In reality, Weishaupt died in 1830 in Gotha; the history of the Order ended with its ban by the government in 1784, and all that remains is a small memorial tablet in the pedestrian precinct in Ingolstadt.

  For some people, that’s not enough.

  When Henry was six he was sent to school and things began to go wrong. The goody cone he was given to celebrate his first day was made of red felt with stars stuck on it and a magician with a pointy beard. It was a heavy cone, it had a green paper cover, he’d carried it all by himself since they’d left the house. Then the cone got caught on the door handle of the classroom and that made a dent in it. He sat on his chair and stared at his cone and everyone else’s cones, and when the teacher asked his name, he didn’t know what he was supposed to say and he began to cry. He was crying because of the dent, because of the strange people, because of the teacher, who was wearing a red dress, and because he’d pictured everything differently. The boy next to him stood up and went in search of a new neighbor. Until that moment Henry had thought the world had been created for him; sometimes he had turned round quickly, hoping to catch objects as they changed places. Now he would never do that again. He remembered nothing about the rest of the lesson, but later he believed his life had been knocked out of balance that day in a way that could never be righted again.

  Henry’s parents were ambitious; his father was the kind of man that no one in their little town ever saw without a tie and polished shoes. Despite all the strains created by his background, he had become the deputy director of the power company and a member of the town council. His wife was the daughter of the richest farmer in the area. And because Henry’s father had only had ten years of school, he wanted more for his son. He had a false picture of private schools, and he mistrusted state schools, which is why the parents decided to enroll Henry in a boarding school in southern Germany.

  An allée lined with chestnut trees led to the former sixteenth-century monastery. The school board had bought the building sixty years before; it had a good reputation. Industrialists, top officials, doctors, and lawyers sent their children here. The headmaster was a fat man with a cravat and a green jacket; he greeted the family at the big front door. His parents talked to the unknown man as Henry walked behind them, looking at the leather patches on the man’s elbows and the reddish hairs on his neck. His father’s voice was softer than usual. Other children came from the opposite direction; one of them nodded to Henry but he didn’t want to respond and looked at the wall. The unknown man showed them Henry’s room for the next year; he’d be sharing it with eight other boys. The beds were bunk beds, and there was a linen curtain in front of each one. The man told Henry this was now his “kingdom”; he could stick posters up with Scotch tape. He said this as if he were being friendly. Then he slapped him on the shoulder. Henry didn’t understand him. The unknown man’s hands were soft and fleshy. Finally he went away.

  His mother packed everything into his cupboard. It was all strange; the sheets and pillowcase had nothing to do with home and all the noises sounded different. Henry was still hoping it was all a mistake.

  His father was bored. He sat next to Henry on the bed and both of them watched as Henry’s mother unpacked the three suitcases. She talked without pause, saying she wished she’d been to a boarding school, and she’d loved holiday camps when she was young. The singsong in her voice made Henry feel tired. He leaned against the head of the bed and closed his eyes. When he was awoken, nothing had changed.

  A fellow pupil came and said he’d been told to “show the parents around.” They saw two classrooms, the dining room, and the kitchenette; everything dated from the seventies, the furniture h
ad rounded corners, the lamps were orange, it was all comfortable and nothing looked as if it belonged in a monastery. His mother was enchanted by everything, and Henry knew how stupid the other pupil thought she was. At the end, his father gave the boy two euros. It was too little, and his mother called him back and gave him more. The boy bowed, holding the money in his hand, and looked at Henry, and Henry knew he’d already lost.

  At some point his father said it was late already and they still had the long return drive ahead of them. As they headed down the allée, Henry saw his mother turning back towards him one more time and waving. He saw her face through the window and he saw her saying something to his father; her red mouth moved silently, it would move forever, and he suddenly grasped that it wasn’t moving for him any more. He kept his hands in his pockets. The car got smaller and smaller until he could no longer distinguish it from the shadows in the allée.

  He was twelve years old now and he knew that all this was premature and much too serious.

  The boarding school was a world unto itself, more constricted, more intensive, devoid of compromise. There were the athletes, the intellectuals, the showoffs, and the winners. And there were the ones who were ignored, who were mere wallpaper. No one made his own decision as to who he was, it was the others who judged and their judgment was almost always final. Girls could have provided the corrective, but the school didn’t admit them, so their voices were missing.

  Henry was one of the inconspicuous ones. He said the wrong things, he wore the wrong clothes, he was bad at sports, and he couldn’t even play computer games. No one expected anything of him, he was one of the ones who went along, people didn’t even make fun of him. He was also one of the ones no one would recognize at future class reunions. Henry found a friend, one of the boys in his dorm room, who read fantasy novels and had wet hands. In the dining hall they sat at the table that got served last, and they stuck together on class outings. They got through, but when Henry lay awake at night, he wished there were something more for him.

  He was an average student. Even when he really tried, it made no difference. When he turned fourteen he developed acne, and everything got worse. The girls he met in his little town during the vacations wanted nothing to do with him. If they bicycled to the quarry pond on summer afternoons, he had to pay for the ice cream and the drinks in order to be allowed to sit with them. And in order to be able to do this, he stole money from his mother’s wallet. The girls kissed other boys all the same, and all he had left at night were the drawings he had made of them secretly.

  Things went differently only once. She was the prettiest girl in the clique; it was during the summer vacation when he had just turned fifteen. She had told him he should come with her, just like that. He had followed her into the cramped changing cubicle; it was a wooden shed by the lake with a narrow bench and no window, full of junk. She undressed in front of him in the semi-darkness and told him to sit down and unzip his pants. The light coming in between the planks divided her body; he saw her mouth, her breasts, her pubic hair, he saw the dust in the air and smelled the old inflatable mattresses under the bench, and he heard the others by the lake. She knelt in front of him and took hold of him; her hands were cold and the light fell on her mouth and her teeth, which were too white. He felt her breath in front of his face, and suddenly he was afraid. He sweated in the dark little room as he stared at her hand that was holding his penis and the veins on the back of her hand. He suddenly thought of an excerpt from their biology textbook: “the fingers of a hand open and close themselves 22 million times in the course of a life.” He wanted to touch her breasts but he didn’t dare to. Then he got a cramp in his calf, and as he came, because he had to say something he said, “I love you.” She jumped to her feet and turned away; his stomach was sticky with sperm. Bending over, she pulled her bikini back on hastily, then opened the door and turned back towards him as she stood in the doorway. He could see her eyes now. They held sympathy and disgust and something else he didn’t yet recognize. Then she said “Sorry” softly and slammed the door, running to join the others out of sight. He sat in the dark for a long time. When they met next day, she was standing among her friends. She said loudly, for everyone to hear, that he shouldn’t stare at her so idiotically; she’d lost a bet, that was all, and “that thing yesterday” had been the stake. Because he was young and vulnerable, the imbalance grew even more severe.

  In ninth grade a new teacher arrived at the boarding school; she taught art and suddenly Henry’s life changed. Up until then school had been a matter of indifference to him; he’d have been happier doing something else. Once during a vacation he’d done an apprenticeship in a screw factory back home. He’d like to have stayed there. He enjoyed the orderly course of things, the unchanging rhythm of the machines, the unchanging nature of the conversations in the cafeteria. He liked the foreman he was assigned to, who answered his questions in monosyllables.

  Everything changed with the new teacher. There were a handful of drawings in his parents’ house, quick sketches made for tourists which his father had bought from fly-by-night dealers in Paris during their honeymoon. The only original came from Henry’s grandfather and hung over the bed in his boyhood room. It was of a summer landscape in East Prussia; Henry could feel the heat and the loneliness and he knew for sure, though he had no grounds for it, that it was a good picture. At school he had drawn figures for his friend out of the fantasy novels; there were scenes with dwarves, orcs, and elves, and the way Henry drew them gave them more life than the language in the books did.

  The teacher was almost sixty-five years old and came from Alsace. She wore black-and-white suits. Her upper lip wobbled a little when she talked about art, and that’s when you could hear the faint remaining traces of her French accent.

  As always at the beginning of the school year, she had the children paint a scene from their vacations. That afternoon she leafed through their work, to see how far along they were. As she took the pictures out of the folder one by one, she was smoking, something she only did at home. From time to time she made notes. Then she held Henry’s sheet of paper in her hands. It was a drawing, just a few pencil strokes, of his mother collecting him at the station. She hadn’t so much as noticed the boy in class, but now her hand began to tremble. She understood his drawing, it was all evident to her. She saw the struggles, the wounds, and the fear, and suddenly she saw the boy himself. That evening, her entry in her diary consisted of two sentences: “Henry P is the greatest talent I have ever seen. He is the greatest gift of my life.”

  They caught him shortly after Christmas vacation.

  An indoor swimming pool had been built on to the monastery in the 1970s. It was muggy in there, and smelled of chlorine and plastic. The boys used the anteroom to change. Henry had hurt his hand on the edge of the pool and was allowed to leave ahead of the others. A few minutes later another boy went to fetch his watch; he wanted to measure how long they could stay underwater. As he came into the anteroom, he saw Henry taking money out of the other boys’ pants, counting it and hiding it away. He watched him for several minutes, while the water dripped onto the tiled floor. At a certain point Henry noticed him and heard him say “You swine.” Henry saw the puddle of water beneath the boy’s feet, his green-and-white swimming trunks, and his wet hair that hung down into his face. Suddenly the world slowed, he saw a single drop falling in slow motion, its surface perfect, the neon light on the ceiling refracting itself within it. As it splashed onto the floor, Henry did something he shouldn’t have done and which later he couldn’t explain to anyone: he knelt. The other boy grinned down at him and repeated, “You swine, you’re going to pay for this.” Then he went back to the swimming pool.

  The boy belonged to a little group in school who secretly called themselves the Illuminati. During his summer vacation he had read a book about defunct orders, the Templars and the Illuminati. He was sixteen and seeking explanations for the world. He gave the book to the others and after a few months
they knew all the theories. There were three of them; they talked about the Holy Grail and world conspiracies, they met at night, searched for signs in the monastery, and finally they found symbols because they wanted to find them. The arches of the windows threw midday shadows that looked like pentagrams; they discovered an owl, the emblem of the Illuminati, in the dark portrait of the abbot who had founded the monastery; and they thought they saw a pyramid above the clock on the tower. They took it all seriously, and because they talked to nobody about it all, things took on an unfounded significance. They ordered books on the Internet, they went onto innumerable websites, and gradually they came to believe what these said.

  When they arrived at exorcism, they decided to seek out a sacrificial victim, someone they could purify of his sins and make their disciple. Much later, after everything had happened, more than four hundred books were found in their cupboards and night stands, books on Inquisition trials, Satanic rituals, secret societies, and flagellants, and their computers were full of images of the torturing of witches and sadistic pornography. They thought a girl would be ideal and they talked about what they would do with her. But when the thing with Henry happened at the swimming pool, the die was cast.

  The teacher was careful with Henry. She let him draw what he wanted. Then she showed him pictures; she explained anatomy to him, and perspective and composition. Henry sucked it all in; none of it gave him any difficulties. He waited every week for the two hours of art class. When he had made some progress, he took his sketch pad outdoors. He drew what he saw, and he saw more than other people did. The only person the teacher talked to about Henry was the headmaster; they decided to let Henry continue to grow within the shelter provided by the school; he still seemed overly fragile. He began to grasp the pictures in the art books, and he slowly realized that he was not alone.