Guilt (6 page)

They came at seven in the morning. He’d been supposed to drive to Hannover that day: a new customer, complete equipping of an office, good contract. They handcuffed him and led him out of the house. Still in her pajamas that he liked so much, Miriam stared at the arrest warrant. “Twenty-four counts of child abuse.” She knew the name of the girl from her primary school class. She stood in the kitchen with an officer as two of the policemen led Holbrecht down the narrow path to the police car. They had planted the boxwood hedge the year before; the jacket she’d given him last Christmas hung awkwardly on his shoulders somehow. The policeman said most wives had no idea. It was meant to sound comforting. Then they searched the house.

It wasn’t a long trial. Holbrecht denied everything. The judge held up the fact that porno films had been found on his computer. Admittedly there were no children in them and the films were legal, but the women were very young: one of them had barely any tits. The judge was sixty-three. He believed the girl. She said Holbrecht had always intercepted her on the way home. He had touched her “down there”—she started to cry as she testified about that. The terrace of his house was where it took place. Another girl confirmed
everything; she’d even seen it all twice herself. The girls described the house and the little garden.

Miriam didn’t attend the main hearing. Her lawyer sent the divorce papers to the house of detention. Holbrecht signed everything without reading it.

The court sentenced him to three and a half years. It stated in its opinion that it had no cause to doubt the girl’s testimony. Holbrecht served out his sentence to the last day. The psychologist had wanted him to acknowledge his guilt. He said nothing.

His shoes were soaked by the rain; water had forced its way in over the rims and seeped into his socks. The bus shelter had a plastic roof, but Holbrecht preferred to stand outdoors. The rain ran down the back of his neck into his coat. Everything he owned fit into the gray suitcase that was standing beside him. Some underwear, a few books, approximately 250 letters to his wife which he had never sent. In the pocket of his pants he had the addresses of his probation officer and a boardinghouse where he could stay to begin with. To tide him over, he had the money he’d earned in prison. Holbrecht was now forty-two years old.

The next five years passed quietly. He lived on his wages as a sandwich-board man for a tourist restaurant. He stood at the end of the Kurfürstendamm with colorful pictures of the various pizzas on cardboard boxes. He wore a white hat.
His trick was to give a little nod to people when he handed them the flyer. Most of them took one.

He lived in a one-and-a-half-room apartment in Schöneberg. His employer valued him; he was never ill. He didn’t want to live on unemployment benefits and he didn’t want any other job.

He recognized her at once. She must now be sixteen or seventeen, a carefree young woman in a close-fitting T-shirt. She was with her boyfriend, eating ice cream. She tossed her hair back as she laughed. It was her.

He turned aside quickly, feeling ill. He pulled off the sandwich board and told the restaurant owner he was sick. He was so pale that no one asked him any questions.

In the suburban train someone had written “I love you” and someone else had written “pig” in the dirt on the window. Back home he lay down on his bed in his clothes, and spread a wet kitchen towel over his face. He slept for fourteen hours. Then he got up, made coffee, and sat down at the open window. A shoe was lying on the canopy of the building next door. Children were trying to reach it with a stick.

In the afternoon he met his friend, a homeless man, who was fishing in the Spree, and sat down beside him.

“It’s about a woman,” said Holbrecht.

“It’s always about a woman,” said his friend.

Then they fell silent. When his friend pulled a fish out of the water and killed it by smacking it against the concrete wall of the quay, he went home.

Back in the apartment he looked out of the window again. The shoe was still lying on the canopy. He fetched a beer from the refrigerator and pressed the bottle to his temples. The heat had barely eased at all.

She had walked by him and his sandwich board on the Kurfürstendamm every Saturday. He took the weekend off and waited. When she came he followed her; he waited in front of shops and cafés and restaurants. Nobody noticed him. On the fourth Saturday she bought movie tickets. He found a seat directly behind her. His plan was going to work. She had put her hand on her boyfriend’s thigh. Holbrecht sat down. He smelled her perfume and heard her whispering. Pulling the kitchen knife out of the waistband of his pants, he clutched it under his jacket. She had pinned her hair up; he saw the blond fuzz on the back of her slender neck. He could almost count the individual tiny hairs.

He thought he had every right.

I don’t know why Holbrecht came straight to my office. I have no walk-in clients, but the office is not far from the movie house: maybe that’s the only reason. My secretary called me early in the morning; a man was waiting without
an appointment, he’d been sitting on the steps outside the office, and he had a knife. My secretary has been with me for years. Now she was afraid.

Holbrecht sat hunched in a chair, staring at the knife in front of him on the table. He didn’t move. I asked him if I might take the knife. Holbrecht nodded without looking up. I put it in an envelope and carried it to the secretary’s office. Then I sat down with him and waited. At some point he looked at me. The first thing he said was “I didn’t do it.” I nodded; sometimes it’s hard for clients to talk. I offered him a coffee, then we sat there and smoked. It was midsummer, and through the large open windows of the conference room you could hear high voices—children on a class outing. Young people were laughing in the café across the way. I closed the window. It was quiet and warm.

It took a long time before he told me his story. He had a strange way of talking: He nodded after every sentence, as if he had to personally reaffirm everything he said. And there were long pauses. At the end he said he’d followed the girl into the movie house but he hadn’t stabbed her; he couldn’t bring himself to do it. He was trembling. He had sat all night in front of my offices and he was exhausted. My secretary called the movie house: there had been no incident.

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.