Guilt (10 page)

She had positioned the chair in front of the window. She liked to drink her tea there, because she could see into the playground. A girl was doing cartwheels while two boys watched. The girl was a little older than the boys. When she fell down, she started to cry. She ran to her mother and showed her the scrape on her elbow. The mother had a bottle of water and a handkerchief and swabbed the wound clean. The girl looked over to the boys as she stood between her mother’s legs holding out her arm to her. It was Sunday. He would be coming back with the children in an hour. She would set the table; friends were coming to visit. It was silent in the apartment. She stared into the playground again without seeing what was happening there.

They were well. She did everything the way she’d always done it: conversations with her husband about work, shopping in the supermarket, tennis lessons for the children, Christmas with her parents or parents-in-law. She uttered the same sentences she always uttered; she wore the same clothes she always wore. She went to buy shoes with her girlfriends, and went to the movies once a month if she could get a babysitter. She kept up-to-date with exhibitions and plays. She
watched the news, read the political section of the paper, paid attention to the children, attended parent-teacher days at school. She didn’t do any sports, but she hadn’t put on weight.

Her husband suited her; she’d always believed that. But it wasn’t his fault. It was nobody’s fault. It had just happened. She hadn’t been able to do anything about it. She could remember every detail of the evening when it all became clear.

“Are you ill?” he had said. “You look pale.”

“No.”

“What’s the matter?”

“Nothing, darling, I’m just going to go to bed now. It was a long day.”

Much later, when they were lying in bed, she’d suddenly been unable to breathe. She’d lain awake until morning, rigid with anxiety and guilt, her thighs cramping. She didn’t want it that way, but it had stayed that way. And while making breakfast for the children next day and checking their schoolbags, she’d known she’d never feel any different again: she was totally empty inside. She would have to keep living with that.

That had been two years ago. They went on living together; he didn’t notice. Nobody noticed. They rarely had sex, and when they did, she was affable with him.

Gradually everything disappeared, until she was a mere shell. The world became alien to her; she no longer belonged in it. The children laughed, her husband got excited, their
friends argued—but nothing touched her. She was serious, she laughed, she cried, she comforted—it was all the way it usually was and all on cue. But when things were quiet and she looked at other people in cafés or on the streetcar, she felt none of it had anything to do with her any more.

At some point she started. She stood for half an hour in front of the shelves with the stockings, went away, came back. Then she grabbed. It didn’t matter what size or what color. She shoved the packs under her coat too hastily and the stockings slid to the floor. She bent down, then ran. Her heart was racing, she could feel the pulse in her neck and stains on her hands. Her whole body was wet. She didn’t feel her legs, she was trembling, then she was past the checkout. Someone bumped into her. Then the ice-cold evening air, and rain. Adrenaline flooded through her; she wanted to scream. Two corners further on, she threw the stockings into a garbage can. Taking off her shoes, she ran home in the rain. Outside her front door she looked up into the sky. The water splashed onto her forehead, her eyes, her mouth. She was alive.

She only ever stole superfluous things, and she only ever stole when she couldn’t stand it any longer. She wouldn’t always get away with it, she knew that. Her husband would say that was in the nature of things. He always uttered remarks like that. He was right. When the detective stopped her, she immediately confessed, right there on the street. People passing by stopped to stare at her, a child pointed and said, “That woman stole things.” The detective was holding
her tight by the arm. He took her to his office and wrote up a report for the police: name, address, identity card number, sequence of events, value of goods 12.99 euros, check the relevant box “admitted: yes/no.” He was wearing a checked shirt and smelled of sweat. She was the woman with the Louis Vuitton handbag and the Gucci wallet, credit cards, and 845.36 euros in cash. He showed her where to sign. She read the sheet and wondered for a moment if she could correct his spelling mistakes, the way she did with her children. He said she would get something from the police in the mail, and grinned at her. The remains of a sausage roll were lying on the table. She thought of her husband, and imagined the trial, with the judge questioning her. The detective took her out through a side door.

The police asked her to make a written statement. She came to my office with it. It didn’t take long to settle. It was the first time, the value of the goods was minimal, she had no previous convictions. The DA stopped the proceedings. No one in the family learned of it.

Things settled down, the way everything in her life had always settled down.

The old man stood in the kitchen and smoked. It was August, the day was warm, and he’d opened the window wide. He looked at the ashtray: a naked mermaid with a green fishtail and underneath, in script, “Welcome to the Reeperbahn.” He didn’t know where he’d got it. The color on the girl had faded and the “R” of Reeperbahn had disappeared. The drops of water splashed into the metal sink, slow and hard. It calmed him. He would remain at the window, smoking and doing nothing.

The special task force had assembled in front of the building. The policemen were wearing uniforms that looked too big, and black helmets; they carried transparent shields. They were brought in when things got too difficult for the others, and armed resistance was anticipated. They were hard men with a hard code. Their task force had also suffered deaths and injuries, and the adrenaline was building up in them too. They had their orders: “Drug den, suspects thought to be armed, arrest.” They were now standing silently by the garbage cans in the courtyard and waiting both on the staircase and in front of the apartment. It was too hot under their helmets and their riot masks. They were
waiting for the word from the leader of the task force; everyone was eager to hear it now. At some point he would yell “Go, go, go” and then they’d do what they had been trained to do.

The old man at the window thought about Hassan and his friends. They had the key to his apartment and when they came during the night they made up the little packages in his kitchen, “stretching,” they called it, two-thirds heroin, one-third Lidocaine. They compressed it into rectangular lumps with a jack. Each lump weighed a kilo. Hassan paid the old man a thousand euros every month, and he did it punctually.

Of course it was too much for one and a half rooms in the back of a building, fourth floor, too dark. But they wanted the old man’s apartment; nothing served them better as their “bunker,” as they called it. The kitchen was big enough and that was all they needed. The old man slept in the room and when they came he switched on the television so that he didn’t have to listen to them. The only thing was, he couldn’t cook any more: the kitchen was crammed with plastic wrappers, precision balances, spatulas, and rolls of adhesive tape. The worst thing was the white dust that settled in a film on everything. Hassan had explained the risk to the old man, but he didn’t care. He had nothing to lose. It was a good business arrangement, and he’d never cooked anyway. He drew on his cigarette and looked up at the sky: not a cloud to be seen; it would get even hotter before evening.

——

He first heard the policemen when they broke down the door. It all went fast, and there was no point in fighting back. He was thrown to the floor, fell over the kitchen stool, and broke two ribs. Then they yelled that he was to tell them where the Arabs were. Because they were so loud, he said nothing. And also because his ribs hurt. He kept silent later in front of the examining magistrate too—he had been in prison too often, and he knew it was too early to talk. They wouldn’t let him go now if he did.

The old man lay on his bed, cell number 178, C block, in the prison where detainees await trial. He heard the key and knew he had to say something to the female guard now, or nod, or move a foot; otherwise she wouldn’t leave. She came every morning at 6:15; it was called “life check.” They were looking to see if any of the prisoners had died in the night or killed themselves. The old man said everything was in order. The guard would also have collected his mail, but he had no one he could write to, and she no longer asked. When he was alone again, he turned to the wall. He stared at the bright yellow oil paint; the lower two-thirds of the walls were painted with it, then there was a white stripe. The floors were light gray. Everything here looked the same.

As soon as he woke up, he had thought about the fact that today was their wedding anniversary. And now he thought again about the man who was sleeping with his wife. His wife.

It had all started with the undershirt. He remembered
the summer evening twenty-two years ago when he found it under the bed. It was lying there all crumpled up and somehow dirty. It wasn’t his undershirt, although that was what his wife kept saying. He’d known it belonged to the other man. After that nothing was the same. In the end he used it to clean his shoes, but that didn’t change things either, and at a certain point he’d had to move out or else he’d have fallen apart. His wife cried. He didn’t take anything with him; he left the money and the car and even the watch she’d given him. He quit his job. It was a good one, but he couldn’t keep going there; he couldn’t bear it any longer. He got drunk every evening, silently and systematically. At a certain point it became a habit, and he sank into a world of schnapps, petty crime, and social security. He didn’t want anything else. He was just waiting for the end.

But today was different. The woman who wanted to talk to him was called Jana, plus a last name that had too many letters in it. They told him there had been a mix-up, she had applied for a visitor’s permit. She didn’t need his permission for that. So he went to the visitors’ room at the appointed time and sat down with her at the table which was covered with green plastic. The officer who was supervising the conversation sat in the corner and tried not to disturb them.

She looked at him. He knew he was ugly. His nose and his chin had been growing towards each other for years until they almost formed a semicircle, his hair was almost all gone, and his stubble was gray. She looked at him anyway.
She looked at him in a way no one had looked at him for years. He scratched his neck. Then she said in a strong Polish accent that he had beautiful hands, and he knew she was lying, but it was okay that she said it. She was beautiful. Like the Madonna in the village church, he thought. As a boy he had always stared at her during Mass and imagined that God was inside her stomach, and that it was a riddle how he’d managed to get in there. Jana was in her seventh month; everything about her was round and radiant and full of life. She leaned over the table and touched his sunken cheek with her fingertips. He stared at her breasts and then was ashamed and said, “I’ve lost all my teeth.” He tried to smile. She nodded in a friendly way. They sat at the table for twenty minutes and didn’t utter another word. The officer was familiar with this; it often happened that prisoner and visitor had nothing to say to each other. When the officer said that visiting time was over she stood up, leaned forward quickly again, and whispered in the old man’s ear, “Hassan is the father of my child.” He smelled her perfume, and felt her hair on his old face. She blushed. That was all. Then she left and he was taken back to his cell. He sat on his bed and stared at his hands with their age spots and scars, he thought about Jana and the baby in her stomach, he thought about how warm and safe it was in there, and he knew what he had to do.

When Jana got home, Hassan was asleep. She undressed, lay down beside him and felt his breath on the back of her neck.
She loved this man whom she couldn’t make sense of. He was different from the boys in her village in Poland, he was grown-up, and his skin seemed to be made of velvet.