Guilt (11 page)

Later, when he woke up for a moment, she told him the old man wouldn’t testify against him; he could stop worrying. But he had to do something for him, buy him new teeth, she’d already spoken to a social worker who could take care of it. No one would find out. She was all worked up and talking too fast. Hassan stroked her stomach till she fell asleep.

“Does your client wish to make a statement about the men behind this? If so, the court could consider sparing him any further pretrial detention.” I had taken on the defense on a pro bono basis and applied for a review of his remand. Everything had been negotiated with the court; the man would be released. It was not a complicated set of proceedings. The police had found two hundred grams of heroin in the apartment. Worse still: the old man had had a knife in his pocket. The law calls this “trafficking with a weapon”; the minimum sentence—the same as for manslaughter—is five years. The intention of the law is to protect officers from attack. The old man had to provide the name of the actual perpetrator: it seemed to be his only chance. But he remained silent. “In which case pretrial detention will continue,” said the judge, shaking his head.

——

The old man was happy. The Polish girl must not have her baby alone. That’s more important than me, he thought, and even as he was thinking it he knew that he’d won something distinct from—and more important than—his freedom.

The trial began four months later. They fetched the old man from his cell and led him to the courtroom. They had to pause for a moment in front of the Christmas tree. It was standing in the main corridor of the prison, as enormous as it was foreign, the electric candles reflected in the decorative balls which hung in orderly gradation, the largest ones at the foot, the smaller ones above. The electric cable from the bright red drum was attached to the floor with black-and-yellow warning stickers. There are safety precautions for things like that.

It rapidly became clear to the judges that the old man could not be the owner of the drugs; he simply didn’t have the money for that. Nonetheless, what was at issue was the five-year minimum term. No one wanted to sentence him to something that high—it would have been unjust—but there seemed to be no way out.

During a recess something strange happened: the old man was eating some bread and cheese, which he was cutting with a plastic knife into tiny little pieces. As I was looking at him he apologized: he didn’t have his teeth any more and had to cut up everything he ate into these little morsels. The rest of it was simple. That was why, indeed it was
the only reason why, he had had the knife in his pocket. He needed it in order to be able to eat. There was a decision handed down by the Federal Court that said “trafficking with a weapon” didn’t apply if the knife was clearly intended for another use.

The business with the teeth was perhaps an odd explanation, but this was also the last trial of the year. Everyone was relaxed, during the recesses the DA was talking about the presents he hadn’t yet bought, and we were all wondering if it was going to snow. Finally the old man was given a two-year suspended sentence, and he was released from prison.

I wondered where he would spend Christmas; the lease on his apartment had been terminated and he had no one he could go to. I stood on one of the higher landings and watched him walk slowly down the stairs.

On the twenty-fourth of December, the old man was lying in the hospital. The operation wasn’t due to take place until January 2, but the clinic had insisted that he go directly from jail to hospital. They were afraid of an alcoholic relapse. The social worker had organized everything, and when the old man was first told of it, he didn’t want to do it. But then he heard that someone called Jana, or so the social worker said, had already paid for his new teeth at the clinic. Because they came from her he pretended she was a relative and agreed.

The hospital bed was clean, he’d showered and shaved, and they’d given him a gown with a yellow pattern on it. There was a Santa Claus made of chocolate on his night-stand. Its chest was squashed in and it looked oddly lopsided.
He liked that. He’s just like me, he thought. He was somewhat afraid of the operation; they were going to take a piece of bone from his hip. But he was excited about the new teeth. In a few months he would finally be able to eat normally again. As he went to sleep, he no longer dreamed of the undershirt under his bed. He dreamed of Jana, her hair, her smell, her stomach, and he was happy.

Just over a mile away Jana was sitting on the sofa telling her sleeping baby the Christmas story. She had cooked borscht for Hassan. It was a lot of work, but she knew how to do it; after her father died, that was how her mother had kept the little family’s heads above water in Karpacz in southwestern Poland. Borscht made with brisket of beef and beets for the tourists who hiked over the mountain and were hungry. That had been her childhood, her mother standing out in the cold every day with her pots and her Bunsen burners among the other women, as they all squeezed the last of the goodness out of the vegetables and then threw them behind them into the snow. Jana told the baby about the red snow you could see from a long way away, and the fine smell of the soup and the gas burners. She thought about her village there in the mountains, and her family, and she told stories about Christmas, the yellow lights, roast geese, and Uncle Malek, who owned the bakery and certainly had baked the biggest cake again today.

Hassan was not coming back, she knew that. But he had been there with her when the baby came, he had held her hand and wiped the sweat from her forehead. He had stayed calm when she screamed, he was always calm when things
came right down to it, and she believed nothing would happen to her as long as he was there. But she had also always sensed that he would go; he was far too young. She could only live in peace if she loved him from a distance. Suddenly she felt alone, she missed the village and her family, she missed it all so much it hurt, and she decided to take the train to Poland the next morning.

Hassan was driving through the city. He couldn’t go see her; he didn’t know what to say. He was engaged to another woman in Lebanon; he had to marry her, his parents had arranged it while he was still a child. Jana was a good woman; she had saved him from prison; she was clear and direct in every way. He slowly worked himself into a fury, at himself and his family and the world in general. And then he saw him.

The man was just coming out of a shop where he had been buying his last presents. He owed Hassan twenty thousand euros and had simply disappeared. Hassan had been looking for him for weeks. He stopped the car, took the hammer out of the glove compartment, and followed the man to the entrance of a building. Seizing him by the throat, he threw him against the wall. The shopping bags fell to the ground. The other man said he wanted to pay but it was taking a little time. He begged. Hassan wasn’t listening to him any more; he was staring at the little gift parcels lying in the hallway. He saw the printed Father Christmases and the golden gift ribbons and suddenly it all came together in his head: Jana and the baby, the heat of Lebanon, his father and his future wife. He realized he couldn’t change any of it now.

It took far too long and a neighbor said later he’d heard the blows interspersed with the screams, a dull, wet sound like you hear at the butcher’s. When the police were eventually able to pull Hassan off the man’s upper body, his victim’s mouth was a mass of blood. Hassan had smashed eleven of his teeth with the hammer.

Snow did fall that night. It was Christmas.

The Russian spoke German with a heavy accent. The three of them were sitting on three red sofas in a café in Amsterdam. The Russian had been drinking vodka for hours while Frank and Atris drank beer. They couldn’t work out the Russian’s age, maybe he was fifty; his left eyelid drooped since his stroke, and his right hand was missing two fingers. He said he’d been a career soldier in the Red Army. “Chechnya and all that.” He held up his mutilated hand. He liked talking about the war. “Yeltsin is a woman, but Putin, Putin’s a man,” he said. It was a market economy now, everyone understood that. A market economy meant you could buy anything. A seat in parliament cost $3 million, a ministerial post $7 million. Everything had been better during the war with Chechnya, and more honorable; men had been men. He had respected the Chechens. He’d killed a lot of them. Their children would already be playing with Kalashnikovs; they were good fighters, tenacious. They should drink to them. A lot of alcohol was drunk that evening.

They’d had to listen to the Russian for a long time. Finally he got around to the pills. Ukrainian chemists were going to make them; they’d lost their state jobs and were out of work. They’d had to privatize; their wives and children had to eat.
The Russian had also offered Frank and Atris everything imaginable: machine guns, howitzers, grenades. He’d even had a photo of a tank in his wallet. He’d looked at it tenderly and passed it around. He said he could get viruses too, but that was a dirty business. They all nodded.

Frank and Atris didn’t want weapons. They wanted the pills. The previous night they’d tried out the drugs on three girls they’d taken along from a nightclub. The girls had told them in a mixture of English and German that they were going to study history and politics. They had all driven to the hotel, where they drank and fooled around. Frank and Atris had given them the pills. Atris found himself thinking repeatedly about the things they did next. The red-haired one had lain down on the table in front of Frank and tipped the ice from the champagne bucket on her face. She’d screamed it was too hot for her and they were to hit her, but Frank didn’t want to. He had faced the table with his trousers down, smoking an enormous cigar, while his hips kept moving in the same rhythm and the girl’s legs rested on his chest, as he kept up a complicated monologue about the dissolution of Communism and its consequences for the drug trade. The cigar made it hard to understand him. Atris lay on the bed and watched him. After he’d forbidden the two girls between his legs to keep going, they’d fallen asleep, one of them with his big toe still in her mouth. Atris realized the pills would be perfect for Berlin.

Now the Russian was talking about the drug-sniffing dogs. He knew everything about them. “In South Korea they even
clone them because they’re so expensive,” he said. You had to weld a metal box into the car and then prepare it by stuffing bags of garbage, coffee, and wash powder into it, all separated by thick wrappers; it was your only chance to stop the dogs smelling something. Then he went back to talking about the war. He asked Atris and Frank if they’d ever killed anyone. Frank shook his head.

“With the Chechens it’s like it is with potato chips,” the Russian said.

“What?” said Frank.

“Potato chips. With the Chechens it’s like with a bag of potato chips.”

“I don’t get it,” said Frank.

“Once you start killing them, you can’t stop till they’re all gone. You have to kill them all. Every single one of them.” The Russian laughed. Then suddenly he turned serious, and stared at his crippled hand. “Otherwise they come back,” he said.