Guilt (15 page)

The policewoman was friendly; she wasn’t in uniform, and she stroked the girl’s forehead. Larissa lay in a clean bed; one of the nurses had brought her a few flowers. She told them everything. “It’s in the cellar,” she said. And then she said something that no one could believe: “I didn’t know I was pregnant.”

I visited Larissa in the women’s prison. A judge who was a friend of mine had asked me to take her on as a client. She was fifteen. Her father gave an interview to the tabloids, saying she’d always been a good girl and he just couldn’t understand it. He was paid fifty euros.

There have always been repressed pregnancies. Every year in Germany alone, 1,500 women recognize too late that they’re pregnant. And year after year, almost 300 women only realize it when they give birth. They misinterpret all the signs: menstruation has ceased because of stress, the stomach is distended because of overeating, the breasts are enlarging as a result of some hormonal disturbance. These women are either very young or over the age of forty. Many have already had children. People can repress things, though nobody knows how the mechanism works. Sometimes it’s totally successful: even doctors are deceived and refrain from further physical exams.

Larissa was set free. The presiding judge said the child had been born alive, it had drowned, its lungs had been fully developed, and coliform bacteria had been found in them. He said he believed Larissa. The rape had traumatized her and she hadn’t wanted the child. She had repressed everything so powerfully and so completely that she literally had no knowledge of her pregnancy. When she had delivered the baby on the toilet, she had been astonished. As a result, she was in a state in which she could no longer distinguish right and wrong. She was therefore not guilty of the death of the newborn infant.

In a separate trial, Lackner was sentenced to six and a half years.

Larissa took the streetcar home. All she had with her was the yellow plastic bag that the policewoman had packed for her.
Her mother asked how it had been in court. Larissa moved out six months later.

After our phone conversation she sent me a photo of her children. She also included a letter, written in her best copybook handwriting on blue paper; she must have done it very slowly. “Everything is fine with my husband and my girls. I’m happy. But I often dream about the baby lying alone in the cellar. It was a boy. I miss him.”

The criminal court is in the Moabit district of Berlin. That part of the city is gray; no one knows where the name came from; it sounds a little like the Slavic word for a Moor. It is the largest criminal court in Europe. The building has twelve courtyards and seventeen staircases. Fifteen hundred people work here, including 270 judges and 350 prosecutors. Approximately 300 hearings take place every day, 1,300 prisoners from 80 nations are incarcerated here awaiting trial, and more than 1,000 visitors, witnesses, and trial personnel pass through. Every year roughly 60,000 criminal proceedings are handled here. These are the statistics.

The officer who delivered Turan said quietly that he was “a poor bastard.” He arrived in the interrogation room on crutches, dragging his right leg. He looked like the beggars in the pedestrian passageways. His left foot was turned inward. He was forty-one years old, a thin little man, just skin and bones, sunken cheeks, almost no teeth, unshaved, unkempt. In order to shake my hand, he had to lean one of the crutches against his stomach, and he found it hard to keep his balance. Turan sat down and tried to tell me his
story. He was serving his term of detention; the sentence had long since started to run. He had supposedly attacked a man with his pit bull, and “brutally beaten him up and kicked him.” Turan said he was innocent. It took time for him to answer my questions, and he spoke slowly. I didn’t understand everything he said, but then he didn’t have to say much: he could barely walk, and any dog would have knocked him over. When I was about to leave, he suddenly clutched my arm, and his crutch fell to the ground. He wasn’t a bad man, he said.

A few days later the file arrived from the DA’s office. It was thin, barely fifty pages. Horst Kowski, forty-two, had gone for a walk in Neukölln. Neukölln is a district of Berlin where schools employ private guards, technical schools have up to 80 percent foreign pupils, and every second person is on welfare. Horst Kowski had gone for this walk with his dachshund. The dachshund had gotten into a fight with the pit bull. The owner of the pit bull got angry, the fight escalated, and the man assaulted Kowski.

When Kowski arrived home, he was bleeding from the mouth. His nose was broken, his shirt badly torn. His wife bandaged him up. She said she knew “the man with the pit bull” and his name was Tarun. He was a regular at the tanning salon where she worked. She checked the computer in the salon, and found Tarun’s discount card and his address: Kolbe-Ring 52. The couple went to the police; Kowski showed them the computer printout. Tarun was not a registered resident of Berlin. The officer was not surprised:
Neukölln is not a place where the obligation to register is always observed.

The next day the officer on the beat failed to find any Tarun among the 184 names on the little signs next to the buzzers at Kolbe-Ring 52. There was, however, a label with the name “Turan.” The policeman made inquiries at the State Residents’ Registration Office; there was in fact a Harkan Turan registered at Kolbe-Ring 52. The officer thought it must be a misspelling—it should be Turan, not Tarun—so he rang, and when no one answered he left a summons for Turan in the mailbox.

Turan didn’t go to the police. Nor did he send an excuse. After four weeks the policeman sent the file to the DA’s office. The DA requested a penalty order and a judge signed it. If he didn’t do it, he’ll surface, he thought.

When Turan received the order he could still have changed everything; all he had to do was write one line to the court. The penalty order took on the force of law after two weeks. The department in charge of enforcement sent a form for a money transfer to use when he paid the fine. He naturally didn’t pay because apart from everything else, he didn’t have the money. The fine was replaced by a term of imprisonment. The detention center wrote telling him to present himself within fourteen days. Turan threw the letter away. After three weeks two policemen came to get him in the morning. Since then he had been sitting in prison. Turan said: “It wasn’t me. Germans are so thorough—they must know this.”

Turan’s deformity was congenital; he’d had a whole series of operations. I wrote to his doctors and gave their case notes to an expert in the field. He said Turan was incapable of assaulting anyone. Turan’s friends came to my office. They said he was afraid of dogs so of course he’d never owned one. One of the friends even knew Tarun and his pit bull. I demanded that the matter be reopened. Turan was released. Three months later there was a hearing. Kowski said he’d never seen Turan in his life.

Turan was exonerated. The court forgot about the charge against Tarun.

By law, Turan had a claim against the state: eleven euros for every day of wrongful imprisonment. The claim had to be made within six months. Turan didn’t get any money—he missed the deadline.

Alexandra was pretty: a blonde with brown eyes. In older photographs she wears a hair band. She grew up in the country near Oldenburg, where her parents were livestock farmers: cows, pigs, hens. She didn’t like having freckles, she read historical novels, and all she wanted was to go and live in the city. After middle school, her father got her an apprenticeship in a respectable bakery and her mother helped her look for an apartment. At first she felt homesick and went home on weekends. Then she got to know people in the city. She loved life.

After she’d completed her apprenticeship she bought her first car. Her mother had given her the money, but she wanted to choose it herself. She was nineteen. The salesman was ten years older. Tall, slim-hipped. They took a test drive, and Thomas explained the points of the car to her. She was drawn to his hands: slender, sinewy, they attracted her. Afterwards he asked her if she would like to have dinner with him, or go to a movie. She was too nervous, so she laughed and said no. But she wrote her phone number on the contract. They made a date a week later. She liked the
way he talked about things. And she liked it that he told her what to do. Everything felt right.

They married two years later. In her wedding photographs she’s wearing a white dress. She’s tanned, she’s laughing into the camera and holding the arm of her husband, who’s a couple of heads taller. They had paid for a real photographer. The picture was to stand on her night table forever: she’d already bought the frame. They both liked the reception afterwards, and the solo entertainer on the Hammond organ; they danced, although he said he was not much of a dancer. Their families got on well together. Her favorite grandfather, a stonemason with silicosis, gave them a statue as a wedding present—a naked girl who looked a lot like her. His father gave them money in an envelope.

Alexandra had no worries; everything was going to work out well with this man. It was all the way she’d wished it for herself. He was loving, and she thought she knew him.

The first time he hit her was long before the baby was born. He came home drunk in the middle of the night. She woke up and told him he smelled of alcohol. She didn’t find it that bad; she was simply telling him. He yelled at her and dragged the bedclothes off her. As she sat up, he hit her in the face. She was terrified; she couldn’t say a thing.

Next morning he wept and blamed the alcohol. She didn’t like the way he sat on the kitchen floor. He said he would never drink again. When he left for work, she cleaned the entire apartment. She did nothing else all day. They were
married, she thought; that sort of thing happened, it was a slip-up. They didn’t discuss it again.

When Alexandra got pregnant, everything became the way it had been before. He brought her flowers on weekends, he lay on her stomach and tried to hear the baby. He stroked her. When she came home from the hospital after the birth, he had tidied everything up. He’d painted the nursery yellow and bought a baby’s changing table. Her mother-in-law had brought new things for the child. There was a wreath of paper flowers over the door.

The girl was baptized. He’d wanted to name her Chantal, but finally they settled on Saskia. Alexandra was happy.

After the birth he didn’t have sex with her any more. She tried a few times, but he didn’t want it. She felt a little lonely, but she had the baby and she made herself get accustomed to it. A girlfriend had told her it sometimes happened if the husband had been present at the birth. It would pass. She didn’t know if this was true.

After a few years, things got harder. Sales of cars were slow; they had the payments on the apartment to make. They managed somehow, but he drank more than in former times. Sometimes in the evenings she smelled a perfume she didn’t know, but she didn’t say anything. Her friends had bigger problems with their husbands; most of them were getting divorced.