Guilt (3 page)

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 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 had 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.