Guilt (4 page)

In ninth grade a new teacher arrived at the boarding school; she taught art and suddenly Henry’s life changed. Up until then school had been a matter of indifference to him; he’d have been happier doing something else. Once during a vacation he’d done an apprenticeship in a screw factory back home. He’d like to have stayed there. He enjoyed the orderly course of things, the unchanging rhythm of the machines, the unchanging nature of the conversations in the cafeteria. He liked the foreman he was assigned to, who answered his questions in monosyllables.

Everything changed with the new teacher. There were a handful of drawings in his parents’ house, quick sketches
made for tourists which his father had bought from fly-by-night dealers in Paris during their honeymoon. The only original came from Henry’s grandfather and hung over the bed in his boyhood room. It was of a summer landscape in East Prussia; Henry could feel the heat and the loneliness and he knew for sure, though he had no grounds for it, that it was a good picture. At school he had drawn figures for his friend out of the fantasy novels; there were scenes with dwarves, orcs, and elves, and the way Henry drew them gave them more life than the language in the books did.

The teacher was almost sixty-five years old and came from Alsace. She wore black-and-white suits. Her upper lip wobbled a little when she talked about art, and that’s when you could hear the faint remaining traces of her French accent.

As always at the beginning of the school year, she had the children paint a scene from their vacations. That afternoon she leafed through their work, to see how far along they were. As she took the pictures out of the folder one by one, she was smoking, something she only did at home. From time to time she made notes. Then she held Henry’s sheet of paper in her hands. It was a drawing, just a few pencil strokes, of his mother collecting him at the station. She hadn’t so much as noticed the boy in class, but now her hand began to tremble. She understood his drawing, it was all evident to her. She saw the struggles, the wounds, and the fear, and suddenly she saw the boy himself. That evening, her entry in her diary consisted of two sentences: “Henry P is the greatest talent I have ever seen. He is the greatest gift of my life.”

They caught him shortly after Christmas vacation.

An indoor swimming pool had been built on to the monastery in the 1970s. It was muggy in there, and smelled of chlorine and plastic. The boys used the anteroom to change. Henry had hurt his hand on the edge of the pool and was allowed to leave ahead of the others. A few minutes later another boy went to fetch his watch; he wanted to measure how long they could stay underwater. As he came into the anteroom, he saw Henry taking money out of the other boys’ pants, counting it and hiding it away. He watched him for several minutes, while the water dripped onto the tiled floor. At a certain point Henry noticed him and heard him say “You swine.” Henry saw the puddle of water beneath the boy’s feet, his green-and-white swimming trunks, and his wet hair that hung down into his face. Suddenly the world slowed, he saw a single drop falling in slow motion, its surface perfect, the neon light on the ceiling refracting itself within it. As it splashed onto the floor, Henry did something he shouldn’t have done and which later he couldn’t explain to anyone: he knelt. The other boy grinned down at him and repeated, “You swine, you’re going to pay for this.” Then he went back to the swimming pool.

The boy belonged to a little group in school who secretly called themselves the Illuminati. During his summer vacation he had read a book about defunct orders, the Templars
and the Illuminati. He was sixteen and seeking explanations for the world. He gave the book to the others and after a few months they knew all the theories. There were three of them; they talked about the Holy Grail and world conspiracies, they met at night, searched for signs in the monastery, and finally they found symbols because they wanted to find them. The arches of the windows threw midday shadows that looked like pentagrams; they discovered an owl, the emblem of the Illuminati, in the dark portrait of the abbot who had founded the monastery; and they thought they saw a pyramid above the clock on the tower. They took it all seriously, and because they talked to nobody about it all, things took on an unfounded significance. They ordered books on the Internet, they went onto innumerable websites, and gradually they came to believe what these said.

When they arrived at exorcism, they decided to seek out a sacrificial victim, someone they could purify of his sins and make their disciple. Much later, after everything had happened, more than four hundred books were found in their cupboards and night stands, books on Inquisition trials, Satanic rituals, secret societies, and flagellants, and their computers were full of images of the torturing of witches and sadistic pornography. They thought a girl would be ideal and they talked about what they would do with her. But when the thing with Henry happened at the swimming pool, the die was cast.

The teacher was careful with Henry. She let him draw what he wanted. Then she showed him pictures; she explained
anatomy to him, and perspective and composition. Henry sucked it all in; none of it gave him any difficulties. He waited every week for the two hours of art class. When he had made some progress, he took his sketch pad outdoors. He drew what he saw, and he saw more than other people did. The only person the teacher talked to about Henry was the headmaster; they decided to let Henry continue to grow within the shelter provided by the school; he still seemed overly fragile. He began to grasp the pictures in the art books, and he slowly realized that he was not alone.

For the first few weeks they humiliated him in a haphazard way. He had to polish their shoes and buy candy for them in the village. Henry did what they told him. Then came the carnival holiday before Lent; the boys had three days off, as every year, but for most of them it was too far to go home. They were bored, and things for Henry got worse. The monastery had an outbuilding; during the monks’ time it had been the slaughterhouse. There were two rooms inside, with yellow tiles that reached all the way to the ceiling. It had stood empty for many years, but the old chopping blocks were still there, as were the drainage channels for blood in the floor.

He was made to sit naked on a chair, while the three boys circled round him screaming that he was a swine and a thief and a traitor to their community, and human garbage, and ugly. They talked about his acne and his penis. They beat him with wet towels. He was only allowed to move if he was
on his knees, or they made him crawl on his stomach; and he had to keep repeating “I have brought great guilt upon myself.” They forced him into an iron butcher’s barrel and banged on the metal until he almost went deaf. And they discussed what they should do with the pathetic creature. Shortly before supper, they stopped. They were friendly to him and told him to get dressed again; they would continue next weekend but for now they mustn’t be late for supper.

That evening one of them wrote home about how the week had gone, and that he was looking forward to the holidays. He mentioned his marks in English and mathematics. The two others played soccer.

Henry went back to the slaughterhouse again after supper. He stood in the half-darkness and waited, but he didn’t know what he was waiting for. He saw the streetlamp through the window, he thought about his mother and how he’d once eaten chocolate in the car and smeared it on the seat. When she discovered this, she got very angry. He spent the whole afternoon cleaning the car, not just the seats but the exterior too; he even scrubbed the tires with a brush, till the car gleamed and his father complimented him. And then suddenly he took off his clothes, lay down on the floor, and spread his arms wide. He felt the cold rising up into his bones from the flagstones. He closed his eyes and listened to nothing except his own breath. Henry was happy.

“He ascended into heaven and sitteth at the right hand of God the Father Almighty. From thence he shall come to judge the quick and the dead …”

It was the liturgy for Good Friday; attendance at the village
church was compulsory for the boys. Originally it had been a Lady Chapel; now it was a baroque church full of gold, trompe l’oeil marble, angels and Madonnas.