Guilt (8 page)

She had been taking Prozac for a long time. She thought she was dependent on it and never left the house without the green-and-white pills. She didn’t know why she satisfied men. Sometimes in the night, when the house was still and Paulsberg was asleep and she couldn’t stand the bright green numbers on her alarm clock, she got dressed and went out into the garden. She would lie down on one of the lounge chairs by the pool and look up at the sky, waiting for the feeling that she’d known ever since her father died. She
could hardly bear it. There were billions of solar systems in the Milky Way and billions of Milky Ways. And in between, nothing but cold and the void. She had lost control.

Paulsberg had long since forgotten about the other man. He was at the annual association conference in Cologne, standing at the buffet in the breakfast room, when the man called his name. Paulsberg turned around.

Suddenly the world slowed down and became viscous. Later he would remember every image, the butter floating in ice water, the colorful yogurt cartons, the red napkins and the slices of sausages on the white hotel plates. Paulsberg thought the other man looked like one of those blind amphibians he’d seen as a child in caves in Yugoslavia. He’d caught one once back then, and carried it all the way back to the hotel, wanting to show his mother. When he opened his hand, it was dead. The other man’s head was shaved bald; watery eyes, thin eyebrows, thick lips, almost blue. The lips had kissed his wife. The other man’s tongue moved in slow motion, pushing against the inner surface of his front teeth as he said his name. Paulsberg saw the colorless threads of spittle, the pores on his tongue, the long thin hairs in his nostrils, the larynx pressing hard against the reddened skin from the inside. Paulsberg didn’t understand what the other man was saying. He saw the girl in the blue-and-white bathing suit from the picture in the hotel; she turned around towards him, smiled, then pointed to the thin man kneeling over his wife. Paulsberg felt his heartbeat stop; he imagined
himself falling over, dragging the tablecloth down with him. He saw himself lying dead between the sliced oranges, the white sausages, and the cream cheese. But he didn’t fall. It was only a moment. He nodded at the other man.

There were all the usual speeches at the association meeting. They looked at presentations, and there was filter coffee out of silver vacuum jugs. After a few hours nobody was listening any more. It was nothing special.

That afternoon the other man came to his room. They drank the beer he’d brought with him. He also had some cocaine and offered Paulsberg a line; he tipped the powder onto the glass table and inhaled it through a rolled-up banknote. When he went to the bathroom to wash his hands, Paulsberg followed him. The other man was standing at the basin, bent over to wash his face. Paulsberg saw his ears and the yellowed edge of his white shirt collar.

He couldn’t help himself.

Now Paulsberg was sitting on the bed. The hotel room was like a thousand others he had slept in. Two slabs of chocolate in the brown minibar, vacuum-packed peanuts, yellow plastic bottle opener. A smell of disinfectant, liquid soap in the bathroom, the sign on the tiles saying please support the environment by reusing your towels.

He closed his eyes and thought about the horse. He had
walked across the bridge that morning and then to the stone steps leading to the water meadows by the Rhine in the early mist that was rising from the river. And suddenly there it was, right in front of him, steam coming off its coat, its nostrils soft and bright red.

He would have to call her at some point. She would ask him when he was coming back. She would tell him about her day, the people in the office, the cleaning lady who banged around the garbage cans too noisily, and all the other things that made up her life. He would say nothing about the other man. And then they would hang up and try to go on with their lives.

Paulsberg heard the other man in the bathroom, groaning. He threw the cigarette into a half-full glass of water, took his traveling bag, and left the room. When he was paying his bill at reception, he said it would be a good idea for the room to be made up quickly. The girl behind the counter looked at him, but he didn’t say anything else.

They found the other man twenty minutes later. He survived.

Paulsberg had done it with the ashtray in the bathroom.

It was a 1970s piece, thick and heavy, made of dark smoked glass. The medical examiner later categorized it as blunt-force trauma; the edges of the wounds could not be clearly distinguished. The ashtray was identified as the weapon.

Paulsberg had seen the holes in the other man’s head as the blood poured out of them, brighter than he had expected.
He’s not dying, he thought as he kept hitting the skull. He’s bleeding but he’s not dying.

Paulsberg finally jammed the other man in between the bathtub and the toilet and laid him facedown on the toilet lid. He’d wanted to hit him one last time, and raised his arm to strike. The other man’s hair had clumped together; it looked stiff with blood, black wires like pencils on the pale skin of his head. Suddenly Paulsberg found himself thinking about his wife, and the way they’d said goodbye for the first time, in January ten years ago; the sky was made of ice and they’d stood on the road outside the airport, freezing. He thought of her thin shoes in the slush, and of her blue coat with the big buttons, and the way she’d turned up the collar, holding the lapels together with one hand. She’d laughed; she was lonely and beautiful and wounded. After she’d got into the taxi, he’d known she belonged to him.

Paulsberg set the ashtray down on the floor. The officers found it later among the red smears on the tiles. The other man had groaned quietly again as he left. Paulsberg no longer wanted to kill him.

The trial began five months later. Paulsberg was accused of attempted murder. According to the prosecutor, he’d tried to kill the man from behind. The indictment stated that cocaine was at issue. The prosecutor couldn’t have known better.

Paulsberg gave no reason for his act and said nothing about the other man. “Call my wife” were his only words to the
policeman after his arrest. Nothing more. The judges were looking for a motive. Nobody simply batters another man in his hotel room. The prosecutor had been unable to find any connection between the men. The psychiatrist said Paulsberg was “absolutely normal”; no drugs were found in his system and nobody believed he’d tried to kill out of sheer bloodlust.

The only person who could have provided the information was the other man. But he kept silent too. The judges couldn’t force him to testify. The police had found cocaine in his pocket and on the glass table; preliminary proceedings had been initiated against him, and this allowed him to remain silent—he could have incriminated himself by making any statement.

Of course judges do not have to know the motives of a defendant in order to be able to sentence him. But they want to know why people do what they do. And only when they understand can they punish the defendant in a way that is commensurate with his guilt. If that understanding is lacking, the sentence will almost always be longer. The judges didn’t know that Paulsberg wished to protect his wife. She was a lawyer; he had committed a crime. Her office had not yet fired her: no one can do anything about an insane husband. But the partners in the law firm would not be able to accept the truth about all the unknown men, and so she would have been unable to continue in her job. Paulsberg left the decision up to his wife. She was to do what she thought was right.

——

She appeared as a witness without legal counsel. She seemed fragile, too delicately spun a creature to belong with Paulsberg. The presiding judge instructed her that she had the right to remain silent. Nobody believed anything new was going to come out now in this trial. But then she started to speak and it all changed.

In almost every jury trial there is this one moment when everything suddenly becomes clear. I thought she was going to talk about the unknown men. But she told a different story. She spoke for forty-five minutes without interruption, she was clear, explicit, and did not contradict herself. She said she had had an affair with the other man and Paulsberg had found out. He had wanted to separate; he was crazed with jealousy. The guilt was hers, not his. She said her husband had found the film she and her lover had made. She handed the bailiff a DVD. Paulsberg and she had often made similar films. This one came from the encounter with the other man. The video camera had been on a tripod next to the bed. The public was asked to leave, as we had to view it. You can find such films on countless sites on the Internet. There was no doubt: it was the other man who was having sex with her. The prosecutor observed Paulsberg while the film was running. He remained calm.

The prosecutor had made yet another mistake. Our criminal law is over 130 years old. It is an intelligent law. Sometimes things don’t go the way the perpetrator wants. His revolver is loaded. He has five bullets. He approaches a woman, he shoots, he wants to kill her. He misses four times, only a single shot grazes her arm. Then he’s standing
right in front of her. He pushes the barrel of the revolver against her stomach, he cocks it, he sees the blood running down her arm, and he sees her fear. Perhaps he has second thoughts. A bad law would sentence the man for attempted murder; an intelligent law wants to save the woman. Our criminal code says that he can step back from his attempt to murder without incurring punishment. Which is to say: if he stops now, if he doesn’t kill her, his only punishment will be for endangering her by inflicting bodily injury—not for attempted murder. So it’s up to him: the law will be friendly to him if he does the right thing at this point and lets his victim live. Professors call this “the golden bridge.” I never liked this expression. The things that go on inside people at such moments are too complicated, and a golden bridge belongs more in a Chinese garden. But the idea behind the law is right.

Paulsberg had stopped beating in the other man’s skull. At the end, he no longer wanted to kill him. This meant that he stepped back from attempted murder; the judges could only convict him of endangering someone by inflicting bodily injury.