Read Online Guilt by Ferdinand von Schirach - Free Book Online

across. It was an execution. Pätzold could only start a new file and notify his colleagues in Poland. Bathowitz’s death was never solved.

Desire
    She had positioned the chair in front of the window. She liked to drink her tea there, because she could see into the playground. A girl was doing cartwheels while two boys watched. The girl was a little older than the boys. When she fell down, she started to cry. She ran to her mother and showed her the scrape on her elbow. The mother had a bottle of water and a handkerchief and swabbed the wound clean. The girl looked over to the boys as she stood between her mother’s legs holding out her arm to her. It was Sunday. He would be coming back with the children in an hour. She would set the table; friends were coming to visit. It was silent in the apartment. She stared into the playground again without seeing what was happening there.
    They were well. She did everything the way she’d always done it: conversations with her husband about work, shopping in the supermarket, tennis lessons for the children, Christmas with her parents or parents-in-law. She uttered the same sentences she always uttered; she wore the same clothes she always wore. She went to buy shoes with her girlfriends, and went to the movies once a month if she could get a babysitter. She kept up-to-date with exhibitions and plays. Shewatched the news, read the political section of the paper, paid attention to the children, attended parent-teacher days at school. She didn’t do any sports, but she hadn’t put on weight.
    Her husband suited her; she’d always believed that. But it wasn’t his fault. It was nobody’s fault. It had just happened. She hadn’t been able to do anything about it. She could remember every detail of the evening when it all became clear.
    “Are you ill?” he had said. “You look pale.”
    “No.”
    “What’s the matter?”
    “Nothing, darling, I’m just going to go to bed now. It was a long day.”
    Much later, when they were lying in bed, she’d suddenly been unable to breathe. She’d lain awake until morning, rigid with anxiety and guilt, her thighs cramping. She didn’t want it that way, but it had stayed that way. And while making breakfast for the children next day and checking their schoolbags, she’d known she’d never feel any different again: she was totally empty inside. She would have to keep living with that.
    That had been two years ago. They went on living together; he didn’t notice. Nobody noticed. They rarely had sex, and when they did, she was affable with him.
    Gradually everything disappeared, until she was a mere shell. The world became alien to her; she no longer belonged in it. The children laughed, her husband got excited, theirfriends argued—but nothing touched her. She was serious, she laughed, she cried, she comforted—it was all the way it usually was and all on cue. But when things were quiet and she looked at other people in cafés or on the streetcar, she felt none of it had anything to do with her any more.
    At some point she started. She stood for half an hour in front of the shelves with the stockings, went away, came back. Then she grabbed. It didn’t matter what size or what color. She shoved the packs under her coat too hastily and the stockings slid to the floor. She bent down, then ran. Her heart was racing, she could feel the pulse in her neck and stains on her hands. Her whole body was wet. She didn’t feel her legs, she was trembling, then she was past the checkout. Someone bumped into her. Then the ice-cold evening air, and rain. Adrenaline flooded through her; she wanted to scream. Two corners further on, she threw the stockings into a garbage can. Taking off her shoes, she ran home in the rain. Outside her front door she looked up into the sky. The water splashed onto her forehead, her eyes, her mouth. She was alive.
    She only ever stole superfluous things, and she only ever stole when she couldn’t stand it any longer.