Guilt

The first of August was too hot, even for the time of year. The little town was celebrating its six-hundredth anniversary, the air smelled of candied almonds and candy floss, and greasy smoke rose from the grills to settle in people’s hair. There were all the stands you usually find at annual fairs: a carousel had been put up, you could go on the bumper cars or shoot an air gun. The older people spoke of “the Emperor’s weather” and the “dog days,” and wore bright-colored pants and open shirts.

They were respectable men with respectable jobs: insurance salesman, car dealer, skilled carpenter. You would have no cause to find fault with them. Almost all of them were married, they had children, they paid their taxes, their credit was good, and they watched the news on television every evening. They were perfectly normal men, and nobody would have believed that something like this could happen.

They played in a brass band. Nothing exciting, no big events, Queen of the Grape Harvest, annual Rifle Club outing, Fire Department picnic. They had once played for the president
of the Republic, out in his garden; there had been cold beer and sausages afterwards. The photo now hung in their meeting hall; the head of state himself was nowhere to be seen, but someone had stuck the newspaper article up next to it to prove it was all real.

They sat on the stage with their wigs and their fake beards. Their wives had made up their faces with white powder and rouge. The mayor had said that everything was to look dignified today “in honor of the town.” But things didn’t look dignified. They were sweating in front of the black curtain and they’d had too much to drink. Their shirts were sticking to their bodies, the air smelled of sweat and alcohol, and there were empty glasses between their feet. They played nonetheless. And if they hit false notes it didn’t matter because the audience had drunk too much too. In the pauses between the pieces they played there was applause and more beer. When they took a break, a radio announcer acted as a DJ. The wooden floor in the front of the curtain was giving off clouds of dust because people were dancing despite the heat, so the musicians went back behind the curtain to drink.

The girl was seventeen and still had to ask permission at home if she wanted to stay the night at her boyfriend’s. In a year she would sit her school-leaving exams, then she would be off to study medicine in Berlin or Munich. She was looking forward to it. She was pretty, with blue eyes and an open face, and she laughed as she served the drinks. The tips were
good; she wanted to travel across Europe with her boyfriend during the summer vacation.

It was so hot that she was only wearing a T-shirt with her jeans, and sunglasses, and a green hair band. One of the musicians came out in front of the curtain, waved at her, and pointed to the glass in his hand. She crossed the dance floor and climbed the four steps up to the stage, balancing the tray that was too heavy for her small hands. She thought the man looked funny with his wig and his white cheeks. He smiled, she remembered that; he smiled and his teeth looked yellow against the white of his face. He pushed the curtain aside, letting her into where the other men were sitting on two benches, all thirsty. For a moment her white T-shirt gleamed with an odd, bright flash in the sun; her boyfriend always liked it when she wore it. Then she slipped. She fell backwards, it didn’t hurt, but the beer spilled all over her. Her T-shirt became transparent; she wasn’t wearing a bra. She felt embarrassed, so she laughed, and then she looked at the men, who had suddenly gone silent and were staring at her. The first man reached out a hand towards her, and it all began. The curtain was closed again, the loudspeakers were blaring a Michael Jackson song, and the rhythm on the dance floor became the rhythm of the men, and later nobody could explain anything.

The police came too late. They didn’t believe the man who’d called from the public phone booth. He’d said he was one of the band but didn’t give his name. The policeman who took
the call told his colleagues, but they thought it was a joke. Only the youngest of them thought he should maybe take a look, and went across the street to the fairground.

It was dark and dank under the stage. She was lying there naked in the mud, wet with sperm, wet with urine, wet with blood. She couldn’t speak, and she didn’t move. She had two broken ribs, a broken left arm, and a broken nose; splinters from the glasses and the beer bottles had gashed her back and arms. When the men had finished, they had lifted one of the boards and thrown her under the stage. They had urinated on her as she lay down there. Then they had gone out front again. They were playing a polka as the policemen pulled the girl out of the muck.

“Defense is war, a war for the rights of the accused.” The sentence appeared in the little book with the red plastic cover that I always carried around with me back then. It was the
Defense Attorney’s Pocket Reference
. I had just sat my second set of exams and been admitted to the bar a few weeks earlier. I believed in that sentence. I thought I knew what it meant.

A friend I had studied with called up to ask me if I’d like to work with him on a defense; they still needed two lawyers. Of course I wanted to; it was a big case, the papers were full of it, and I thought this was going to be my new life.

In a trial, no one has to prove his innocence. No one has to defend himself; only the prosecutor has to provide
proofs. And that was also our strategy: all of them were simply to keep silent. We didn’t have to do anything more than that.

DNA analysis had only recently been admitted at trial. The policemen had secured the girl’s clothing at the hospital and stuffed it into a blue garbage bag. They put the bag in the trunk of their patrol car, to be delivered to the medical examiner. They thought they were doing everything right. The car stood in the sun for hour after hour, and the heat caused fungi and bacteria to grow under the plastic wrapping; they altered the traces of DNA and no one could analyze them any more.

The doctors saved the girl, but destroyed the last of the evidence. As she lay on the operating table, her skin was washed. The traces the perpetrators had left in her vagina, her rectum, and on her body were rinsed away; nobody was thinking of anything except her emergency care. Much later the police and the medical examiner from the state capital tried to locate the waste from the operating room. At some point they gave up: at 3 a.m. they sat in the hospital cafeteria in front of pale brown cups of filtered coffee; they were tired, and had no explanations. A nurse told them they ought to go home.

The young woman couldn’t name her attackers; she couldn’t tell one from another; under the makeup and the wigs they all looked alike. At the lineup she didn’t want to look, and when she did manage to overcome her aversion, she couldn’t identify any of them. Nobody knew which of the men had called the police, but it was clear that it had been one of them. Which meant that any one of them could
have been the caller. Eight of them were guilty, but each of them could also be the one innocent party.

He was gaunt. Angular face, gold-framed glasses, prominent chin. At that time, smoking was still permitted in the visitors’ rooms in prisons; he smoked one cigarette after the other. As he was talking, spittle built up in the corners of his mouth which he wiped away with a handkerchief. He had already been detained for ten days when I saw him for the first time. The situation was as new for me as it was for him; I gave him too elaborate an explanation of his rights and the relationship between lawyer and client, too much textbook knowledge as a form of insecurity. He talked about his wife and his two children, about his work, and finally about the Funfair. He said it had been too hot that day and they’d drunk too much. He didn’t know why it had happened. That was all he said—it had been too hot. I never asked him if he’d joined in; I didn’t want to know.

The lawyers were staying in the hotel on the town’s market square. In the taproom we discussed the file. There were photos of the young woman, of her maltreated body, of her swollen face. I had never seen anything like this. Her statements were confused, they gave us no clear picture, and on every page of the file you could read fury, the fury of the policemen, the fury of the DA, the fury of the doctors. None of it did any good.

In the middle of the night, the phone rang in my room. All I could hear was the caller’s breathing; he didn’t say a word.
He hadn’t dialed a wrong number. I listened to him until he hung up. It took a long time.

The court was on the same square as the hotel, a classical building with a small flight of steps in front, a celebration of the might of the law. The town was famous for its winepresses, merchants, and the winegrowers who lived there; it was a blessed piece of land, sheltered from all wars. Everything radiated dignity and upright behavior. Someone had planted geraniums on the window ledges of the court.