Free Guilt by Ferdinand von Schirach

breasts and then was ashamed and said, “I’ve lost all my teeth.” He tried to smile. She nodded in a friendly way. They sat at the table for twenty minutes and didn’t utter another word. The officer was familiar with this; it often happened that prisoner and visitor had nothing to say to each other. When the officer said that visiting time was over she stood up, leaned forward quickly again, and whispered in the old man’s ear, “Hassan is the father of my child.” He smelled her perfume, and felt her hair on his old face. She blushed. That was all. Then she left and he was taken back to his cell. He sat on his bed and stared at his hands with their age spots and scars, he thought about Jana and the baby in her stomach, he thought about how warm and safe it was in there, and he knew what he had to do.

    When Jana got home, Hassan was asleep. She undressed, lay down beside him and felt his breath on the back of her neck.She loved this man whom she couldn’t make sense of. He was different from the boys in her village in Poland, he was grown-up, and his skin seemed to be made of velvet.
    Later, when he woke up for a moment, she told him the old man wouldn’t testify against him; he could stop worrying. But he had to do something for him, buy him new teeth, she’d already spoken to a social worker who could take care of it. No one would find out. She was all worked up and talking too fast. Hassan stroked her stomach till she fell asleep.

    “Does your client wish to make a statement about the men behind this? If so, the court could consider sparing him any further pretrial detention.” I had taken on the defense on a pro bono basis and applied for a review of his remand. Everything had been negotiated with the court; the man would be released. It was not a complicated set of proceedings. The police had found two hundred grams of heroin in the apartment. Worse still: the old man had had a knife in his pocket. The law calls this “trafficking with a weapon”; the minimum sentence—the same as for manslaughter—is five years. The intention of the law is to protect officers from attack. The old man had to provide the name of the actual perpetrator: it seemed to be his only chance. But he remained silent. “In which case pretrial detention will continue,” said the judge, shaking his head.
    ——
    The old man was happy. The Polish girl must not have her baby alone. That’s more important than me, he thought, and even as he was thinking it he knew that he’d won something distinct from—and more important than—his freedom.

    The trial began four months later. They fetched the old man from his cell and led him to the courtroom. They had to pause for a moment in front of the Christmas tree. It was standing in the main corridor of the prison, as enormous as it was foreign, the electric candles reflected in the decorative balls which hung in orderly gradation, the largest ones at the foot, the smaller ones above. The electric cable from the bright red drum was attached to the floor with black-and-yellow warning stickers. There are safety precautions for things like that.
    It rapidly became clear to the judges that the old man could not be the owner of the drugs; he simply didn’t have the money for that. Nonetheless, what was at issue was the five-year minimum term. No one wanted to sentence him to something that high—it would have been unjust—but there seemed to be no way out.
    During a recess something strange happened: the old man was eating some bread and cheese, which he was cutting with a plastic knife into tiny little pieces. As I was looking at him he apologized: he didn’t have his teeth any more and had to cut up everything he ate into these little morsels. The rest of it was simple. That was why, indeed it wasthe only reason why, he had had the knife in his pocket. He needed it in order to be able to eat. There was a decision handed down by the Federal Court that said “trafficking with a