Free Guilt by Ferdinand von Schirach Page A

weapon” didn’t apply if the knife was clearly intended for another use.
    The business with the teeth was perhaps an odd explanation, but this was also the last trial of the year. Everyone was relaxed, during the recesses the DA was talking about the presents he hadn’t yet bought, and we were all wondering if it was going to snow. Finally the old man was given a two-year suspended sentence, and he was released from prison.
    I wondered where he would spend Christmas; the lease on his apartment had been terminated and he had no one he could go to. I stood on one of the higher landings and watched him walk slowly down the stairs.

    On the twenty-fourth of December, the old man was lying in the hospital. The operation wasn’t due to take place until January 2, but the clinic had insisted that he go directly from jail to hospital. They were afraid of an alcoholic relapse. The social worker had organized everything, and when the old man was first told of it, he didn’t want to do it. But then he heard that someone called Jana, or so the social worker said, had already paid for his new teeth at the clinic. Because they came from her he pretended she was a relative and agreed.
    The hospital bed was clean, he’d showered and shaved, and they’d given him a gown with a yellow pattern on it. There was a Santa Claus made of chocolate on his night-stand. Its chest was squashed in and it looked oddly lopsided.He liked that. He’s just like me, he thought. He was somewhat afraid of the operation; they were going to take a piece of bone from his hip. But he was excited about the new teeth. In a few months he would finally be able to eat normally again. As he went to sleep, he no longer dreamed of the undershirt under his bed. He dreamed of Jana, her hair, her smell, her stomach, and he was happy.
    Just over a mile away Jana was sitting on the sofa telling her sleeping baby the Christmas story. She had cooked borscht for Hassan. It was a lot of work, but she knew how to do it; after her father died, that was how her mother had kept the little family’s heads above water in Karpacz in southwestern Poland. Borscht made with brisket of beef and beets for the tourists who hiked over the mountain and were hungry. That had been her childhood, her mother standing out in the cold every day with her pots and her Bunsen burners among the other women, as they all squeezed the last of the goodness out of the vegetables and then threw them behind them into the snow. Jana told the baby about the red snow you could see from a long way away, and the fine smell of the soup and the gas burners. She thought about her village there in the mountains, and her family, and she told stories about Christmas, the yellow lights, roast geese, and Uncle Malek, who owned the bakery and certainly had baked the biggest cake again today.
    Hassan was not coming back, she knew that. But he had been there with her when the baby came, he had held her hand and wiped the sweat from her forehead. He had stayed calm when she screamed, he was always calm when thingscame right down to it, and she believed nothing would happen to her as long as he was there. But she had also always sensed that he would go; he was far too young. She could only live in peace if she loved him from a distance. Suddenly she felt alone, she missed the village and her family, she missed it all so much it hurt, and she decided to take the train to Poland the next morning.
    Hassan was driving through the city. He couldn’t go see her; he didn’t know what to say. He was engaged to another woman in Lebanon; he had to marry her, his parents had arranged it while he was still a child. Jana was a good woman; she had saved him from prison; she was clear and direct in every way. He slowly worked himself into a fury, at himself and his family and the world in general. And then he saw him.
    The man was just coming out of a shop where he had been buying his last presents. He owed Hassan twenty thousand euros