Free Crime by Ferdinand von Schirach

stranger to her; she used it like a tool. She wanted to survive, even if she didn’t know for what. She didn’t feel herself anymore.
    He sat on the sidewalk every day. She saw him as she got into men’s cars, and she saw him in the early mornings when she went home. He had placed a plastic bowl in front of him, into which people sometimes threw money. She got used to the sight of him; he was always there. He smiled at her, and after a few weeks, she smiled back.
    When winter set in, Irina took him a blanket from a secondhand shop. He was delighted. “I’m Kalle,” he said, and let his dog sit on the blanket, wrapping him up and scratching behind his ears, while he himself stayed squatting on some newspapers. Kalle wore thin trousers; he froze even as he kept the dog warm. Irina’s legs were trembling and she hurried on. She sat down on a bench around the corner, pulled up her knees, and buried her head. She was nineteen years old, and for a whole year no one had hugged her. She cried for the first time since that afternoon back home.
    When his dog was run over, she was standing on the opposite sidewalk. She saw Kalle running across the street in slow motion and dropping to his knees in front of the car. He lifted up the dog. The driver yelled after him, but Kalle walked down the middle of the street with the dog in his arms, and he did not turn around. Irina ran after him. She understood his pain, and suddenly she knew that they were soul mates. They buried the dog together in the city park, and Irina held Kalle’s hand.
    That’s how it all began. At some point, they decided to try to make a go of it together. Irina moved out of her filthy boardinghouse and they found a one-room apartment. They bought a washing machine and a TV, and then gradually everything else. It was Kalle’s first apartment. He had run away from home at sixteen, and since then he’d been living on the street. Irina cut his hair, bought him pants, T-shirts, pullovers, and two pairs of shoes. He found a job distributing brochures and helped out in the evenings at a bar.
    Now men came to the house and Irina didn’t have to walk the streets anymore. When they were alone again in the mornings, they got their bedding out of the cupboard, lay down, and held each other tight, lying together, naked, silent, motionless, listening only to each other’s breathing, and shutting out the world. They never spoke about the past.
    Irina was afraid of the dead fat man, and she was afraid of being arrested on illegal immigration charges and then deported. She decided to go to her girlfriend’s and wait for Kalle there. She grabbed her purse and ran down the stairs, leaving her cell phone forgotten on the kitchen table.
    Kalle had ridden his bike with its little trailer to the industrial zone, as he did every day, but today the man who parceled out the work said he had nothing for him. It took Kalle a half hour to get home. As he took the elevator up, he thought he heard the sound of Irina’s shoes clacking on the stairs. When he unlocked the door to the apartment, she was going out the front door downstairs, on her way to the bus stop.
    Kalle sat on one of the two wooden chairs and stared at the dead fat man and his blindingly white undershirt. The breakfast rolls he had brought with him were lying on the floor. It was summer, and the room was warm.
    Kalle tried to concentrate. Irina would be put in prison and then she’d have to go back to where she’d come from. Maybe the fat man had hit her—she never did things without a reason. Kalle thought about the day they had taken the train out to the country. They had lain down in a meadow in the summer heat, and Irina had looked like a child. He had been happy. Now he thought he was going to have to pay. And Kalle thought about his dog. Sometimes he went to the place in the park to see if anything had changed.
    Half an hour later, Kalle knew he’d made a mistake. He had stripped down to his undershorts and