Georg Letham (10 page)

“Defend yourself, dear doctor, I don't understand you!” the attorney often said to me when, during the periods of questioning by the examining magistrate, which could go on for hours, he had seen me sitting almost silent, seemingly apathetic, profoundly uninvolved, smoking one cigarette after another and rubbing the dry palms of my hands together. The rubbing produced a strange singed odor, particularly in dry weather. I breathed in this odor, bringing my palms toward my face mechanically. I was barely listening to the aggressive insinuations of the examining magistrate. Perhaps I was reminded of the odor my wife had had about her, which had also struck me as “singed.”

The examining magistrates now suspected that I had not committed my crime intentionally–but the court psychiatrists had not found
in my mental state the necessary evidence of certifiable insanity as defined by law.

Yet my father still, more than ever now, spared no effort in trying to have me committed as a mental patient. But my memories of the psychiatric observation unit were so terrible that I opposed this with all my strength. Better decapitated than decerebrated! Better dead than mad! My brother and my attorney backed me up. My brother's reasoning was based on his naïve belief in miracles; the attorney trusted that any circumstantial evidence would have sufficient shortcomings, and he was constantly warning me just not to say too much. What an unnecessary thing to ask! I had learned restraint. I was doggedly silent during the questioning periods, even though it is generally among the very worst mental torments to be harassed for hours on end by questions rephrased again and again. The judges, police inspectors, and so forth, traded off, I thought. They even set the chaplain at my throat, repeatedly. Events long past, such as the unsuccessful operations, were brought up and sifted through. They were described imprecisely and inaccurately, yet there was no way to object.

A half an hour of it is all right, you close your ears, you busy yourself with something, with voluptuously lingering over a cigarette, say, or with looking at your surroundings, the inkstands, blotters, faces, the sky that can be glimpsed through the poorly cleaned windowpanes. But then it becomes more and more difficult. Not that it would have driven me to a confession as the attorney feared. Not at that time. But the prisoner yearns for peace. Peace, quiet! A lie, some incomplete, equivocal utterance, would stop those probing questions repeated over and over and over once and for all. Or the truth would. The temptation to speak
becomes stronger and stronger. Just so he stops! You bite down with your upper incisors as hard as you can against the lower–a not entirely natural defensive reaction, for, as anyone can verify for himself, maxilla and mandible normally meet in such a way that the lower row of teeth makes contact behind the upper, about three-quarters of a centimeter back, that is, not incisal edge against edge. Who cares? Why does it matter? But this is the kind of thing you work out, dream up, while the inquisitorial examining magistrate's drill buzzes into your brain, to no effect but still excruciatingly.

The observations you can make while getting the third degree in your chair are limited–silly ones of no scientific value. Eventually it became my only goal, in compensation for my loss of freedom, to make it through the many examinations without confessing, and without lying, either. For any lie would have turned into a confession. I have always had a sense of logic and coherence and I would not have been able to sustain an internally flawed structure. The facts were so very solid. Even though it was
my
crime!

The great difference in age between my wife and me, the marriage that had been contracted largely for financial reasons, the will benefiting myself, the insurance enriching the surviving spouse, with me needing those riches so very much and my wife almost not at all, my alleged propensity toward acts of cruelty, the outbursts of violent, ruthless temperament, and above all the direct evidence of my crime, Toxin Y, which on the fateful day I had taken from the locked reagent cabinet in the laboratory. I could have brought it to my apartment only by deliberate plan. My wife's sudden death showing signs of intravascular coagulation, the strokelike collapse. My father's sudden flight, etc., etc.

The gears meshed tooth for tooth, in fact they meshed too well.

I did not speak. They made me stand now. But I looked at the gentlemen and was silent. The gentlemen looked at me and were doubtful. At the end of the presentation of evidence, the examining magistrates and later the jury too had their doubts about the “truth,” because it seemed just too simple! So this is how it was. Serious, but not hopeless.

I might still have been able to save myself after all, it is at least possible, if only I had been able to enlist people's sympathy. But I was not. I breathed a sigh of relief every time I was back in my cell after the interrogations. They were terrible, especially when I was dragged out of bed and marched off for questioning.

Over the long term it was not entirely easy for me to carry on extended conversations with my brother about things of less direct concern to him or to me than my crime and its consequences. But even where my crime was concerned I had nothing enlightening to tell him, although he was waiting for something and would have been overjoyed if I had told him,
lied
to him, that I was innocent, that it was all just a misunderstanding or heaven knows what. I couldn't! I couldn't!

He came to see me shortly before my trial. He brought me some clean laundry and put the dirty laundry in a briefcase. At the end of his long visit, during which I had said nothing serious or to the point for many hours, I went to signal the turnkey to let him out as he stood at the door (I have already said that visitation was very humanely administered in my case, in marked contrast to the period following the verdict). I saw that his hands, clasped over the shabby briefcase stuffed with clothes, were perspiring heavily and trembling violently. He had lowered his eyelids, his mouth was half open. The light from the bare electric bulb on the ceiling of the cell glinted on his thick, dark blond, clean brush cut, the style favored by so many good petty officials.

He wanted to tell me something, perhaps give me a word of advice, or perhaps he wanted to slip me a sacramental charm for my trial–to this day I do not know. He had always been very devout–like my father–and yet devout in a way quite unlike the nasty old man. It was only now, when I was in my fortieth, he in his forty-third year, that we had gotten to know one another. But he said nothing more, and I too was silent. When the guard's footsteps were audible in the flagstoned corridor (it had never been so late before), I told him he would hear something good from me yet. His eyes lit up, he spread his arms, the briefcase fell to the floor with a smack. But he did not embrace me, nor did we say anything more. But it seemed that he left me consoled.

Was it not a topsy-turvy world in which, on the eve of a man's trial, one in which his life is at stake, he consoles his older brother, instead of conversely? Though the “consolation” I offered consisted in something entirely material. The original medicine for “loving hearts”–money. It was the first time I had ever given someone a present of any magnitude, and the first time I had had anything to do with a person without making him the subject of an experiment. For my financial status had changed entirely as the result of my wife's death. To be sure, I had not become her heir. Whether I was condemned or was acquitted (but how could I be acquitted?), in no event would the tiniest fraction of
her
assets come into my possession. But the insurance was a different matter. I asked my attorney, and he agreed. The insurance policy dealt with the claims of the survivor, but nowhere in its many paragraphs were there any particulars about the circumstances under which one spouse became the survivor. The company could sue, of course. But my claim was incontrovertible. I had not taken out the policy. So there could not be anything “immoral” about the policy, whether I was a criminal
now or not. I, or, in case I was convicted, my designated assignee, would have to come into effective possession of that very large sum. On the evening before the first day of the trial, I drafted a will, worded to be simultaneously a deed of gift. In it I named my brother and his children as my heirs. I could assume now that they would receive this inheritance after my “demise” under any circumstances. Even if I was sentenced to deportation or a relatively lengthy prison term, they would immediately come into possession of the money.

On the night before the trial, I slept like a log.

The proceedings went as I had expected. For the murder of my wife, committed by poisoning, I was sentenced to hard labor for life in C. All the facts of my life were regarded as incriminating, with the exception of my zealous service on the military hygiene task force during the war. To this latter fact I owe the decision not to impose the death penalty. I will not recount here all the phases of the trial, which was, I might note, at no point dramatic, at best theatrical sometimes. What would be the point of bringing my stepdaughter from the wings to pointedly ask of the assembled court, “How can I live without my mama?” or my son-in-law to ball his neatly gloved fists and threaten to spring at me, at the man, that is, whose crime had brought him a fortune of millions? What would be accomplished by repeating my concierge's statements about my private life, or the account of a full-bearded, stammering, dark-spectacled department head from the Pathology Institute speaking evasively about my scientific work and, when pressed by the prosecuting attorney, ascribing to me (a) amateurish abilities and knowledge; (b) erratic interest in my scientific experiments–excessive enthusiasm
alternating with laziness; and (c) a dark, withdrawn cast of mind in our personal dealings, something I had never thought I had? What would that prove?

It was certainly of greater consequence that my father, at that time long retired from the civil service and in every respect his own master, scorned to meet me face-to-face in the courtroom or testify for or against me. He gave evidence by proxy only, asserting his right to refuse to answer questions as a witness (did he have that right?).

But what was most painful for me was the fact that I did not see my brother, either among the witnesses or among the spectators. He had hardly figured in my past, but his role in my present was immense. I could not understand why he had not appeared.

I asked my attorney, who was astonished at my “impatience.” Perhaps I was less “criminal,” a person of lesser caliber, than he had assumed. He thought I must surely have had other worries.

Anyway he soon lost interest in me after the verdict. Though he did initiate the obligatory formal appeals procedure, clearly nothing could be expected from this step. He now came to the prison only rarely. All my visits were much more stringently monitored now, I wore the prescribed costume, I was subject to prison discipline, made my circuit of the yard, hands folded behind my back, on Sunday I heard (or did not hear) Mass, and time passed. The number of letters I could send was regulated, as was my activity, my cell had to be kept far tidier–but my psychological paralysis still had not entirely resolved. This circumstance was preventing me from regaining clear, responsible consciousness.

When I came from the mental ward to the prison, I was like someone entering a monastery after a terrible catastrophe. I wanted peace and
quiet above all (or the death of the spirit); freedom was secondary. The import of a “sentence” had not yet dawned on me.

But the tedium gradually became very oppressive. I applied to the prison administration for work as a clerk. My request went completely unacknowledged. Perhaps I had not submitted it to the right office. The chaplain had the most influence on the premises, but I had never dignified his driveling missionary efforts with a response. Was I to bare my heart and my innermost motivations to
him
, when I had not bared them to my father, my brother, my attorney? But perhaps I had underestimated how helpful and also how dangerous he could be. It was on him that the type and quantity of reading material allowed to fall into my hands, classified by “level,” depended. Any institution allows for small but over time very significant acts of preferential and discriminatory treatment. There will be loopholes in “house rules” seemingly covering every detail: unpleasant severities for this person, compensatory, palliative benefits for that one.

An intellectually responsible person bears up under solitary confinement, isolation, being alone with himself, quite differently from an intellectually lazy one. But–this was my good fortune–at that time I was not remotely among the intellectually living. Only very slowly did my past, from childhood on, begin to come to life in me. I had become a gloomy monk without a monastery and without belief. It took a long time for me to recall, bit by bit, my younger self, my childhood, the crucial experiences of my youth, my father, the house that had been my home.

I had often been sleepless before my crime. Also when I was in the observation ward among the mentally ill. But after that, even during the trial, I became hypersomniac, always tired, apathetic–heavy limbs,
dull thoughts, no will, no pain–in a word, paralyzed. Hence, too, my yawning during the final statements. It honestly was not bravado, not a cynical gesture.

The date of our upcoming little cruise was uncertain. We communicated with one another as prisoners do everywhere. It was important to many to maintain contact with the outside world so that they could put their private affairs in order before they were deported to C., receive gift parcels, amass as much money as possible, and, as its possession was indispensable but forbidden, find ways to smuggle it onto the ship and to C.