Guilt by Ferdinand von Schirach Read Free Book Online

and body. The stranger picked up his towel and left the sauna without saying a word. They stayed behind in the heat.

    First they experimented in public saunas, then in swinger clubs, and finally they advertised on the Internet. They established rules: no violence, no love, no encounters at home. They would stop it all if either of them started to feeluncomfortable. They never stopped once. At the beginning he was the one who wrote the copy, then she took over; they posted masked photos on websites. After four years they had it down to a science. They’d found a discreet country hotel. There they would meet men on weekends who’d answered their ads. He said he was making his wife available. They thought it was a game, but after so many encounters it wasn’t a game any more, it had become a part of them. His wife was still a lawyer, she was still radiant and unapproachable, but on weekends she became an object used by other people. That was how they wanted it. It had simply presented itself; there was no explanation.

    The name in the e-mail had meant nothing to him, nor could he connect the photo with anyone; he had stopped looking at the photos the men sent a long time ago. His wife had written back to the man and now he was standing in front of them in the hotel reception area. Paulsberg knew him fleetingly from school thirty-five years before. They had had nothing to do with each other there. He was in the parallel class. They sat on the barstools in the lobby and told each other the things people who’ve been at school together always tell each other; they talked about former teachers, the friends they’d both known, and tried to ignore the situation. But it didn’t get any better. The other man ordered whiskey instead of beer and spoke too loudly. Paulsberg knew the firm he worked for; he was in the same business. The three of them ate dinner together, and the other man drank too much. He flirted with Paulsberg’s wife, saying shewas young and beautiful and Paulsberg was to be envied, and he kept on drinking. Paulsberg wanted to leave. She began to talk about sex and about the men who sent her pictures and whom they met. At a certain point she laid her hand on the other man’s hand, and they went to the room they always booked.
    While the other man was having sex with his wife, Paulsberg sat on the sofa. He looked at the picture that hung over the bed: a young woman standing on the seashore. The artist had painted her from behind, in a blue-and-white bathing suit of the kind worn back in the twenties. She must be beautiful, he thought. At some point she would turn around, smile at the artist, and they would go home together. Paulsberg thought about the fact that they had been married for eight years now.
    Later, when they were alone in the car, neither of them said a word. She stared out of the passenger window into the darkness until they reached home. During the night he went to the kitchen to drink a glass of water, and when he came back he saw the display on her phone light up.
    She had been taking Prozac for a long time. She thought she was dependent on it and never left the house without the green-and-white pills. She didn’t know why she satisfied men. Sometimes in the night, when the house was still and Paulsberg was asleep and she couldn’t stand the bright green numbers on her alarm clock, she got dressed and went out into the garden. She would lie down on one of the lounge chairs by the pool and look up at the sky, waiting for the feeling that she’d known ever since her father died. Shecould hardly bear it. There were billions of solar systems in the Milky Way and billions of Milky Ways. And in between, nothing but cold and the void. She had lost control.

    Paulsberg had long since forgotten about the other man. He was at the annual association conference in Cologne, standing at the buffet in the breakfast room, when the man called his name. Paulsberg turned around.
    Suddenly the world slowed down