Ferdinand von Schirach: The Collini Case

Caspar Leinen spent the rest of that Sunday beside a lake in Brandenburg, where he had rented a little house for the summer. He passed the time lying on the landing stage, dozing, watching the yachts and the windsurfers. On the way back he looked in at his chambers again, and now he was listening to the message on his answerphone for the tenth time.

‘Hello, Caspar, this is Johanna. Please call me back right away.’ Then she gave her number, and that was all. He sat down on the floor beside the phone among the boxes, kept pressing the Repeat Message key, leaned his head back against the wall and closed his eyes. It was stuffy in the little room; the air over the city had been stagnant for days.

Johanna’s voice hadn’t changed. It was still soft, the words still a little too slowly spoken, and suddenly it all came back to him: Rossthal, the green grass under the chestnut trees, the smell of summer when he was a boy.

They lay on the flat roof of the nursery-garden shed, looking up at the sky. The roofing felt was warm underneath them; they had put their jackets under their heads. Philipp told him he’d kissed Ulrike, the baker’s daughter.

‘And?’ asked Caspar. ‘Did she let you go any further?’

‘Hmm,’ said Philipp, leaving it an open question.

The Thermos flask of cold tea stood between them in its faded rattan cover. Philipp’s grandfather had brought it back from Africa. They heard the cook calling to them from the terrace of the house, but they stayed put. Here, in the shade of the old trees that Philipp’s great-grandfather had planted, everything moved at a leisurely pace on that late-summer afternoon. If things go on like this I’ll never get to kiss a girl, thought Caspar. He was twelve; Philipp and he went to the same boarding school on Lake Constance.

Caspar was glad he didn’t have to go home in the holidays. His father had inherited some land in Bavaria, part of a forest. He lived alone in a dark forester’s house dating from the seventeenth cetury. The walls were thick, the windows tiny, and there was no central heating. Antlers and stuffed birds hung everywhere. All through his childhood, Caspar had been freezing cold in that house. Both it and his father smelled of soft liquorice in summer – the smell of Ballistol, the oil used for cleaning hunting guns. Ballistol was also used to treat all manner of ailments: it was rubbed on cuts and aching teeth, and even when Caspar had a cough he was given a glass of hot water with some of the oil in it. The only magazine to be found in the house was all about hunting and shooting. The marriage of Caspar’s parents had been a mistake. Four years after the wedding, his mother had petitioned for divorce. His father said, later, it was really just because she couldn’t stand the way he always went around in gumboots. His mother met another man, known at home only as ‘that upstart’ because he wore a watch that had cost more than the annual income from the forest. Caspar’s mother moved to Stuttgart with her new husband and they had two more children. Caspar stayed with his father in the forester’s house until he went to boarding school. He had been ten at the time.

‘OK, I suppose we’d better go in,’ said Philipp. ‘I’m hungry.’

They climbed down from the roof and went over to the house.

‘How about a swim afterwards?’ asked Philipp.

‘I’d rather go fishing,’ said Caspar.

‘Right, fishing’s a better idea. We can grill the fish.’

After the cook had scolded them, and the boys had told her they’d been too far off to hear her calling, there were buttered rolls with ham. As usual, they ate in the kitchen, not upstairs with Philipp’s parents. Caspar liked it down there, where countless white kitchen drawers had writing in black ink on them: SALT, SUGAR, COFFEE, FLOUR, CARAWAY. When the postman came in the morning he sat at the table with the boys and they all looked through the senders’ addresses on the letters and read the postcards before they were taken up to Philipp’s parents.

Every other afternoon Philipp had extra coaching, and Caspar spent that time with Philipp’s grandfather, Hans Meyer, in his office. Sometimes they played chess on a very old board. Meyer was patient with the boy, let him win now and then, and gave him money when he did.

Hans Meyer still ran the family firm. His grandfather had founded the Meyer Works in 1886, and after the Second World War Hans Meyer had built it up into an international concern. The company manufactured all kinds of machinery, as well as surgical instruments, plastic and packaging. At the beginning of the twentieth century Hans Meyer’s father had bought a huge tract of marshy land outside the city. He brought in architects and landscape gardeners from Berlin to drain the site and to lay it out as a park, with paved drives, gravel and woodland paths, lawns, exotic trees and an avenue of chestnuts. The stream was dammed to form three pools, and an artificial island stood in the largest; you reached it over a pale blue Chinese bridge. There was a tennis court with a red-sand surface, an open-air swimming pool, a nursery garden, a guesthouse and a house for the chauffeur and his family. Down in the park a path led past lilac bushes to an orangery with glass panes set in lead frames. The main house was built in 1904, on a small rise; a flight of steps outside led up to a stone terrace with four round columns. Although there were over thirty rooms, with six garages accommodated in the side wings, the house had a natural look and seemed to belong in the landscape. The window shutters were always painted dark green, and so it was known in the family simply as the Green House. It was a well-chosen name in other respects too, for ivy grew all over one side of the house, and behind it stood eight old chestnut trees. The family ate supper under their tall crowns on summer weekends.

Hans Meyer was the only person at Rossthal who had time for the children. He told them how to build tree houses without using nails, and where to find the best worms for fishing bait. Once he gave Philipp and Caspar knives with birch-wood handles. He showed them how to cut whistles with the knives, and the boys imagined using them to defend the family against any burglars who broke in at night. That was the last summer to be all theirs. The grown-ups didn’t bother about them, and they had hardly any concept of time longer than a single day. All that was wrong with their world was that the fish didn’t bite and the girls wouldn’t kiss.

Four years later Caspar met Johanna, Philipp’s sister. He and Philipp were spending all their holidays at Rossthal now. Even at Christmas, it was more fun there than at Caspar’s father’s cold house. It had begun snowing two weeks before the Christmas celebrations began, and now the snow was so deep that the paths in the park looked like mazes when they were cleared. Philipp and Caspar were sitting in front of the tall fireplace in the entrance hall. The family’s three dogs were asleep on the stone floor; they were not allowed in the upper storeys. Philipp was wearing a yellow dressing gown with a plate-sized crest on it; he had found it in a wardrobe in the attic. They were smoking his grandfather’s cigars, looking at the fire and planning what to do over the next few days.

Franz, the family’s chauffeur, had met Johanna at Munich Airport. She came into the hall through a side door, so Philipp couldn’t see her. When Caspar was about to get up she shook her head and put her forefinger to her mouth. Then she crept up behind Philipp’s chair and covered his eyes with her hands.

‘Who am I?’ she asked.

‘No idea,’ said Philipp. ‘No, wait, with those rough hands it’s obviously fat Franz!’ He laughed, took her hands away from his face and came round the chair to give his sister a hug.