Page 81 of Anatomy of a Killer
I give him an honest answer: ‘No.’
Once inside, I hand over my bag, Ludwig his mobile, wallet and car keys. We’re allowed to keep our watches on and we’re only scanned by a detector rather than being searched by hand. Ludwig’s name prevents any of those unpleasantries– he’s a personal guest of the prison governor. Handy for us, but not without its risks. Nobody would have noticed if either of us had something in our coat pockets that the metal detector didn’t pick up.
We’re taken to a special visitors’ room where we wait outside the door until the governor comes. Handshakes all around and Ludwig jokingly enquiring after the man’s handicap. I giggle. It feels like Ludwig’s played them all at tennis or golf.
Then the governor explains how this is going to work. ‘As we discussed, we’ll refrain from posting an officer in the room. But he’ll wait right outside the door. Just in—’
‘Nothing’s going to happen,’ I say. ‘He is still my father, after all.’
‘Of course.’ The governor nods keenly. ‘You have half an hour. If you wish to leave earlier, just knock. The officer will let you out.’
I thank him. Then I turn to Ludwig. ‘For days I’ve been thinking about what to say. I’ve even been practising in front of the mirror.’
Ludwig gives me a hug. ‘You’ll be fine,’ he says, adding that he’ll wait for me in the governor’s office.
The room isn’t any different from the one I met my father in three and a half years ago. The same pale walls, the soft buzzing of the neon lights on the ceiling, the sparse furnishings consisting of a table and two chairs. And yet everything is different. Back then, my father was my father, the person I loved most in the world, who I trusted unfailingly, who I believed to be innocent. Today he’s a convicted killer. And I’m stigmatised.
When we got married, I took Zoe’s surname, which means I’m now Ann Brambach. I’m just a random woman amongst three and a half million people in Berlin. It’s been a long time since the media were interested in me; my face was only in the papers a few times in 2018, around the time of the trial. So it’s completely absurd for me to sometimes think that people are staring at me. And even more absurd that, in spite of everything, I should occasionally find myself envying Nathalie. Seen from the outside, she’s anything but enviable. She’s imprisoned in a psychiatric institution, up to her eyeballs with medication. But internally, it’s possible she’s doing better than I am. Because she took a clear decision: to inhabit her own story, the world behind her closed eyelids. She’s happy there.
I take a seat. My left arm is trembling; I feel sick. Briefly, I fancy I can hear footsteps out in the corridor. Heavy, sluggish footsteps, redolent of evil. I’ve often imagined what my father might look like now, drained by the last few years, illness and himself. Jakob has already warned me that he must have got very thin.
The door opens; I leap up as if conditioned.
He’s dragging his feet, but walking upright.
He must have lost five kilos at least. Ten, maybe.
His hair is almost white. Cut short with a precise parting. He’s got a beard, which I’ve never seen on him before. It suits him, allows him to look respectable, like the captain of a large boat.
However. . . the way he’s moving, his emaciated physique, his thin face that looks grey.
‘My Beetle,’ he says. It’s like a death blow, a command for my tears.
‘I’ll be outside if you need me,’ says the prison officer who brought him in.
‘Thanks,’ my father replies politely. He makes a gesture which I take to be an invitation to sit. He does the same.
I hastily wipe my eyes and clear my throat. ‘Here we are then.’
He nods. ‘Indeed. How do you feel?’
I swallow with difficulty; the back of my chair is hard and digging into me. All the same I try to sit up. My pride, my defiance, my disappointment. For three and a half years, my father has refused to give me an explanation; all my life he’s been deceiving me. If I’m unable to hate him, at the very least I want to make him feel this. He’s still the man who carried me on his shoulders. And he looks so ill. Colon cancer, his death sentence. It might be quick, or he could waste away.
‘I haven’t come to talk about me.’
A smile twitches on one side of his mouth. ‘You must have heard the recordings your friend Jakob Wesseling did. So now you know everything.’
‘I know what happened, yes. And yet, I still don’t understand. On the contrary, it comes across as so banal, despite the barbarity of it all. You wanted to study death, and to do this, you committed murder. What a cliché.’
‘Death is neither banal nor a cliché, Ann. It’s humanity’s last great unanswered question. Think of your mother. Did you never want to know what she saw or felt at the end, after her face was stuck in a scream?’
I shake my head. ‘She was in pain, Dad. That’s all. She wanted to scream in pain, but she didn’t have the strength to.’
‘That’s what you’re guessing, Ann. But you don’t know.’
‘What about you? Do you know now? Do you? You’ve destroyed dozens of lives to find out this answer. What good does it do, Dad? All of us are going to die one way or another. And for this reason alone, it makes no difference if it’s heaven, hell or just the big black void waiting for us at the end, because there’s nothing we can do to change it. We’re born to live and then, at some point, to die. That’s nature.’
‘No, Ann, that’s blind acceptance. And man is definitely not created for that. We search for meaning in our existence, an intended purpose. Look at yourself– you’re the best example of this. You listened to Wesseling’s recordings and yet you still came today. Because for you, it’s not enough to know what happened when, where and how. You can’t be done with this until you see some meaning in the whole thing.’
