across from the courthouse, that they certainly did not want to see Konrad punished too harshly, and their son would no doubt have concurred. “We see ourselves as completely free of anything that might amount to a desire for revenge,” Frau Stremplin said.
If I had been there simply on a professional basis, as a journalist, I would have criticized the reduced finding of manslaughter as “too lenient,” if not as a “miscarriage of justice.” As it was, leaving my obligation as a journalist aside and concentrating entirely on my son, who received his sentence of seven years in juvenile detention without emotion, I was horrified. Lost years! He will be twenty-four if he has to serve the entire time. The daily contact with criminals and genuine right-wingers will harden him, and once he is freed, he will presumably commit another crime and land in jail again. No! This verdict cannot be accepted.
But Konny refused to take advantage of the opportunity to appeal that his lawyer pointed out to him. I can only repeat what he is supposed to have said to Gabi: “Hard to believe that I got only seven years. They slapped eighteen years on the Jew Frankfurter, though of course he served only nine and a half…”
He didn't want to see me before he was taken away. And while still in the courtroom, he hugged not his mother but his grandmother, who reached only to his chest, even in her spike heels. When he had to go, he glanced around one more time; perhaps he was looking for Davids or Wolfgangs parents and realized they were missing.
When we found ourselves standing outside the regional courthouse on Dremmlerplatz, and I could finally light up a cigarette, it turned out that Mother was furious. She had taken off the fox, and with that neck decoration for official occasions she had also dropped her stilted High German: “You can't call that justice!” Furiously she ripped the cigarette out of my mouth and stomped on it, as a substitute for something else she wanted to destroy, yelled for a while, and then talked herself into a frenzy: “That's a crime! There's no justice anymore. They should've nailed me, not the boy. No, no, I was the one who gave him that computer thinga-mabob, and then gave him that gun last Easter, because they personally threatened my Konradchen, them skinheads. One time he came home bleeding — they'd beaten him up. But he didn't cry, not one bit. No, no. I had that in my drawer for ages. Bought it right after the changeover at the Russki mart. Real cheap. But in court not a soul asked me where the thing came from…”
The do not enter sign he posted at the very beginning. He strictly enjoined me from speculating about Konny's thoughts, from creating scenarios based on what he might be thinking, perhaps even writing down what might be going on in his head and presenting it as suitable for quoting.
He said, “No one knows what he was thinking and is thinking now. Every mind is sealed, not just his. A no- man's-land for word hunters. No point to opening up the skull. Besides, no one says out loud what he thinks. And anyone who tries to is already lying in the first words that come out. Sentences starting with 'At that moment he was thinking…' have never been anything but crutches. Nothing is locked tighter than a mind. Even progressively harsher torture doesn't produce complete confessions. Even in the moment of death, a person can cheat in his thoughts. That's why we can't know what Wolfgang Stremplin was thinking when the decision to play the Jew David on the Internet was ripening within him, or what literally was going on in his head as he stood in front of the Kurt Burger Youth Hostel and saw his bosom enemy, who had called himself Wilhelm on line, and now, as Konrad Pokriefke, pulled a pistol from the right pocket of his parka and after the first shot to the stomach fired three more shots that hit his head and its sealed-in thoughts. We see only what we see. The surface doesn't tell everything, but enough. So no thoughts, including none thought out ex post facto. If we use words sparingly, we'll get to the end more quickly.”
It's a good thing he can't guess the thoughts that against my will come creeping out of the left and right hemispheres of my brain, making terrible sense, revealing anxiously guarded secrets, exposing me, so that I am horrified, and quickly try to think about something else. For instance, I thought about a gift I could bring my son in Neustrelitz, something to show I cared, suitable for my first visit.
Since I had had all the newspaper coverage of the trial sent to me by a clipping service, I had in my possession a photo of Wolfgang Stremplin that appeared in the
I might add that the press coverage of my son's trial was disappointingly slim. Around the time of the proceedings, both parts of the now united Germany were experiencing a series of right-wing extremist criminal acts, among them the attempted killing of a Hungarian in Potsdam with baseball bats and the beating of a retiree in Bochum that led to his death. Skinheads were striking everywhere, relentlessly. Politically motivated violence had come to seem routine, likewise appeals addressed to the right and expressions of regret by politicians who supplied those committing acts of violence with tinder, concealed in asides. But perhaps it was the undeniable fact that Wolfgang Stremplin was not a Jew that diminished interest in the trial, for initially, right after the deed, there had been banner headlines all over the country: jewish fellow citizen shot! And cowardly murder motivated by anti-semitism!
The caption to the photo of Wolfgang echoed this sensationalism: “The victim of the most recent act of anti-Semitic violence.” I snipped off this caption.
So when I paid my first visit to the juvenile detention center — a pretty run-down place that seemed ripe for demolition — I had the newspaper photo of Wolfgang Stremplin tucked into my breast pocket. Konny even thanked me when I pushed the piece of newsprint, folded only once, toward him. He smoothed it with his hand, and smiled. Our conversation dragged, but at least he was speaking to me. In the visitation room we sat opposite each other; at other tables other juvenile detainees also had visitors.
Since I have been forbidden to try to read my son's thoughts from his forehead, all that remains to be said is that face-to-face with his father he was closemouthed as always, but did not give me the cold shoulder. He even favored me with a question about my journalistic work. When I told him about a story I was doing on Dolly, the miracle sheep cloned in Scotland, and her creator, I saw him smile. “Mama will certainly be interested in that. She's fascinated by genes, especially mine.”
Then I heard about the option of playing Ping-Pong in the recreation area, and learned that he shared a cell with three other youths — ”pretty screwed-up, but harmless.” He had his own corner, with a table and bookshelf. Distance learning was also available. “That'll be something new!” he exclaimed. “I'll do my university qualifying exams behind prison walls, proctored indefinitely, so to speak.” I didn't particularly like to see Konny attempting to be witty.
When I left, I saw his girlfriend Rosi waiting to take my place. She looked as though she had been crying, and was dressed all in black, as if in mourning. A general coming and going was characteristic of visiting day: sobbing mothers, embarrassed fathers. The guard who checked the gifts fairly casually allowed me to bring in the photo of Wolfgang as David. Before me, Mother had no doubt already been there, perhaps with Gabi; or had the two visited Konny one after the other?
Time passed. I was no longer feeding Dolly the miracle sheep with high-cellulose-content paper, but was hot on the heels of other sensational stories. Meanwhile one of my short-lived relationships — this time it was with a photographer who specialized in cloud formations — happened to come to an end, without any hue and cry. Then another visiting day was marked on the calendar.
We had hardly sat down facing each other when my son told me that he had made frames for several photos, which he now had behind glass and mounted under his bookshelf: “The one of David, too, of course.” He had also framed two photos that had been part of his Web site material; Mother must have brought them at his request. They were two images of Captain Third Class Aleksandr Marinesko, which, however, as my son said, could not have been more different. He had fished the images out of the Internet. Two Marinesko fans had claimed separately that they had the true likeness in their frames. “A comical quarrel,” Konny said, and pulled the two pictures, like family photos, out from under his indestructible Norwegian sweater.
He lectured me in a factual tone: “The round-faced one next to the periscope is on display at the St. Petersburg Naval Museum. This one here, with the angular face, standing in the tower of his boat, is supposed to be the real Marinesko. At any rate, there's written evidence indicating that the original of this photo was given to a
