The Unlucky Lottery

And Bachmann put his hand on his heart, assuring her that he would do his best. Although there were several things that were unclear, and one simply can’t get away with anything at all in court.

Every time he pointed this out he gave her a quick smile, but she never responded with one of her own.

The chaplain was called Kolding, and was about her age. A low-key preacher who always brought with him a flask of tea and a tin of biscuits, and generally sat on the chair in her cell for half an hour or so, without saying very much. In connection with his first visit he explained that he didn’t want to harass her, but it was his intention to call in every two or three days. In case there was something she would like to take up with him.

There never was, but she had nothing against his sitting there. He was tall and thin, slightly stooping in view of his age, and he reminded her of the vicar who conducted her confirmation classes. She once asked him if they were relatives, but of course they were not.

However, he had worked for a while in the Maalwort parish in Pampas. This emerged from one of their sparse conversations, but as she had only been to church once or twice during all the years they had lived only a stone’s throw away, there was not much to say about this circumstance either.

Nevertheless, he would sit there in the corner several afternoons a week. And made himself available, as he had promised. Perhaps he was simply tired, and needed to rest for a while, she sometimes thought.

In so far as he had any effect on her at all, at least he did not annoy her.

Other people who took the trouble to come and visit her were her two children and the assiduous Emmeline von Post.

Before the trial began, when she counted up the visits, she concluded that Mauritz had been three times, and Ruth and Emmeline twice each. On her birthday, the second of December, Mauritz and Ruth turned up together with a Sachertorte and three white lilies – which for some reason she found so absurd that she had difficulty in not bursting into laughter.

Otherwise she made a big effort – during all these visits and greetings – to behave politely and courteously; but the circumstances sometimes meant that the atmosphere inside her pale yellow cell often felt tense and strained. Especially with Mauritz, there were a few occasions when heated words were exchanged about trivialities – but then she hadn’t expected anything else.

On the whole, however, her time in prison – the six weeks of waiting before the trial began – was a period of rest and recovery, so that when she went to bed the evening before the proceedings started, she felt inevitably a bit worried about what lay in store, but also calm, and quite confident that her inner strength would carry her through these difficult times.

As it had done thus far.

The trial began on a Tuesday afternoon, and her lawyer had promised her that it would be all over by the Friday evening – always assuming that no complications arose, and there was hardly any reason to expect that they would.

However, the first few hours in the courtroom were characterized by ceremonial posturing and a slow pace that made her wonder. She had been placed behind an oblong wooden table with bottles of mineral water, paper mugs and a notepad. On her right was her lawyer, smelling of his usual aftershave; on her left was a youngish woman dressed in blue, whose role was unclear to Marie-Louise Leverkuhn. But she didn’t ask about it.

This was not one of the bigger courtrooms, as far as she knew. The space for members of the public and journalists was limited to about twenty chairs behind a bar at the far end of the rectangular room. Just now, on this first afternoon, the audience was restricted to six people: two balding journalists and four women reassuringly well into pensionable age. It was a relief to find that there were so few: but she suspected that there would be rather more people sitting on the high-backed chairs later on in the performance. Once it was properly under way.

Sitting opposite her, enthroned on a dais barely a decimetre high, was Judge Hart behind a broad table covered in a green cloth hanging down to the floor on all sides – so that one didn’t need to look at his feet. Or up skirts, she fantasized, if the judge happened to be a woman. But she didn’t know. In any case, her own administrator of justice was a man of generous proportions in his sixties. He reminded her very much of a French actor whose name she couldn’t remember, no matter how hard she tried. Ended in -eaux, she seemed to recall.

On the right of the judge were two other officers of justice – young and immaculately groomed men wearing glasses and impeccable suits – and on the left was the jury.