AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Within a fraction of a second, an overview of news items appears on the display.
I tap the first one, which already names the victim in the overview: “Gesine Grosse-Garbe, also known by the abbreviation GGG, has made no friends with her relentless action against organized gang crime,” I read out. I skim the rest in silence:Her unorthodox strategy has won her sensational victories in court. Her books, written in the style of popular science, have become instant bestsellers. Most recently, being in her mid-fifties, the independent woman was considered the new Minister of Justice in North Rhine-Westphalia.
“It’s her.” Although Philip’s whisper is barely audible, I clearly pick up on the emphasis of the last word.
Willing to wait as long as it takes him, I turn off my cell phone.
The silence between us piles up like soft pink cotton candy at a funfair. Artificial, sticky, cavity-inducing.
Finally, Philipp seems to have composed himself. “All right, then. How do I start?” From the way he incessantly opens and closes his fingers around the steering wheel, I can gauge his quest for words to get started.
But I don’t rush him, instead giving him all the time he needs.
After a while, he takes a breath, his lungs filling with a tremor. As he exhales, I can feel how he struggles for control, then finally his voice cuts through the distant roar of rush hour traffic on the interstate.
“It’ll be best if I start at the beginning, right?” he asks me but doesn’t wait for my answer at all. Instead, it bubbles out of his mouth as if he’s been waiting forever for the right occasion. “I was born in Cologne on February 14, 1987, the first and only son of two law students, Gesine Grosse-Garbe and Thomas Sandtmann.”
On Valentine’s Day… when that GGG disappeared. His… mother.I have countless questions, but this is Philipp’s story, and I don’t want to disturb him.
“You can’t necessarily say I was a planned child.” He laughs hoarsely. “Classic contraceptive accident. If my…” His hesitation is unmistakable. “…mother hadn’t blamed the irregularity of her menstruation on the stress of exams… She would have aborted me, I guarantee it.”
Oh my God!It takes all my self-control not to put my curved index finger in my mouth to bite down on it.How… hardened he said that.My heart breaks at the thought of the hurt such knowledge does to a child.
“Unfortunately, she missed the right moment,” Philipp continues. “And so, I truly screwed up her summa cum laude in record time. Because I, selfish and stubborn, just didn’t want to stick to her schedule of being born on time after the final exam.” Again, he laughs hoarsely. “She made me pay a thousand times for being delivered five days early.”
Well, now I’m biting my finger.
“My… parents had a civil marriage…” Philipp doesn’t let me interrupt him and continues, but again I notice his hesitation. “…already during the Christmas vacations. The big wedding at church was then celebrated together with my baptism. I wasn’t seven days old when she was already back at the university full-time.”
“Who was looking after you during that time?” Thoughts of grandparents run through my head.Or maybe a nanny?
“For that, my… father had to step in. Following GGG’s logic, he had brought her the problem, so he had to face the music. Besides, he was probably already mediocre back then. At everything.”
Whatever Philipp might mean by that, I don’t cut in on him. Not even when he talks about how his mother passed the first and the second state examination with top marks and could then choose where she wanted to work.
“She could have joined the law offices of her equally talented former fellow students,” he recounts. “A little bit of Domestic Relations Law, divorces, mediation, alimony, and shit like that. That would have allowed him to focus on his studies. I was old enough to go to kindergarten by then, after all. But she didn’t want to do it either. She was too ambitious for a law office job. And probably three years seemed too little to her as penance for his misdemeanor.” Philipp lets out a snort.
I quietly bite my lip and continue to listen to how his elementary school years—parallel to his father’s resumption of his studies—went quite harmoniously, although as anaccidenthe did not receive much affection from either parent at home.
In the half-Greek family of his best friend, however, Philipp probably received the portion of nest warmth that a child needs to grow up healthily. But the move to secondary schools cut off the healing contact.
Because of his talent, which Philipp had shown during private piano lessons, his mother enrolled him in a classical language high school with a focus on music. His buddy, on the other hand, attended the nearest comprehensive school.
“Classical languages?” I inquire. “You know Latin? Greek, too, perhaps?”
He laughs out loud. “Knowing is carrying things too far. I’ve got a few more chunks than the usual Asterix quotes stuck in my head, but I wasn’t a particularly diligent student, nor did I go to school for very long.”
“But you can still remember something,” I challenge him. I don’t know why either. But something in me thinks he should recall positive aspects of his childhood now.
“All right.” Again, he laughs. “Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres, quarum unam incolunt Belgae, aliam Aquitani, tertiam qui ipsorum lingua Celtae, nostra Galli appellantur. Hi omnes lingua, institutis, legibus inter se differunt. Gallos ab Aquitanis Garumna flumen, a Belgis Matrona et Sequana dividit.”
Now it’s me laughing. “That sounds imposing. And what does it mean?”
“It’s the first three sentences of Julius Caesar’sOf the Gallic War. I was still getting the benefit of the old-fashioned way of learning. Meanwhile, I’ve read, Latin teachers are giving thedead languagea livelier touch.”
“And…” I hesitate for a moment. “Can you just recite it by heart, or do you remember what it means?”
“All of Gaul is—”
