Fear

by Dirk Kurbjuweit

  Even now, I insist that I had a normal childhood—a childhood without much money, with the odd scuffle, few problems at school, loving parents, a big sister, and before too long a little brother. We lived on a new estate in Berlin’s north-west: red tower blocks interspersed with lawns, a playground and a stadium belonging to Wacker 04, the local football club, where I played in goal on the youth teams. My parents evidently didn’t consider the town dangerous, although it was at the centre of the Cold War, because I remember getting the bus a lot without them, and that must have been before my tenth birthday. Soon after that birthday, we moved to the northern outskirts of the city, where my parents bought a semidetached house. That makes it easier to place memories, because I have a fairly clear idea of what was before the move and what came after.

  The bus rides were definitely before. I have forgotten why I travelled about such a lot—I ought to ask my mother some time—but I certainly spent a great many hours on those pale yellow double-decker buses. I would jostle to be first at the bus stop as soon as the bus arrived, and then rush up the narrow stairs to claim a front seat. A ride in any other seat was a lost ride—I let buses drive past if I saw that both front benches were taken. Those benches had the best view and only there did you sometimes get that slight tingling in your belly from the feeling that you were sitting at the edge of a moving precipice. It was glorious.

  I remember the smell of chlorine on the way back from the public swimming pool, burning my fingers on bags of chips, and eating my first hamburger at the German–American festival (long before McDonald’s arrived). I remember the quiet of the local library and the guilt I felt when a book I’d borrowed was overdue.

  I remember, too, rides on the underground, especially the empty stations in East Berlin that our trains passed through without stopping. In the dark of those stations I saw sandbags and soldiers with rifles, and that must have been my first waking nightmare—that my train would be stranded there and all the passengers made to get out and left at the mercy of this world of darkness. That’s all East Germany was to me at the time: the dark of their underground stations and the great emptiness around the Brandenburg Gate.

  My parents took us to the gate, my brother and sister and me, and we all climbed onto the viewing platform and peered over the Wall. No one there. The square was empty, the streets beyond too. It made no sense to me when I was a child. Why did the East Germans build an enormous wall, put up watchtowers, pile up sandbags and have soldiers patrol when they had nothing to protect except deserted stations and empty squares and streets? There was something bad about the world behind this wall—that much I had gleaned from remarks dropped by my parents. But what? I didn’t know and in fact I didn’t care. When I wasn’t passing through one of those empty stations, I forgot that I lived behind a wall and that this wall was, as my parents had told me, a symbol of hostility.

  Only once did I experience that hostility at first hand. It was probably in 1969 or 1970, when I was about eight years old, before the transit agreement signed a few years later that made it easier for us to travel through East Germany. We were going to visit my grandparents—not my father’s parents, but my mother’s, who lived in Wuppertal. I had been to visit them once before, but that time we had flown. As my parents packed our Ford 12M, I noticed how nervous they were, especially my father, who always got cross when he was nervous. He snarled at me and dragged my sister off the back seat because she’d got in too early, before my mother had stowed the last bags and parcels in the back foot wells. My father fetched and carried, my mother stowed things; that was the arrangement. He had strength and she had skill—and the optimism needed to continue packing a car that was clearly chock full.

  My father was in a sweat—not from the fetching and carrying, which was over, but from watching. The 12M’s springs and shock absorbers were sagging, and there were still bags in the parking area outside our house. I remember that car park as largely empty, but some wise person had designed it for a great automotive future—a future which did indeed come. There are hardly any free parking spaces in Berlin these days, not even in our little street, which isn’t exactly densely populated. Eventually my father walked away, because he couldn’t bear to watch my mother stowing things anymore. That wasn’t unusual—my father often walked away when things got difficult, but he always came back. We knew he would, so we weren’t worried.

  My mother went to fetch him after cramming the last thing—her vanity case—into the Ford. My sister, my four-year-old brother and I stood by the 12M and watched our parents negotiating with one another on the far side of the big, empty car park. My sister fiddled with her plaits, my little brother sucked his thumb and I plunged my hands into my pockets. We couldn’t hear what our parents were talking about, but we knew how it would end. My mother took my father in her arms and held him for a while, and then they came back hand in hand.

  My father was still nervous, though. I noticed this as we drove down the motorway. When we were waiting in the queue at the checkpoint on the East German border, he broke into a sweat again. A face appeared at the side window beneath a big military cap. We were to get out, said the man in the military cap. When we had got out, he said we were to take our things out of the car.

  ‘Everything?’ my mother asked, because in situations like this my father wouldn’t or couldn’t talk.

  ‘Everything,’ said the man.

  ‘All right then, everything,’ said my mother.

  I was afraid now. I was afraid of this man who was giving us orders so curtly. I was afraid, too, that my father would pull out his gun and start a shootout. He couldn’t win, that much was clear to me, because there were a lot of men in military caps standing about. They carried pistols—I had already noticed that—and some of them even had rifles or machine guns. I didn’t know at the time that my father, who always wore a pistol in a holster, did not have it on him that day, because nobody would be so mad as to approach an East German border post with a pistol holstered under their arm—certainly not with his wife in the passenger seat and three children in the back of the car. So my fear was unwarranted. My father couldn’t start a shootout—he had no gun to hand. It was only years later that I found out from my mother that there had, in fact, been every reason to be afraid. My father, who couldn’t bear the thought of spending several days unarmed, had stayed at work after hours in the dealership’s garage and welded himself a secret compartment in the 12M. In this compartment he had put a revolver, which goes a long way towards explaining his nervousness.

  Mind you, the people unpacking and repacking their cars in front of us and behind us were also nervous. It was a dreadful situation. We children looked on as our capable mother serenely undid her great feat of packing, while our father was paralysed with fear or anger or both and could only do as she asked, on autopilot, even though unloading a car is so much easier than loading it. Then my parents were instructed (again, curtly) that they were to unpack the suitcases. My mother set to work, on her own, while my father sat on the edge of the passenger seat, his feet on the asphalt, head in his hands. Beneath the gaze of two men in military caps, my mother took trousers, shirts and skirts out of our suitcases, using only her left hand because her right arm was around my little brother, who had begun to cry.

  Sometimes, by no means rarely, we host soirees in our flat. They are really just big dinner parties, but we have always called them soirees, using the rather pompous name ironically, to begin with, and then for tradition’s sake. On one such occasion, the conversation turned to the subject of dignity, and I talked about my mother. I described how she had squatted there in front of our suitcases, pulling out one item of clothing after another, briefly presenting them to the border guards and then laying them on a pile beside the suitcase. She did this with everything, even her underwear. Garment after garment she pulled out, unmoved and imperturbable, holding each one up to the border guards and then setting it aside. Her youngest child was snivelling at her side; her husband was in a
state of depressed shock; her daughter desperately needed the toilet but didn’t dare ask if she could go; and her elder son was terrified that under the next bra, under the next shirt, a weapon might appear. When my mother had shown the border guards the entire contents of our luggage, she packed the suitcases, bags and parcels again and stowed everything once more in our Ford, with the same skill and optimism as before, looking for all the world as if she were enjoying herself. My father didn’t watch her—he was already at the wheel, staring straight ahead, past the checkpoint. After my mother had stowed everything, she said a polite goodbye, wished the guards a nice day and got in the car. We drove off at a hundred kilometres an hour, not one kilometre over the limit.

  At this point in my story, one of our guests, the director of a film production company, interrupted me and said: ‘The West Germans slunk through East Germany for decades on terrified best behaviour, doing as they were told for fear that they’d be fined, and now they reproach the East Germans who did exactly the same for fear they’d be arrested and locked up in Bautzen.’

  ‘Are you from the east?’ asked another guest, a doctor.

  ‘No,’ said the director.

  ‘But I am,’ said a journalist who presented a late-night cultural show on the radio, ‘and I agree with you. The West Germans were like East Germans the moment they set foot across the border. Given half the chance, we Germans like to subjugate ourselves.’

  During the heated discussion that ensued, I sat feeling rather annoyed. I had told our border-crossing story to show how wonderfully composed my mother had been—that she should be accused of willing subjugation hadn’t occurred to me. Eventually the journalist said it was possible to display dignity in submitting to authority, as my mother had done. Everyone agreed and I felt a little better about our evening.

  I still remember the ghastly drive from the checkpoint to my grandparents’ house, more than five hours away. My sister still desperately needed the toilet, but my father refused to pull into an East German road stop. I am afraid she soiled her pants. But what I remember most from the time with my grandparents and our subsequent seaside holiday in the Netherlands is my aunt—my mother’s sister—saying at a big family gathering: ‘Randolph never has anything to say.’ They are words I have heard many times since—from my wife, among others.

  5

  MY FONDEST CHILDHOOD MEMORIES—and by childhood I mean our time living in the flat on the estate—are of my visits to the Ford dealership where my father worked. He started out as a mechanic there, but I only ever knew him as a car salesman and, to quote the words he said to me not so long ago, I was proud of him. I would get the bus there by myself, and I enjoyed going, because I liked the new cars, their shininess, the smell of metal and leather and rubber, the hint of animal about them, their dumb inertia which could, I imagined, give way without a moment’s notice to a wild chase.

  My father was in charge of these huge predatory beasts, although he was not, as I was well aware, in charge of the business. That was my father’s boss, a man named Mr Marschewski, the son of the owner. But it was my father who was in charge of the car yard—the animals, the other salesmen, the customers. I liked watching him pace slowly from one car to the next—17M or 15M to begin with, later Consul, Capri and Granada, and later still Scorpio and Mondeo, but by then I had stopped being proud of him. My father knew all about those cars—about every new Ford on the market. Back then, in the sixties, people were willing to marvel when someone explained an automobile to them—because it was their first, or because they had not yet lost their awe of industrial technology. My father was not a salesman for me: he was a man who could make others marvel, something like a magician, perhaps.

  I am afraid to say he was also the man who took me along to the firing range at the rod and gun club every Saturday. I had already managed to prevent him making a hunter out of me. Aged six, I had sat in a raised hide with him, waiting for a deer, and done nothing but cry, so that he had ended up taking me home. But if I was spared being a hunter, I was to be a sports marksman. Every Saturday, we drove down the motorway, took the Wannsee exit and followed the rail embankment south. On the back seat lay a leather case secured with a padlock.

  I don’t remember much about the firing range and I wouldn’t dream of driving there to refresh my memories. If I make an effort, I see a wooden shack where you could buy sausages, and there were two or three shooting ranges as well as a field where archers practised. The first hour was tolerable. My father shot and I hung around the archers, watching them or helping them gather up the arrows that had missed their target. It was quiet there, which made it all right. The horror began when my father fetched me from the field and we went to the shooting range.

  As I was still too weak to hold a pistol, a sandbag was placed on the shelf in front of me. I was eight or nine—tall, but slight. I put on ear protectors, and my father loaded the pistol, almost tenderly, and gave it to me. I always felt panicked as I took it in my hands, knowing I could injure or kill someone—including myself. In spite of the ear protectors, I would hear the shot clearly—painfully clearly, even. The recoil would jerk my arms back, and that hurt too. My father would correct my posture before I took a shot. After I had fired, he would upbraid me for getting everything wrong as usual, and before long he would be exasperated: he was not a patient teacher. I could hardly hear him, because of the ear protectors, but I didn’t want to take them off because there was constant shooting to the right and left of me, so I understood next to nothing of what he said. I saw only his face, saw it change as his gathering impatience eventually tipped over into anger.

  On a bad day, he would walk away—if I still hadn’t been breathing properly even after the third or fourth shot—breathe in, breathe out, breathe halfway in, hold your breath—or if I had hunched my back at the last second in a defensive gesture. Then I stood there alone, helpless, surrounded by silent, unmoving men in shooting glasses, their focus narrow and intense, with neither eyes nor heart for my plight. Maybe these men were practising to be murderers, I thought. My father would, of course, come back—he always came back—but that didn’t make it any better here at the shooting range. He’d calm down, to a certain point, but then it would begin all over again: the unintelligible words, the look on his face, the way it contorted as his impatience inevitably morphed into anger—or rather, wrath, for anger is human, whereas wrath is something that seizes the gods, and that is how my father seemed to me in his omnipotence—a wrathful god, an Ares. There was no way out: I had to shoot, so I shot. Sometimes I even hit the target.

  After this ordeal, we sat in the wooden shack. I ate a sausage and drank lemonade, while my father drank a beer—only ever one—and cleaned the pistols we had used. There were other men sitting in the shack, but we usually sat on our own. My father wasn’t—and still isn’t—a sociable man. He went to the shooting range to shoot, not to meet people.

  There was sometimes a woman in the shack, too, whose presence always disconcerted me. In the books and comics I read, women didn’t shoot—and if they did put in an appearance, there was kissing soon afterwards, something I found embarrassing, and also irksome, because it held up the plot, which was what interested me. The pursuit of criminals or Indians was interrupted until the hero had finally done with all that awful kissing. And so the woman at the firing range was suspicious to me. Why did she come to our table and knock on the wooden tabletop? What did she want from my father? He knocked too, and then the woman went on her way and knocked on the tables where other men were sitting. In the end she sat down on the corner bench, behind the round table, where there was always the most talking and laughter. I kept an eye on her.

  As my father cleaned his pistols and drank his beer, he made plans about the gun he would soon buy me—a birthday and Christmas present combined, because guns are expensive. It would be my first gun, a pistol of my own. I have forgotten the names of the models he pondered in a tender voice—all I remember is the atmosphere at our table. I
had put the weekly torment behind me, and I felt the warmth of my father’s love and approval as I discussed with him the pros and cons of various small arms for a nine-year-old.

  Even if I didn’t want a pistol, not under any circumstances, I liked it when my father indulged in flights of fancy. He could imagine wonderful things and get as enthusiastic about them as if they were already real. Despite my disappointing performance on the range less than an hour ago—and repeated every week—he envisaged me winning the German youth championship with my pistol some day, and it made him happy. I saw myself with a trophy in my hands.

  My favourite times with my father, my favourite times all round, were our Sunday walks in the woods. We would all set off together, but after half an hour my father would stride ahead and I was the only one who could keep up, while my sister and little brother trotted along behind at my mother’s side. Once it was just the two of us, out in front, my father would dream up journeys for us to go on together. These were, without exception, journeys of adventure. My father had read a lot of adventure books as a boy and they had made an adventurer of him. If he happened to be an adventurer who had not yet had an adventure, it was, I knew, for a good reason: he lacked a travelling companion. But soon that would change. I was nine years old, and next year I would be ten. Ten was already pretty old—old enough for first adventures. As I walked along beside my father, listening to his stories of our future journeys, I was preparing myself for the role of his travelling companion.

  Those journeys took us into the mountains, high up into the snow and the merciless cold, where you could only survive in special sleeping bags and tents; they took us into the wilderness where we didn’t see a soul for days on end, only buffalo (sometimes we shot one—we were good marksmen—and barbecued buffalo loin over our camp fire in the evening); they took us into whitewater canyons, where we skilfully steered our canoe through the rapids. I listened breathlessly. It was better than the tales I borrowed from the library and read again and again until they were overdue. My father’s stories made me think that I, too, could live a life of adventure—or something approaching it.