Fear

by Dirk Kurbjuweit

  6

  I HAD A HAPPY CHILDHOOD, really I did—the only problem was the target practice. My mother sometimes clobbered me with wooden coathangers, but in those days that was the usual punishment meted out to a boy who behaved badly at school and had no qualms about signing his mother’s name beneath the red F at the bottom of a school essay: Read and acknowledged, Elisabeth Tiefenthaler, 14 April 1972. I was good at forging, but occasionally I was caught all the same and it was then that the coathangers came into action.

  My father never hit me, by the way—only my mother. I didn’t consider it abuse. All my friends were given regular hidings; that’s just the way it was. It wasn’t until I was seventeen or eighteen and fighting major battles with my mother that I resented the beatings and reproached her for them. It was a way of manoeuvring my mother, who had come to regret the beatings, into an awkward position—a way of turning my childhood pains to my advantage. My moral stance was more tactical ploy than deeply held conviction, and nothing to be proud of. Though I myself have never hit my children, sometimes I have come pretty close.

  I think it was in September 1972 that I told my father one Saturday morning that I wouldn’t be accompanying him to the firing range. Until then I hadn’t dared, but my tenth birthday was approaching and I had to reckon on being given a pistol at Christmas at the latest. After that there would be practically no getting out of our weekly target practice. ‘What do you think a pistol like that costs?’ my father would have been able to say, and for a child who has grown up in financial straits that is a weighty argument.

  For a long time I thought money was tight because of the meagre wages earned by a car salesman, even one who was a magician. And it’s true, car salesmen don’t get rich. The basic wage is low, but with the commission on sales it’s possible to make a decent living. Our problem was that my father was constantly buying new guns—pistols, revolvers, hunting shotguns. He never told us how many guns he had. Not even my mother knew precisely. Later, in the eighties, she guessed that it was at least thirty.

  Because we had so little money, we couldn’t go on holiday every year. I remember riding my bike all around the neighbourhood in the holidays, desperately looking for another boy like me who hadn’t been able to go away. This is one of the very few things I hold against my father. He should have taken us to the seaside more often—to Amrum, on the North Sea, where I once went on a school trip and slid down the big white dunes, or to Noordwijk, the Dutch seaside resort we had visited with my mother’s family. Ten or fifteen guns should have been enough—even for a man like him, who not only liked guns but needed them.

  But he did appreciate—and this speaks in his favour—that his elder son did not want to be a marksman. He asked me why I didn’t want to accompany him to the firing range, and I said, at once defiant and timid: ‘It’s no fun.’ My father looked at me, not cross but disappointed, and then he drove to the firing range on his own. I never went back and my father never asked me to accompany him again. He didn’t punish me, though, as I’d feared—didn’t give me the cold shoulder, or stop telling me stories as we hiked through the woods. Those glorious tales of our future adventures continued, and I remained his companion. That, at least, was my impression.

  It was only years later, through my son, that I discovered how disappointed my father had been when I gave up our weekend trips to the shooting range. When Paul was five, my father gave him a target, a cardboard square of maybe fifteen centimetres by fifteen centimetres, yellowish around the edge with a black circle in the centre divided by thin white lines. There were six small holes in the cardboard, all within the black circle, all close to the centre, some of them touching each other. ‘Grandad says you were good at shooting,’ said Paul, when he showed me the target. I took it, quickly gave it back to him, turned and left the room. My father had kept that target for thirty-five years.

  I can’t remember being a good marksman. I remember my fear. I remember my father’s wrath. That’s memory for you.

  It wasn’t until some weeks after giving up target practice that I realised my sister was not around on Saturday mornings. I asked my mother and she told me she’d gone to the firing range with Dad. That seemed strange to me—she was a girl, wasn’t she? But I didn’t let it bother me. Perhaps she could learn to shoot. A girl couldn’t become a travelling companion, though—that much was clear.

  It’s not worth saying much more about my childhood. Friends came and went, girls were first scorned and later loved—shy kisses, short letters. There were wooden coathanger days, and days when my mother played with us for hours on end: Chinese chequers, ludo, pick-up sticks. My father sat on the sofa and read. My memories are no more than vague fragments: onion-patterned orange wallpaper, green curtains, a husky voice from the radio saying that a man was being buried, an important man—Adenauer, I suppose, the first postwar chancellor, but I’m not sure—and my father freaking out, enraged, because students were fighting the police in the streets. That must have been in 1967 or ’68. Willy Brandt was elected not too much later—I remember hearing his name often, and the footballer Franz Beckenbauer’s. We didn’t have television, so I watched the sports round-up at a friend’s house, and Star Trek, too. My mother sewed us symbols like the ones Captain Kirk and Spock and the others wore on their chests: jagged yellow triangles that she cut out of cardboard and covered with cloth. I remember blue-uniformed air hostesses when we flew Pan Am to Hamburg on a school trip, and the memorial ceremony for the Israeli athletes killed by terrorists at the Olympic Games in Munich. I remember a few scuffles, which I lost (harmless), and being tested by a school psychologist (all well, was the report—but also a term I didn’t understand until later: inhibited aggression). ‘Not a problem,’ the school psychologist told my mother. ‘Not a problem,’ she told me.

  It was a normal childhood—I insist on that. My mother taught me to say my prayers, and every evening I thanked the good Lord for my happy life and prayed for it to carry on. That bears me out. There were times, later on, when I thought my childhood couldn’t have been that happy, because my father and I were getting on so badly. I didn’t want to admit that he had provided me with a happy childhood, but that was silly—and shabby of me, too. It was during my years in the peace movement, when I hated weapons, and the weekends we’d spent together on the firing range seemed to me like a form of child abuse.

  But do you have the right to decide, looking back, that your childhood was unhappy, if you didn’t feel unhappy at the time? I don’t think you do. I really didn’t like it at the firing range, but it was only a few Saturdays, and don’t a lot of parents try to interest their children in their hobbies and pastimes? Why not shooting, which is, after all, an Olympic sport? And who’s to say children don’t suffer on tennis courts or ice rinks?

  No, I won’t let myself be talked out of the memory of a happy childhood—not that anyone apart from me has tried so far, with the exception of a therapist I went to see a few years back, when I was going through a troubled patch. He told me I should stop trying to see everything so positively. I only went back a few times.

  7

  WHEN WE BOUGHT THE FLAT, our children were two and five. We met the owners of the three other flats over coffee on the first floor, including the owner of the basement, a laundry manager in his late fifties, who looked as if he could afford more than a dingy little place underground. The others were elderly people who said there hadn’t been children living there for ages and it was time there was life in the house again. They were nice, but nobody told us that the basement owner was not the basement tenant.

  You might ask why an architect buys a flat rather than building a house, particularly since I specialise in family homes. I fear the truth is that I felt a certain uneasiness at the idea, as if I was afraid that someone like me might manage to botch his own house. But it was also a question of money. The kind of house I would like to build is out of my price range. I know only too well how sad it is when great ideas dwindle under the dikta
t of a meagre budget.

  My clients often come to me with ideas for family homes that would cost a million euros, not even counting the land. They want three hundred square metres of living space, and mezzanines with beautiful vistas; they want the bottom quarter of the facade clad in slate, and a freestanding bathtub carved from precious wood in the ensuite bathroom. The tub alone costs nine thousand euros and is struck off the list in the first round of hard truths. The next round puts paid to the slate and the mezzanines, and so it goes on, until my clients settle for two hundred and twenty square metres over two storeys, which costs them four hundred and fifty thousand euros (not counting the land again) and leaves them fifty thousand euros over their budget. They manage, somehow—the bank coughs up, or Mum and Dad advance a share of their inheritance—and my clients end up moving into houses in the new classical style, perhaps with an expressive flourish here or there—a few rounded corners, for example. I prefer to spare myself such orgies of reduction.

  I first saw Dieter Tiberius after we had been living in the new flat for six weeks. He had already met my wife several times. There was something strange about him, but he was friendly, she told me. What do you mean, strange? I asked. She shrugged, and I forgot about him. I didn’t meet him myself until I got home from work one evening and inadvertently rang his doorbell. He climbed the stairs and opened the front door. No, that’s not right—he flung it open.

  ‘Shouldn’t think you were wanting me,’ he said.

  I was flummoxed. I stared at him and said nothing. He was short and fat, but there was nothing flabby about his corpulence—he was tautly fat. He looked supple and elastic, like an ageing gymnast, and must have been about forty. He had a large head, a high forehead and hair that looked a bit like Elvis Presley’s, because he wore it combed back. Something flashed in his eyes—something alien and repulsive. I can’t say precisely what it was—cunning was part of it, that much is certain, and annoyance, maybe because I had disturbed him, but there was nothing unequivocally threatening in the way he looked at me, no brutality or malice. It was more like the will to survive, and fear, too—I don’t know, exactly. Maybe that is just how I interpret it now, looking back. I only saw him a few times close up.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said eventually.

  ‘That’s all right,’ he said with a grin.

  I went up the stairs and knocked at our front door. I was in shock—there’s no other way of putting it. I immediately had the feeling that it had been a mistake to buy the flat, although Dieter Tiberius didn’t look terrible or threatening—really he didn’t. Maybe ‘unusual’ is the right word. Dieter Tiberius looked unusual. That is by no means a reason for not wanting to live upstairs from someone or for being afraid of him, but that’s how it was with me.

  We knew nothing about him. He clearly didn’t go to work, and when he did leave the house, my wife told me, he returned shortly afterwards with bags from the supermarket—not from either of the two organic supermarkets in our neighbourhood, but from the discount store. The curtains of his flat were always drawn, but the glow from his television could be seen through them in the evenings, and sometimes we heard the sound too. The films he watched weren’t bad—Hollywood classics rather than trash. He was keen on Dustin Hoffman—I often heard snatches of dialogue from The Graduate, Marathon Man, Tootsie or Rain Man.

  In the first months, nothing happened, and I was reassured. He was pleasant to my wife—and to the children. Once he showed my son a short animal film on his computer; my wife didn’t take issue with it, so I didn’t either. He would bake biscuits and leave a plate outside our door with a note beneath it: Here’s to good neighbours. We ate the plate clean. Dieter Tiberius could bake, no doubt about it. The children began to like him. When we had breakfast in the living room at the front of the flat on a Sunday, we always saw him leave the house at nine, and an hour and a half later he was back. We assumed that, unlike us, he went to church. We only go at Christmas, and indeed I saw him on Christmas Day, singing ‘O, How Joyfully’, like me. He was up in the gallery, looking over the balustrade at us down in the nave when I spotted him.

  In January my wife told me that Dieter Tiberius had started baking more often for her and the children. When she got home, he would open the front gate with the buzzer in his flat.

  ‘As if he were waiting for me,’ said my wife.

  There was often a tray of cake or pizza on our doormat when she came in. She felt watched.

  ‘Shall I talk to him?’ I asked.

  She hesitated, thought about it and then said: ‘No, he’s only trying to be nice.’

  Today I reproach myself for not intervening, not confronting him. It might have prevented things from getting out of hand, although probably not. All the same, I should have tried.

  The first entry in my diary indicating that the situation had taken a dangerous turn is dated 11 February. At the back of the basement is a laundry room that belongs to us. For some time, Dieter Tiberius had been coming out of his flat when he heard my wife hanging up the washing in there. He would chat to her in a friendly, even cheerful way, and my wife did not, at first, find it awkward—she had company during a dull chore. On this particular day, however, when she took a pair of her underpants out of the washing machine and pulled them flat, Dieter Tiberius said: ‘They must look good on you.’ It was an impossible remark, an impertinence, revolting. My wife ignored it. She hung up the underpants, Dieter Tiberius changed the subject, and she carried on pegging out the rest of our clothes as if nothing had happened. In the evening my wife told me about it, and I should of course have stormed down to the basement and taken Dieter Tiberius to task, but I didn’t. I had got home late, my wife was already in bed, and she didn’t tell me until I was in bed too. I was horrified and said I would speak to him in the morning, but I didn’t—my next mistake.

  On 19 February my wife found a letter on the doormat, a love letter, which she showed me that evening. It was written in a neat, almost childlike hand. The spelling was accurate. Dieter Tiberius wrote that she was very beautiful and very nice and that he loved her, but he had grown up in a children’s home and so was prone to excessive emotions. It was absurd—I had to laugh. A fat, ugly dwarf had fallen in love with my beautiful, intelligent wife. I expect I said as much to Rebecca. In the seven months that followed, we thought, said and did a great deal that contradicted the image we had of ourselves, and what I call our enlightened middle-class values. This was the moment it began—the cruel language and the arrogance were our first step towards barbarism.

  I pondered the significance of his childhood in care. Did it make him more than usually dangerous, because he’d had it rough and knew how to survive, or less than usually dangerous, because he had no family to support him? I didn’t—couldn’t—come up with an answer, because I had no experience of people brought up in state care, but it reassured me a little that Dieter Tiberius was evidently conscious that he had overstepped the mark. I interpreted the reference to his background as an apology and, believing myself capable of handling such a man, took the letter down to the basement and knocked at his door. Nothing stirred. All was quiet in his flat. I couldn’t hear the television. I rang the bell, called his name—nothing. I was sure he was in—he never went out in the evenings. So he was hiding, he was afraid. That, too, reassured me. I underestimated Dieter Tiberius from the beginning.

  22 February: Found a book on our doormat for Rebecca, The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Puzzled over a possible message, but couldn’t come up with anything. Sat up half the night reading the book, but found no connection.

  10 March: Rebecca rang me at the office. I could tell she was upset. Tiberius had written her another letter. It says he was passing our door and happened to hear the words ‘pull down your pants’. He thinks this might be a sign that we’re abusing the children. He himself was sexually abused ‘as a child in care’ and is thus ‘sensitised to such things, maybe over-sensitised’. I told her I’d come straight home and talk to hi
m, in no uncertain terms. ‘I’ve already done that,’ she said. ‘I screamed my head off at him.’ Must have been hell for the poor bastard.

  Today I am ashamed of these words. Back then I wrote them without thinking, because I knew only too well what it’s like when my wife has a screaming fit.

  I went home that day all the same. My secretary had called me a taxi and I rushed down to the street and waited impatiently. In the taxi I wondered whether to hit Dieter Tiberius, but I haven’t hit anyone since I was ten, except in harmless fights with my little brother. I don’t believe in resolving conflicts with violence, even though my time in the peace movement is long over. I’d shout at him, I thought in the taxi. But I’ve never shouted at anyone, not even my children. When things get difficult, I tend to be calm and cold—getting loud is not my thing. But maybe I could manage to raise my voice a bit, I thought, let him see that I’m angry. Maybe that would make an impression on him.

  I regret to say that my initial fury at his obscene accusations had abated before I arrived home, and I had even begun to feel relieved. This ridiculous stunt somehow made him seem less of a threat.

  I wrote in my diary later that he must be mad. I saw no danger, fearing only awkwardness and unease:

  Anyone who infers sexual abuse from ‘pull down your pants’ is a lunatic. They are words spoken a dozen times a day in a family with small children. No one seriously out to undermine us would come up with such a ludicrous accusation. But can we live under the same roof as a man who harbours such thoughts? Isn’t it too revolting?