Fear

by Dirk Kurbjuweit

  ‘You,’ I said, uncomprehending.

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘you weren’t having sex with the woman you ignore during the day.’

  ‘I never think of anyone else,’ I said, and it was the truth. I had no affairs, no fantasies. ‘Do you think I’m having an affair?’ I asked Rebecca.

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘I don’t think you’re having an affair.’

  I turned over and laid a hand on her back. ‘Not only do I not think of any other woman, there’s no other woman I could be thinking of. The evenings I’m not here, I really am alone,’ I said, rather moved by my own decency.

  ‘I know,’ said Rebecca.

  ‘How do you know?’ I asked.

  She had followed me, she said, last week, and she had seen me at Luna.

  ‘You were spying on me?’ I said indignantly.

  She had wanted to know why she no longer interested me, she said, and so one evening she had followed me, and she had seen her husband in an expensive restaurant, sitting alone, surrounded by tables of couples, and this solitary man, her husband, had very slowly lifted a fork holding a piece of sausage to his mouth, gazing at this sausage as if he were contemplating a glorious flower—and then the sausage had vanished into his mouth and he had closed his eyes and chewed the sausage with an expression of rapture. Rebecca really did keep saying ‘sausage’, and it was true, the third course at Luna that evening had been homemade veal chipolata with Swiss chard and black truffles.

  A sad image appeared before me: my wife, in her tan trench coat, standing at the window of Luna, watching her husband feasting in solitary splendour. I imagined it raining, to make it even sadder, but I don’t know whether it really did rain that evening.

  ‘Do you know what happened next?’ asked Rebecca, my hand still resting on her back. ‘After you had eaten your sausage, you took your phone and sent me a text: Still working, love and kisses.’ She was crying now.

  ‘It was the truth,’ I said. ‘I was still sketching drafts.’

  ‘I’m sure you were,’ she said gently. ‘I’m sure you were. But still,’ she went on, ‘I don’t know what’s worse—seeing you there with another woman or seeing you there on your own.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said.

  She sat up. Her index finger shot out at me. ‘Oh yes, I do,’ she said, her voice tight and shrill. ‘I know what’s worse. Seeing that empty chair opposite you, because you’d rather have an empty chair than me.’ My heart started racing. ‘If there had been a woman sitting there with tits and an arse,’ Rebecca shrieked, ‘for all I care, the best tits and arse in the world, then I could fight against that woman. But I can’t fight against an empty chair. I don’t know how to fight against an empty chair.’ She snatched up the alarm clock that stood on the bedside table and dashed it against the wall.

  ‘Mama?’

  Fay was standing in the door, a toy sheep in her arms. Rebecca leapt out of bed, ran to her and lifted her onto her hip. I watched the two of them disappear and then heard whispering and singing. My wife sings nicely, in spite of her high voice.

  A quarter of an hour later, Rebecca returned, got into bed and pressed herself firmly against me, twining her fingers in my hair.

  ‘You don’t have sex with me,’ she said, after a while, and her voice was calm. ‘You have sex with yourself. You go into raptures over yourself and you use me as an instrument.’

  ‘That’s not true,’ I said, appalled.

  ‘Sssh,’ said Rebecca. ‘I mean a beautiful instrument, a Stradivarius violin, something very noble and precious. You use me the way a master violinist uses his violin—passionately, lovingly, tenderly. You’re very tender. But if it were another woman lying here, you’d get just as carried away, because it’s about you, not about the woman.’

  I went to protest, but Rebecca put a finger to her lips. ‘Sssh,’ she said again, and then: ‘We must sleep now.’

  I lay awake for a long time that night. I tried to think of something that would prove my wife wrong, but didn’t come up with much. In the morning I asked her whether she didn’t like sex with me, and she said: ‘Oh, yes, I like sex with you—it’s nice to be present.’

  I went to the office in a bad mood, but it didn’t last long. There was so much to reassure me. At least the sex was good. At least our holidays and Christmas parties were a success. At least I loved my wife, or at any rate, I could say I did. At least the four of us made a good family—and we really did. We were, without exception, cheerful around the children. They noticed nothing of my drifting away.

  The trouble with a long marriage is that there are so many different versions of it. If I wanted to believe that everything between us was fine, I could look back on the good times and tell myself it was true. If I wanted to justify avoiding my wife, I could look back on the not-so-good times, choose a different story, a different version, and still believe it. I told myself what I needed to hear and made no move to change anything.

  My wife calls this the privilege of the Anyway World: ‘We’re your family. We’re always here. You have us without making an effort, because we’re here anyway. It’s lucky for you, but bad luck for us, because there’s no pressure on you to change anything. I ought to break up the Anyway World, ought to leave you or start an affair, but I don’t want to—I’m your wife.’

  I was moved by such words and resolved to change something at last, to come out of my isolation. It was a resolution I often made. I’m the kind who’s always giving things up, who likes saying, ‘Just once more,’ or ‘This is the last time.’ I have said it to myself at Luna, at Hedin, at Stranz. Time and again I’ve said to myself, ‘One last feast, and then I’ll spend all my evenings with Rebecca.’ Not long afterwards, I’d be sitting there again, in self-indulgent solitude. Unhappy marriage as a satisfying way of life—maybe that exists.

  11

  WHEN I LEFT FOR BALI, my wife didn’t drive me to the airport, because she had to take our children to some unspecified event. A kiss in the hall, a fleeting hug, Fay cried. I immediately resolved never to travel without my family again. But as it was going to be my last trip without them, I was determined to make the most of it and to some extent I shook off my guilty feelings during the flight. There wasn’t much point in doing otherwise. I didn’t give a thought to Dieter Tiberius.

  My friend Stefan picked me up at Denpasar Airport. We had known each other since our late teens, which is to say, for a long time. Both of us had refused to do the compulsory six months in the military, and instead did national service as civilians, working in an old people’s home. Stefan had studied business afterwards and gone to work for Deutsche Bank in Jakarta, where he married an Indonesian woman. Now he was self-employed and involved in complex financial transactions I couldn’t fathom, but we usually talked about other things. We were radically open with one another on the subject of our private lives and called this ‘talking vulvar’, a term we’d coined in our student days, when we would exchange notes on our girlfriends’ most intimate body parts. These days we more often talked vulvar about our marital problems, which we divulged in a spirit of rigorous self-examination, but the drive from Denpasar to Seminyak was too short to get started on that. We brought each other up to date on our lives instead and talked about the wedding, his second—another Indonesian woman.

  There were three days until the wedding. I was staying at a hotel on the beach and would sleep until midday, read William Faulkner’s Light in August on my balcony for a couple of hours, do a bit of sketching, go for a spin around Seminyak on a moped I’d hired and then, at about four, head down to the water, where most of the wedding guests had already gathered. It was a broad, white beach—high waves, heat even in the late afternoon. I hired a short surfboard and swam out a little way to wait for some decent waves, but there weren’t many. We drifted in the sea, telling each other about our jobs and families, and when a good wave came, we tried to catch it as it broke, throwing our bodies onto the surfboards, paddling briefly with our arms and letting t
he wave carry us to the beach. It was easy and good fun, and we laughed like children. Later somebody would fetch beer. We hoped for a dramatic sunset, but a grey strip of cloud settled itself between sea and sky every time, and the sun scornfully vanished behind it.

  Every afternoon at half past four, groups of twenty or thirty Indonesians descended on the beach, alarming some of the guests. They were festively attired in turbans and brightly coloured scarves, and they sang. They had bowls of blossom with them and long objects that looked like big Christmas crackers. At five o’clock they got up, walked slowly to the water and threw in the things they had brought with them. Then they turned back. The sea washed the things onto the shore again even before these people had left the beach, but they didn’t appear to care.

  Two or three men from the wedding party said it was a ritual to appease the sea—apparently there had been a tsunami warning. Stefan said that was nonsense. His friends—who did not live in Asia but claimed to have read a lot about it—stood their ground. Some believed them, others didn’t. I walked down to the water for a closer look. I found orange-coloured blossoms, woven amulets with gold ribbons, dishes made of palm leaves. I also found a chicken’s egg in a plastic bag but didn’t know whether it was one of the cult objects or had fallen prey to the sea on some other occasion. I was inclined to disbelieve the alarmists, but I wasn’t sure.

  Dogs fought on the beach, a few boys played football, and sometimes vendors came by trying to sell us kites in the shape of ships. Some of them hung above us in the sky; they had black sails. I bought a kite for my children. I made an effort to talk to as many of the guests as possible, so no one could comment that I never had anything to say. I was somewhat apprehensive about the speech I had prepared for the wedding reception.

  On the second evening we went to Métis, a restaurant-cum-lounge, open on one side and looking out onto long ponds covered with waterlilies. Fat koi swam in and out between the lily pads. A DJ was spinning records, and a trumpeter accompanied the music live. We sat in armchairs, looking at the waterlilies and drinking strawberry mojitos or Moscow mules, our clothes sticking to our skin. I had a long chat with a woman based in Bangkok who was the EU diplomat in charge of Myanmar. She was wearing a short, white, Mondrian-style dress and told me about the generals, and the opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi in her lakeside house. We flirted a little, aimlessly, only because it was that kind of an evening, and then Stefan joined us. The diplomat left, and we talked vulvar. I told my friend all about Dieter Tiberius and was rather put out when he asked whether, given the circumstances, it was right to leave my family in Berlin. On the other hand, asking uncomfortable questions was precisely the point of our conversations. I said that Tiberius had never been physically threatening and that I didn’t consider him dangerous. Later, I lost myself to the trumpet, and it seemed to me I had never heard music that penetrated so deep into my being, but I expect the cocktails were to blame.

  At one in the morning it began to rain, and the trumpet was drowned out by the patter. We waited for taxis that were a long time coming. Some of the wedding guests went on to a club; I went back to my hotel and rang my wife. She didn’t pick up. She must have been at home—in Germany it was eight in the evening, our children’s bedtime. If I had been there, I’d have been reading them a story. In those days I lived a lot in the hypothetical subjunctive. I was often away and would imagine in detail what I would have been doing if I had been with my family. That way, I was half there—in my mind, at any rate—and that reassured me.

  Suddenly I began to worry, thinking of Dieter Tiberius. I rang again and left a voice message. ‘I love you,’ I said at the end. The next morning Rebecca had left me a message in return. She said the children were well and so was she.

  On the day before the wedding, my friend had a stag party. He set off with the men, his fiancée with the women. We ate in a restaurant that served gigantic spare ribs, sawing the meat off the bones with sharp knives and then picking them up and gnawing them. We drank beer in a few bars and ended up in a club famous for a drink containing hallucinogenic mushrooms. I had never tried drugs, hadn’t even smoked a joint, but I drank out of the glass that was doing the rounds. There were eight of us. Clinging to the wall was a gecko, and somebody said that geckos didn’t have eyelids, so they had to moisten their eyes with their tongues—that was why geckos’ tongues flickered in and out. I gave a loud laugh. Three women came and stood by our table and danced to the music coming from the speakers—spare, graceful movements. They were Balinese women, small, dainty and young; they wore high-heeled shoes and leopardskin bikinis, and they danced for us for five minutes. Half an hour later they came back. They were lovely. I looked at them. I felt happy. Then I forgot about them. I didn’t notice much effect from the mushrooms.

  We decided to meet up with the women guests and carry on partying at Stefan’s house. As I was sitting on my moped waiting for the others, one of the dancers came and stood beside me. She was now wearing jeans and a white T-shirt, her long hair tied back in a red band. She smiled at me. I smiled back, shy and a little helpless. I didn’t know what she wanted. The others got on their mopeds, ready to set off. As I started up the engine, the Balinese woman got on the pillion seat. I let it happen—that’s the only way of putting it. I hadn’t asked her to get on, not with words or gestures. I could reproach myself for smiling, but I don’t believe there’s anything that says you’re not allowed to smile. She put her arms around my hips and her hands on my belly and snuggled up to me. We drove through the night until we found the women guests. They too got on their mopeds and followed us. On the way we stopped off at a shop and bought beer, wine, vodka, crisps and chocolate. The Balinese woman asked me my name and then practised saying ‘Randolph’ until she pronounced it well. She was called Putu.

  Stefan lived in a house in the hills above Seminyak. It was open on one side, like most houses in Bali, and the kitchen opened onto the pool. We sat at the kitchen counter, drinking, eating nibbles and laughing. Two of the men were pretty far gone on the mushrooms. They started throwing the women into the pool and then went sailing in themselves. Soon almost everyone was in the water. I didn’t resist for long. Two other men, the biggest and heaviest, fought on the lawn beside the pool like elephant bulls until they, too, splashed into the water together. Putu, who had been spared, brought our drinks to the pool. We prattled away, drinking and looking up into the starless sky. Somebody said: ‘Let the Asians control the world. Who cares, as long as we get to control the swimming pools?’ Everybody laughed.

  Later we borrowed clothes from Stefan and his fiancée. Some fitted better than others. A woman from the Goethe Institut swung around the pole of a parasol and claimed it was pole dancing. Then Stefan danced with the pole and managed to poke it into the kitchen fan. The fan stopped for a moment but then continued to turn lopsidedly. We laughed and laughed. I sat in a deckchair, Putu asleep on the lawn beside me. It was six in the morning, and I wondered whether to take her to my room.

  At half past six—it was getting light—my phone rang. Everyone started—so many people these days have that ringtone that sounds like an old-fashioned telephone. Most of the guests looked around for their mobiles, some of them realising only now that they had fallen in the water with their phones on them. Loud swearing. The ringing stopped. Soon afterwards it started up again. I heaved myself out of my deckchair—it’s not so easy to get out of them at my age—and went to the kitchen counter, where I had left my phone when it had become clear there was no escaping the water. The screen was illuminated, my wife’s name flashing across it. In Germany it was half past midnight.

  ‘Hello,’ I said, in what I hoped was an unpartyish way.

  My wife’s voice was panicked. ‘Tiberius is in our garden.’

  12

  I OFTEN WONDERED LATER why the call had to reach me just then. I would have preferred a more appropriate moment, preferred not to be caught in such frivolous circumstances. But is there an appropriate moment for
disaster? We can’t live our entire lives in such a way that if disaster strikes we can be sure of our dignity—that would be ridiculous. But I’m getting ahead of myself, getting off track. I shouldn’t do that. And why am I constantly defending myself? I really ought to stop.

  Rebecca had already rung the police. She had gone to bed early, hadn’t been able to sleep, and after a while she had got up to have a drink of water. Our kitchen is at the back of the house, and when my wife looked out at the garden as she drank the water, she saw a figure in the moonlight behind a birch tree. My wife couldn’t be seen, because she hadn’t switched on the kitchen light. The figure moved away from the birch and she saw that it was Dieter Tiberius, who now ran across the garden to our house and up the steps to our conservatory. At the top, he leaned over the railings and peered in at our daughter’s bedroom window. He was sweating profusely. He ran back, hid behind the birch, then set off again, once more staring through Fay’s window. My wife rang the police, then me.

  ‘Where’s Tiberius now?’ I asked.

  ‘Behind the compost heap,’ said my wife.

  ‘Get the breadknife,’ I said.

  ‘I’ve already got the breadknife,’ said my wife.

  ‘Are all the doors locked?’ I asked, helplessly.

  ‘Of course,’ said my wife, and then added, ‘I’m scared.’

  ‘Why aren’t the police there yet?’ I asked.

  ‘Now he’s running across the garden,’ she said. ‘He keeps running backwards and forwards—what’s he doing?’

  ‘Jesus, where are the police?’ I cried.

  Then there was silence.

  ‘What the fuck’s going on?’ I yelled into the phone. ‘Where is he?’

  ‘I can’t see him anymore,’ said my wife. I heard our doorbell. ‘That’s the police,’ said my wife.

  ‘Ring me back,’ I said.

  ‘Okay,’ she said and hung up.