Fear

by Dirk Kurbjuweit

  16

  WHEN WE GOT HOME after my return from Bali, there was a bulging letter on the windowsill in the common entryway. For Rebecca Tiefenthaler, it said on the envelope, and on the back: Dieter Tiberius.

  ‘Who’s that letter from?’ Paul asked.

  ‘Just someone I know,’ my wife said blithely.

  It was then that we started to put on an act—though my wife had presumably started when I was in Bali. We’re generally bright, if not cheerful, in the presence of our children. We remained that way even while dealing with Dieter Tiberius and his threats, but from then on it was only a pretence. That was the first drastic change he imposed on us: we started acting, and our lives became a performance for our children.

  I was first at the door to our flat. I unlocked it and walked through all the rooms as if on patrol. It was as it always was. It was a pleasant day, and the rooms were filled with sun. My wife locked herself in the toilet, and I knew she would read the letter there. I went into the kitchen and made breakfast for the children, telling them about Bali, the sea, the surfing.

  ‘Imagine, Dada on a surfboard,’ I said, my throat tight. They laughed. My wife came back. She’d put the letter away somewhere so the children wouldn’t be reminded of it.

  ‘Dada went surfing,’ Fay said.

  ‘That must have looked funny,’ my wife said.

  ‘Really funny,’ said Paul.

  ‘Dada used to be a world champion in surfing,’ I said.

  ‘Wow,’ said Fay.

  ‘That’s a big fib,’ Paul crowed.

  I couldn’t stop thinking: Dialogue between parents accused of sexually abusing their children and the children in question. The awful thing was that Paul and Fay were in the way right now. I wanted to know what was in the letter—I had to know—but we couldn’t talk about it as long as they were around.

  ‘Time to leave for kindergarten,’ I said, getting up. ‘Teeth brushed, jackets on.’

  While Rebecca helped the children pack their bags and put on their shoes, I went out to the garage, taking the short cut through the basement. Passing the door to Dieter Tiberius’s flat, I pricked up my ears: nothing, not a peep. I kicked the door down and hurled myself at the sleeping man, but only in my head, and then carried on out into the yard.

  I retrieved my bike from the garage, then Paul’s bike, as if on autopilot, and a moment later my wife appeared with the children. She’d gone round the side of the house, not through the basement.

  Then the familiar ritual: children’s helmets on, Fay in the child seat, a kiss for my wife.

  I hesitated. ‘Did you want to come with us?’

  ‘No, it’s all right,’ she said and kissed the children goodbye.

  We cycled to kindergarten. I dropped off Paul and Fay and rushed back. My wife was sitting in the living room, talking to her mother on the phone, the letter on the sofa beside her.

  ‘I’ll read you what he’s written,’ she said when she’d hung up.

  ‘Not here,’ I said. ‘Let’s go in the kitchen.’ The basement flat is under our living room. We could hear Dustin Hoffman’s voice when we were in there, so Dieter Tiberius could probably hear us too.

  We sat down at the kitchen table and my wife read me the letter. It was eleven pages long. Dieter Tiberius gave a detailed account of what my wife and I had, in his opinion, been doing to our children. I can’t quote it here, although I remember it precisely, because I was to read the letter many times in the months that followed, with a disgust previously unknown to me. I will only say that most of the scenes that Dieter Tiberius described took place in the bathroom, and some in our bed. Frequent words were ‘willy’ and ‘fanny’, and he said that the children shouted, ‘Oh, that’s hot,’ or ‘Don’t rub so hard.’

  I found it particularly upsetting that the account was not wholly the product of a sick imagination, but shot through with real-life detail—the detail of our family life. ‘Don’t rub so hard’ are words that have been said in our bathroom—as are the words ‘Oh, that’s hot’. They are probably to be heard in all bathrooms the world over where small children get washed. Dieter Tiberius had overheard them being used by our children and incorporated them in his sick fantasies. In this way he deprived us of the sense of pure innocence that his very accusations left us in such sore need of.

  Even before my wife had reached the end of the letter, I had begun searching my memory for the situations he described. When had I let the shower run too hot? When had I rubbed too hard with a towel that was a bit too rough? And didn’t the jet of too-hot water and the not entirely gentle way I dried my children in the morning rush constitute minor assaults in themselves? With his letter, Dieter Tiberius had sown in us the seeds of self-doubt, and so it was to continue in the months to come.

  My wife put the letter on the kitchen table and said, ‘He wants our children.’ The same thought had occurred to me—anyone describing sex with children in such detail could only be a paedophile. ‘I’ll kill him,’ Rebecca said, her voice high and unsteady. ‘I’ll kill him!’ She jumped from her seat. ‘He’s an animal!’ she shrieked. ‘He’s a filthy animal, a freak, a pervert! I’m going to kill him!’

  I took her in my arms, and we stood in our kitchen holding each other tight for a long while. I think it was the first time I took my wife in my arms unprompted after one of her screaming fits.

  In that moment, I thought all was well between us, that we had had our crisis, but that, in the face of danger, we had weathered it. I was wrong: marriages are more complex than that. It wasn’t just that our embrace left me feeling slightly unnerved, although it did. It was that I had acquired a new picture of my wife—two pictures, in fact. In one of them, she was reading the letter out loud, almost tonelessly, faltering occasionally, and once with a brief tremor in her voice—reading scenes in which she abused her children. In the other picture, she was with our children, with Paul and Fay, in the bath or the shower, doing the things that Dieter Tiberius had described. I didn’t believe a word of it, not for a second, and yet those pictures were there and had become a part of my wife. I kept pushing them away, but they came back, just like the pictures I now had in my head of my children and me.

  17

  THAT AFTERNOON WE HAD AN APPOINTMENT with our lawyer. On the way, we stopped off at kindergarten and impressed on both teachers that on no account were our children to be picked up by a third party, no matter what he said. That is, in any case, a basic rule of our kindergarten: no child may be picked up by anyone who hasn’t been authorised by the parents and introduced to the teachers. But we wanted to be on the safe side—we wanted, I think, to feel that there was something we could do. Then we sat hand in hand in our lawyer’s office while she read our letters from Dieter Tiberius. For the first time, I was struck by a thought that was to bother me repeatedly in the months to come: What if she believes him rather than us? What if she thinks there’s something in his accusations?

  Sitting there, I was for the first time a man under the shadow of suspected child abuse, a man faced with the question of how to prove that he hasn’t abused his children. I realised that we were now dependent on the trust and goodwill of others. I remember, too, a conscious feeling of uprightness and decency, an almost holy feeling. In the face of the accusations I was the very model of uprightness and decency. And I remember being confident, as I sat in that lawyer’s office, that Dieter Tiberius had made a mistake. His perverted letter would enable us to evict him from the house and from our lives—maybe not straight away, but definitely within a few weeks.

  ‘Disgusting,’ the lawyer said. ‘I’m so sorry you have to be put through this.’

  ‘It’s slander,’ I said, ‘severe defamation.’ I had little idea of law and legal terminology at the time—only a sense of justice, of right and wrong. ‘It must be easy,’ I went on, ‘to evict him from his flat on the strength of that.’

  The lawyer looked at me and for a while she said nothing. Her dark hair was combed back off her face an
d secured in a headband, the jacket of her suit hung over her chair, an office classic by Charles and Ray Eames. USM furniture in black, one carefully chosen piece in red, a glass desk, a Dokoupil leopard on the wall, a cork print. Eventually she said something that shattered my confidence: ‘Mr Tiefenthaler,’ she said, ‘unfortunately we live in a state where the law prevails.’

  ‘What do you mean, unfortunately?’ my wife asked icily.

  ‘I always thought we were fortunate to live in a state where the law prevails,’ I added.

  The lawyer looked at us somewhat pityingly. ‘In your present situation, it is not particularly fortunate,’ she said coolly, ‘because I fear that your expectation—your reasonable expectation—that this person can be swiftly removed from your vicinity is not easy to fulfil.’

  ‘But presumably we can sue him,’ I said naively.

  ‘Of course we can sue him,’ the lawyer said—and she would of course set the ball rolling immediately, but that did not mean Tiberius would have to evacuate his flat. She was afraid she could give us no hope in that direction. People were fairly hard to dislodge from their homes in this country, especially when social security was paying the rent, which, given Tiberius’s lack of work, seemed likely. She could tell us stories about her own tenants—horrendous. Her contemptuous words made me uncomfortable. I hadn’t been thinking of our case in terms of class or social privilege and had no desire to.

  My wife said that as she understood it, those who acted lawfully were protected by the law. A long and increasingly trenchant discussion ensued between the two women, but of course got us nowhere. My unease grew. I was a great believer in good behaviour and had this stupid fear that the lawyer might begin to doubt our innocence if we upset her. I intervened, saying that we’d be grateful if she would use all—really all—legal means at her disposal. She agreed to that. She took copies of the letters, we signed a power of attorney, and she saw us to the door. If we didn’t feel safe, she could organise a gun for us, she said. I shook my head.

  In the lift, my wife had one of her fits. I have forgotten what she said, but she screamed all the way down from the fifth floor. When we reached the ground floor, she started to cry. I took her in my arms, but was unable to communicate so much as a spark of optimism. I am a law-abiding citizen—always have been. I believe the law exists so that peaceable people like me can live in peace. Should that peace be disturbed, I believe the law is there to restore it immediately. This trust had been shattered—in a lawyer’s office, of all places—but it was only for a few minutes. Back in the car, I, the optimist, my mother’s son, was already saying I didn’t believe the lawyer.

  ‘The law will protect us,’ I said. We drove to a shop that specialised in self-defence and bought my wife a can of pepper spray.

  On the windowsill in the common entryway was another letter, a thin one this time. There was only one sheet of paper in the envelope and only a single sentence on the paper: I forgot to mention in my last letter that I have filed a complaint against you with the police. Dieter Tiberius.

  In the kitchen we discussed what to do next, and eventually decided that my wife would take the children to stay with her mother for a while, down near the Austrian border. While Rebecca collected Paul and Fay from kindergarten, I booked their flights for the following morning. Then, as I was already online, I decided to find out more about our legal situation. I googled terms like ‘defamation’ and ‘stalking’, but found nothing to vindicate my optimism. There was no anti-stalking law at that time, and I don’t know whether it would have helped us. Dieter Tiberius wasn’t exactly a proper stalker, even if we often called him ‘our stalker’—and still do.

  That afternoon I played with my children. I am a keen Lego builder, which maybe isn’t surprising in an architect, but I don’t just build houses with Lego—I build cars and ships too. Paul and Fay talked the entire time, as usual, but I barely heard a word of it. My thoughts kept returning to Dieter Tiberius and his attack on our family, and I was tired, too. I hadn’t slept for two nights in a row. Once I heard the sound of the toilet being flushed in the basement and felt a rush of hatred.

  In the evening, when the children had gone to bed, I walked around the outside of the house, once at nine and once at eleven, nervous and tense, because I knew I might come face to face with Dieter Tiberius at any moment. I kept stopping and listening, and tried to work out how long it would take me to leap to the woodpile next to the garage door—the people who live in the attic flat have a fireplace—and grab myself a cudgel.

  After driving my family to the airport the next morning, what I now call the ‘active phase’ began. History has to be divided up, or else you lose sight of the big picture. I rang the local youth welfare office and asked to be put through to the director. I told him that we had been accused of sexually abusing our children, but that this was not the case, quite definitely not, and he could come around any time he liked to assess our children.

  ‘Who are you?’ the director of the youth welfare office asked. I told him our names again and described the situation, once more protesting our innocence.

  ‘It is not pleasant for us, but our children are at your disposal,’ I said in a firm voice.

  I had read about tests done on children to ascertain whether or not they’d been abused. Among other things, they were made to draw pictures. I don’t know what you should or shouldn’t draw, but I was sure my children would draw the right things—after all, they hadn’t been abused. I couldn’t help imagining, though, that they might accidentally draw something wrong—perhaps a tree, which a psychologist might interpret as a phallus—but the very idea was so terrible that I preferred not to think about it.

  The director of the youth welfare office said that this was the first time anyone had ever called him to report that they hadn’t abused their children. He would look into the matter and get back to me. It was then that it began to dawn on me that we were well on the way to hysteria—but that did nothing to stop us. We justified everything we did by saying that we had to stop Dieter Tiberius from assaulting our children. It was impossible to do too much—only too little. So I was quite satisfied to have made my phone call to the youth welfare office.

  Later, I was rung by a youth welfare officer who had called the crime office to investigate and told me that ‘the matter’ involved allegations ‘against unknown individuals’. I didn’t understand what that meant—it made no sense. Why unknown? Dieter Tiberius had presumably named us as offenders.

  ‘And what happens now?’ I asked.

  ‘Probably nothing for the moment,’ the welfare officer said.

  I was afraid that some vast secretariat would now deal with us according to its own laws, with neither our knowledge nor our involvement—that we would be crushed in the cogs of a creaking machine. I rang the crime office and was directed with surprising rapidity to the department dealing with so-called ‘crimes against the person’. I made an appointment for that afternoon with a Ms Kröger.

  Ms Kröger was wearing jeans and a denim jacket and had short, copper-coloured dyed hair. When she gave me her hand, I saw that she had a pistol in a holster under her arm. We sat down. In front of her on the desk was an unopened file. It was slim—almost flat—as if it had very little in it, which could have been reassuring, if it were our file, or alarming, if it were our stalker’s. The fatter his file, the more suspect he would be. Behind Ms Kröger hung a poster of two fluffy kittens.

  I outlined the situation for her and asserted our innocence. Ms Kröger said that our neighbour hadn’t actually done anything, so the police didn’t have ‘much of a handle’ on him. I asked when the police would have a handle.

  ‘If your wife or children were attacked,’ she said.

  ‘My wife has been attacked—’ I said, ‘with words.’

  ‘Physically,’ said Ms Kröger.

  ‘Does that mean,’ I asked, ‘that the police will only intervene when something happens to my wife or children?’

  �
��I can’t tell you otherwise,’ said Ms Kröger.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ I said.

  She looked at me in silence. A man came in and said, ‘We’re about to start.’

  ‘I’m coming,’ she said and got up.

  ‘Please,’ I said, ‘just one more minute.’

  She sat down again.

  ‘Tell me what we ought to do,’ I said.

  ‘Try to obtain a restraining order,’ said Ms Kröger.

  ‘What’s that?’ I wanted to know.

  ‘A court order that requires your neighbour to keep a distance of at least fifty metres from your wife and children,’ said Ms Kröger.

  ‘What about the accusation of child abuse?’ I asked.

  ‘It’s possible your children will have to undergo a psychological evaluation,’ she said.

  Ms Kröger was by no means forthcoming. In her face I saw no emotion, no inclination to take sides—not even sympathy. I did not have the impression that anyone was being investigated: neither Dieter Tiberius, nor us. The file, unopened throughout, would evidently remain slim, I thought, as I said goodbye.

  All the same, I left feeling nowhere near as bad as I might have done. The words ‘restraining order’ had raised my hopes. If Dieter Tiberius had to keep a distance of at least fifty metres from my wife and children, he wouldn’t be able to carry on living in his flat. He would have to move out, and we’d be rid of him.

  I rang our lawyer. She was in a meeting and rang back two hours later. She had already considered applying for a restraining order, she said, but she didn’t think we’d find a court willing to issue one in our case.

  ‘Why ever not?’ I asked, with a hint of desperation in my voice.

  ‘Because he lives in the same building as you, and no court is going to drive him out of his own home,’ she said.