Fear

by Dirk Kurbjuweit

  ‘Give it a try, all the same,’ I begged.

  ‘All right,’ she said.

  18

  I MADE MYSELF MOZZARELLA and tomatoes for supper, with basil that I cut from a pot in the garden. Then I rang my wife and told her what I’d done that day and how things stood. I admit I glossed over the facts and made the restraining order sound like a real hope, not even mentioning our lawyer’s doubts, leaving Rebecca with the impression that things didn’t stand too badly at all. I did mention, though, that a performance had begun—a drama in which the truth was not easy to discern. I told her I missed her, which was the truth.

  ‘I miss you too,’ she said, and then: ‘We’re going to make it, aren’t we?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘You and I, we’re going to make it.’

  We were a little embarrassed, perhaps because we hadn’t spoken to each other so lovingly for a long while. Then I spoke to the children and heard happy reports about a steamboat trip on Lake Constance.

  In the evening I watched a football match on television, patrolled the flat and went to bed at half past ten. As I lay there in the dark, I kept looking at the alarm clock; the last time I remember seeing was three o’clock. Until then, at least, I was awake. I wondered why there had to be a threat lurking one storey below me again, just as there had been in my childhood. I don’t want to compare my father to Dieter Tiberius, but all the same, I felt a sense of déjà vu.

  I wasn’t afraid in the way that I had once been afraid of my father, but still I lay in bed with a sense of impending danger. The question troubling me now was that of my own manhood. I was no longer sure that the state was going to help me. It was possible that I would have to take it upon myself to turn Dieter Tiberius out and ensure the safety of my family.

  Iwasassailedbydetailedandendlesslyspirallingmemories of a Christmas Eve we had celebrated a few years ago with our extended family. My parents were there, Rebecca’s mother, her mother (so my children’s great-grandmother) and Cornelia with her new boyfriend, Mircea. My little brother wasn’t there—he only rarely showed up at family gatherings. This time he had rung from Minneapolis-St Paul to make his excuses. He had an assignment that could make a big difference, he told me, and he’d send me an email soon. The email never came.

  My sister’s marriage had broken up six months before, and for two months now she’d been going out with this new boyfriend, a Romanian from Bucharest who ran a gym in Berlin. That was where my sister had met him. My mother had warned me that Mircea was, as she put it, ‘different’. I liked him at first. He was open, warm and extremely good-looking—broad-shouldered and robust. He was a new type for my sister, who had so far spent her life with gentle, not particularly enterprising men. She hadn’t wanted children with her husband because she didn’t think he was in a position to provide for them, and before he was able to put himself in such a position, she left him. Mircea, on the other hand, was bursting with energy.

  Since my wife took charge of our Christmases, they’ve felt much more festive. While the Christmas trees of my childhood were always meagre affairs, Rebecca organises splendid Nordmann firs that bend even under our high ceilings. My wife has a good eye, so our trees are always tastefully and cheerfully decorated, sometimes in red, sometimes white, sometimes in a golden honey colour. We don’t have set Christmas rituals—no one in my family is a devout Christian, except for Cornelia, who flirted with religion at the age of fifteen or sixteen and subsequently embraced it with a vengeance. That was another reason why Mircea came as a surprise to me. The zest for life he exuded was at odds with the image I had of my sister. She did not, however, try to force her beliefs on others, and let us celebrate Christmas as we liked.

  First, we all went to church, then presents were opened. This, I am sorry to say, transforms my children year after year into beings completely alien to me. I cannot put it any other way: during that half-hour at the Christmas tree, when Paul and Fay greedily tear open their presents, dashing from one to the next (there’s always an enormous heap), and eventually ask a little disappointedly (in spite of the enormous heap) whether that’s all—during that half-hour, my children are alien to me. We don’t sing carols or recite poems or say prayers, but soon after the presents we have Christmas dinner, which is always cooked by my mother and always the same: stuffed turkey with red cabbage and potatoes, followed by baked apples. My sister said grace. For the rest of us that was always a strange moment, because we didn’t know what to do with our hands. On the table? Under the table? Together? One over the other? Where to look? What to think? To begin with, when I was still being a jerk to Cornelia, I think I looked pitying or even scornful. Later I managed a kind of minute-long trancelike state of inner neutrality—and soon after that she was dead.

  I don’t know whether we’d have fared better at the Christmas known to the family as the ‘Mircea Disaster’ if we had had more firmly established rituals. Maybe we’d have kept control of the evening then. Maybe we’d have insisted it went the way we wanted it to—and that our way involved not arguing at Christmas, being considerate of one another, rather than laying into one another. Our idea of Christmas was what you might call a ceasefire.

  It didn’t get off to a bad start. Mircea was charming to my sister; he was also charming to the other women, including Rebecca’s grandmother, always noticing when they needed more gravy or their wine needing topping up. We were all a little bewitched by this kindness and attentiveness, as it was not something we had ever bothered with among ourselves—not on my side of the family, at any rate. Mircea snared us in his never-ending web of stories, a shimmering, silky-soft web. He carried us off to the gargantuan palace that the dictator Ceauşescu had built in Bucharest in the eighties. We roamed with him through staterooms as large as gymnasiums, along endless corridors, into nooks and crannies where no one had ever set foot. We saw magnificent elephantine chandeliers and golden taps, and came across strange, long-forgotten characters doing their duties in remote corners of the palace, laying a mosaic or dusting windowsills.

  Mircea himself had worked as an electrician, screwing thousands of light switches into the walls of the palace without an end in sight and without ever meeting another soul. He made it sound as if he were the true master of this giant stone realm, the man who was in control of everything and saw to it that even when there were delays in the delivery of materials, the construction work never flagged. It bothered me that he displayed sympathy for Ceauşescu’s dictatorship, but I dismissed it as nostalgic nonsense. After the revolution had swept away Ceauşescu and his wife—I clearly remember the pictures of their corpses—Mircea left for the west, where, after a few false starts, he ended up in Berlin. He then became a fitness trainer and later took over a gym.

  At this point in his story—it was after the baked apples—I began to feel uneasy, because Mircea not only knew how to get bodies in shape, he could also heal souls, imagining himself in possession of psychic powers. His hands, the same hands that for years had screwed light switches into the walls of Ceauşescu’s palace, were, he believed, miracle-healer’s hands. When he caught my sceptical glance, he leapt to his feet and began to massage Rebecca’s grandmother’s neck. She had complained of aches and pains earlier in the evening. Was it better, he asked after a minute, and what could the old woman say but yes? She was ninety-two. He threw me a look of triumph, and, carrying on with the massage, told us that some bandits, as he called them, had broken into his gym the previous week and stolen his laptop and a stereo.

  ‘And what do the police do?’ he asked. From the sneering way he asked, the answer was clear: nothing. ‘In Germany the police never do anything,’ said Mircea. If he had happened to be walking past his gym that night and seen the burglars, they wouldn’t be alive today, that was for sure. It was no good showing mercy to these people—things only got worse and worse—and things were in fact getting worse and worse in Germany. I said we lived in a country where the rule of law prevailed and where the police solved most crimes.
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  ‘Ha,’ he said, his hands still on Rebecca’s grandmother’s neck. We were given a long list of thefts and murders left unsolved. The victims were, without exception, acquaintances of his.

  I glanced at my father. In the past he had made speeches like this himself, but he had grown meeker in his old age and now voted Green. He was silent, fixing Mircea with a look that seemed more like a prayer—a prayer that this man might turn out to be good for Cornelia, even if it didn’t look that way just now.

  Germans were simply too soft, said Mircea. All they did was stuff their faces and think about their pensions. They no longer had the guts to defend themselves, and Germany would soon go under.

  I got up, went over to the Christmas tree, gouged the burnt-down candles out of their holders and put in new ones. I made another feeble attempt to defend the rule of law, but Mircea cut me short. His hands had stopped moving and were resting on Rebecca’s grandmother’s shoulders.

  ‘There are no men here,’ he said. ‘You have beautiful women,’ he added, with a charming glance at my sister and wife, ‘but you don’t have real men anymore.’

  I wondered whether lighting Christmas-tree candles counted as men’s work or women’s. Fire is associated with cooking—that is why it was more often the women who were in charge of fire back in the Stone Age. So my task couldn’t be genuinely masculine—it was feminine, and from a masculine point of view that meant effeminate. On the other hand, I had seen pictures showing men chasing mammoths with torches, so perhaps I was in fact upholding a masculine tradition when I lit the honey-coloured candles with extra-long matches.

  ‘Well, as long as we have beautiful women,’ I said, but my pathetic attempt to save the situation with humour fell flat. Mircea went on and on. He railed against ‘the overfed Germans’ and we made no comment. It was just as he said—we were too soft. But that’s only partly true and isn’t quite fair.

  We already knew at the time that my sister had cancer—breast cancer. Her gynaecologist had diagnosed it two years before, after overlooking it for years. My sister, a conscientious person, had been for regular mammograms, but her doctor had shown himself incompetent. By the time he discovered the breast cancer, it had already spread to the liver—usually a death sentence. But my sister fought with a strength I wouldn’t have credited her with. She underwent hormonal therapy, became vegetarian and got up every morning at half past five to do tai chi in the park. The cancer vanished. Cornelia considered herself healthy, a survivor, and we, her family, went along with that, for her sake and for ours. But by then we knew too much about cancer to suppress a particular thought, even if we never voiced it: cancer can hide, it can come back—especially liver metastases. That’s why we were glad of anything that did Cornelia good, and a man undoubtedly did her good, especially after the break-up. If she had chosen Mircea because of his putative healing powers, that was fine by me, even if I couldn’t believe in them myself. Maybe he was just great in bed. That kind of happiness could ward off cancer too—why shouldn’t it? At any rate, we were not going to do anything that got in the way of my sister’s happiness. That is another reason we kept silent, another reason I betrayed my values.

  It was a double betrayal, because on the one hand I kept silent in the face of this ignorant, brutish view of democracy, civilisation and the rule of law—and on the other hand I sat there wishing my father would go into the spare room, where one of his guns was sure to be lying. My parents always stayed the night with us at Christmas, and we’d had to train my father not to leave his gun under the pillow here, the way he did at home. One of the children might have found it and wreaked havoc. In my anger at Mircea, I imagined my father momentarily holding a gun to his head to stop him talking such bullshit, to show him that we too were capable of defending ourselves. So it was that I was too feeble that Christmas to take a stand for civilisation and at the same time succumbed inwardly to the temptations of barbarism.

  The rest of Christmas Eve passed peacefully. In the end Mircea wearied of his tirades and sat down, and was once again charming to everyone. My sister had kept quiet throughout, but now she billed and cooed with her boyfriend as if nothing had happened—as if she had heard nothing to alarm her. I was glad when, long after midnight, the pair of them left.

  I thought of Mircea as I lay sleepless in my bed. I wondered what he would have done in my place. There was a good chance Dieter Tiberius would no longer be alive. Or else Mircea would have beaten him up until he moved out. Or tortured him. I wished Mircea was a good brother-in-law so that I could ring him up and get him to take care of things for me. I was ashamed of this wish. I couldn’t ring him anyway—not now. He was as dead as my sister—he had died even before she had, in a car crash in Romania. And I wouldn’t have rung him, honestly. I believed in the law, just as I believe in it to this day, even if, in our case, a loophole has opened up.

  Democracy is often unappealing—too many politicians fooling around—but it is, I think, the best we have, all the same. In a dictatorship the very people who scare me would be in power—the unscrupulous intelligent ones—and to enforce their power they would use the people who scare me even more—the dumb brutal ones. My fear of dictatorship is a fear of subjugation: the unscrupulous intelligent ones telling the dumb brutal ones to beat me up because I like my freedom. Democracy, on the other hand, is a form of government for people who can’t or won’t resort to physical violence. In the past, you might have said it’s a form of government for weaklings. In this traditional sense, I am a weakling—yes, I admit it; I want to assert my position by means of negotiation, not brawls or shootouts. It is very much in our interest as weaklings that it’s not dog eat dog. That is why we established the rule of law and set the police to enforce it. Our problem is that we are good at developing a society that protects us, but not good at defending ourselves when it fails us. We don’t even like to get into a full-blown fight because we’re afraid that cerebral fluid will flow. Nothing makes us as strong or as weak as our brains.

  I wondered that night whether I was the man I possibly ought to be just now—I mean a real man, in the classic sense of the word. For the time being my family was unprotected by the state, so all protection had to come from me. Hadn’t I failed long ago? Because I hadn’t taken Dieter Tiberius on right at the beginning—hadn’t acted like an angry gorilla?

  I heard the toilet being flushed: Dieter Tiberius was as awake as I was. How humiliating to hear that noise from him and have to imagine him wiping the drops from his glans—if he was that fastidious—and then tucking away his penis. And this man desired the same woman I did. That is the trouble with beautiful women: in desiring them you associate yourself with other men, even with idiots, or with sickos like Dieter Tiberius. I fought back this thought, wearily, exhaustedly, and, by a roundabout route, ended up remembering Putu. I saw her dancing: the leopard-skin bikini, the high heels, her firm body. It is the last image I recall from that night.

  19

  WHEN I GOT UP, the first thing I did was to check in the entryway to see if there was a letter on the windowsill, but there was nothing. I left the house at nine and went to a laundry and drycleaners near the train station. It’s not a small business, not somewhere you’d take the odd skirt or shirt, but more like a factory, catering to professional customers: local restaurants or bed and breakfasts. The manager, a man named Thomas Walther, let the basement to Dieter Tiberius.

  The woman at the counter sent me to the back of the building through a heavy steel door. I found myself in a kind of small hangar dotted with machinery, including what looked like enormous washing machines. It was hot; damp gathered on my skin. I saw steam and heard a rumbling and a hissing. People in white overalls stood between the machines. Because of the steam I did not immediately recognise Walther. I asked around and found him standing by a machine from which a young woman was pulling white sheets. The two of them were laughing as I approached.

  I had thought he would remember me, just as I remembered him from the
conversation we’d had with the other homeowners in our building, but he did not. I told him who I was and asked whether I could speak to him in private. The woman was from Moldova and didn’t understand a word of German, said Walther. She hadn’t let herself be put off by my arrival and carried on pulling sheets from the machine.

  His tenant, I said, was seriously harassing my wife—could he, as the man’s landlord, not give him notice? It was impossible for us to continue living under the same roof. I was prepared to find a new tenant for the basement and would bear all resulting costs. I had to talk loudly to make myself heard above the rumble and hiss of the machines.

  ‘What’s old Dieter been up to then?’ asked Walther.

  It worried me that he referred to him so familiarly.

  ‘He writes my wife obscene letters,’ I said. I could tell from Walther’s face that he was not at all perturbed.

  ‘Love letters?’ he asked.

  ‘No, obscene letters,’ I said. ‘About sex, perverted sex.’

  He nodded knowingly and then said: ‘I’ve never had any trouble with Dieter.’

  ‘He claims that we are sexually abusing our children,’ I said.

  The woman from Moldova looked at me. She had pulled all the sheets out of the washing machine and stowed them in a trolley.

  ‘That you’re sexually abusing your children,’ said Walther, in a semi-questioning tone.

  ‘We don’t abuse our children,’ I said, and immediately realised that it made me sound guilty as hell. You shouldn’t have to tell anyone that you don’t abuse your children—it should go without saying. Sweat was pouring down my face. It was hot between the machines, and my shirt and suit trousers were sticking to my skin.

  Now Walther looked at me with interest, almost searchingly. ‘And what makes Dieter think that?’ he asked.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘All I know is that I don’t want to live a day longer under the same roof as him.’