Fear

by Dirk Kurbjuweit

  35

  THE FRONT GATE SQUEAKS; I look up. The Moldovan woman is coming home. She sees me looking and waves a hand. I wave back. Small neighbourly smiles on her face and mine. The Moldovan woman from the laundry now lives in the basement, a stout woman in her late thirties, a quiet, agreeable neighbour from whom we have nothing to fear. We did panic briefly when she baked us a cake once, afraid that it might be the start of some new horror, but it wasn’t. She keeps herself to herself, with only occasional displays of goodwill towards us, and in return we give her small presents that might come in useful: a thermos flask, some pretty salad servers. She doesn’t have much money.

  Sometimes the laundry manager comes round in the evening and stays for an hour or two. He lives nearby with his family, but we’ve no bourgeois hang-ups; let people do what they like, as long as they can square it with themselves. We turn the music up a bit, Mahler’s second and fifth symphonies at the moment. When we meet the laundry manager at the front gate, we don’t smirk, although his raspberry-coloured cords invite it. He always wears raspberry-coloured cords when he visits the Moldovan woman. There’s a shop in Charlottenburg with a wide range of coloured cords on sale for men. I wonder why a certain type of man—over fifty, usually bald—feels the need to sheathe his legs in coloured corduroy.

  My Black Print is almost gone. I have drunk a lot while writing today, because what is coming is not easy for me. I have to put down the words that haven’t yet been said, so that I can, perhaps, say them at last, to Rebecca, to Bruno, to my mother, and some day to the children. They, I think, are the ones who should be told, but I shy from telling them, because I am afraid they will see me with different eyes—maybe disown me, maybe admire me, I don’t know. Anything is possible, but I’d prefer it if everything stayed the way it is. We have found our way back to normality, a new normality, a post-Tiberius normality, to put it pretentiously.

  If we didn’t go to visit my father regularly, our day-today life would be similar to what it used to be—although, it’s true, I suppose, that I still patrol the garden at night, not because I believe the ghost of Dieter Tiberius might come back to haunt us, but because I can’t shake off the fear that he might have had a friend, another of his own kind, who is plotting to avenge his lost companion. I take the dog with me; he has to go out at night anyway. He sniffs and snorts; once or twice I have caught him staring in bewilderment at a hedgehog. The fox, which we know is there, eludes us; we have never seen another person either. Most likely there is no avenger, but we will never feel as safe as we used to. That does not, however, mean I have a gun.

  What we do have is our Rhodesian ridgeback, big and broad; gentle at home, but dangerous on the street and even more so immediately outside the house. When I take him for a walk, I sometimes think I’ve ended up like my father: I am armed. Benno is not a killer, not bloodthirsty; we haven’t trained him to attack. But his natural aggressiveness is enough to get me into a lot of awkward situations. I have to mollify people when he barks at them, or jumps up at them in spite of his lead. At home I snuggle up to him on the floor and we both like that, but he does detract rather from my claim to enlightened middle-class values. Anyone walking around with an enormous beast like that seems antisocial. But we need Benno; Rebecca would never have regained her equilibrium without him. When all was well again and Dieter Tiberius no longer able to harm us, my wife’s spirits had darkened. Rebecca, who had borne so much, so bravely, all through the crisis, and been so sensible and level-headed, now cried a lot, without being able to say why. Things didn’t improve until the dog came to live with us. He gives Rebecca the sense of security she needs.

  Our marriage has essentially remained what it became thanks to Dieter Tiberius. That’s a harsh thing to say, I know, but sometimes it does us good to say things that hurt—all the more so if they’re true. When Dieter Tiberius set about destroying our family, it was more or less destroyed already. That is also too harsh. Why does pain sometimes do us such good? I don’t know; I only feel it. If I look at the history of my marriage with cool detachment, it is clear to me that it was in a state of severe crisis when Dieter Tiberius entered our lives, and that it was he who enabled me to take an honest look at myself, my wife and our marriage. After that, things improved.

  Thank you, Dieter Tiberius.

  Now that really hurts. But sometimes the toads, those warty guardians of my unconscious, allow those words to rise up. I wave the thanks away, banish them to the depths of the well, regarding these expressions of gratitude as unwarranted, but I can’t pretend not to notice that they occasionally surface. If only we really were the masters of our thoughts. But at least I can say that nothing makes me happier than to be with my wife—that I have not once relapsed into my old self-sufficiency, and now live and think and feel as if I were not complete without Rebecca. That, I think, is probably the best basis for a marriage. I’m not talking about a symbiosis; we remain autonomous beings—it is only that we are incomplete autonomous beings without one another.

  I am afraid, though, that I am not always sure my wife feels the same way. I have noticed that in a certain situation she is very quick to give in to the dog. Our Rhodesian ridgeback is jealous, and whenever I hug Rebecca, he immediately thrusts himself between us. I would drive him away, but my wife lets him push us apart. A trivial thing, I know, but it is accompanied by a slight reserve that is new in her. Maybe her terrible memories are to blame, or maybe it’s me. Does she, like my brother, like the prison inmates, think me a coward?

  All in all, though, I would maintain that the crisis brought out the best in my family. We stood the test. We were threatened, but we stuck together, showing ourselves capable of defending ourselves, and emerging victorious—although ‘victorious’ might not be the right word. We combined our efforts and secured our safety. Can anything better be said of a family? I don’t think so.

  And I have a father again. I shall leave that statement as it stands, without further comments.

  We have taken care of my mother. I have rented her a small flat not far from us, a very pretty flat, overlooking a garden. The landlord doesn’t mind my mother making herself useful in the garden, and she loves that—cutting roses or watering the tomatoes. Almost every day she comes to see us and plays with the children or reads to them. She misses her husband, to be sure, but her new life isn’t all that bad, especially as I am, of course, once again able to furnish her with stories about my happiness and success. I’ve sorted things out with my little brother, too, and we are friends again. Sometimes my voice wobbles when I have to make a speech, but I can live with that.

  I often ask myself whether it was right to put an end to Dieter Tiberius’s life. It is not a matter I treat lightly; such thoughts torment me. He never attacked us, and we could probably have gone on living with him for ever, waiting for the day when he’d had enough of my wife’s fits of anger. But would he ever have had enough? And what kind of life would that have been? We would have lived in constant fear, because we’d never have found out what game Dieter Tiberius was playing with my wife. At the end of such broodings, I never say to myself it was right, or it was wrong. Dieter Tiberius’s death weighs on my conscience, although I could not imagine continuing to live under the same roof as him. What troubles me more than anything is that he only ever attacked us with words, never with deeds; that he violated our minds, not our bodies; that he used a sophisticated cultural tool—the poem—albeit in a deplorable form, to attack my family. We were the barbarians in the end. But I’m rambling. I shouldn’t ramble. I should get round to putting down what I have to say. I have just opened another bottle of Black Print and taken a big gulp. Blue teeth—I’ll have blue teeth now. I know that without having to look in the mirror. My gaze wanders out to the gas lamp, as if I were hoping to find solace or strength in its glow, to face what is to come. When I look at that street lamp I almost always think of a poem by Alexander Blok.

  Night, pavement, street lamp, chemist’s shop,

 
A pointless, dimly glowing light.

  Keep on another twenty years—

  Things stay the same. There’s no way out.

  You die—you start over again.

  And this time too, it’s all the same:

  Night, icy ripples on the canal,

  Chemist’s shop, pavement, dim street lamp.

  Isn’t that the way it is? First I’m afraid that my father is going to climb the stairs and attack me, then I’m afraid that Dieter Tiberius is going to climb the stairs and attack us. My life begins with the fear of weapons, I do everything to escape that fear, but then I give in to it, and a man is shot.

  Stop! Stop and speak the truth at last.

  36

  THE TRUTH. On the morning of the third day of his visit, my father was sitting in our kitchen, a pistol on the table in front of him, a Walther PPK. I joined him, and at first we acted as if there was no pistol lying there between us. We drank coffee and sat in silence. After a while, my father pushed the Walther PPK across to me, and there it lay beside my espresso cup. I looked at my father, and he gave me a nod. I didn’t think about it for long; I took the gun and went down the stairs to the basement, to the door of Dieter Tiberius’s flat.

  All this time I held the pistol in my right hand, not stiffly or at arm’s length, but in the way of one who does something familiar, something natural. The wooden grip fitted snugly into my hand. I don’t remember thinking anything. I had a pistol in my hand and I was going to shoot Dieter Tiberius. There was no doubt, no pause for thought. I was will, not reason.

  When I rang the bell, it wasn’t long before Dieter Tiberius opened the door. Usually he laid low and didn’t answer, but that was after we’d come clattering or screaming down the stairs. This time I’d been quiet; he couldn’t know who was standing outside his flat. I heard his footsteps. A chain was drawn back, then the door was flung open. I raised my arm and shot Dieter Tiberius in the head. He was standing a metre and a half from me, and I wouldn’t be my father’s son if I missed a target at that distance. I turned around and went back upstairs.

  My father was standing in the doorway. He took the gun from me and carried it into the kitchen, where he cleaned it carefully with one of his polishing cloths so that only his fingerprints would be found on it later in the laboratory. When he had finished, he said, ‘You should ring the police now.’ I did as I was told and rang the police. ‘Wash your hands,’ my father said then, and again, I obeyed.

  It took eight minutes for the police to arrive.

  ‘I have shot the basement tenant,’ my father said to Sergeant Leidinger. That was a lie.

  I, Randolph Tiefenthaler, shot the basement tenant. That is the truth.

  37

  IF I REMEMBER RIGHTLY, in the days that followed I barely thought about the fact that I was now a murderer. There was so much commotion, and all the commotion revolved around my father having killed Dieter Tiberius, so that I took on the role that implied: the man whose father had killed Dieter Tiberius. We had several talks with our lawyer, visited my father in custody, and took care of my mother. We took care of the children too, of course, so that they weren’t wrenched out of their happy childhood by their grandfather’s crime—their grandfather’s alleged crime, I should say, can say, now that the truth is out at last. I was in a trance, so caught up in my role that I really believed it. I was the man whose father had killed Dieter Tiberius. Because everyone acted as if that was the truth, I accepted it as the truth.

  That worked up to a point—until one evening when I was at Hedin with my wife. It was three weeks after the murder. I hadn’t been to a starred restaurant alone since my nosebleed, and it had never occurred to us to go together, perhaps because such places were a reminder of darker times of our marriage. But after three weeks, I said to Rebecca, ‘Let’s go to Hedin. Let’s have a nice evening out.’ The commotion had died down; we could see that my father was coping well with his life in custody; that my mother, although sometimes distressed, was not going to pieces; and that our children, after their initial bewilderment, were once more living and playing cheerfully.

  I booked a table, my mother came around to babysit, and then there we were, in that coolly metropolitan room: blue chairs, finely grained wood, Chinese vases in lime green, a big Harald Hermann picture of plump bin bags bulging out of rubbish bins. In this day and age, in my circles, everything has to be ironically undermined. We see exquisite things even in rubbish—an aestheticised rubbish, of course. If pictures exuded the smell of the things they depict, that Hermann would not be hanging in Hedin.

  Rebecca and I began our dinner without champagne. We hadn’t talked about it, but we had a tacit understanding that there would be nothing celebratory about the evening. We were glad to be rid of Dieter Tiberius, but we didn’t think a man’s death cause for rejoicing. I ordered a low-priced red wine and we drank in moderation, talking about the children and my wife’s desire to go back to working in research. After the third course, langoustines with Greenland salt and celeriac puree, I suddenly felt uneasy, and broke into a sweat.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ Rebecca asked, seeing my light blue shirt turn dark.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said, but I already had a suspicion. The other diners were there to enjoy themselves, and although the people who sit in Hedin may like watching plays where people get murdered, or arguing about murderous regimes in Africa and Asia, or calling the government of the United States a murderous regime, they do not want to spend their evenings in the presence of a murderer—only, perhaps, at the very most, a murderer who has served his sentence and been rehabilitated. That might be just about acceptable, but it didn’t apply to me. I could sense them sensing that I was a murderer and knew I was encroaching upon their enjoyment of the evening, tainting the atmosphere. Today I can see that it was all in my head, but at the time I couldn’t. I suddenly felt hugely present, hugely visible, as I never had before; I’d never wanted to attract attention, be in the limelight, make speeches. I was happy to be inconspicuous.

  We left before dessert, chocolate from French Guiana in a maize crust.

  The next day I had a similar attack in a coffee shop where I had planned to drink a quick espresso. Nothing is spreading in Berlin as fast as these coffee shops—chains like Starbucks and so on—where everyone goes for instant revival and to fortify themselves against the coming hour. This city is nervous in the extreme—hypersensitive. Everyone is so overloaded with impressions and noises and confrontations of every kind that even a little extra pushes them over the edge, into neurasthenia, as it used to be called. I was now that little extra, I thought, the murderer, whose presence was the final imposition, too much to bear.

  Nor could I find respite in my work. I, of all people, built houses for a living, homes in which to live a peaceful life—and who could ever be at peace in a house built by a murderer?

  38

  I COULDN’T STAND BERLIN ANYMORE, because Berlin could no longer stand me, or so I believed, and I told Rebecca I needed some time out, a week of peace and relaxation, away from it all. She could well understand: I was, she thought, the son of a murderer and had a lot to come to terms with. I flew to Bolzano, a town in the Italian Alps, and from there took a taxi to a remote guesthouse. I’m not a hiker, I’m not a mountain person, but I had once been to a conference in Bolzano and liked the starkness of the Dolomites. Even a murderer could not disturb the equanimity of mountains like these, which have been around for millions of years.

  I moved into my room at midday and set off in the early afternoon with no plan, no aim. I took the path that led past the guesthouse, following it uphill. I had barely taken the first few steps before I was beset by the questions I had so far kept at bay. How could someone who hated guns shoot a man dead? How could someone who set such store by the rule of law take the law into his own hands?

  My first thought was that we’d been living in a bubble. We had panicked, and our panic had cut us off from reality, from reason, from our better selves. We
had retreated into a bubble and lived our panicked lives there. Children make you vulnerable to this kind of thinking; you tell yourself you’ll do anything to protect your family without asking what that means.

  It was from within this bubble that I began to plan the murder, I thought, as I made my way up the mountainside. I planned the murder, but somebody else, my father, would be carrying it out, and that made it easier, perhaps—extenuated the moral issue somewhat. It also, to be sure, raised another moral issue. I was using my father’s skill to my own purposes, yet as his son I felt justified in doing so. If I ended up as the gunman, it was because of the situation, the emotional charge. My father pushed the pistol across to me, and I was so astonished that I thought no more, but only acted.

  Now I was angry with him, angry with him for dragging me into it, but not for long; after only a few more steps I realised that it was in fact I who had dragged him into it, that he had followed my plan—apart from not wanting to be the gunman, choosing instead merely to pass as the gunman. He had every right. Doesn’t it make Dad’s sacrifice even greater, that he accepted life in prison for a crime he hadn’t committed? For me.

  I pushed on for about an hour, caught up in these thoughts. Ahead of me, the peaks of Santner and Euringer pierced the sky, sheer and angry. There were no longer any trees, only grass and scree. I was sweating profusely. It was already growing dark, but I kept walking. I was feeling good, in spite of the troubling thoughts that kept surfacing; the massif could cope with them, and it could cope with me. It was all right for me to be here, though I was guilty of murder, or manslaughter, to be precise, not that it made much difference; it didn’t matter to me how long the sentence was.

  I marched on up the mountain, a law-abiding man who had broken the law. And yet the law is absolute. It admits no exception. That should be obvious, but it was only now that I was trying to find myself a loophole that I realised it. There is no loophole. The law must be merciless, its rule totalitarian. Any exception destroys it. It does not, however, ostracise a criminal forever; it punishes him, and once his punishment is served, the criminal is exonerated. But that path is not open to me, because I’m not facing up to my punishment, not taking responsibility: there will be no relief, only cruel, shameful guilt going on forever.