When I woke up in the morning and looked into the garden, the tent was gone. I never saw it again. My father never went on his journeys of adventure, not even by himself. He never even travelled without his wife, as far as I know, and the furthest they got was Lake Garda in northern Italy, where they stayed in a guesthouse. He was a dreamer who didn’t have the nerve to do much, but never stopped thinking that he would. In that respect he was an optimist after all.
14
MY FATHER WAS SOMETIMES IRASCIBLE OR TETCHY, even in my childhood, but during my teenage years he would fall for days into a black mood from which my mother was unable to rouse him. He did nothing but sit on the sofa and sulk. He would explode at the slightest disturbance, so even in our rooms we could only listen to music turned down low, or had to reckon with an irate visit. It once cost me the pick-up of my record-player when my father put a brutal end to a Pink Floyd song.
I don’t want to claim that it was solely my father’s fault that he and I talked to one another so little—that he barely took any notice of me. I think the most disastrous discovery of my teenage years was that my grammar-school teachers and friends considered me intelligent. My parents aren’t stupid, not by any means, but neither of them went to university: my father failed his leaving exams and my mother left school at fourteen, because her parents couldn’t afford anything else. I soon began to feel that I was more intelligent than my parents, and I am ashamed to say that I acted in such a way that they couldn’t fail to notice. My mother bravely took me on in every debate I forced on her, although I sometimes jeered at her. Whenever I launched into one of these debates at dinner, my father would leave the table and sit on the sofa. He read or cleaned his guns, but I knew he was listening. I knew too that after a while he would jump to his feet and start shouting. At that point, I would go to my room with a smirk, but my heart was pounding. I was seized by the fear that he might come up and shoot me.
By then I was fifteen or sixteen and knew my father was not a spy. I knew too that he was more than just an amateur marksman, a hunter and a gun enthusiast. He needed the guns to protect himself. He was afraid. I didn’t know what he was afraid of—as far as I could tell, he had nothing to fear, no reason to be frightened. He didn’t hang out in the red-light district in town. He didn’t even go to normal pubs, where he might have got into a fight after a few beers. He was almost always at home when he wasn’t working. And yet I saw him strap on his holster and put in a gun before he drove to the shops with my mother. What was he so scared of? And why did I never ask? I would love to ask him now, but I can’t do it with Kottke around, and Kottke is, by force of circumstance, always around when I visit my father.
I couldn’t fail to notice at the time that my father had guns not only to shoot at targets, but also to shoot at people—in case he was threatened, I suppose, for he was not the kind to go about attacking others. He took part in combat training—self-defence courses in small arms fire. I saw him practise at home. He wore a holster at his belt, threw a coin in the air and pulled the gun. He didn’t shoot: the idea was to pull the revolver before the five-mark piece fell to the floor. My little brother liked watching him. I went to my room as soon as these drills began.
Bruno is three years younger than me. In the flat on the estate we shared a room. There is a photo that shows him sitting in a big pram, looking into the camera in astonishment. I am standing at the handle of the pram, the big brother. I didn’t love him instantly, because I had to make space for him in my small room and because he cried a lot when he was a baby. But I soon set him to gathering up the cars I raced down my magnetic track and bringing them back to me, and in return I let him push a car down the track himself every now and then. I loved him before I had a word for it, and I still love him, although it’s not always easy with Bruno.
When we went to the car dealership together, he would run straight to the garage, a place I didn’t like, loud and dirty. In those days garages were still oily—today they’re more like electronics labs. It made his day when one of the mechanics allowed him to give a screwdriver or monkey wrench a few twists. I preferred to sit in the new cars and pretend to drive. I especially liked the cars with leather seats, because they smelt so tangy.
For a time my father took my little brother along to the firing range, but Bruno does not respond well to rigorous discipline—and discipline, my father said more often than necessary, is what matters most at the firing range. Bruno waved the gun around or annoyed people who were trying to concentrate on their next shot. When he took a pot shot at a bird, my father put an end to his career as a marksman. Only my sister continued to shoot. She was Berlin’s vice-champion in some youth class, and the cup stood in our living room; Bruno and I made jokes about it, partly because it pained us to see so much made of Cornelia’s shooting skills. I don’t know how hard it was on my father to realise that neither of his boys was any good as a marksman, but I am sure that my disappointment in him was matched by his disappointment in me and my little brother.
One evening I was lying on my bed, reading, when I heard a gunshot. I ran downstairs, terrified that my father had killed my little brother. No one made him freak out the way Bruno did—but when I burst into the living room, Bruno was alive and well, sitting at the table with my sister and mother, playing a memory game. My father was wearing his belt holster, standing at the patio door looking at a hole in the windowpane. On the floor lay a five-mark piece. His revolver had gone off inadvertently and we were all lucky that no one was walking past our house when it happened.
Lying on my bed again later, I pondered the fact that the guns my father kept at home were obviously loaded. I had known that he was well equipped with ammunition—the brightly coloured cardboard boxes were sometimes stacked on our dining table—but my father stored guns and cartridges separately, and never brought them out at the same time. He was—I had always believed—very particular about safety.
15
I WANT TO STRESS HERE that even my teenage years were completely normal. That is another trap into which historical narrative can fall: when prominence is given to dramatic events, every era seems eventful, or even turbulent. Our days were calm, especially at home. We got up in the morning and breakfast was ready; we went to school, came home again, did our homework, met up with friends; then, in the evening, we ate dinner with our parents, talking to my mother while my father, as a rule, read peacefully. On rare occasions he would interrupt our conversations to recount an episode from his youth or an incident that had taken place at the car dealership. If he was brooding, we didn’t let it bother us. After dinner I usually went to my room to read and listen to music. My sister and brother stayed and played games with our mother. When it was time for Bruno to go to bed, I read him a story, and then we talked a bit before our mother came to say our prayers with us. Silently, I continued to thank the good Lord for my happy life.
But there were also these moments of shock, and there was an underlying fear—fear for myself, but more still for my brother. The wooden coathanger days were a thing of the past—my mother no longer hit us—but we might be grounded, or lose our pocket money, which was also painful, in a way. My little brother still got beaten—but only by my father. When Bruno provoked him, my father lost control.
Once I heard my little brother screaming and immediately ran downstairs, jumping four steps at a time. I saw him sitting on the floor, his arms pressed over his head as my father, blind with rage, rained hard, brutal blows on him. My mother grabbed at his hands, but he kept shaking her off. ‘Hermann,’ she cried. ‘Hermann, stop it!’
When my father saw me, he paused before delivering one last blow.
‘I’ll…’ he snarled.
‘Hermann,’ my mother cried.
I pulled Bruno up and took him to my room. He threw himself on my bed and sobbed uncontrollably. I sat with him, stroking his head.
‘I’m going to kill Dad,’ my little brother sobbed. Such words have probably been thought or spoken in man
y a teenager’s room, but they sound different in a house full of guns.
‘Calm down, easy does it,’ I said, though I was agitated too, afraid that my father had taken a pistol out of the safe in the bedroom he shared with my mother and was on his way to shoot us. I got up and listened at the door—nothing. I locked it.
We set up our slot car racing track and had almost finished when the doorhandle turned. We froze, but then we heard our mother’s voice. I unlocked the door, and she came in. We saw at once that she hadn’t been crying. Bruno wouldn’t let her take him in her arms, so she sat down on the chair at my desk. When you talk to our mother, even after a dreadful scene like this, you always come away feeling that everything’s fine, that the world’s a lovely place. She glosses over anything that might contradict this point of view. It was just the same this time. She said that Bruno shouldn’t provoke his father—said it very gently, almost sympathetically: she thought it would be nice if Bruno could avoid provoking his father in future.
‘I didn’t say anything,’ Bruno protested.
‘But you told me I was only my husband’s servant,’ my mother said, ‘and that wasn’t kind.’
Bruno had only told me that Dad freaked out because he, Bruno, had been arguing with Mum—and that Dad suddenly threw his newspaper to the floor, leapt up from the sofa and laid into him. He hadn’t told me what the argument was about.
‘I’m not your father’s servant,’ my mother said now to Bruno, ‘and I was glad to give up my job—for the three of you as well as for him.’
I could imagine Bruno making this accusation, definitely not in the calm tone my mother had just used, and definitely not just once, but over and over again and with growing aggression. He was like that at the time, and I wasn’t so very different myself.
‘But that’s no reason to beat someone half to death,’ I said to my mother.
‘Your father wouldn’t beat you half to death,’ my mother said.
‘But he did,’ cried Bruno.
We now got into a discussion such as we often used to have with our mother. We said that our father was terrible; she said that wasn’t true. She always protected him when we spoke badly of him. But she also protected us when he got angry with us. That was her role: to mediate, to appease, to pacify. She did it in a calm, almost relaxed manner, as if things weren’t as bad as all that, as if everything were perfectly normal.
I don’t know whether she really saw it that way. It’s possible. If you walked through the burning city of Cologne as a little girl, heard the bombers, the shells and the sirens, knew the smell of burnt human flesh and had to see open wounds and torn limbs, perhaps you feel that you have put the worst behind you—that a domestic dispute is a trivial matter. But it is also possible that my mother, bombed out of her home and left fatherless by the war, knew too much suffering and loss as a child and can’t take any more, so that, no matter what the actual state of the world, she chooses to believe that all is well. Perhaps she told herself that our home was a happy one, despite my father’s stockpile of weapons and the threat it posed to her children. On the other hand, perhaps she knew for certain that her children were not even remotely in danger, because she was sure she could trust her husband. I don’t know. I must ask her some time. All I know is that my mother always kept her cool. It was no different that evening. She talked to us for half an hour and then said goodnight, as if a sweet, weightless sleep lay ahead of us all, and went back down to her husband. I locked the door again.
Bruno and I raced our cars until midnight. Then I carried Bruno’s mattress into my room and put it next to my bed. I soon heard him breathing peacefully, but I lay awake for a long time, wondering what I’d do if my father did show up after all. He had said, ‘I’ll…’ and I could only complete the sentence with ‘…kill you’, although, looking back, I’m sure that wasn’t what he meant. It was a quirk of my father’s to utter vague threats. ‘Just you wait,’ he’d say, ‘I’ll…’ In a household like ours, unspoken threats had terrible implications. Although I don’t own a gun, it has taught me that I shouldn’t be vague when I discipline my children. I have to tell them exactly what to expect if they carry on making mush of their food or throwing tennis balls at the dog to make it howl.
I had long ago thought up strategies for dodging a bullet from one of my father’s guns. I had considered putting my mattress up against the door; that might stop the bullets. That night, we even had two mattresses, which would make things better. But of course my father could shoot open the lock, and then he’d be with us in no time. As soon as we heard him, we’d have to make a dash for the window, slide a little way down the roof tiles and drop to the ground, making sure to land on our feet.
The question was whether my little brother should climb out first or me. There were pros and cons. If I were first, he’d be at risk for longer, but I’d be able to catch him at the bottom. I found it hard to make up my mind. In the end I decided it would be better to let him get away first—I thought he’d probably manage the jump. Once on the ground, we would have to start running, zigzagging across the lawn, which provided a superb field of fire, of course, but perhaps the darkness would protect us—clouds, no moon—and at the back of the garden on the right, shrubs were waiting to hide us from our father’s view. After that we would be safe, because I didn’t believe my father capable of finding us in the surrounding gardens—they were our territory.
Later, much later, during an argument with my little brother at a bar, I told him I’d saved his life that day. It was a stupid thing to say, of course, and not even true. The lines of my brother’s mouth instantly hardened, and he said he didn’t want a life he owed to my generosity. We had one of our ridiculous fights, but made it up over the beer after next. No doubt about it, the two of us, our parents’ surviving children, are scarred. Nothing terrible ever happened to us. My father never shot us, never took aim at us, never even threatened to shoot. We grew up as untouched by weapons as everyone else—but for the fact that the guns were there, which changed everything. It meant there were different possibilities—possible threats, in particular. It changed the way we thought and, looking back, sometimes inclined us towards hysteria. For me, home was a place where you could get shot.
I know what suggests itself at this point: my trouble adapting to a new flat and solitary evenings in starred restaurants might have something to do with the threat I felt in my own home as a teenager. Maybe there’s something in that, but on the whole such an interpretation seems to me simplistic. I am not the victim of my father’s guns. You could also look at it like this: our childhood was exciting; it was intense. It had its moments.
What strikes me today is not so much the sense of menace at home as my father’s fears. I recall one incident that left us all speechless. We had driven to Karstadt department store together, not in the Ford 12M, which was too small by then, but in a Ford Granada.
‘We need new winter clothes,’ my mother had said, and a little later we were circling around the store’s car park. It took us a long while to find a space, although a prize had been offered to the first to spot one—a Nuts bar.
‘There! There!’ my little brother crowed after some time, to the chagrin of his brother and sister, who were sitting one either side of him.
My father let the Granada roll slowly towards the parking space, but a rally-style Kadett GT/E, yellow on the top and black on the bottom, shot out from the left, cutting us off. We couldn’t get past, but the Kadett couldn’t park either, unless we moved back—the corner was too sharp. My father had one of his fits of wrath, yelling and flailing his arms about, but the driver of the Kadett, a young man, just grinned insolently. We sat there like that for a while and slowly the fear crept up on me that my father would get out of the car and shoot the man in the Kadett. He had a revolver tucked under his armpit—I had seen it when we were putting our coats on. Then my father went very quiet and I panicked, but he didn’t get out—he put his foot down and drove away. Now I was horrified
for a different reason, as were my brother and sister. How could he give up a parking space that was clearly ours? My father was big and strong—he could have seen off that idiot in the Kadett even without his revolver. We didn’t look for another parking space—my father turned the Granada around and we drove home in silence. My little brother made a brief attempt to claim his Nuts bar—because he’d discovered the parking space and it wasn’t his fault, was it, if my father didn’t drive into it, but my sister quickly shut him up, to my relief.
I think that encounter taught me a lot about my father. He couldn’t argue, couldn’t assert himself with words or gestures—his only options, when faced with a problem, were to run away or shoot. Luckily, he always ran away. I don’t know why he was like that. The childhood he described to us was a normal childhood. He was an only child whose parents owned a pub in Spandau, and he saw little of the war because his parents sent him to an uncle’s farm in Westphalia when the bombing got bad.
My father said his mother often beat him with the poker, and that his father had been a policeman before opening the pub and had always brought his service weapon home. That weapon had interested him, he said. Later, he had a big fight with his parents because they insisted he take over the pub and he was determined not to. Just as he loved guns, he also loved cars, and so, after failing his school leaving exams, he became a mechanic, though he’d rather have been an engineer. My father didn’t do military service: too young during the war, too old afterwards. Are these clues that could help to explain my father’s peculiar life? When he comes out of prison, I have a great deal to ask him.
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