‘He’s a good tenant,’ Walther said. ‘Social security pays the rent, so it’s always on time. Have you been to the police? What do they say?’ he asked.
‘They’re still looking into it,’ I said.
‘Good,’ he said, ‘let’s wait to hear what they have to say, then we can talk again, okay?’ His tone wasn’t unfriendly, but the conversation had got me nowhere.
‘Okay,’ I said, despondently, wishing my wife had done the talking. She’s better at taking a firm stand than I am—we’d divided up the tasks wrong. On the other hand, I could hardly have left her alone in the house with Dieter Tiberius while I went off to her mother’s with the children.
I drove to the office and did some work, without registering what I was doing.
That night I lay awake for a long time again, listening out in the silence and wondering whether Dieter Tiberius was also lying awake in bed, thinking of me the way I was thinking of him. We were at most ten, fifteen metres apart, two men under their bedclothes, their heads on their pillows, apparently tranquil, but horribly embroiled, horribly entwined in each other’s lives—one an architect, a married man with a beautiful wife and two children, well-off, middle-class, and the other a former ward of the state, unemployed, alone, on government benefits.
All the advantages were on my side, but I was afraid this might turn out to be a disadvantage, that there were people—social workers, journalists—who would transform this story into a symbolic battle between the poor man in the basement and the wealthy one upstairs. Ultimately it would be my fault, the fault of my class, that Dieter Tiberius had to revolt. People would want to see him win, and me lose, and that desire would propel him to victory. My heart was racing.
The next morning I went to the social welfare office. I had rung up, but was told they didn’t provide information over the phone. I enquired at counters, followed directions, made my way through the corridors and sat outside rooms waiting my turn to go in for an excruciatingly long time. Looking at the others waiting too, I saw despondency, grief, indignation and anger, and in the end I got nowhere.
Eventually I found myself in a completely unadorned room, without so much as a potted plant. Two men and a woman sat opposite me at a round table—no file. I told them my story, almost routinely. I told it to blank faces. When I had finished, the woman said they couldn’t discuss Dieter Tiberius with me, couldn’t even say whether or not social security paid his rent. They would ask me to please accept that, one of the men added.
‘I suppose I’ll have to,’ I said, ‘but I’d like to ask you to look at the matter like this: perhaps my neighbour is someone who needs help—and that’s a job for the social welfare office, isn’t it?’ Shrugs, silence. I put down my business card and left.
In the corridor I ran into a man who was so fat that it was impossible to miss him. ‘Scuse me,’ I mumbled.
‘Look where you’re going next time,’ he called after me.
Fat lump, I thought. Stupid fat lump.
When I got home in the evening I found a letter in my letterbox. It was not from Dieter Tiberius—I saw that at once. The handwriting was different and the envelope was franked. A lawyer informed me that he was representing Dieter Tiberius. That was all the letter said, and yet it sounded threatening to me. I took it to mean that Dieter Tiberius had taken on a lawyer to fight us with all available means. Over dinner, at an Italian place near the station, it occurred to me that the letter might also be a good sign. Tiberius had evidently decided to take the legal route. That was terrain we could prevail on, whatever the cost. The money was there—and if it wasn’t enough, I could get hold of more.
I rang my wife and fed her with optimism again. I was, I have to confess, playing the man of action who does all that he can to defend his family—playing the warrior—and I announced my first small successes. In fact, I was getting nowhere. I had heard nothing from the police. My lawyer, I had discovered in a phone call, was unable to organise a restraining order, but this did nothing to rouse the Mircea in me. Even our stalker had gone quiet—until the lawyer’s letter arrived, I hadn’t seen any sign of him in days. I was beginning to think I was waging a non-existent war.
When I gave my wife a more truthful description of the situation ten days later, she said maybe it really had blown over. ‘Maybe he’s come to his senses,’ she said. We decided that she and the children should return the following day. We’d just have to be careful. My wife said she wasn’t afraid of Dieter Tiberius—only afraid for Paul and Fay. I knew exactly what she meant. Nothing makes us as vulnerable—and thus as anxious—as our children.
20
ISN’T IT AWFUL THAT, whether as children or as adults, we can never live without fear? Apart from the fear of my father, the great fear of my youth was nuclear war. You didn’t have to know much about the arms race, didn’t have to understand anything—a single sentence was enough to send shivers down your spine. After a nuclear attack everything is destroyed and everybody is dead. I only had to look out of the window of the bus and tell myself that none of these houses would be left standing, only had to look around my class and tell myself that none of these children would be left alive, and the terror set in. Nuclear war was an abrupt change from a life of promise to nothingness, and nobody had a chance. The thoughts I could usually rely on to ward off fear failed me here. When I was seized with panic that the plane I was in was going to crash, I would tell myself that one person was going to survive and that person would be me. Such cases existed, I knew they did. But in a nuclear war nobody escaped alive and it wasn’t even desirable to be spared. What could I possibly do all alone in a radioactive wasteland? Rats as big as dogs. I wasn’t yet familiar with the word ‘mutant’, but I knew, though no one had ever told me, that nuclear rays could somehow turn ordinary creatures into monsters. Then there was cancer. The fear of nuclear warfare was the fear of death and the fear of life. That was what made it so insidious. I often lay awake long into the night imagining the world’s disappearance—and with it my own.
That’s how I became a pacifist, if my father’s guns hadn’t already made one of me. When I was sixteen or seventeen I began to read books and articles on disarmament like a man possessed. I soon knew all the acronyms and watchwords of that strange era: SALT I, MIRV, flexible response, equilibrium of terror, SALT II, SS-20, Pershing II, zero option. I stuck a dove of peace, white on a blue background, on my bedroom door—on the outside, so that my father could see it. It was ages since he’d last set foot in my room. When my music (reggae, at the time) was too loud for him, he would yell up the stairs at me, and when the music was so loud I couldn’t hear him, he would fling open the door to my room and yell again, but he didn’t come in.
When in October 1981 the peace movement called for a demonstration in Bonn, the West German capital, I went along with a few friends. We were protesting NATO’s ‘double-track decision’, instigated in large part by the West German chancellor, Helmut Schmidt, who feared that a growing imbalance between the Warsaw Pact countries and NATO left us vulnerable. Schmidt’s argument was that we had to force the Soviets to agree to limit the kinds of weapons that could be deployed—and that the only way we could do so was to develop similar weapons ourselves first. We saw this as madness.
It was shortly before our leaving exams but, seeing that the survival of the human race was at stake, we had asked to be let off lessons. The teachers were divided: those who, like us, were against NATO’s counter-armament wanted to let us off; the others, who supported Helmut Schmidt, were against it. The headmaster ruled that we should attend lessons on the day of the demonstration, but a teacher who was on our side said no one was going to punish our absence, and so it was decided.
We took the train. The East German border guards who inspected our identity cards were friendlier than ever before: no searches, no nastiness. For the first time, I saw those grey-uniformed men and women smile, and when they left, silence fell on our compartment. We had read in the conservative press
that we were the fifth column of the Eastern bloc, that we were helping Brezhnev towards world domination. We laughed—we had no sympathy with real-life socialism. We had been to East Berlin too often to find life there acceptable. We wanted peace, wanted to save the world, and believed that every additional rocket made nuclear war more likely. And now we had been treated like Warsaw Pact allies. For a few kilometres we felt bad, but we shook it off, opened a bottle of Martini and held a celebration, though only a modest one. Things were too serious for us to get drunk. We arrived in Bonn at night, hung around the station for a while and later grew cold on benches by the Rhine.
The next day I stood in the vast crowd in the Hofgarten, listening to speeches in favour of peace and disarmament, and thinking of my father. I hadn’t talked to him for ages. Provocation was now my only mode of interaction with him, and when he wasn’t getting worked up about things I’d said, he ignored me. I don’t want to claim that relations between us were like those between the US and the Soviet Union, because neither my father nor I was thinking in terms of annihilation. There was no equilibrium of terror, either, but only, to use another term common at that time, a tense coexistence. I resolved to take home something of the desire for peace I had seen there in the Hofgarten.
First I spoke to my mother, knowing that my father’s guns were a cause of suffering to her, too. Her war had been more difficult than his, and she wanted nothing to do with guns. That she chose this man and has remained with him to this day is one of love’s miracles. She agreed to my plan, as expected, and so one afternoon when my father was at the car dealership, she and I drew up a disarmament treaty together with my sister and brother. I had read and heard such a lot about it already that I knew just what to do, and I talked of confidence-building measures and aides-mémoire, ranting on and on until my little brother started to grumble that he didn’t understand a word of it. At any rate, I said, we wouldn’t get anywhere unless we made our father some kind of offer.
‘You,’ I said to my little brother, ‘could stop smoking.’
‘But he doesn’t smoke,’ said my mother.
‘Of course he smokes,’ I said.
‘Do not,’ said my little brother.
My mother got terribly upset, because she believed me rather than my little brother, and rightly so, and in the end my brother agreed to stop smoking. We did, however, have to promise we wouldn’t tell Dad that he ever had smoked.
‘Otherwise he’ll be firing one last shot before he scraps his guns,’ my little brother said.
‘Your father doesn’t shoot at his children,’ said my mother, and the topic of smoking was dropped from the negotiations. It was even harder with my sister. In my parents’ eyes, she essentially did nothing wrong.
‘Cornelia could take up shooting again,’ said my little brother. She had stopped when she turned eighteen. We had all noticed my father’s disappointment, but he had accepted it uncomplainingly.
‘We can’t open disarmament negotiations with someone announcing she’s going to take up shooting,’ I said. ‘That goes against the spirit of the talks. They’re supposed to make the world safer, not unsafer.’
‘I don’t make the world unsafe when I shoot,’ said my sister. ‘I only shoot at targets, and unlike you, I actually hit them.’
That was aimed at me, and usually I’d have said something even nastier back to her, but I was serious about preparing for our upcoming talks, and although it wasn’t easy, I restrained myself.
‘How about you give up being so arrogant?’ my sister said. ‘Dad would be sure to hand over all his guns then.’
Now I’d really had enough.
‘Not even God could cure you of your stupidity,’ I sneered.
Our mother intervened. Peacemaking was, I think, the role she was most often called upon to perform. She was good at it, and in the end we had got together a pretty good catalogue of offers for my father. Tidying up was one of them, not leaving bikes in front of the garage door, having shorter showers, mowing the lawn, using headphones when we listened to music. My mother agreed to take extra driving lessons, so that our cars didn’t always get scratches and dents when she parked them.
‘And what are we going to demand?’ I asked.
‘That he sells all his guns,’ said my little brother.
‘A zero option then,’ I said.
‘You think you’re so smart,’ said my sister.
‘Maybe we’ll start with half,’ my mother said, and we agreed on that.
I suggested that I conduct negotiations with my father during a walk in the woods. I remembered the cheerful, high-spirited mood of those walks with my father, as he planned journeys of adventure for the two of us. The others objected: they wanted to be present. My sister probably thought her personal contributions to the family’s peace would snowball if she didn’t keep an eye on me. We agreed instead to have a special dinner.
It went badly. I had prepared a long speech full of references to the global situation, but it left my father cold. When he realised what we were driving at, he said only one word: ‘Never.’ We tried to insist, keeping the tone friendly, but he only ate his turkey leg in silence, a black look on his face, until suddenly he threw down his knife and fork, leapt up and stormed out. He hasn’t sold a single gun to this day—not that he can use his guns now anyway, of course, because the police have seized them all.
I spent just under a year still living at home after this disaster, until I’d finished my leaving exams. Then I went away to university, and my father and I practically stopped speaking.
I have often thought about my teenage years since then, weighing the good against the bad, but never coming to a clear-cut conclusion. Of course there were upsides: friends, my first girlfriends. I had a way with people, and I was a good student, too, well liked and well respected. But all that is overshadowed by those anxious hours when I thought my little brother or I might be shot. I had a happy childhood, but not a happy youth. What was worse, I lacked a father—he was reserved, even disdainful. But I have a theory that unhappiness early in life is later transformed into happiness. I always wanted to get away—away from those guns, away from my father—and as a result I had goals. I was ambitious and still am. That helped me to become a successful architect. This theory reconciles me, in part at least, to my youth, but at the same time it worries me. What about my children, who have parents who do everything they can to make them happy? Can happiness early in life also be translated into happiness later on? I don’t know.
Memories are slippery at the best of times. Not long ago, I bumped into an old schoolfriend in a Munich hotel, a friend I had lost touch with. Meeting Saif I met my younger self, but that self turned out to be one I didn’t recognise. For a long time, I have thought of my story—the story I tell myself and others about who I am—as one of nonviolence, but Saif made me question it. We talked a lot about the past, of course, and at some point he asked me whether I knew what had shocked him about me. I didn’t. He said I had once had a fight with Schiephake outside our classroom—did I remember Schiephake? I only vaguely remembered Schiephake. I had forgotten his first name, and Saif had too.
‘You won the fight,’ said Saif, ‘and he was lying underneath you, and you took his head and banged it several times against the floor.’
‘No, I can’t believe that,’ I said.
‘That’s how it was,’ said Saif.
I have no reason to doubt him, but two things alarm me: that I did it, and that I forgot about it. If you can forget something like that, something that would drastically change how you see yourself, how can you ever know who you truly are?
So what is my story? Maybe, in one of his fits of rage, my father really did hold a revolver to my head and threaten to pull the trigger. Since Saif’s revelation, I tell this story tentatively. There is always something new we can learn.
A greater source of worry to me lately is the fact that you can have memories of things that didn’t happen. For instance, I sometimes worry
that our children might one day come up with the idea that they were sexually abused by me or my wife. After all, the suspicion was voiced, even if it was voiced by the dubious Dieter Tiberius. It is a part of our family’s story. Paul or Fay might unconsciously have picked up on it, and, at some point in the future, if things are going badly for them, they might imagine that they were once abused.
21
WHEN MY WIFE RETURNED from her mother’s place with the children, it was twenty hours before she found another letter on the windowsill in the entryway. She rang me in the office and told me Dieter Tiberius was claiming he’d sent emails to RTL, Sat. 1 and the Bild. We knew what they were interested in, he said. My wife went down to the basement with the letter in her hand and ‘confronted’ him, as she put it, probably vociferously. He had only grinned impertinently.
I took the letter to our lawyer and a photocopy to Ms Kröger at the crime office. They both said it wouldn’t make much difference, but for me it made a huge difference. This was the beginning of what I call, in retrospect, the surveillance phase. When I turned into our street in the evening, I expected to see a row of vans with logos on their sides, and reporters with microphones and camera crews. No such vehicles appeared, but there was a camera with me all the time: my own camera, the one in my head. I began to see my life through a camera lens. It was the life of a man who was not a child abuser.
When I went to the playground with Paul and Fay, I behaved like a man who did not abuse his children. I had no idea how to go about it, so I just behaved as I normally would, except that I now did it with a kind of conscious solemnity, aware at all times that I was being normal, that I did not abuse my children. I saw myself through the eyes of policemen, detectives, journalists, social workers and whoever else was part of the infernal cast of my waking dreams. Trying to withstand their stern gaze, I was law-abiding to the point of fastidiousness, never so much as dropping a gum wrapper on the ground. I’d never littered in the past either, but now I did it as a man who did not abuse his children.
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