‘Your nose is bleeding,’ said the waiter.
I dabbed the skin above my lip with my left index finger and felt a thick fluid. I held the finger up to my eyes and saw blood, my blood. The sommelier, once again the embodiment of charm and composure, handed me a starched napkin.
‘Are you unwell?’ he asked.
‘No, no,’ I said hurriedly. My nose didn’t bleed heavily, but it bled for a long time, gradually staining the napkin red. In somebody’s company it would have been embarrassing enough, but alone it was unbearable. In top restaurants, the single man is eyed with mistrust as it is. He is suspected of eavesdropping on the tables next to him; he is thought too odd to have a wife or friend; he is despised for the nerve-grating rip of his drafting paper. With a nosebleed, however, he is the sick man, the leper, ruining everyone else’s festive evening, their five-hundred-euro evening, by imposing his loneliness on them and then not even managing to cope with it, but bleeding all over the place in rather a pathetic way.
I cut short the dinner after I had staunched the bleeding, paid for the entire meal and drove home. My wife was sitting curled up on the sofa above Dieter Tiberius’s flat, reading a novel. I stopped in the doorway and, pointing to the floor, I said, ‘He’s not the one destroying my family—it’s me.’
23
I MET REBECCA in the university canteen when we were both studying in Bochum. I had moved there after leaving school, wanting to get away from my parents, but also away from Berlin, my parents’ town. I had known for a long time that I wanted to study architecture; it was an obvious choice for me because I liked drawing. The downside of leaving was that in Berlin, unlike Bochum, I would have been exempt from national service. But I didn’t care.
I took a one-bedroom flat, studied architecture, worked on a construction site on the side and waited for my draft notice, which did indeed come a few months later. I had a medical and applied to be exempted from military service as a conscientious objector. My hearing was classic: a few old men, one of them a war invalid with only one arm. They asked this and that and eventually came to the crux of the matter: ‘You’re walking in the woods with your girlfriend. All of a sudden you come face to face with three Russian soldiers who want to rape her. You can prevent it, because you have a gun. What do you do?’
My generation was prepared for this question. There were ways of arguing that allowed you to keep the Russians in check or even shoot them and still pretty much pass for a pacifist. I knew the tricks; there were books, there were briefings. But I had decided on a different approach. I said I wouldn’t shoot under any circumstances, that it was impossible for me to attack a human being. I would try to dissuade the three men by talking to them.
‘But they refuse to be dissuaded,’ said the man who only had one arm.
‘I wouldn’t shoot,’ I said.
‘Then your girlfriend gets raped—is that what you want?’ asked another of the old men.
‘Of course not,’ I said, ‘but I can’t shoot. It’s impossible for me.’
‘Then your girlfriend gets raped,’ said the one-armed man.
‘I can’t shoot at humans,’ I said.
Things went back and forth like this for a while. Then the men sent me out while they consulted. I passed the test. The chairman of the committee said they were sure I would end up shooting, but I had nevertheless defended my standpoint with such determination that there was no denying my pacifist convictions. I was exempted from military service and permitted to serve in the community instead. But first I put in a few semesters at the university.
To begin with it was the usual student life of those days: idling, drinking beer, playing cards, a few friends—sometimes a girlfriend, but never for long. At Christmas I went back to my parents’ place, where nothing had changed. My sister was studying fashion design at art school, and was still living at home, just like my little brother, who was at school. We had one of our puny Christmas trees, ate turkey, played Scrabble with my mother while my father read, and got on peaceably enough.
When I was in my fourth semester, my little brother turned up on my doorstep and said, ‘I’ve come to live with you.’ I didn’t want that—I didn’t want him to drop out of school—but I couldn’t send him away. He got the room that had been my sitting room until then. We worked together on the construction site, went drinking together, argued and fought, and I gave advice to the girls he made unhappy. Sometimes I slept with them, but only after they had asked my little brother if it was all right. At first I enjoyed living together, but then my little brother was out a lot, I didn’t know where, and when I saw him in the morning, I knew he’d been partying too hard. Later he told me he’d done ‘everything except shooting up’ at that time.
Some nights he was so wasted that I would read to him for hours, afraid that he’d never wake up again if he fell asleep. I read The Lord of the Rings, which in those days, before the films, was a book for people who thought they were different. I read to fight my brother’s glassy eyes, to stop him from drifting off. Sometimes I shouted the words out to keep him awake, and when his drooping eyelids hadn’t come up for a while, I would hit him. It was at that time that my brother began to draw pictures, pen-and-ink pictures with motifs from The Lord of the Rings. They were to form the basis of his later career and I am a little proud to have given him that start.
After a year and a half, my brother disappeared. I had begun my national service in the old people’s home and came back to the flat one evening to find a note on the kitchen table, saying: Thanks, big bro. I went straight to his room and saw that his things weren’t hanging there anymore. I rang around, but nobody knew where my little brother had gone. My mother and sister didn’t know either. We worried about him, and it wasn’t until six months later that I got a postcard from Montevideo, half in pictures, half in words. If I understood correctly, Bruno had joined the navy and was travelling halfway around the world on the destroyer Mölders.
‘Can you make anything of it?’ I asked my mother.
‘He’s his father’s son,’ she said.
‘And me, who am I then?’ I asked.
‘You too,’ she said.
A few weeks after resuming my studies, I met Rebecca in the canteen. I was sitting alone at a table, eating chicken fricassee smothered in ketchup, when she joined me and said, ‘You’re someone I’d like to get to know.’ I was so surprised, I couldn’t think of anything to say. ‘Can you talk?’ she asked.
‘Yes,’ I said.
I had seen her around quite a bit. She had mid-length black hair and a dark complexion, and she was slightly plump—not fat, but agreeably plump. In the middle of her forehead she had a mole, almost exactly in the middle, which bothered me at first, because I don’t think striking features belong in the middle; they should be off-centre, at least from a graphic point of view. She was a Mediterranean type, but spoke without an accent.
‘Are you sure?’ she asked. ‘Or do you need some help?’
‘I’m all right,’ I said, and told her my name and my major.
‘And why architecture?’ she asked.
If I remember correctly, I gave her an extremely long answer. ‘Look at the kinds of cities we live in,’ I said. ‘Look at the houses. Look at the world.’ It wasn’t, I told her, enough to want to build houses or cities. You had to build worlds. That’s what I was like at the time. I had big plans and thought megalomania was a good characteristic, not a bad one. I conjured up worlds before Rebecca’s eyes, worlds I wanted to build, worlds where living and working and shopping and everything else would come together in a new way—and I didn’t just say that to impress Rebecca. I really meant it. I took out a pad of paper and made sketches, which I explained to her in detail, and now and then I looked up and saw that Rebecca was looking not at the sketches of the new worlds, but at me.
Rebecca and I often went out together after that, drinking and dancing, and we saw plays at Bochum’s playhouse, but it was a while before it was love. Rebecca was stu
dying medicine. Her father is a classicist at the university in Aixen-Chapelle; her mother is a dermatologist, who has black hair like Rebecca, although she isn’t from the Mediterranean; she’s from the German-speaking minority of Belgium. Because of that I later called Rebecca ‘my Spanish Dutch girl’ sometimes, although she didn’t much like it. Nobody knows where the dark colouring in her family comes from.
Sometimes she would start the day by saying today we had to address each other formally and we would call each other ‘Herr’ and ‘Frau’ until the evening. Or she would say today we were characters in a Chekhov play and she would address me as Ivan Ivanovich and I would call her Anna Petrovna, and she would say things like: ‘Character, Ivan Ivanovich, you’re always harping on about character,’ and I would say things like: ‘Don’t you agree that it’s boring, Anna Petrovna, deathly boring?’ They weren’t quotations; we didn’t know the plays that well. We only acted out the spirit of the thing.
It was six months before Rebecca moved in with me. We hadn’t yet slept with one another at that point, but there followed amazing years with one another: sex until we wanted no more, until we couldn’t anymore, but kept on all the same because we had to. Nothing was to come to an end, no conversation, no outing, no journey, and if anything looked as if it might come to an end because some duty called, we would back out of the duty, and when that was no longer possible because it would have meant living without a degree, without friends, without fillings in our teeth, we parted with a pain usually reserved for the emigrant docks.
‘Those years are our seminal myth,’ Rebecca once said to me later. ‘When I can’t get through to you, and I don’t mean on the phone—I mean when I can’t get through to you even when you’re in the flat, even when you’re sitting right next to me—then I think of our seminal years and I think to myself that what we had then can’t have disappeared, that it will come again.’ I like this notion, although I have sometimes wondered whether that seminal myth didn’t lull us into a false sense of security, whether it wasn’t one reason we accepted my descent into lovelessness.
After three years, my little brother came back. He rang the doorbell and told me over the intercom that I had to come down.
‘Don’t you want to come up?’ I asked.
‘No, I have to show you something,’ he said.
I ran down, curious to know why he would insist on being reunited on the street after all this time. The first thing I noticed was the tattoo on his neck, then the long hair. We hugged, and I saw a motorbike parked on the pavement, a chopper with a long front fork and a low saddle. Tank, mudguard and side panels were elaborately decorated and I understood at once that Bruno had painted them; it was his style, his way of creating worlds—sombre, mystical worlds that owed much to The Lord of the Rings.
‘So what do you think?’ he asked after we had hugged, glancing at the bike.
‘Very nice,’ I said.
‘A bit more enthusiasm, please,’ he said. ‘How about magnificent, ravishing, breathtaking?’ He boxed me in the chest, I boxed back and we were in each other’s arms again.
‘Where did you get the money for a bike like that?’ I asked and instantly regretted it. My little brother was back; I shouldn’t have come over all parental so soon.
‘Belongs to a customer,’ said Bruno.
Over coffee and whisky in my flat, he told me he had picked up a special airbrush technique and was now, as he put it, ‘beautifying’ cars and motorbikes.
‘It’s already going pretty well,’ he said.
In fact, it never went really well—still doesn’t to this day. Sometimes he earns money, sometimes he doesn’t, and when he doesn’t, he lives off money I give him or money his women earn, but they don’t earn much and they never stick around for long either. He has fans in America, some in China, in Qatar. He gets around a lot, and he takes drugs and comes off them again. He’s all right, I think. He has never wanted any other life. Sometimes I think he has it easier than I do.
Now and again I’ve had to send him money in Lima or Houston with Western Union, because he wouldn’t have been able to get back to Germany otherwise. Once I went to Blantyre in Malawi because some people there were keeping him prisoner in a hut. He owed them a thousand dollars and didn’t have a cent. But none of that makes any difference to me. He’s my little brother, and I’m here for him. For a long time he was the only family I had.
He ended up moving back into the flat with Rebecca and me. It was cramped, but we got on fine; he and Rebecca like each other. After a year he found a little flat of his own in Bochum and has lived there to this day.
There’s not a lot more I can say about my time in Bochum—only that, yes, there was one strange and unsettling incident. One day—this was before mobiles—the phone rang in our flat. I picked it up, and at first I had trouble taking in the speaker’s words, they were so alien to me: ‘It’s Dad, I was wondering how you were.’ I think I was silent for a long time. In those days, I didn’t know my father’s telephone voice at all. He’d never rung me, not even on my birthday. My mother would ring and wish me many happy returns and tell me the story of my birth, just like the year before and the year before that. Then she would pass on a happy birthday from my father. ‘Tell him thank you,’ I would say. Now he was on the phone asking how I was. What was I to say?
‘Fine,’ I said.
‘University going well?’ he asked.
‘Yes, great.’ There was a short pause. I searched for words, but before I had found any, my father said, ‘Well, that’s all right then. Just wanted to know how you were.’ He hung up.
When I told Rebecca, she said he was trying to send me a signal, a signal of interest.
‘But he’s never been interested in me,’ I said.
‘Yes, he has,’ she said. ‘You told me he took you to the firing range.’
‘That’s ages ago,’ I said stubbornly.
A few days later, Rebecca urged me to give my father a ring, but I didn’t. Today I reproach myself for that. I think he had made up his mind to rediscover his son, but found himself up against a hard heart—my heart.
I can’t say I missed him during my time in Bochum, but I missed having a father. This became painfully clear to me one year after Christmas when I was waiting in Berlin for the train to take me back to Bochum. Next to me was a man of about my age who had his father with him. When the train drew into the station, the two of them hugged so hard and so long and so tearfully that it brought tears to my own eyes. I could hardly bear to look.
In the year that East and West Germany were reunited, I graduated and wanted to return to Berlin—wanted, as I said to myself at the time, to help build up the new city. Rebecca came with me and continued her studies at a prestigious research university. Even then, she knew she wasn’t going to be a doctor. She was interested in the human genome, and wanted to do research in the field. We married soon afterwards, because we were sure we belonged together. Do I see things differently today? No. We belong together, although we now know that those words do not imply a good life together—certainly not consistently good.
24
ON 15 JUNE IN THE YEAR OF TIBERIUS, we held a soiree. It was, we told ourselves, a first step back to normality: we would rediscover something of the life we had lived before Dieter Tiberius. We invited the three couples we got on with the best and who knew about our situation, and one of Rebecca’s schoolfriends who happened to be staying in town with his wife. We didn’t know the wife. Rebecca and I agreed not to talk about Dieter Tiberius that evening. We wanted a normal evening such as we used to have, and that is what we told our friends when we invited them—but not the schoolfriend, of course, who knew nothing.
As always, Rebecca cooked a first-rate dinner, worthy of at least one star, and the evening got off to a good start. I found myself opening bottles of wine in quick succession. After dessert, we talked about a recent political scandal and about whether children were in good hands in a state school or better off going to
a private school so that they might one day end up at Yale or Cambridge. Opinion was divided. Rebecca’s schoolfriend’s wife—who specialised in family law—was particularly vocal, declaring herself ‘against the early privileging of children’ and in favour of state schools, ‘to allow all social classes to come into contact with each other, and to maintain that contact for as long as possible’.
I agreed to a certain extent, but said that my concern for my children’s wellbeing might lead me to act ‘antisocially’. This term was then hotly debated, and Rebecca was among those who disapproved of it. I opened the next bottle of Black Print, although there were already two open; as I have said, it needs time to breathe.
One of my friends now said that the real difference between the classes was the way they behaved in public. He considered it an ‘admirable middle-class characteristic’ that we refrained from imposing ourselves on others in everything we did. We didn’t eat kebabs on the bus or the train; we didn’t drink beer on the street; and even when we were drunk, we didn’t urinate against trees or in alleyways.
At this point the family lawyer piped up again. She disagreed with my friend, saying how awful it was travelling on the train these days because of middle-class people talking on their mobile phones, not caring if the entire carriage heard them. Everyone had something to say to that, and the table grew loud. At around two in the morning I asked our guests to lower their voices: we did not, I said, pointing at the floor with a smug smile, want to ‘disturb our dear Tiberius’. Our friends grinned, arousing the interest of Rebecca’s schoolfriend, who wanted to know who this Tiberius was, and why everyone else seemed to have heard of him already.
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