Because I had been stupid enough to raise the topic, Rebecca abandoned our plan and told all there was to tell about Dieter Tiberius, working herself into such a rage that she even let drop the words ‘our Untermensch’. I asked her several times to talk quietly, because there were only thirty centimetres separating us from Dieter Tiberius and no carpet, of course, because we have old oak parquet. Even before Rebecca had finished talking, I saw her schoolfriend’s wife purse her lips. Was it not possible, she asked eventually, that Dieter Tiberius was just a victim? After all, he’d grown up a ward of the state, and we all knew what went on in children’s homes.
I had not until then applied the word ‘victim’ to Dieter Tiberius. For us, he was the perpetrator. Even if we knew that he had probably had an awful childhood, we didn’t believe that gave him the right to terrorise us. My wife said as much to the family lawyer, and then things went back and forth, getting louder and louder, and all attempts to placate the two of them failed.
The ‘poor man’ downstairs, said the family lawyer, had to look on daily as we ‘flashed our wealth around’, had to listen to us ‘tottering’ over the parquet in our ‘Gucci shoes’ and watch our children hurtling almost inevitably towards stellar careers. That must be hard to bear for a ‘poor man’ like him, for whom ‘society’ had no other plan but ‘a dark, musty hole underground’. Of course he had to defend himself, said the family lawyer.
‘Defend!’ my wife screeched. ‘We’ve never done anything to him.’
Oh yes, we had, said the family lawyer, we’d provoked him with our Nazi jargon.
Now I, too, had had enough and protested at this accusation.
The family lawyer said very calmly that, what was more, she knew from her work that there were also incidents of child abuse in middle-class families, and that a ‘poor man’ like Tiberius who was ‘bound’ to have been abused himself while in state care would, of course, be particularly sensitive to the issue. He would, she said, have ‘special sensors’.
My wife jumped up and screamed at the lawyer to leave the flat at once. The guest sitting next to Rebecca grabbed hold of her, otherwise there’s no doubt that she would have hurled herself at the lawyer; as it was, she managed to snatch a Black Print bottle and throw it at the floor—an empty bottle that didn’t shatter, but rolled away; our parquet is quite well-sprung, but not particularly even. Rebecca screamed and screamed, and then the doorbell rang.
The table fell silent immediately. It was about half past two in the morning and we hadn’t called for a taxi or heard a car draw up. The woman above us had gone to stay with her daughter; the couple in the attic liked giving dinner parties themselves and had never complained about noise. I got up, went into the hall and opened the door. Dieter Tiberius said he couldn’t sleep, and could we not be quieter? He didn’t say it wearily, but with malice. Could he speak to my wife? he asked. She was screaming so loudly.
I saw him only indistinctly, because he hadn’t switched on the light in the stairwell. He was wearing a dressing-gown that was too big for him, or at least too long; it came nearly to the floor and the sleeves almost completely concealed his hands.
He couldn’t speak to my wife, I said—not coolly, I’m afraid, but enraged at his impudence.
Dieter Tiberius: ‘But she’s screaming so angrily.’
Me: ‘I can assure you, we’ll be quiet now.’
And I shut the door.
I went back into the living room and saw that some of the men, including my wife’s schoolfriend, had positioned themselves protectively behind their wives’ chairs. I observed it, I believe, with a scornful smile.
‘Dieter Tiberius asks us to be quieter,’ I said.
The conversation didn’t pick up again; we tried going back to politics, but an embarrassed silence soon set in, and then my wife’s schoolfriend said it was late and they would have to be getting back to their hotel. The others followed suit. I ordered taxis, and then, as we waited, made a bit of small talk—alone, because Rebecca had vanished—accepting muted compliments on the great food and the lovely evening, even from the family lawyer. When the taxis arrived, I saw our guests to the front gate, where there were hugs, handshakes and the odd surreptitious glance at Dieter Tiberius’s basement. It was dark down there; he had drawn the curtains.
When I got back to the flat, my wife was sitting on the sofa. She gave the neck of the Black Print bottle a gentle kick, setting it spinning with a soft rumbling sound.
‘You’ve got to do something,’ she said. ‘You’ve really got to do something.’
25
THE NEXT DAY, the family lawyer rang and apologised to Rebecca for her behaviour. Rebecca accepted the apology coolly and assured her that everything was fine. ‘Cunt,’ she said, after she’d hung up. I had never heard my wife use language like that, but I understood what had prompted it. It was galling to be told by a guest in our home that it was Dieter Tiberius who was the victim in this relationship; that we were the oppressors, and not the oppressed. A lack of compassion for the underprivileged is the last thing we’re guilty of. We willingly share our good fortune with others: we sponsor a child in Africa, with whom we exchange letters; we adopted a tiger in India at Fay’s request; and when there is an earthquake or some other natural disaster, we invariably make not insignificant donations.
I went to the bank that afternoon, and then I returned to the laundry. Once again I found the manager enshrouded in the steam of his machines. I offered him a hundred thousand euros for the basement flat, twice its actual value. I offered him a hundred and twenty thousand and, eventually, a hundred and fifty thousand, although my account manager had said that a hundred and twenty thousand was the maximum. We were still under considerable financial strain after buying our flat, and I am not one of those architects who get filthy rich. I do everything myself, from drafting the design to overseeing the construction, assisted by only a part-time secretary and the occasional intern. That way I am left with quite a bit of my income, but five houses is about as much as I can manage in a year. We are well-off, not rich.
‘The flat’s not for sale,’ said the laundry manager.
‘It’s only a basement flat,’ I said.
‘For you it’s only a basement flat,’ said the manager, gesturing to the Moldovan woman, who switched off a machine that was hissing particularly loudly. ‘I was born in that basement,’ he said. ‘My mother was a servant for the family who used to own the whole house. She cooked for them and did the housekeeping, and I lived there with her until I was twenty.’
He wasn’t allowed upstairs with her when he was little, he said, but sat in the basement alone, listening to the footsteps of his mother and the others in the house. He had spent hours on end looking out ‘from down below’ at the cars and people passing by. Now part of the house belonged to him, and he wasn’t going to give it up.
‘Can’t you turn the tenant out, at least?’ I said insistently.
‘What do the police say?’ the laundry manager wanted to know.
‘Nothing,’ I said.
‘I can’t take the roof from over Dieter’s head for no reason,’ said the laundry manager. ‘But if you want to sell, I can make you an offer.’
I ignored these last words and left.
Today I think that was the mistake of my life. I should have let our flat go. My father wouldn’t be sitting in prison now and we, as a family, wouldn’t have a murder on our conscience. We would have lost the battle against Dieter Tiberius and lost it unjustly, but what would that matter? I don’t subscribe to the masculine ideology that rejects defeat out of hand. And yet at the same time, I didn’t want to yield. For a while now, I have sometimes wondered if I didn’t stay put to give my father and me a chance to reconnect—to reconnect over a crime. Is that abstruse?
When the Tiberius crisis was at its height, our son developed a twitch, pushing out his lips and wrinkling his nose in a peculiar way. He didn’t do it much at first, but before long he was doing it every twenty or thirty seconds. Secret
ly I called it ‘snouting’, and this snouting was a great worry to us. Of course we blamed Dieter Tiberius—we blamed pretty much everything on Dieter Tiberius at that time. We asked Paul whether there was anything worrying him, and he said no. We asked whether he was afraid of Dieter Tiberius, and again he said no.
Paul is, in fact, an easygoing, cheerful child. He has never been difficult: he took the food we offered him, soon admitted defeat if we told him in a shop that we were not going to buy sugary treats, and when we forbade him from drawing on the wall with his felt-tips, he never did it again. Paul has my wife’s dark hair and complexion, and when I mention that to her, she is kind enough to reply that he is pensive like me and has my wrists. I have narrow wrists, which means I can only wear little watches, not those massive chronometers you could hang up in a train terminal. A lot of my colleagues like to wear those watches; the more stupid among them are keen to tell you that they ‘laid out’ fifteen thousand euros for them, a sum of money I couldn’t afford in any case. Paul has a crooked little finger, like me, like my mother. I would call Paul a gentle child, a child who often moves me because he asks on the phone: ‘And how are you, Dada?’
Fay has dark hair too, but fair skin. She has my ambition, my desire to push life into the shape she wants. She is more forceful than her brother, only reluctantly took the food we gave her and never asks me how I am on the phone—but maybe she is still too little for that. She is not as pensive as her brother, but quick and direct, and often hilariously funny. At the outbreak of the Tiberius crisis, we thought she was the one we’d need to keep a close eye on, because she’s prone to strong emotion and feels things so intensely, but then it was Paul who developed this strange snouting. He was having trouble with another boy at the time; the boy wasn’t hitting him, but he was bullying him, and Paul no longer liked going to kindergarten. We were at a loss.
We had tried not to worry the children, despite the menace from the basement; we didn’t talk about it in front of them and acted as if Dieter Tiberius didn’t exist. That seemed to us the right strategy at first. Our children went on playing their games and living their lives the same as ever. We noticed no change in them—but then the snouting began. Had we done something wrong? Was there something fevered in their tireless playing? Children always keep going: even with temperatures of almost forty degrees, Fay and Paul stick their Lego bricks together as unflaggingly as ever. Had they perhaps, then, realised what state Rebecca and I were in, what danger they themselves were exposed to—and did they feel alone and anxious because nobody talked to them about it? Had Paul started the snouting out of worry or fear, even if he denied it?
I made pathetic attempts to get him to break the habit. At first I pointed it out to him in a friendly way every time he screwed up his face, and told him that he didn’t have to do it, that he could stop it. As the days passed, I grew impatient, admonishing him sternly and even snapping at him. He looked guilty then, but also questioning, as if he had no idea what I wanted of him. Once I let myself get carried away to the point of exclaiming: ‘Stop that snouting!’ I found myself looking into big, offended eyes and apologised. But once a word is in the world, I fear it stays there.
It was not long after my unfortunate outburst—my diary tells me it was 27 June—that I went down to the basement in the evening and knocked on Dieter Tiberius’s door. Nothing stirred.
‘I’d like to talk to you. Please open the door,’ I said. Nothing.
I went back to our living room, picked up the phone and dialled his number. I heard it ring in his flat. He did eventually answer, giving his full name.
‘Randolph Tiefenthaler,’ I said, adding superfluously: ‘Your neighbour.’
‘I don’t mind going to prison,’ Dieter Tiberius said at once.
I ignored this bizarre statement and made him an offer: five thousand euros in cash plus removal costs if he left the flat within four weeks. Dieter Tiberius said he’d like to think about it, and hung up.
Money: the contemporary solution to every problem, and a contemptible one, lacking strength, grace and courage. The solution of the businessman, who has become the central figure of our civilisation. And the solution of my class: we have money, and we use that money to buy ourselves the lives we want. But there are limits, of course. I don’t know why I said five thousand euros rather than ten thousand, why calculation plays a role in such matters. I could have afforded fifty thousand euros, with a bit of a struggle and maybe a loan from friends. But I said five thousand. It must, relative to my income, have been the largest sum I was prepared to put up to reward wrongdoing.
That night I pondered what he’d said about going to prison. His words frightened me, because they made him invulnerable. I realised that everything I had thought to my advantage was in fact to my disadvantage: my family, my job, my comfortable life, my money, my good reputation. I could lose all that, whereas he had nothing to lose. He lived in a dingy basement, alone and on benefits, and he was no stranger to hell, whether children’s home or prison. He was tough, whereas I was timid, fearful of loss. The loser is strong because he has nothing left to lose. People like me, apparently life’s winners, are weak because they have so much they want to hang on to. The upwardly mobile are particularly afraid. We are afraid of losing what we have attained, because it is not secure, neither morally nor financially. We lack the reserves, the foundations of a long family tradition.
Two days later there was a letter on the windowsill in the entryway. I tore it open, full of hope, and was disappointed: I’m staying put. You won’t get me out. My mercantile approach had failed.
26
I NOW GOT UP EVERY MORNING thinking that I had to win my wife back, and I set about trying to impress her. I gave her detailed accounts of all the requests I had pouring in, although this was rather an excessive way to describe the actual rate at which projects were coming in—and I showed her an article in Architectural Digest, in which one of my houses was commended.
‘I don’t want you to impress me,’ said Rebecca. ‘I want you to inflict some normality on me—you’ve been depriving me. Bore me,’ she said. ‘Let’s start with that.’
I was ashamed. It was only now that I realised I had chosen the wrong approach. It wasn’t a question of my winning her back; it was a question of winning myself back for my wife. Once I had grasped this, it wasn’t so hard. I told her about all I had seen and read and thought, and she did the same. Our hands found each other again when we went shopping together, and we held one another in long, spontaneous embraces that brought our arms out in goose flesh—but it wasn’t Eros; it was a feeling of disconcertion at finding our bodies in such an unfamiliar situation.
What helped most was looking at things with different eyes—no longer seeing what annoyed me about my wife, but what I liked about her. I changed the story I told about my marriage and suddenly found myself with a completely different woman: not a woman who frightened me with her violent outbursts of anger, but a woman who had an outburst once or twice a year and then got over it. What mattered to me now was the time in between. It was only now that I realised the simple truth: we are not, particularly in long relationships, together with a person who really exists, but with a person we create in our heads, mainly by selecting memories. The ‘real’ person probably doesn’t even exist. Whenever Rebecca does or says something, I see it in the context of my memories, and these can vary greatly, depending on my mood.
During this first phase of rapprochement, the two of us would often have dinner together, choosing to eat in the living room rather than the kitchen. We cooked together, or rather, I peeled what needed peeling and Rebecca took charge of anything that required skill. Then we disappeared into our bathrooms and got changed. Rebecca wore a black dress, high-heeled shoes and chunky jewellery; I wore a suit, a white shirt and a Tom Ford tie. We put out candles, Rebecca’s great-grandmother’s china, a wonderfully balanced Majorcan red, and talked about our everyday life, our children and whether Rebecca should take up her
career again. The music was quiet enough not to disturb our conversation, but loud enough to stop Dieter Tiberius from eavesdropping and to spare us from Dustin Hoffman. I am not given to sentimentality, and I didn’t let it get the better of me once in all this saga—but these evenings, when I liked to put on Shostakovich’s seventh symphony, the Leningrad, were an exception. It was written in the besieged city and is reminiscent of military marches, especially the allegretto, a music of resilience. I approved of that at the time—cultural resistance. What nonsense, I say today.
All was well with us on those evenings. We were a normal couple, and before long we were a couple in love. Rebecca sometimes came up with strange ideas, as she had in the past. Once she said, ‘Come on, let’s say things to each other that no love except ours can withstand.’ I wasn’t sure we were quite ready for that, but I went along with it. At times like that, you can’t refuse the other anything.
‘You’re so unsexy in the winter because you wear slippers and socks with your dressing-gown,’ said Rebecca.
‘But my feet are always cold in winter,’ I protested.
She said cold feet were unsexy too. That hurt me; I didn’t want to be unsexy, even in the winter.
‘And now you have to forgive me,’ said Rebecca. I swallowed my incipient resentment and forgave her, really forgave her, and I thought: What a wonderful woman.
‘Now you,’ said Rebecca, looking at me expectantly.
I thought for a while, but all I could come up with was: ‘You breathe so loudly when you’re eating.’
‘Oh, come on,’—she was disappointed—‘plenty of people do that; any love can withstand that.’
‘Well, slippers weren’t exactly original either,’ I said.
‘Please,’ said my wife. ‘Please, please, please.’
I thought, then said, ‘You don’t smell good when I fuck you from behind.’
That wasn’t true—I loved how she smelled when we fucked—but I wanted to say something that really hurt her.
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