Fear

by Dirk Kurbjuweit

  She swallowed, and I thought I’d gone too far, but then she said, ‘But you still love fucking me from behind.’

  ‘But I still love fucking you from behind,’ I said.

  ‘Because our love is so great,’ she said.

  ‘Because our love is so great,’ I said. We gently clinked our glasses of red wine.

  ‘Ah, pass me a piece of the tomme, Ivan Ivanovich,’ said Rebecca with a melancholy smile that spoke of consumption and approaching death.

  ‘With pleasure, Anna Petrovna,’ I said, cutting her a piece of cheese, ‘but don’t you agree that it’s deathly boring here?’

  ‘Yes,’ she breathed, ‘it is deathly boring, but please stop talking about character—I don’t want to hear another word about character.’

  I understood at once why she was talking like this; she was drawing on our seminal myth, the myth that could save us.

  After dinner, Rebecca went to have a shower, which she never usually did in the late evening. When she got into bed with me, I said, ‘Don’t you dare wash your wonderful smell away ever again.’

  ‘You lied,’ she said. ‘You’re not allowed to lie if you want us to reconnect.’

  Then we had sex, and I made an effort to think not of myself, but of my wife, at every moment. I daresay that doesn’t sound exactly thrilling—you don’t want to associate sex with effort, I know—but when you are emerging from a long, deep valley, the way up can be hard work. We both saw it that way, which made it all right.

  Our children—our unabused children, for that is what they now were—grew jealous, because they weren’t used to seeing their mama and dada so wrapped up in one another. In the past, they had often had me all to themselves when they were playing; now Rebecca sometimes joined us, and she and I talked to one another while I built a ship for Paul or a stable for Fay. (We are a traditional family.)

  ‘Go away, Mama,’ Fay said once, but I insisted that Rebecca stayed and soon the children, too, realised that we were a family of four.

  In short, to all outward appearances, we led a normal life during those Tiberius months, living day to day as if nothing had happened, as if there were no man downstairs who was, as we saw it at the time, out to destroy our happiness. Paul stopped snouting after a couple of weeks, and we continued not to talk to the children about Dieter Tiberius, so that everything, I think, seemed normal to them.

  They knew nothing of my nightly patrols around the house, and of course I never told anyone, not even my wife, about the thoughts that assailed me on those rounds—murderous thoughts. If Dieter Tiberius appeared, I would kill him, I thought, and call it self-defence. But he never did appear, and to be truthful, I was glad, not because I would otherwise have killed him, but because I probably would not have killed him, which would have revealed my defencelessness.

  27

  OUR LIFE WITH THE CHILDREN was not, however, all that normal. It was a while before I realised that I had stopped showing myself naked in front of Paul and Fay as a matter of course. I undressed in the bathroom and I dressed in the bathroom. When I cuddled them, I was careful not to touch them where I never touched them anyway except when I was washing them—and even that I had stopped doing. It’s awful, but I can’t put it any other way: whenever I washed my children, Dieter Tiberius was at my side, watching my every move.

  One day he sent my wife a poem. The rhymes were primitive, but not inane; it even had a certain poetry to it. It was, largely speaking, about my wife’s screams, although it was unclear whether he meant screams of anger or screams of pleasure. Rebecca is quiet in bed, on the whole, but maybe he would have liked her to scream with pleasure. Reading that was disturbing enough, but then the poem ended with his ardent desire to be present when my wife let out her final scream, after which she would ‘gasp her last’ and be silent for ever; here, he rhymed ‘gasp her last’ with ‘all is past’.

  ‘A death threat,’ I said to Rebecca, my voice cracking.

  She read the poem, then sat at the kitchen table in silence. ‘I feel so dirty,’ she said finally. ‘He imagines doing all that to me, and while he’s imagining it, he’s close by me, almost here in the flat, like a lodger. He’s a lodger in my head, too,’ she said. ‘In my feelings, in my body.’

  ‘But we’ve got him now,’ I said. ‘After a death threat, the police have to take action.’

  I took the letter to Ms Kröger at the crime office. She looked at it for a long time, then shook her head.

  ‘No lawyer will see a death threat in that,’ she said. ‘Your neighbour’s been imagining things, but there’s no law against that.’

  ‘But it’s about my wife’s final scream,’ I cried. ‘About gasping her last and all being past—it’s about death.’

  ‘Could also be sex,’ she said.

  ‘You are utterly heartless,’ I said.

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘I said you are utterly heartless. You see before you a man who is afraid for his wife, afraid for his children, and all you can say is that it could also be sex.’

  ‘I’m telling you what the law says,’ she said.

  I burst into tears; I admit it. They rolled down my cheeks as I shook my head, got up and left without a word. In despair, I dropped in on our lawyer, but as expected she too saw no improvement in our situation after reading the letter. I asked her where we were at with the slander charges. She said I must be patient. I withdrew the power of attorney we had granted her, and she took it indifferently.

  I rang my brother, and he came round the next day. I didn’t want to leave my family alone in the flat for a minute under the current circumstances. I had, it is true, almost completely transferred my office to the flat by then, but I sometimes had to drive to building sites and didn’t want to take any risks.

  The evening my little brother arrived we sat at the kitchen table for a long time, he and Rebecca and I, drinking red wine and not talking about Dieter Tiberius. At about midnight, Bruno went out and returned shortly afterwards with a crowbar.

  ‘What’s going on?’ I asked.

  ‘Let’s get it over and done with,’ he said. ‘That’s what I’m here for.’

  ‘No,’ I replied, ‘you’re not here because I want Dieter Tiberius bludgeoned to death. You’re here to look after my family.’

  He said he only needed the crowbar to open the bastard’s door; we could do the rest with our fists. I explained to him that we were on the right side of the law and wanted to stay there.

  ‘What’s the point of a law that fails you?’ my brother asked.

  Today I think Dieter Tiberius might still be alive if I had listened to my little brother back then. Maybe a punch or two would have rattled him, and he would have moved out. But I don’t know—I can’t know. It’s one of those hypothetical questions that sometimes torment me. What would have happened if I had taken a different turn in a certain situation? We always live at least two lives, especially after a big decision: the life we decided on and the life we decided against. In our minds we let that other life play out, comparing it with our actual situation. For me, that alternate life is one in which we have managed to evict Dieter Tiberius from his flat in a peaceable manner. He lives in a secure institution and cannot harm us. Now and again I go and have a cup of coffee with my father, because we have become reconciled with one another even without murder. All’s well in our world.

  My little brother laid the crowbar on the table and sat down. We didn’t storm downstairs that evening; we had a long discussion. Bruno soon annoyed me by calling me a coward, a man who doesn’t put up a fight, but only looks on as his family is attacked. I said that we might as well do away with civilisation altogether if people like me were going to resort to barbarism.

  ‘You don’t have to make such a big deal of it,’ said my little brother. ‘Just smash his face in—civilisation will survive.’

  A violent argument ensued and old grievances were dredged up, but what really got to me was that my wife had nothing to say about it and did
n’t take my side. In the end I made my brother promise he wouldn’t do anything without me—that he’d leave our downstairs neighbour alone. Reluctantly, he agreed.

  I couldn’t get to sleep for hours, as so often at that time, and in my waking dreams I saw myself as part of a great battle, as part of a civilisation that had to resist barbarism, but with its own civilised means, so that it was my duty to overcome barbarism without becoming a barbarian myself.

  The next day, we had the police round again because Dieter Tiberius had reported my brother for sexually abusing our children together with my wife. Sergeant Leidinger and his colleague Rippschaft came, questioned us briefly and then left again. I told my brother he could forget his crowbar; he had given me his promise. Bruno gave me a look of contempt and disappeared back into Paul’s room.

  Perhaps it’s hard to imagine a visit like that from the police, how it must feel. Perhaps the repetition even lends the whole thing an air of comedy, but we were unable to see it like that. Each time, we felt humiliated, besmirched, touched by evil. We were left feeling as if we had been charged but not tried. We were not guilty of any crime, but neither did we feel innocent, because we had not been found innocent; our reputation still hung in the balance. No matter how often we told ourselves we were blameless, it wasn’t enough. We no longer numbered among the ranks of those whose lives are untouched by the suspicion of child abuse.

  28

  THE DAYS WERE NOW VERY WARM, thirty degrees, and a blue sky hung resplendent over our sombre thoughts. One day I was sitting in the garden, working on a model for a house while the children played on the trampoline. It seemed as if all was well, but I sat there like a watchman at his post. The trampoline was behind a hedge, and I saw only the children’s heads as they popped up with laughing faces and disappeared again. I imagined a world without them, a world after Dieter Tiberius had snatched them from us, and I wondered how I would live in such a world.

  It was not, however, the horror that interested me in this scenario, but what solace I might find. The beauty of the mountains would remain, the beauty of the sea. My job would remain; Rebecca would remain—but would she still be the Rebecca I knew?

  Paul popped up. Fay popped up. I waved at them.

  When Paul was born, on a hot summer’s day with the window open, my first thought was that here was a person whose life mattered more than my own, a person for whom I would give my life if it saved his. I have already written that I am not given to sentiment and it’s the truth, but this was another of my rare moments of sentiment. The thought was simply there, as soon as he slid from my wife’s womb. With Fay, I had the same thought, but that time it had to come, because there could be no difference in my love for them. There really is no difference, and it is still true: I would give my life for my children. Every father would, I hope.

  I was folding the corner of a wall and spreading glue along one edge when I realised that I hadn’t seen my children’s heads for a while. I listened for their laughter and giggles, but heard nothing. Don’t panic, I told myself. Don’t be paranoid. But I was paranoid. I got up and looked behind the hedge. Paul and Fay were lying on the trampoline, blinking up at the sun in silence. I lay down next to them and closed my eyes, and we lay there like that for a while without talking. When I opened my eyes again, I saw Dieter Tiberius at the side of the hedge with a knife in his right hand.

  I leapt up, but it took me a moment to crawl out from under the safety net. Then I set off at a run. I caught a glimpse of Dieter Tiberius vanishing into the basement. Standing at the outer door, I realised that I had seen not only a knife, but also an apple: the knife in his right hand, the apple in his left. I didn’t go down to the basement, didn’t hammer on his door, but sat down at the garden table again and went back to working on the model. Fay came and asked me why I’d run away.

  ‘I frightened off a fox,’ I said.

  ‘Did not,’ said Fay. ‘There’s no fox here.’

  ‘You’re right,’ I said. ‘It was a slip of the tongue. I meant an ox.’

  She gave me a doubtful look. ‘Really?’ she asked.

  ‘Or maybe it was a unicorn,’ I said.

  Fay: ‘But an ox is much bigger than a unicorn.’

  Me: ‘But not a baby ox.’

  Fay: ‘Is a baby ox that small?’

  Me: ‘Smaller than a cat, at any rate.’

  Fay: ‘When did you ever see a baby ox?’

  Me: ‘When you were born. There was one in the cot next to yours.’

  Fay: ‘That’s not true.’

  It went to and fro like this for a while. Fay went back to the trampoline, and I turned my thoughts to possible shapes for a bay window. You don’t feel quite at ease with yourself after you’ve outmanoeuvred your own child.

  What had Dieter Tiberius wanted? My wife wasn’t in. He must have known that; he kept a permanent watch on the front gate. Had he hoped that Paul and Fay were alone on the trampoline? We were still tormented by the suspicion that he might be after the children, although everything he did was directed at my wife. All we had to go on was his description of what we supposedly did to them, and we thought, still, that only someone who lusted after children himself could come up with such things. That was part of our paranoia: we could only imagine the worst possibilities. We lived a worst-case life in a worst-case world.

  29

  I MUST CONFESS—and this is extremely painful for me—that I did wonder whether it was possible that my wife was sexually abusing our children. As soon as this thought entered my mind, I banished it; I couldn’t allow Dieter Tiberius to infect me with his perverted suspicions. And yet it happened. I pushed the thought away a few times, but when it persisted, I ended up acknowledging it and thinking it through to its conclusion. I interrogated my memory thoroughly, calling to mind scenes that took place in our bathtub—Rebecca with Fay, Rebecca with Paul—but I could come up with nothing, nothing at all to confirm my suspicions. Try as I might, I recalled only a normal family’s normal physical contact from that time, in the past now, when Dieter Tiberius had not yet frightened us into giving it up.

  I realise, of course, that the world is not only what we see and hear. When our backs are turned, when we are far away, it can be a very different place. That is what makes our lives so precarious. Anything is possible in our absence, every form of betrayal, ignominy, crime—even, damn it, child abuse. I wondered what my wife did when I was out of the house, and unbearable images appeared before me. Those images made me wish Dieter Tiberius dead—yes, that’s how it was, and now I’ve said it.

  I talked of the rule of law, and it wasn’t empty talk, but there were moments when I wished Dieter Tiberius dead, perhaps run over by a truck as he was crossing the road with his plastic bags. It was his fault that the images took shape in my mind; he had poisoned my thoughts. I should, I know, have been certain the images were false. I knew my wife wasn’t capable of such things. I knew too that the accusations Dieter Tiberius had made against me were entirely unfounded, so the same should have applied to Rebecca. But was I certain? Let’s put it like this: I forced myself into certainty.

  In the latter days of this dreadful period, I was to give a speech at a house-warming party. It’s not something I like doing, but I manage: I write down what I want to say, try to calm my pounding heart by giving myself a good talking-to, and it usually goes off all right. Applause. Big thank you from the client. On such occasions I wear an elegant suit, a white shirt and a tie. People like a bit of festivity and so do I. This time I felt more agitated than usual, though. My heart was pounding in spite of the talking-to, and I stood there, looking into the upturned faces of the homeowners, a young married couple with three children, and the faces of the roofers, the carpenters, the plumbers and the electricians, whose eyes were all fixed on me expectantly—greedily, I thought, greedy for my words—and my vocal cords seized up, and my throat grew tighter and tighter, until it was too tight to let out any words.

  I struggled to get those words out,
but they were stuck. I couldn’t dislodge them, and the roofers and plumbers were beginning to look perplexed, wondering why the man up there on his little rostrum that the carpenters had made especially for the occasion didn’t get started and why he was looking so peculiar. I expect the fear that had taken hold of me was already visible. I could bear it no longer; I had to get out of there, away from those upturned faces, and I left. I didn’t run; I put all my effort into controlling my pace so as to retain a last vestige of dignity. I walked past the young couple with their three children past the rows of roofers, plumbers, carpenters and electricians, who were now staring at me even harder, but nobody said a word, and then, at last, I was sitting in my car and driving off.

  The next day I was to hold a small meeting in my office with some contractors, but a quarter of an hour before it was due to start, I was in such a panic that I cancelled and drove home. Only then did I tell Rebecca what had happened to me. We spent quite some time pondering the possible reason but could only come up with Dieter Tiberius. It seemed likely to us that his accusations, however far removed from reality, had triggered a sense of shame in me and a fear that people looking at me might see a child abuser.

  Rebecca comforted me, reassuring me, making me cups of tea, running me baths with fragrant oils and generally being a wonderfully caring wife, but there was no improvement. I couldn’t speak to more than three people at once. I was jeopardising my job, or so I thought at the time. An architect doesn’t have to be a public speaker, but he does have to make the odd speech, and to negotiate and contend with contractors and clients—and I no longer could. If I had so far applied the word ‘weakling’ to myself, it was with a certain self-deprecating pride—we intellectual types are, after all, the true strongmen in a democracy, in a society where the law prevails—but now I truly felt like a weakling, completely at the mercy of Dieter Tiberius.

  Twice I went to a therapist, who soon found out that my father is an interesting case and kept wanting to talk to me about him, because, as he put it, we had to ‘get to the root causes’, but I didn’t feel this line of inquiry would get me anywhere. His remark that I should stop ‘going out of my way’ to regard my childhood as normal was equally unhelpful. I got him to prescribe me tranquillisers and didn’t go back. The tranquillisers helped, but because they were addictive I only took them sparingly, and after a few weeks I realised that I no longer needed them. I felt a little insecure before meetings, but I was able to get through them without anybody noticing anything.