It was then that I first understood my father’s fears. I still didn’t know where they came from, but I knew how they worked. They appear suddenly, seemingly without reason, pulling themselves down over your mind like a black hood, taking hold completely and yelling: ‘Run away!’ Inside, you become a quivering creature, a deer scenting wolves without seeing them. You are divided. Even as you sit or stand somewhere, you are already gone, running, tearing away, escaping your own body. Unbearable tension; it tears you apart. And shame, great shame, at being such a lousy fucking deer.
I understood that my father couldn’t bear his fears, and that the guns were his protection against them. Tormented by inner demons, he could only feel safe by convincing himself that it was external threats he feared. Guns could keep him safe from the criminals he saw in the papers and on the news, making him feel secure. Those demons are something I’ll have to ask him about when he’s out of prison—soon, then, with any luck. Maybe it was something that happened to him during the war after all, even though he never told stories as horrific as my mother’s. Maybe it was his father. A father is always a good place to look for a demon.
It was then that I began to tell my mother about our troubles over the phone. Until that time I had spared her, making a nasty clown out of Dieter Tiberius rather than a threat. Now I made myself clearer, telling her about the letters we’d found on the windowsill. He had now written three poems about my wife, all revolving around sex and death.
At the same time, as I have said, family life carried on as usual. We went on outings to the Spree Woods, a landscape I love more than any other in the world: narrow streams between tall poplars that bend towards one another to make a vast natural cathedral. We hired two canoes and toured the labyrinth of waterways between green meadows, Fay in a boat with me, Paul with Rebecca. The paddles splashed in the water, and I told stories about Lieutenant Shivkov, an officer of the LAPD I had invented for the children, or we sat and watched for beavers in wily silence, and sometimes we saw one, to the children’s great delight. We let them play at a water park, while we lay on the grass and held each other tight, almost having sex, but not really; we were, as an American friend of mine would say, too ‘prudey’ for that. Rebecca told me what she’d most like to do to me and I told her what I’d most like to do to her. Every now and then the children came and poured cold water down our necks.
On the drive home, when Paul and Fay were asleep in the back of the car, Rebecca said there was nothing she wanted more than for Tiberius to disappear, but that sometimes the thought frightened her.
‘Because you’re afraid I’d disappear inside myself again?’ I asked.
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘you might disappear again once the danger was over.’
I assured her it wouldn’t happen, but I knew myself how tenuous statements about the future are. I too was aware that our happiness with one another was a happiness bestowed on us by Dieter Tiberius. Did that mean it was bound up with him? It was bad enough, I thought, that Dieter Tiberius had brought us so much trouble, but it was somehow even worse that he had brought us happiness: the restoration of our marriage and of a good family life. Can evil beget goodness? And what is the goodness worth, if it owes its very existence to evil? Does such goodness evaporate when the evil disappears? I made no real attempt to answer these questions.
One evening when my little brother was out, Rebecca and I sat in the living room having one of what we now called our ‘big evenings’—good food, smart clothes, Shostakovich, good conversation—and after the main course, she said, ‘I have to ask you something, but you mustn’t be angry with me.’
‘Of course, you can ask me anything,’I said, unsuspectingly.
‘The last time we were on holiday in Minorca,’ Rebecca said, ‘why did you lie on the sofa with Fay naked?’
I knew exactly what she was talking about. We had spent a day at the beach—bathing with the children, swimming out to sea, sandcastles, frisbee, books with sand between the pages, newspapers crumpled up by the wind, suncream, snuggling up on blankets, more bathing. When it got cooler, I took Fay back to the house; she was exhausted after the long day and had begun to shiver.
‘Take your wet things off,’ Rebecca called after us. We did. Fay was properly trembling by then, and we quickly got under a blanket on the sofa. Fay immediately fell asleep, and before long I too was asleep. We woke up when Paul pulled the blanket off us.
‘I told you to take your wet things off,’ said Rebecca now, ‘so that you wouldn’t catch cold, and yet for a moment I was disturbed to see you both naked on the sofa.’
‘Fay was so cold,’ I said. ‘I wanted to get her under the warm blanket straight away.’ I said it like a defendant trying to demonstrate his innocence. I told my wife that I wasn’t a fucking child molester. So there we were. I didn’t like her now, because she suspected me of something I myself had suspected her of.
Strangely enough, it had never occurred to me that Rebecca might have wondered about me, just as I had wondered about her. It pained me now. I was pained by the suspicion itself, and by the thought of the disgusting things my wife had pictured me doing with our children.
‘Forgive me, please,’ said Rebecca. ‘I trust you. I just wanted to have talked to you about it.’
‘I trust you, too,’ I said. It should be a beautiful moment, a sublime moment, when two people exchange words like these, but we were forced to express our trust where there should have been no need. ‘I trust you not to abuse our children’ is something you should never have to say. We sat there together, deeply unhappy, two confirmed non-abusers.
When my little brother came home we were still sitting in the living room. I don’t know whether we had spoken in the meantime. We were wrapped up in our black thoughts, engrossed in our life under Tiberius. Bruno tried to cheer us up, but he didn’t get anywhere, and we all three sat there in silence until we went to bed.
30
WE SOON RECEIVED ANOTHER LETTER from Dieter Tiberius, accusing us of having stolen his bike. A laughable accusation—we all had Bianchi bikes, because I’m so fond of the celeste green used by that brand, and he had a rusty, rickety ladies’ bike—but the blatant abstruseness of the charge did nothing to reassure me. I saw in it further evidence of the man’s madness—a madness that would stop at nothing. Every ring at the door set off warning signals in my head: Is that him? I shooed the children into their rooms before opening the door, muscles tensed as if for a boxing match, and soon afterwards, feeling relieved but rather sheepish, found myself signing my name with the electronic pen the DHL man hands you when you accept a parcel.
Then a letter came from Dieter Tiberius in which he took back all accusations—bicycle theft and child abuse—and apologised. We did not celebrate, too sceptical for that, but for the first time in ages we felt hope again. The next day we got another letter. He took nothing back: everything was true, and the situation, he wrote, was getting worse and worse. The police came and went.
We found ourselves a new lawyer, an older, experienced man recommended to us by friends. He was understanding and somehow had a more constructive way of frustrating our hopes. We shouldn’t expect too much from the slander charges, he said. He’d have no trouble convincing a judge that Dieter Tiberius had badly slandered us, but the penalty would only be a fine, which wouldn’t even hurt him because he’d be too poor to pay it. He’d have to do a bit of community work, but would stay in his flat. That destroyed our last shred of faith in the law. I spent a lot of time on the phone to my mother.
‘Listen,’ my little brother said to me one day, ‘if you don’t want to smoke that guy down there out of his hole yourself, then let someone else do it, but stop putting up with all this like such a wuss.’
He knew people, customers of his, who could do the job. They’d let the freak have it, he said, and nobody would be able to prove that we were behind it. It would very much surprise him if ‘that bastard’ decided to stay after ‘treatment’ of that kind, and if
he did, he’d just have to have a ‘second lot’.
I had been pondering this method for a while. I’d been calling it the ‘Chechen solution’, ever since a client of mine, a Georgian, on hearing the rough outline of our story, had suggested leaving the matter to ‘Chechen friends’ of his. I hadn’t taken him up on this, of course, but in the back of my mind, the Chechen solution sometimes surfaced—as a solace, or a revenge fantasy.
When my brother spoke to me I was too worn down to say no firmly. First I said no, then I let myself get drawn into a discussion, and in the end I agreed to go and see these people. Bruno made some phone calls, and when he was done we had an appointment that evening with a man who called himself Mickel.
We drove to the north-east of Berlin. My little brother directed me to a bar with a great many motorbikes parked outside, mostly heavy motorbikes and choppers. I saw that two of them had been decorated by Bruno with women and warriors from fantasy worlds.
‘Are you proud of me?’ Bruno asked as we stood in front of them.
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I’m proud of you.’
The bar was called the Fuzz. The man who called himself Mickel was sitting at a table right at the back, by the wall. We crossed a dark smoky room. All the tables were full; a few people were throwing darts at a target. Mickel was a thin man of about sixty—pointed nose, narrow lips, white eyelashes, white eyebrows, his skull bald except for a wreath of white hair hanging down in long strands. He was wearing a heavy sleeveless vest, like rockers wear. Almost everyone in the Fuzz was wearing them, even the few women. Rock music blared out of the speakers. Beer was put down in front of us, although we hadn’t ordered any.
‘You’ve got a problem,’ said Mickel to me in broad Berlin dialect. ‘Tell me about it.’
I gave him a detailed and rather dramatic report on Dieter Tiberius. When I was finished, Mickel said briefly: ‘That’ll be a thousand euros, plus two hundred expenses.’
‘But I don’t want him to get injured,’ I said.
‘That’ll cost you one thousand five hundred,’ said Mickel, ‘plus three hundred expenses, because of the towels.’
‘Why towels?’ I asked and saw my little brother roll his eyes.
‘To wrap up their fists,’ said Mickel.
I wanted to know why a gentle treatment was so much more expensive than a rough one, and Mickel explained in some detail how complicated it was to hurt people without injuring them.
A woman came up to the table—short skirt, low cleavage, red shoes. She put down a bundle of banknotes and Mickel moistened a finger and counted them. I counted too; it must have been about nine hundred euros. Mickel nodded, the woman left.
‘My big brother wants to preserve civilisation,’ Bruno said.
‘And we’re to help him?’ Mickel asked.
I was annoyed. Everything had been going well; why did Bruno have to show me up now?
‘We could try sticking to the Geneva Convention,’ said Mickel.
I was still marvelling that he’d even heard of the Geneva Convention when my brother said, ‘Take along the International Committee of the Red Cross and a couple of paramedics and you can’t go wrong.’
‘Cost you extra, though,’ said Mickel, and Bruno laughed.
‘You’re such an arsehole,’ I snapped at him.
‘Can’t you see what a fool you’re making of yourself?’ he snarled, coming very close to me. ‘If you can’t act like a man then at least let others act like men.’
I headbutted him hard in the forehead; I couldn’t stop myself. We both jumped up, knocking over our beer glasses, and started wrestling, but only seconds later I found myself in the firm grip of a rocker; Bruno likewise. Mickel gave us a medium-weight slap round the head, more from solicitude than in anger, and told us to piss off; he couldn’t do business with people like us.
Outside, my brother gave one of the motorbikes he’d decorated a kick. It fell over with a crash and we ran away laughing, jumped into my car and drove off with screeching tyres.
The next day my brother heard that the motorbike was seriously damaged, and Mickel’s lads were looking for him. He went to Qingdao for a while to decorate a Bentley for a rich Chinese client.
31
WHEN I RETURNED TO BERLIN after graduating, I began by working in the office of an established architect. Three years later I went freelance, rented a few rooms in a nice part of the city, made some investments and suddenly found myself with a pile of debts. I specialised in family homes, starting off with major renovations and conversions and then gradually designing more and more houses myself. Nothing was left of my fantasies of building a new world, but we all grow older, and I found it gratifying to be able to provide other people with a home. In no other area of architecture is the owners’ happiness as palpable as in mine. How pleased they are to have made themselves a home for life—although often enough, of course, this is not the case. I have sometimes rebuilt houses of my own design for a new family after the first family has broken up.
I was good at my job and won a few prizes. My favourite work? A house in Dahlem, entirely of glass: rectangular, two storeys, with a panel of horizontal slats running along the top, three centimetres apart. The visible undersides of the slats are painted in various colours, making the house appear not garish but colourful and vibrant, and always different, depending on your angle of vision and the position of the sun. That is the house that was praised in Architectural Digest.
Rebecca graduated and got a job as research assistant to a professor who was working on the Human Genome Project. The aim of the project was to decode the human blueprint, but also to get rich and famous; there were hopes that genetic research would yield breakthroughs leading to new drugs. Rebecca’s professor was sequencing chromosome 21, which promised to be particularly lucrative. Rebecca was good at her job and worked hard, but so did I, and we meant enough to one another not to drift apart.
It was only in 1998 that things got tough, when Craig Venter caused a furore. Does anyone remember Craig Venter? He’s the American who founded the company Celera Genomics and was able to decode human DNA quickly using a special method, focusing above all on those sections that promised to be profitable—so chromosome 21, among others. A race began, a race for fame and patents. Rebecca had to work even at the weekend, and when she did have time off, she was drained and not particularly sociable. Before we knew it, we were in the middle of our first crisis.
Sometimes we argued too, because I refused to accept that humans are determined by their genes. I believe humans are autonomous beings, master of our own decisions. That may sound naive; I know there are people who aren’t free to do what they want. But essentially, my view can be summed up as follows: We have the choice. Rebecca, naturally enough, sees things differently. For her, our genes are a major force, with considerable influence over our lives.
‘But look at my brother and sister and me,’ I once said. ‘We’re made up of the same genes, and yet we’re completely different people.’
‘Has it ever occurred to you,’ she asked, ‘that you’re an architect, your brother decorates motorbikes and your sister studied fashion design—that you all three draw and paint although you’re supposedly so different?’
‘But our parents don’t draw and paint,’ I said stubbornly.
‘You’re blind,’ Rebecca said. ‘Did anyone ever knit more beautiful jumpers for her children than your mother? I’ve seen all the pictures in the family albums,’ she continued. ‘There’s talent there—the urge to express oneself in pattern and form—design as a manifestation of love.’
‘But I haven’t inherited anything from my father,’ I said, and the answer flung back at me was the answer I have heard so often in this context.
‘That’s because you don’t want to have inherited anything from your father. But they’re good genes,’ said Rebecca. ‘They’re genes that could tell you how to enjoy a long marriage, how to provide for your children in difficult times—’
‘
I’ll provide for my children too,’ I said, interrupting Rebecca—foolishly, as it turned out.
‘Exactly,’ she said, not skipping a beat, ‘it’s all there inside you, even before you’ve had children of your own.’
I had been defeated once again and I was annoyed, but didn’t give up. At the end of these discussions we usually agreed that our lives are like a Greek tragedy: the gods guide and steer the humans, but in the end it’s the humans themselves who make the decisions.
‘So they do have the choice,’ I always said, despite myself.
‘They choose the way God wills,’ Rebecca would say, and I always suspected that this was not an empty phrase, but a cunning way to show me she had been right all along—only I never managed to work out where the cunning lay.
In the middle of the hottest phase of sequencing, Rebecca got pregnant. We had never really used contraception. I took care, she took care, except that now one of us—or both of us—hadn’t. It was clear to her that she should have an abortion; it was less clear to me. We had long discussions about what our life would be like if we had a child—in my view, very nice; in hers, not at all, because she would be prevented from working full time just as things were getting exciting. But then she couldn’t bring herself to have the abortion after all. Paul was born, and six weeks after his birth, his mother was sequencing again.
Fear Page 16
