Fear

by Dirk Kurbjuweit

  We had made logistically complicated breast-pumping and childcare arrangements, but they didn’t go well. Rebecca’s professor, driven by the desire for immortal fame, was dissatisfied because Rebecca couldn’t give her work ‘everything’. Rebecca was unhappy because she missed her baby when she was at work and missed her work when she was with the baby. Perhaps she hoped that I would cut back my working hours to allow her to do more, because I was the only person she really trusted with the baby. But I was already earning good money, and she, as is the way of the world, wasn’t. That, I thought, put paid to that solution and, after lengthy discussions, she thought so too. Six months later she gave up and took maternity leave. She never returned to her job.

  A sad story? Rebecca gets cross at our soirees when career women, who are so sure they have made the right choices, express pity for her; we have had some nasty arguments. The women go for each other’s throats; the men grow more and more taciturn. But I also know that Rebecca is often bitter at having missed her chances of a career. I comfort her by saying that there is nothing more commendable than to dedicate your life to your children, but I know it’s easy to say that if you are a man who has been (and still is) able to spread his wings professionally. Lately, Rebecca has talked a lot about wanting to go back to work.

  Through the children, we got to know each other all over again, because children change everything, especially their parents. After the first few months with Paul, it was clear which of us had the strength to sit up with a sick baby three nights in a row and which of us didn’t. (I didn’t, Rebecca did.) We fought so many battles in those early years that we no longer knew whether we were still partners or had become opponents. It was the allocation of time that was at issue: who could leave the screaming baby to the other one and go out for a glass of wine? Who got to go to Barcelona with an old schoolfriend at the weekend?

  We now knew what it was not to want each other at night, because you’d spent more or less all day with a baby in your arms, on your belly, on your chest, and any further human contact would send you over the edge. Maybe that was another reason we drifted apart. But I resist this thought, because children are the best that can happen to us, and how should anything negative come of the best? On the other hand, if evil can beget goodness, then presumably goodness can also beget evil. We have to live with these inconsistencies. I grew closer to my parents when the children were babies, especially to my mother, who is a marvellous grandmother. My father doesn’t make a bad job of things either; sometimes this gives me a strange feeling, which I would be horrified to think of as jealousy. Just as we can tell different stories about our partners, we can, I suppose, also tell different stories about our parents.

  About six months after my sister died, I got a phone call from my mother. I clearly remember that it was a Tuesday; I was on a building site wrangling with some bricklayers when my mobile rang, and it was my mother shouting excitedly that my father was at the gynaecologist’s. I knew at once what she meant. The gynaecologist has been our family’s enemy ever since he overlooked Cornelia’s breast cancer.

  ‘I’ve had a call from the receptionist,’ my mother said.

  I left the wrangling bricklayers, ran to my car and sped off. I knew where the practice was and, although a law-abiding citizen who even has trouble jaywalking, I ignored every traffic signal, every road sign that didn’t speed my progress. I had always believed my father capable of a massacre. Whenever I heard on the news that there had been a killing spree, I would hold my breath, unable to relax until it was clear that it couldn’t have been him. That’s paranoid, I know, but it’s inevitable if you grew up the way I did. Already I could see the corpses piled up in Cornelia’s gynaecologist’s practice and the blood flowing in broad streams. I double-parked, ran up the stairs three at a time and prayed, although I’d stopped praying years ago, that I wouldn’t hear shots now, at the last second.

  ‘Where’s my father?’ I cried to the receptionist and she pointed into the waiting room. There he was, sitting on a chair, his arms folded in front of his chest. On his left was a pregnant woman; on his right a woman breastfeeding her baby. In a corner, a child was playing with wooden blocks. The waiting room was two-thirds full—a dozen women. My father didn’t see me—or rather, he didn’t register my presence; he was staring into space. When I touched him on the shoulder, he jumped slightly, but not enough to reach for his gun.

  ‘It’s me,’ I said.

  ‘Randolph,’ he said.

  ‘Come on, let’s go home,’ I said. I took hold of his right arm, as if to help him up, but in fact to prevent him from pulling his gun; he had it with him, no doubt about it. He got up, very slowly, like a much older man. The women looked at us as I led my father out, little step by little step.

  On the stairs he began to cry. I had never seen my father cry and didn’t know what to do. Then he flung his arms around my neck, which he had never done before either, and sobbed into my skin; I could feel his tears. I was, I must confess, helpless, overwhelmed. I wanted to free myself from his clasp and run away, but I was his son; I couldn’t abandon him.

  I could feel the revolver under his armpit.

  ‘Give me the gun,’ I said, although it was unnecessary; he wasn’t going to start a massacre now. It was my way of resolving the situation, putting an end to the embrace. Obediently he stepped back half a pace, fumbled around, brought out the revolver and handed it to me. Because I had heard someone coming in the door, I stuck the revolver into the waistband of my trousers, under my jacket, and led my father down the stairs, still sobbing. A woman gave us a funny look; the revolver was pressing against my coccyx.

  We got into my car and I dropped my father off at home, and then drove back to the building site, strangely agitated, I must say, because if my father had toyed with the idea of shooting the gynaecologist or even starting a massacre at his practice, it could only mean that he had loved his daughter. That hadn’t been clear to us when she was alive. Hidden love.

  What did this tell us about my father’s feelings towards my little brother and me? Were we loved too? I couldn’t follow this thought through to its conclusion, seized with fear of my emotions. It was clear to me, though, that my father was capable of a great deal if anything bad happened to one of his children. Today I know that my father loves me—that he has always loved me. Men of his generation love in a different way from us; they love without showing it.

  I do things differently with Paul and Fay. For a long time, I thought I had escaped my father. I wasn’t particularly interested in cars, I wasn’t a salesman, I didn’t work for Ford, I was a completely different kind of person. That, I thought, had always been my advantage. An intelligent woman like Rebecca could hardly avoid following her mother into medicine. For me, the field was free; I didn’t have to do what my father did, because I had repudiated my father. I thought I was free. What a fool. We can’t escape our parents. We go their way, or we go another way because we don’t want to go theirs. Even with my own children, I am my father’s son, acting in a particular way because he acted otherwise. Nothing is as deeply lodged in us as our parents; there’s no shaking them off. It took me a long time to understand that. At our soirees, there is no greater, no more emotive topic than parents. There are moments when it can turn fifty-year-olds into children, crying over wounds incurred forty-five years ago, longing to hear words that haven’t been spoken since, and hankering—desperately hankering—to be cradled in Mum or Dad’s arms, then and there.

  32

  I SAW DIETER TIBERIUSIN the garden another two or three times. He kept his distance, hanging around his door and beating a retreat whenever I got up out of the deckchair. I never saw him with a knife again, or an apple. ‘Clear off,’ I called out to him. He said he was allowed to be there, and from a legal point of view, he was right. From then on, I made do with getting up from time to time, to put an end to his unbearable presence. The children bounced on the trampoline, oblivious.

  I had told a frien
d about the knife episode—without, however, mentioning the apple. It was ridiculous to leave out that detail, but I increasingly had the impression that other people regarded our situation as rather less dramatic than we did, because nothing dramatic had happened. They had no idea of our silent terror, the terror of our own thoughts. That’s why I left out the apple—so as to be understood, at last. Instead my friend thought the situation so dramatic that he was convinced we ought to move out at once. What’s more, he couldn’t believe that the law wouldn’t intervene when someone lunged at you with a knife.

  ‘He didn’t exactly lunge at us,’ I said, realising that I had made a mistake—that the drama of our situation lay in being threatened in an undramatic fashion. I stopped telling my friends about Dieter Tiberius. If they asked, I gave vague, laconic answers. ‘Nothing new,’ I would say.

  In August we spent three weeks in Minorca again. It was a good holiday to begin with, and our unabused children were cheerful—not that they weren’t cheerful at home—but then something happened that saddened Rebecca and me. Walking back to our house from the beach one day in the late afternoon, laden with towels, empty picnic basket, water wings and so on, we passed, as we did every day, a low stone wall. In one place there was a hole at the bottom and the children stopped to puzzle over it. Why was it there?

  ‘For animals,’ said Fay, which we all thought seemed plausible. We came up with some animals that would be able to creep through the hole: cats, dogs, foxes—if there were foxes in Minorca—martens…

  ‘Crocodiles,’ I said.

  ‘There aren’t any here,’ said Paul knowledgeably.

  ‘There are lambs, though,’ crowed Fay.

  Then Paul said, ‘But Tiberius wouldn’t fit through there.’

  That came as a shock. It was the third week of our holiday; we had hardly mentioned Dieter Tiberius, and of course we hadn’t mentioned him at all in front of the children. What had made Paul think of him now? What was going on in my boy’s head?

  ‘No,’ I said quickly, ‘he’s too fat.’

  ‘He’s really fat,’ said Paul.

  ‘Completely fat’, said Fay.

  ‘He’s not here anyway,’ said Rebecca, and I heard a quaver in her voice. We went back to talking about animals: moles, mice…

  In the evening, when the children were in bed, my wife and I sat on the terrace, drinking wine and talking about whether it was right to avoid mentioning Dieter Tiberius to the children. I felt that our strategy had failed; Paul’s words made it clear that the children had not forgotten the threat—that it was still working away inside them and occasionally broke out.

  ‘We should have called in a child psychologist,’ I said. ‘They’d cope better with Dieter Tiberius then.’

  A bird called in the night, an annoying call, regular, insistent; later we heard our neighbours bang spoons against pans to drive the bird away, but it wasn’t to be scared off. We were silent for a long while, and I let myself be carried away by the appalling idea that my children might fall into Dieter Tiberius’s clutches, be kidnapped, locked up, abused. These thoughts were punctuated by happier images: Fay snuggled up with her cuddly toys, Paul on the floor with his Brio train set. I saw them trapped underground, thinking back to those happy, carefree days. We lay awake a long time that night. I heard Rebecca toss and turn, heard the bird call.

  When we got home, there was a letter with a poem on the windowsill. I didn’t even read it properly—just skimmed it to see what Dieter Tiberius had come up with this time, and then took it to our lawyer, a routine procedure conducted without hope. There was still no date for the hearing into the slander charge, but that was almost irrelevant. I rang my mother. I told her about what Paul had said in Minorca and described our hopeless situation. This marked a turning point in our relationship. It was my job to provide my mother with happy stories. Her daughter was dead; her younger son shocked her with his lifestyle and she couldn’t possibly imagine him happy, even though he was. My life, on the other hand, corresponded with her idea of success: a stable family, wealth, a certain standing.

  ‘Are you happy at least?’ she would sometimes ask, after lamenting Cornelia’s death and Bruno’s putative unhappiness at some length—and so far, I had always given her the same answer: ‘Yes, Mum, I’m happy.’ Then I would supply her with stories of my successful life, even in the days when my marriage was by no means a model of success. I was the purveyor of happiness; I couldn’t afford to be reckless and tell her the truth.

  Now I supplied my mother with reports of unhappiness from the World of Tiberius. I can’t recall planning this; it just happened. I began to make those phone calls and only gradually did it dawn on me that I was pursuing a goal. Looking back on it today, I think that a strategy had begun to take shape in the deepest well of my subconscious, right down at the bottom, in the stagnant water where toads guard our forbidden thoughts. Sometimes the toads let these thoughts rise up in the water—let them bubble up and ferment until they become deeds. I suppose that’s how it was with me. I knew that my mother would tell my father everything I told her. I knew how much it would upset my father, because I had seen him in Cornelia’s gynaecologist’s practice. Perhaps a faint hope stirred in me that he wouldn’t put up with it for long, but I can’t say any of this was consciously thought out.

  One morning Dieter Tiberius rang me on my mobile. He had the number from better days, when he had once asked me for advice because something in his flat was broken.

  ‘Are you still talking to me?’ he asked abruptly.

  ‘Yes,’ I said in alarm, hoping, perhaps, that there was a suitable solution after all.

  ‘Do you believe,’ asked Dieter Tiberius, ‘that nothing I have seen or heard has taken place?’

  My reply, soured by my initial disappointment, was rather ridiculous: ‘I’ll only discuss that in court.’

  He paused a long while, then said, ‘When you were at my door, you said I needed help, because I’m sick, but I’m not sure that’s the case.’

  ‘I am certain that you’re sick and need help,’ I said.

  ‘Do you believe,’ he continued, ‘that there isn’t a single accurate detail in what I’ve said?’

  There was only one reply to that: ‘No, not the slightest detail.’

  He was silent again.

  ‘You should seek help,’ I said, more mildly now.

  ‘Sometimes I’m not sure,’ he said. ‘Maybe I really am sick. I’d like to go to the doctor some time, but I’m always scared.’

  I promised to find a doctor for him, and then we hung up.

  I asked my GP whether he had a colleague with a background in psychology. He recommended someone, and I soon had the psychotherapist’s promise that he would visit Dieter Tiberius. An appointment was duly made; I saw the doctor draw up in his car, get out and press Dieter Tiberius’s buzzer at the front gate. There was no response. I heard the doctor press the buzzer several times, until eventually I opened the gate and let him in the front door. We went down to the basement together, rang, banged, called—in vain. I thanked the doctor and apologised to him and off he went, taking with him my last hope of a peaceable solution. The next day there was another poem on the windowsill.

  33

  WHAT HAPPENED NEXT, I described at the beginning, or more or less. Our front gate has always squeaked; even oiling it was no use, and so it squeaked too when Dieter Tiberius’s body was carried out to the street. I stood at the window watching, without triumph, but relieved. My father had already been taken away by then. I rang Rebecca, then my mother. Neither seemed surprised. We didn’t talk about the crime or the events leading up to it; our thoughts were focused on Dad—how we could help him, how we could make his life in custody easier.

  In the course of the investigations, the detective superintendent briefly pursued the idea that the whole thing was a family conspiracy, a murder plot, but we assured him that not a word had been spoken on the matter, and that wasn’t a lie. I really had never talked to
my father about Dieter Tiberius; we spoke to each other only once during all this time, on his birthday, and not much was said on that occasion beside ‘Many happy returns’ and ‘Thank you very much’ and ‘How are you?’ and ‘Very well, and you?’ and ‘Very well too’ and ‘Take care’ and ‘You too.’ The way it was between my father and me. Nor did I ever suggest to my mother that she should speak to my father, and Rebecca wasn’t privy to my plan, if you can even call it a plan. We communicated with one another differently, silently, the way our family does. Everybody understood the signals, and silent consensus is not punishable; it is, in any case, not provable. What tipped the scales was that my father accepted all guilt and denied any conspiracy. The detective superintendent did not pursue his suspicion any further. I don’t know whether he believed us. He must have realised he wouldn’t find any evidence.

  In March of the following year the trial began. I was nervous. We knew the prosecutor would bring charges of murder, but our lawyer allowed us to hope that the jury might in the end come to the conclusion that it was manslaughter. You get life for murder, and serve a minimum of at least fifteen years. For manslaughter, you get fifteen years maximum and serve a minimum of seven and a half years. The question was whether my father, then seventy-seven years old, would ever live as a free man again.

  The jury was chaired by a blond woman in her mid-fifties with a round, friendly face, a voluminous hairdo that nearly doubled the size of her head—the kind of hairdo I hate sitting behind in the theatre—and clunky gold jewellery. The prosecutor, in his early fifties, was gaunt, almost emaciated. I could see him running marathons. He charged my father with murder, because malice aforethought, the defining characteristic of murder, was present. Some spectators hissed when they heard that. The courtroom was almost full; the press had reported the case in detail, and largely with understanding. The greatest goodwill, I am afraid to say, was expressed by the papers I didn’t normally read, but which now became my allies. A family under threat taking the law into their own hands fitted their world view, and I began to read the tabloids with new sympathy. Today I would cite this as an additional sign—along with my arrogant language and altered mindset—of the barbarism into which Dieter Tiberius had plunged us. The crime itself, of course, was also barbaric.