Fear

by Dirk Kurbjuweit

  At the beginning of the trial, my father made a confession. Unlike me, he’s good at speaking. He gave a powerful description of the fear he had felt for his grandchildren, son and daughter-in-law, of the unbearable notion that something might happen to his loved ones at the hands of that ‘man in the cellar’. He spoke angrily of the impotence of the authorities, of a state that had not been capable of protecting an innocent family who had done nothing wrong. If I am not mistaken, the judge and the prosecutor looked embarrassed at that.

  ‘I am guilty,’ my father said at the end of his speech. ‘I killed somebody because I didn’t know how else to help my family. I must be punished for that and I will bear my punishment with humility.’

  My father kept his cool and for that I admire him. He said nothing about the exact circumstances of the crime.

  Hardly had he reached the end of his statement when the door of the courtroom opened and a man in a hoodie came in. The hood was pulled down so low over his face that it was a while before I recognised my little brother. I motioned to him to sit down next to me, but he found himself a seat at the edge. I hadn’t seen him since he left for Qingdao; my emails had gone unanswered. I was pleased that he’d come, but surprised at his unfriendly glances.

  That morning, Rebecca was the first witness to testify. She described her fears for herself and her children, the suffering inflicted on her by the letters and poems. She did it very well, appearing unfazed, but not cool—troubled by her horrific memories without succumbing to emotion. Our lawyer insisted on reading out all Tiberius’s missives. As he did, I could feel the shock in the courtroom.

  After Rebecca, it was my turn. I too spoke of our fears and gave a detailed account of my efforts to solve the problem by legal means. I constructed my entire testimony around the word ‘defenceless’. We had been defenceless; we had suffered as a result of our defencelessness. The state, which had our trust, our taxes (which we paid regularly) and our allegiance (which we demonstrated by voting in every election), had left us defenceless. I was not quite as unfazed as Rebecca; my voice occasionally trembled. But I didn’t make a bad job of it. Now and then I glanced at my little brother, but I couldn’t catch his eye because he had his head propped in his hands and was staring at the floor.

  The prosecutor pestered me with questions for a while. Why, he asked, hadn’t we simply moved out?

  ‘Would you give up your home if you were being threatened by someone who was entirely in the wrong?’ I retorted.

  ‘I certainly wouldn’t solve the problem with murder,’ said the prosecutor.

  At that our lawyer intervened: ‘Are you insinuating that the witness committed a murder?’

  The prosecutor was not, he said, insinuating anything.

  The presiding judge urged them to keep a neutral tone and asked the prosecutor whether he had any further questions to put to the witness.

  ‘No further questions,’ said the prosecutor.

  In the recess, I went straight to my brother. I wanted to give him a big loving hug, the way I always did, but he was stiff and awkward, his body rejecting my embrace. Disappointed, I let him go, because Rebecca was waiting to hug him too, and I saw the two of them hold each other long and affectionately.

  ‘Why the hood?’ Rebecca wanted to know, and my little brother said that they were always trying one or another of Mickel’s gang here in the local criminal court, and he had to reckon on running into them. They were still angry with him.

  We went to a pub across the road from the court, and even before the sandwiches and coffee had come, my brother asked me in a sullen, almost offensive tone: ‘Why did you have to drag Dad into this? Why couldn’t you do it yourself?’

  I said that I hadn’t dragged him into it, that I had never talked to our father about murder, that I hadn’t talked to him at all at that time. ‘You know him,’ I said.

  ‘Stop taking the piss,’ said my little brother. ‘We both know you dragged him into it.’

  I only weakly denied it this time.

  ‘Why weren’t you man enough to deal with it yourself?’ he asked, in the same sullen tone. I said that this was the best solution for the family. If I’d done it, Paul and Fay would have lost not only their breadwinner, but also their father, their companion. They too would have grown up fatherless.

  ‘What do you mean, they too?’ my brother hissed, stressing the word ‘too’.

  ‘Like us,’ I said.

  He hadn’t grown up without a father, Bruno said. His tone was snotty now, not sullen.

  Our father, I said, never did anything for me. Now he’d had the chance to do something for me and he had taken it.

  ‘Coward,’ said my brother, far too loud.

  Sitting at the next table were some judges or lawyers in their robes; a few of them turned around and my little brother stuck up his finger at them. Rebecca laid a hand on Bruno’s forearm and said: ‘Sssh.’ Our food arrived, and we ate in silence until my little brother started to tell us about his experiences in China. Then we went back across the road, and the second part of the first day of the hearing began.

  My father’s sizeable stockpile of weapons played an important role at the trial. The prosecutor initially saw it as evidence of ‘a propensity to violence’, but then a psychologist spoke as an expert witness in my father’s defence. This man made an excellent impression on me, portraying my father as a somewhat comical figure, but by no means a fool—someone who ‘owing to unprocessed and even denied war traumas’ had ‘a disproportionate need of security, accompanied by a desire for violence’—a desire which was not, however, ‘directed towards fulfilment’.

  My father was, the psychologist said, able to ‘keep his fantasies of killing—fantasies common to a great many people—confined to his head without any trouble’, but there was no doubt that he was ‘dangerous in a state of complete helplessness, because he had only to enact what he had so often imagined, and because his fears rid him of inhibitions’. His family’s predicament had put him in just such a state; it had been the trigger that had ‘transported Hermann Tiefenthaler’s propensity to violence out of his fantasy world and into reality’. I had no idea whether or not that was true, but it sounded good in a convoluted kind of way and delivered my father from the stigma of that ‘propensity to violence’.

  The judge announced that she would like to bring the first day of the trial to a close, but our lawyer asked her to hear another expert witness. I was surprised; this wasn’t something we had discussed. The judge didn’t seem too pleased to be taken off guard in this way either. Our lawyer said that he had been approached during the recess by a psychologist who had read of the trial in the papers and come to watch because he had known Tiberius. He had once been asked to write an assessment of him. Now the judge’s attention was grabbed, and the prosecutor also agreed to hear the expert witness.

  I was nervous at the prospect, because I felt the trial had gone well so far. My greatest worry, in particular, had not been realised: that people might see Dieter Tiberius as the victim in a confrontation between rich and poor, making us the wicked rich people who had disputed a poor man’s right to his place in society. Now it looked as if the psychologist might head in that direction. He was wearing corduroy trousers gone baggy at the knees and a checked jacket with leather elbow patches. A pair of reading glasses dangled from his neck.

  ‘Let’s hear what you have to say, then,’ said the judge, after the psychologist had taken his place in the witness stand and introduced himself. I leaned forward so as to hear him better. Beside me, Rebecca too seemed tense.

  The psychologist had got to know Dieter Tiberius when he was twenty-eight. The social welfare office had sent him because he had been declared unfit for work owing to severe depression and they wanted to know if it was true.

  ‘I conducted several interviews with him,’ said the psychologist. ‘Dieter Tiberius comes from a lower-middle-class family who were not truly poor but not wealthy either. His father abandoned the famil
y early on—completely abandoned them. He had no further contact with his son, in spite of the boy’s entreaties, and paid no alimony, although he later had a good position as a sales representative for a company that made electrical goods. Tiberius’s mother couldn’t manage to work and care for her son at the same time. She often hit him, and she locked him out of the house, at first for hours at a time, then for entire days, and once overnight. There were regular visits from social workers, until eventually the mother gave up and put her son into state care. He was nine years old at the time.’

  In the children’s home, the psychologist reported, Tiberius, who was fat even then, became the preferred victim of the other boys. His above-average intelligence also played a part—Tiberius was clever, said the psychologist. He described vividly and at length what Dieter Tiberius had gone through: humiliation, beatings, sexual abuse. Once he had been forced to brush his teeth with his own faeces. I confess that I did not feel pity listening to this report, but concern. I heard sighs, and wondered how the court would react to Dieter Tiberius’s suffering.

  When Tiberius was twenty, the psychologist continued, it looked as if he had managed to free himself from his troubled background. He caught up on his missed education, did an IT course and found a job he liked. But then, five years later, he resigned, and withdrew from society altogether. Dieter Tiberius had indeed been severely depressed, the psychologist said: the ‘multiple traumas’ of his childhood and adolescence had led to an extreme form of indolence. Could he tell the court what that was, the judge asked. ‘Lethargy,’ said the psychologist. ‘Apathy.’

  The prosecutor asked whether Dieter Tiberius had exhibited paedophilic tendencies. My wife took my hand. I think we both held our breath; we were about to discover what threat we had really been exposed to. In the past I had hoped it was a minor threat; now I hoped for a major one. It was over; nothing could happen to us anymore. All that mattered was that the shooting appear justified.

  ‘Definitely not,’ said the expert witness.

  I was appalled. This man’s testimony made it seem that Dieter Tiberius had not deserved to die.

  Had Tiberius been a violent person? asked the prosecutor.

  ‘Definitely not,’ said the expert witness again, with the pleasure of a man who is able to say something surprising. A murmur went through the crowd.

  I couldn’t believe it. It wasn’t possible. He had done us so much violence; we had suffered such a lot. And this man was trying to tell us he hadn’t been violently disposed? Our justification of the shooting suddenly looked flimsy, even to me. It wasn’t that I doubted we bore some small measure of blame for Dieter Tiberius’s death, but I set it off against the guilt I would have felt if anything had happened to my wife and children. This argument was starting to seem specious. My wife and children hadn’t been under threat; I had only assumed that they were. That, too, counts for something, but assumption does not have the full moral force of reality.

  My father’s lawyer now intervened. He listed all that Dieter Tiberius had done to us and ended with the words: ‘That is the profile of a violent man.’

  ‘On the contrary,’ said the psychologist, ‘Dieter Tiberius had masochistic tendencies.’ Again I heard a murmur go through the courtroom.

  ‘Can you elaborate on that?’ our lawyer asked.

  ‘Certainly,’ said the psychologist. ‘Nothing aroused Dieter Tiberius more than angry women.’

  At that moment I heard a scream such as I had never heard before and have never heard since. This scream seemed to pierce my right eardrum, for my wife was on my right and it was she who was screaming, shrilly, and without let-up, first sitting and then standing, as everybody stared. The judge asked what was wrong but got no answer; Rebecca had no words. The usher approached us to lead her out, but she wouldn’t let him.

  ‘Rebecca,’ I said soothingly, ‘sit down next to me.’

  To my surprise, she stopped screaming as abruptly as she had started, and then sat down and listened, apathetically, as the psychologist went on.

  ‘If I may permit myself a remark on the subject,’ he said, ‘I should like to. May I?’

  ‘By all means,’ said the judge.

  ‘Tiberius,’ the psychologist explained, ‘staged the entire drama to send Mrs Tiefenthaler into a rage; he wanted to hear her scream because it aroused him. Is it possible to enrage a mother more than by accusing her of sexually abusing her children?’

  The courtroom went quiet.

  Rebecca had understood at once. I knew how she was feeling because I felt similar. Sullied, once again, and now abused as well. Dieter Tiberius had played a sly game with us and we’d been taken in. He knew how volatile Rebecca was; he had heard her screaming fits from the basement, and with his impudent remarks and accusations he had deliberately driven her into a frenzy.

  ‘He raped me,’ Rebecca said quietly to me. ‘No, that’s not it; he had sex with me and I was compliant.’

  I took her in my arms, a betrayed husband of sorts, but one who couldn’t be angry with his wife because she wasn’t to blame for her betrayal. All about me I now saw sympathetic glances from the crowd. The mood in the courtroom had once again tipped in our favour.

  The trial ended with no further incidents. The prosecutor didn’t change his mind; on the second day of the hearing he asked for a verdict of murder. He recognised, he said, that my father had wanted to protect his family from danger, but in planning the unlawful killing of another man, he had knowingly committed the most brutal act of vigilante justice imaginable. My father had not been directly affected by the stalking, the prosecutor noted, and other possible solutions to the problem, such as relocating my family, had not been considered.

  The defining characteristic of a murder, malice aforethought, was met, he said, because the victim had been unsuspecting and defenceless; he hadn’t reckoned with such an attack from the accused, couldn’t have reckoned with it and, what is more, had no appropriate means of defence or realistic means of escape. The prosecutor concluded by saying that the law left him no choice but to demand life imprisonment, even if that did mean that the accused would be released in fifteen years at the earliest. Given his age, this sentence was particularly severe—but unavoidably so.

  Our lawyer pleaded for a verdict of manslaughter and a sentence of six years. He put particular stress on the family’s predicament; I needn’t go into the arguments again. The court concurred with our view and ruled manslaughter, but added two years to the sentence requested by the defence: eight years, release after four years at the earliest, day release after one to two years if the penal system agrees. We are awaiting that agreement now.

  34

  ‘DAD?’

  I was there again today. My father didn’t answer, sat there half asleep again. The children were with me; once a month I take them along. To begin with, we were in a fortnightly rhythm, but it’s hard in prison with children. At first they cried because they thought that the heavy barred doors that closed behind them would never open again. Over time, they became more sure of themselves and ran riot in the corridors. I told them to be quiet, until it occurred to me that there is actually no reason to be quiet in a prison. Then the boredom set in. They were bored today, too, although they had their drawing things with them. They shared the visitor’s chair and drew landscapes with animals while I talked to Kottke. Sometimes they raised their heads to see what Grandad was doing. He sat there, deep down inside himself, and said nothing. He gives them the creeps. I noticed that a while ago, and I hope he hasn’t noticed, I really do.

  Kottke told me how highly regarded my father is in prison. The other inmates admire him because he did away with that ‘bastard’, in spite of his age. Kottke has told me this more than once, and I always take it to mean that the other inmates despise me because I left the dirty work to my father. Besides, I disapprove of such eulogies, because I don’t know what effect it has on my children to hear that the criminals in prison regard their grandad as a hero. It’s no
t what we’ve told the children. After the shooting, of course, we had to talk to them, and we told them that Grandad couldn’t bear to see the harm being done to his family, so he decided to put an end to it, and that was quite understandable, although it was not, of course, right to shoot people. It is not so easy to explain such a complex matter to children. We also told them that it was fair that Grandad had been given a punishment—that he was sitting it out now, and afterwards he would be released and all would be well again. My children had questions of a practical nature, such as whether Grandad would be able to read his magazines in prison, and we were able to reassure them on that count. They now cope very well with having a grandad in prison, but they do moan before visits because they get so bored there.

  It’s harder for me, too, when they are with me, because the topic uppermost in Kottke’s mind is crime, and he lacks any sense of what atrocities you can (or can’t) expose children to, even though he has three children of his own. I had to steer him carefully around the topic again today, lead him on to more innocuous territory, and we talked for a while about coins, although that’s not something that interests me. Kottke collects coins and has a lot to say on the subject.

  The hour dragged on. Ten minutes before it was up, I told the children to pack up their drawing things. Fay had drawn a farm, grazing cows and, above it all, a sun behind bars. She got up, went round the table and gave the picture to her grandad. He thanked her. Paul gave him a racing car. He smiled. The children were embarrassed saying goodbye to their grandfather; they gave him their hands without looking at him. They gave Kottke their hands too, my father and I hugged, and then we went home.