David's Revenge

by Hans Werner Kettenbach

  I looked at her. “What do you mean?”

  She smoothed her skirt down before returning my glance. “Was Ralf really at home until nine?”

  I refrained from wriggling out of it. No, I said, Ralf had been to the cinema, but couldn’t give me the name of anyone who could prove that, and I hadn’t wanted to let the police put any more pressure on our son, so I had given him a false alibi.

  After a moment’s silence she said, “And you’d have done the same even if he’d been at the scene of the attack, wouldn’t you?”

  I said I had no reason to suppose that he had anything to do with the incident. But yes, she was right, even if he had I would have tried to shield him. Nothing was going to keep me from defending our family, and I still hoped she would understand that.

  She looked at me in silence. I wondered if she really knew what difficulties Ninoshvili had brought down on our son. She did not react.

  I said Ralf believed that she had slept with Ninoshvili. And he had been dreadfully upset when he found out that Ninoshvili was obviously planning in all seriousness to make himself permanently at home here. At least, that was the conclusion Ralf had drawn from finding an application form for political asylum that Ninoshvili had brought home. I wasn’t suggesting that she had been helping our guest there, but very likely he had taken her into his confidence.

  “No. I didn’t know about that.” She passed a hand over her forehead and looked at me. “Did Ralf search David’s case, then?”

  I said I didn’t know, but even if he did I could understand him. Our son had realized, I said, that Ninoshvili was someone to beware of, a very dangerous person, and there I was afraid I couldn’t contradict him.

  She said, “Christian, what you’re saying is very close to persecution mania. The poor man’s in hospital, badly injured. A very dangerous person? David is an unfortunate trying to make his way and meeting with failure after failure. Can’t you see that? Are you really so blind?”

  I asked if she knew that our guest was suspected of being a KGB agent. Not just by me, no, Internal Security suspected the same. And did she know that Hochgeschurz was interested in the question of whether Ninoshvili had known the woman who was murdered recently in a hotel in the city centre? Not a normal tourist, oh no, and it hadn’t been a case of sexual murder. The woman had been in the Stasi, with the rank of captain.

  She was staring at me wide-eyed.

  I drank some wine. “I’m sorry if I’ve given you a shock. But it was possible you might have known all this already.”

  “No, I didn’t.” She rubbed her forehead. “And I didn’t know, either, that you are obviously in close contact with Herr Hochgeschurz. Is there anything else you’re keeping from me, Christian?”

  I said I probably had more reason to ask that question than she did.

  “I’m not keeping anything from you, Christian. Nothing that you need to know.”

  I was silent for a while. Then I asked whether, in her opinion, I didn’t need to know that the man we had gone out with on our first visit to Halle together had not been Erika’s boyfriend, he hadn’t lived in Halle, he had come from Leipzig on purpose to see her, Julia. And I asked whether she was surprised if I wondered why she had staged that pretence.

  She asked, “Did Erika tell you this?” I said it made no difference who told me, I knew it anyway. And was it her opinion that I didn’t need to know?

  She said, “He was a man I once had a relationship with in Halle. I was eighteen at the time. I wanted to see him again, it was just an idea, rather a childish idea. It wasn’t worth it, it was a disappointment. But I didn’t want to make you jealous. There was no reason for jealousy anyway.” After a pause she asked, “And what have you been imagining now?”

  I said imagining wasn’t quite the right word, but very well: I had imagined that the man was a member of the Stasi. And he had reminded her of a commitment she had made so that she could leave Halle and settle in the west. So he had tried putting her under pressure, just as Ninoshvili was putting her under pressure now. And I also wanted her to know that I had decided to prevent any attempt to make her atone today for a mistake she had made in her youth.

  “Christian… this is sheer lunacy!” She stared into space for a moment, then took off her shoes, lay down on the sofa and closed her eyes.

  I asked, “Do you call it lunacy for me to defend you? For me to defend our family?”

  She replied, without opening her eyes, “I don’t think you’re bothered about defending me.” After a moment she said, “You’ve been intriguing behind my back. Spying on me. You have not been honest with me, Christian. And I’m afraid you still aren’t being honest.”

  “Have you been honest with me? Are you at least being honest now?”

  She did not reply. After some time, we heard Ralf’s moped. Julia stood up, put her shoes on, and went to open the front door to Ralf. I heard a few murmured words, and then they both went upstairs and the door of Ralf’s room was closed.

  I wondered what Ralf might be telling her. I had reminded him again not to burden his mother with what he had done to get rid of Ninoshvili, whatever nonsense it had been.

  Fifteen minutes later Julia came back and stood in the living-room doorway. I looked at her with a question in my eyes.

  “He sticks to his story of going to the cinema.”

  I nodded. She said, “Perhaps it will be difficult for you to understand this, but I’d like to be alone tonight. I shall sleep in the spare room.”

  I did not reply. She said, “Good night,” and turned away. I stood up. “No, don’t do that. I’ll sleep in the spare room.” She did not protest.

  The sheets looked as if they hadn’t been slept in, but I wanted to make sure. I took them off the bed and made it up

  with clean sheets. I glanced into the wardrobe and tried the clasps of the suitcase; they were locked. Then I opened the drawer of the bedside table. I found Matassi’s photograph under the street map of the city. I looked at the photo, and then went to bed.

  Chapter 70

  Perhaps Mr Perelman is right. School’s Out, as the title of his book runs: we ought to tear down our school here, the classrooms where we try to confront our students, the school hall and that ridiculous platform, and replace it all with a building like a honeycomb full of cells all connected to the Internet, where the kids sit at their computers easily learning what old fogies like me can never drum into their heads. Information at your fingertips, get clever at the touch of a key, as another educational expert, the boss of Microsoft, has put it—and he ought to know, since after all he is selling the programs for it.

  Teachers like me and the classrooms of the old style of school, says Lewis J. Perelman, that progressive educationalist, have about as much place in the learning process of tomorrow as the horse-drawn carriage in the modern transport system. We’re out. I’m out, along with my school class. That’s right, interactive learning is the name of the game, hyper-learning, not head-on teaching of the kind I practise. Head-on teaching, says Mr Perelman, is the outcome of the typical philosophy of indoctrination in the industrial age of the past; the teacher speaks his words of wisdom and the students have to listen and keep their mouths shut. All that’s out, mega-out.

  What, perhaps I say, staking my own claim, if I never try to drill knowledge into my students, if I have always tried to keep a dialogue going with them; what if I have done all I can to teach them not just knowledge but social competence as well? That’s a mistake, says Mr Perelman; by comparison with my outmoded old school there’s far more social interaction in playgrounds, in swimming pools, in cafés. Not to mention computer studios.

  And the educational success of those machines is very impressive. A professor from Oldenburg found out by means of a questionnaire that between seventy-five and ninety per cent of the students she asked had enjoyed learning English more through working with electronic sources of information. No wonder. As I have learned from an article in a progressive magazine prai
sing it, there is a computer program that can tell you within a fraction of a second the meaning in one language of a word in another. Fundamentalists like me, used to looking such things up in a dictionary, can only envy it.

  And that’s not all: more complicated subjects, such as violence, can be made interesting and accessible in the classroom with the help of computers. For instance, students at Bad Essen Grammar School discussed that very subject for weeks on end—think of it, weeks on end without getting tired of it!—in electronic data exchanges with students of their own age at Northeast High School in Oklahoma City. The American kids contributed brand-new material. In the school next to theirs, a ninth-grade student had just been shot dead by another boy. I can hardly compete with that by reprimanding Christian Berkhan in front of my class for hitting little Rudi Ballensiefen over the head with a lath from the fence.

  I ought to remember what Professor Seymour Papert of MIT prophesies, to the effect that in future school will be much more natural, and learning, living and loving will no longer be artificially divided. I’m not sure whether, among the forms of social interaction to which schools of the future will devote themselves, Papert includes the practice of sexual intercourse, but why not? When I was in the sixth grade myself, I’d have liked that better than anything else as an educational aim.

  And then again, if we were all working through the Internet, Manni Wallmeroth could have committed his graffiti to the computer instead of messing up our stage set. Using a graphics program, he could even have painted his swastika onscreen. The computer might have answered back—Arsehole or some such comment—and that would have been the end of it. Or perhaps the computer would have rejected it as unauthorized data. Manni would have turned pale and to mollify the computer would have made haste to ask it a question about the translation of a given word into another language.

  And if I were not an old fogey but an interactive presenter, the teacher of the future, then I would not have had to concern myself with the question of whether Manni Wallmeroth deserved to be punished by exclusion. I wouldn’t have had to do battle with half the school, Dr Lawrenz, and the editorial team of the local paper.

  And I’d long ago have forgotten the educational aims I have been pursuing. I’d have understood the point of what Pink Floyd said in the charts as early as 1980. We don’t need no education. Education is out, edutainment is in. Kids can get what they need to know interactively, from the computer, and have fun at the same time.

  If my school were already open to progress, I wouldn’t have had to deal with the moment when, in my class, no one opens his mouth when Helmut Freese puts his hand up and asks why we are studying the Georgian civil war—after all, the Russian guns had put an end to it, and didn’t I now think that Shevardnadze had betrayed his people and handed them over to Moscow? And I’d have been spared hypocritical questions at break, such as hadn’t the police stopped investigating my son yet, it was absolutely scandalous, of all people your son, Herr Kestner! No one would have avoided me. No one would have made me feel that it was embarrassing to meet me.

  Brauckmann had the nerve to ask me, looking grave, how that Georgian writer was doing, or wasn’t I in touch with the man? I said yes, I was, Herr Ninoshvili was well on the road to recovery, my whole family was concerned for him. After all, he had been staying with us.

  “Really?” Brauckmann raised his eyebrows. “I never knew that! Oh well, then he’s in the best of hands.”

  I said he could be sure of that.

  Brauckmann nodded. Then he asked, “What are his plans? Is he going to stay here?”

  I said it was perfectly possible, but in Georgia it was considered extremely uncivil to ask a guest how long he was going to stay, and I thought that a very good custom. I too would find such questions extremely uncivil.

  “And I’d have expected no less of you,” he replied. “Well, good luck!”

  Of course people made consoling remarks too. Obviously not all the kids thought I ought to be declared obsolete as soon as possible.

  At midday today, when I was on my way to the car park, Günsel Özcan suddenly appeared beside me. She said, “Hello.”

  “Hello, Günsel. Is there a problem?”

  “Oh, nothing special. I just wanted to ask if it would be all right for me to come to the rehearsal a quarter of an hour late tomorrow.”

  “Yes, of course. I’ll switch something around.”

  She didn’t turn away, but kept step with me. When we reached the car park she said, “I thought what Helmut asked you was plain silly.”

  “Then why didn’t you say so?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe I hoped you wouldn’t take something like that seriously.” She looked at me. “You don’t take it seriously, do you? I mean, you’ll go on the same as before?”

  I unlocked my car. “I’ll tell you something, Günsel, but you mustn’t pass it on to anyone else.”

  Her dark eyes widened. “Of course not, Herr Kestner! You can rely on me.”

  I said, “Günsel, I don’t know how things will go on. I wish I did, but I really don’t know how things will go on.”

  Chapter 71

  Ninoshvili wants to go home. He wants to get back to Tbilisi as soon as possible. He’s told Julia he didn’t want to wait until he was completely better. The contacts he’s made in the Federal Republic would have to be enough to open Georgian literature up to German readers. Perhaps he might come back some time.

  He’s suffering badly from homesickness, Julia has told me. He knows that medical care in Tbilisi probably isn’t up to the standards of the Marienhospital, but he’s not letting that deter him. He has kept talking to Julia about Tbilisi these last few days, he’s described his apartment to her, the balcony he steps out on in the morning, the early sunlight, the busy streets. Perhaps snow will already have fallen in Tbilisi, covering the city, the mountains of the Kura Valley and Narikala Fortress like a glittering wedding dress.

  Ninoshvili shed tears describing this picture to Julia. They streamed down his discoloured skin and seeped into his bandages. He shook his head and said, “It is my home, Julia. Never mind what happens, it’s my home!”

  Julia, she tells me, has reached Matassi in Tbilisi. Matassi answered the phone in Ninoshvili’s apartment. She is looking forward very much to David’s return. She is going to take time off work to look after him.

  However, the doctors at the Marienhospital are making things difficult. They say Ninoshvili is far from fit to travel yet. If he insists on discharging himself from hospital, they must disclaim any responsibility. They’re trying to convince him that he ought to stay in their care for a little longer.

  Chapter 72

  Who was the hawk, who was the woodgrouse? If Ninoshvili really said these plaintive goodbyes, in a hurry to go, dissolving into tears, nothing on his mind except getting home, whatever awaits him there—well, in that case then I was seeing our roles the wrong way round. I wasn’t the one who plunged to the depths of the sulphurous waters below, caught in his talons; he fell held in mine.

  Perhaps that’s why confessions of guilt and declarations of remorse are so seldom made, because they almost inevitably shrink to embarrassing banality. Self-righteousness can cloak itself in many fine words; like malice, it can be elegantly phrased. But someone who really wants to admit to guilt and remorse can’t avoid hackneyed phrases. Pater, peccavi! I am sorry. I will improve. I ask for mercy. Over and out.

  I’m not asking for mercy. But I can’t help realizing that I have brought my misery on myself, and David Ninoshvili’s on him too.

  It all began because I was afraid. I was afraid in Tbilisi when Matassi sank on my hotel bed beside me and Karl-Heinz Dautzenbacher knocked on the door. I was afraid of David’s revenge, as if I had done something far worse than commit a peccadillo. Because it was no more. It was improper, but it wasn’t a crime.

  And to suppress the thought of that impropriety, I made up a story for which there was no evidence at all, the story of a couple o
f secret agents, and it frightened me even more. I got myself into a state of such confusion that I couldn’t decide which of my fears was to be taken seriously. Was Ninoshvili bent on revenge because I had put my hand under his wife’s skirt? Or had he sent Matassi in the first place so that I would put my hand under her skirt and lay myself open to blackmail? They couldn’t both be true. But together they made my fear even worse.

  And my fear led to hatred when Ninoshvili obviously won the liking of not just my son but my wife, and both suddenly changed sides. It wasn’t just his nationalism and a hint of racism that influenced my own opinion. I could have discussed that with him, I could have come to terms with it; I didn’t feel called upon to educate a grown man, however foolishly he might express himself. But I was afraid this man might take my wife from me and estrange my son even further.

  It’s easy to condemn xenophobia as long as you are seeing foreigners only from a distance. But it’s obviously very difficult to live with a foreigner under the same roof in practice.

  I would never have thought that someone who thinks himself enlightened could react with such irrational lack of inhibition as I did. I didn’t take up a clear position, I didn’t draw an unmistakable line between what I didn’t like and what I was ready to accept. No, my fear was too great for that, not least the fear of having to admit that I wasn’t as tolerant as I had always made out. I hid, I began snooping around, I indulged in intrigue and denunciation.

  The clues, yes. Ninoshvili’s lies. The gloves, the flick knife, the photographs in his case. To this day not even Herr Hochgeschurz has found any evidence that my guest killed the woman in the hotel. Perhaps he never seriously suspected him, and I was the one who tried to send Hochgeschurz down that trail.

  Perhaps if I had taken the agent to my house and got him to open Ninoshvili’s case, it would have turned out that the blonde in the photograph wasn’t the murdered Stasi captain, but a Georgian writer, a blonde Georgian woman, why not? Herr Hochgeschurz could have photographed the notes in the Georgian alphabet on the back of the photograph with his mini-camera, and had them checked out by the languages department of Internal Security.