Fear Read online

  ‘Fear shifts our moral codes. It makes us sympathetic to violent revenge, accessories to murder. Do we want the victim to survive? No, we don’t. Long after I had put this book down I still didn’t. A great achievement.’ Herman Koch, bestselling author of The Dinner

  ‘Fear forces us to see just how delicate our thin veneer of civilisation really is.’ Der Tagesspiegel

  ‘Dirk Kurbjuweit exposes the evil lurking just below the surface of civilised life.’ Stern

  ‘Gripping, suspenseful and unbelievably dark… As a thriller, Fear more than holds its own against the competition.’ Die Welt

  ‘High-voltage and multi-layered.’

  Frankfurter Neue Presse

  ‘A subtle and engrossing psychological thriller that gives an intelligent, carefully considered response to the question of how much our liberal values are worth when we feel our lives are threatened.’ Brigitte

  DIRK KURBJUWEIT is deputy editor-in-chief at Der Spiegel and divides his time between Berlin and Hamburg. He has received numerous awards for his writing, including the Egon Erwin Kisch Prize for journalism, and is the author of eight critically acclaimed novels, many of which, including Fear, have been adapted for film, television and radio in Germany. Fear is the first of his works to be translated into English.

  IMOGEN TAYLOR is a literary translator based in Berlin. Her translations include Sascha Arango’s The Truth and Other Lies and Melanie Raabe’s The Trap.

  textpublishing.com.au

  The Text Publishing Company

  Swann House

  22 William Street

  Melbourne Victoria 3000

  Australia

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2013 by Rowohlt Berlin Verlag GmbH, Berlin, Germany

  Translation copyright © Imogen Taylor 2017

  The moral rights of Dirk Kurbjuweit to be identified as the author and Imogen Taylor as the translator of this work have been asserted.

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright above, no part of this publication shall be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

  Originally published in Germany under the title Angst by Rowohlt Berlin Verlag GmbH, Berlin, 2013

  Published in Australia and New Zealand by The Text Publishing Company, 2017

  Cover design by Sandy Cull, gogoGingko

  Cover images: gun by Peter Dazeley/Getty Images; man by Tom Merton/iStock

  Page design by Jessica Horrocks

  Typeset by J&M Typesetting

  National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry

  Creator: Kurbjuweit, Dirk, 1962– author.

  Title: Fear/Dirk Kurbjuweit; translated from the German by Imogen Taylor.

  ISBN: 9781925498196 (paperback)

  ISBN: 9781925410518 (ebook)

  Subjects: Fear—Fiction. German fiction—Translations into English.

  Other Creators/Contributors: Taylor, Imogen, translator.

  Dewey Number: 833.914

  CONTENTS

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  For my children

  1

  ‘DAD?’

  My father didn’t answer me. He barely speaks anymore. He isn’t muddled, doesn’t suffer from dementia or Alzheimer’s. We know that, because he does speak sometimes, and on those rare occasions he is lucid and rational. Dad is seventy-eight, but his memories haven’t abandoned him, and he always recognises me when I visit him. I get a smile, not a big one, because that’s the way he is—distant, reserved—but he recognises me, and he’s pleased I come to see him. That is no small thing.

  ‘Mr Tiefenthaler?’ Kottke prompted, when my father didn’t reply. Sometimes my father is more likely to respond to Kottke than to me. Does that make me jealous? I have to admit that it does a bit. On the other hand, Kottke is the man my father now spends his days with, and I’m glad—of course I am—that they get on. Kottke respects my father—I think it’s fair to say that. I don’t know whether he treats all the men here as gently and kindly as he treats Dad. I suspect that he doesn’t, although I have never seen him with the other men.

  But today my father didn’t respond to Kottke either. He sat at the table in silence, half asleep, eyes drooping, hands hanging by his sides. Every now and then he would tilt forwards and I would get a fright, because if my father hit his face on the metal tabletop he would hurt himself. He never falls that far, though—he always checks the tilting movement and rights himself. It was the same today, but I can’t get used to it. It gives me a fright every time. I saw Kottke start forward and then relax—he too had been ready to intervene. We take good care that nothing happens to Dad.

  I’ve been coming to visit my father in this place for six months, and it’s still sad to see him like this, in his threadbare shirt and the worn trousers he wears without a belt. We bought him new things to smarten him up, but he insists on wearing his old familiar clothes, and why shouldn’t he? He looks strange, sitting there, because his chair is too far from the table—as is mine. We sit opposite each other, but the table doesn’t really connect us, doesn’t allow us to sit together. Now, of all times, when we’re closer than ever before, the table separates us. At least that’s the way I see it. Unfortunately it’s not possible to move the chairs, because they’re screwed to the floor. The same goes for the table.

  My father could speak if he wanted to, but he doesn’t. He’s tired, I think, worn out by the long life he found so difficult. We never understood him, but what does that matter? He had to cope with those difficulties, even if he maybe only imagined them. And we don’t know everything about his life. Nobody knows everything about another person’s life. We can only be continuously present in our own lives, and even that doesn’t mean we know all about them, because things that affect us—often momentous things—can happen without our being there, and even without our knowledge. So we should be wary of making statements about other’s lives in their entirety. I am.

  As I was leaving the house this morning, I told my wife I was going to drop in on my father. I always put it like that, and when she goes, she uses the same phrase: ‘I’ll drop in on your father later.’ Half a year is not enough to take the pain out of the word ‘prison’, not for people like us, who must first get used to the idea that such a place has become part of our world. It hurts us, even now.

  My father was sentenced at the age of seventy-seven and has already had—I won’t say celebrated—one birthday as an inmate. We tried to make the hour’s visit festive, but it was not a success. It wasn’t so much the screwed-down chairs and metal table that were to blame, or even the barred window—another all-too-clear reminder that this was not a homey place, not a fitting place to cel
ebrate the fact of your own birth. It was me.

  We had carried off the first half-hour fairly well. We all sang ‘Happy Birthday to You’—my wife, Rebecca, and I; our children, Paul and Fay; my mother; and even Kottke, who had granted us certain exemptions that day. We ate the almond cake my mother has been baking for her husband almost all her life, and which she wanted to present uncut on a baking sheet the way she always does, because she enjoys cutting it with everyone looking on, waiting to have some. But the exemptions didn’t go that far. When we were searched at the door, my poor mother, my seventy-five-year-old mother, had to watch as a prison warder cut her almond cake into little pieces. ‘I assure you I didn’t bake a file into it,’ she said, with a forced cheerfulness that made me sad. They probably believed her, but of course there are rules. I hate those words, hate having it pointed out to me that there are rules preventing what is reasonable. But they are words I have heard often since my father has been in prison.

  We talked about other birthdays—birthdays my father had celebrated as a free man—when I suddenly found myself sobbing, quite unexpectedly. At first I thought I could stop and I fought back the sobs, but they grew heavier until I was weeping uncontrollably. My children had never seen their father in such a state and stared at me in horror. Kottke, bless him, looked away, embarrassed. My mother, who was sitting on one of the screwed-down chairs, stood up and came towards me, but my wife reached me first. She took me in her arms, and I buried my face in her shoulder. After a few minutes my sobbing fit was over, and I looked up. My eyes still blurred with tears, I saw my father regarding me with what can only be described as interest—a peculiar interest I did not know how to interpret. I have often wondered about it since, but have come up with nothing that could explain that look. My mother passed me a paper napkin, and I apologised and began, quickly and far too cheerfully, to recount some story about another of my father’s birthdays. But this time it was no more than an attempt to speed up the clock, because I wanted to get out. We all wanted to get out.

  I shouldn’t write that—it seems a bit much, when your father’s in prison. If anyone had to get out, it was my father, but he couldn’t. We, on the other hand, would be leaving as soon as possible, and as four o’clock approached, we transferred what was left of the cake from the baking sheet to two paper plates—one for my father and one for Kottke and his colleagues—and then we hugged him and left, not forgetting to say thank you to Kottke. My father remained behind, of course. He’d been sentenced to eight years. The six months he spent in remand count towards that, and he’s served another six months here in Tegel, which leaves seven years. If he behaves well—and we firmly expect him to do so—he might be released in three or four years’ time. Kottke has told us repeatedly that there is no better-behaved inmate than my father, and that fuels our hopes. It would give him another few good years of life as a free man. That’s what I tell my mother. ‘If only he doesn’t die in there,’ my mother often says, and immediately repeats herself: ‘If only he doesn’t die in there.’

  ‘He’s healthy,’ I tell her, when she says that. ‘He’ll make it.’

  ‘Dad?’ I asked again, after chatting a while with Kottke. That’s how I tend to spend my time here: Kottke and I talk. He does most of the talking—Kottke’s nothing if not talkative—but that’s a good thing. It’s a help. I find the silence of the prison intolerable, because eerie sounds emanate from it that can be heard in the visitors’ room—metallic noises I can’t identify, not ringing out sharply, but flat and dull. At first I thought I could hear rhythms, as if somebody was tapping or filing, but over time I realised that I had become the victim of my own expectations—namely, that a prison must always be filled with the sounds of thwarted communication or attempted flight. There were no rhythms, nor was there any quiet sighing such as I once thought I heard—only unfamiliar, unaccountable noises coming from deep inside the building. I was glad when Kottke drowned out these sounds with his grating Berlin accent. He has a long career as a jailer behind him—more than forty years serving the law—and has a great many stories to tell. I never really wanted to know so much about the world of crime and criminals, but that world is not without interest, especially now that it intersects with our own.

  Kottke was soon looking at the clock. He has an unerring instinct, always knowing when our hour together is up. ‘Time we made a move,’ he said, as usual, and I was grateful to him: this turn of phrase makes it sound as if the two of them have to leave a pleasant coffee party and drive home. Home for my father is a cell, but this uncomfortable fact is obscured by Kottke’s well-chosen words. A jailer’s sensitivity—there is such a thing. We’ve been lucky.

  Until then, Kottke had been leaning against the wall next to the window. Hardly had he spoken when he took two steps across the room towards my father and put out a hand to touch his upper arm. He always does that—there are a whole host of rituals here, of repetitions and routines. In this place the gesture seems almost official, a warning that it’s not worth trying to escape, because Kottke, friendly though he may be, must do his duty. But I think he acts out of solicitude—he wants to support my father, even though there’s no need. Dad is quite capable of getting up by himself.

  When Dad stood up, so did I. We gave each other a brief hug (we can now), and then he left, Kottke at his side. My father is taller than his guard: a slim six foot two to Kottke’s corpulent five foot six. He is still as trim as ever, but he has lost his hair, and with age his legs have become bowed, giving him a rolling gait like a seaman. Not that he ever was a seaman—my father was a mechanic and then a car salesman.

  When they had left, another jailer appeared, one whose name I don’t know. He too was fat (a lot of the men here are), and he looked dutiful rather than friendly. We didn’t exchange a single word as he accompanied me to the door. At last, the street—cars, birds, wind in the trees, life. Twenty paces off, my Audi winked cheerily when I pressed the button on my car key.

  2

  WHY IS MY FATHER IN PRISON? I don’t have to make a big secret of it. He has been found guilty of manslaughter.

  If he was sentenced to just eight years, that is because he confessed, and because his motives seemed less atrocious, somehow, than those of a murderer. We accepted the court’s judgement. It is hard for us, but we can’t say that justice has been ill served. My father agrees. Of course he had hoped for a mild sentence, but it was clear to him from the outset that he would go to jail as a result of his actions. There can be no talk of a spur-of-the-moment act—it was planned and carried out in sound mind.

  My father’s age played no part in the trial—he did not act out of befuddlement or in a state of senility—but it was, I think, taken into account at his sentencing. The court wanted to offer him the prospect of spending his last days with his family, a free man. His sentence may be reduced after a year or two, and we cling to the words ‘day release’. My father would spend his days with us and in the evening I would drive him back to Tegel. ‘To Tegel’ is another phrase we’re fond of using. Others say it and mean the airport. We mean the prison.

  I must confess that I am not innocent of this manslaughter. I could have prevented what happened, but I didn’t want to. When my father came to see us in late September last year, I knew what he was intending to do. It was a sunny day, and our windows were open, letting in all the noise of the street. The roads in our part of Berlin are cobbled, and the rumbling of the traffic is sometimes a torture to me when I work at home. My wife thinks I’m oversensitive. I once told her that Schopenhauer regarded sensitivity to noise as a sign of intelligence: the more sensitive a person was, the more intelligent he was likely to be. ‘Are you trying to tell me—’ she began. ‘No,’ I replied, ‘I’m not.’ Before long it had developed into one of those exchanges that can make married life so unpleasant. I later apologised. It wasn’t a nice thing to say, but perhaps it was true.

  I was expecting my father. He had let me know he was coming the day before, and soon after
he’d left home my mother rang to tell me he’d be with me in two hours at the latest. This was a recent habit. My mother didn’t think my father should be driving anymore, and if he didn’t turn up at the expected time I was to initiate search-and-rescue operations immediately. Rebecca and I agreed with my mother and didn’t like letting the children in the car with him, but my father knew nothing of this. It would have hurt and upset him—he still saw himself as a first-rate driver.

  While I was waiting for my father, I wondered whether a man who no longer drove well could be a good marksman. Not that it was likely to be a tricky shot. He’d manage. I also caught myself picturing the drive going wrong in some way so that he wouldn’t have to prove himself as a marksman at all. It would only take a minor accident to prevent his arrival and foil the murder plot. I always thought of the anticipated act as murder back then—it was only afterwards that our lawyer pointed out to me that it might technically be considered manslaughter, and that manslaughter was less severely punished.

  But I wasn’t really hoping for an accident. I wanted this murder. I’d been thinking about it for long enough, and now it had to happen. My wife had taken the children to stay with her mother—the circumstances couldn’t have been better. My father’s drive, his last for the time being, would ideally be a smooth one. I’d followed the radio bulletins, and there were no traffic jams.

  A few cars rumbled past and eventually I saw my father park his Ford outside our house. It’s a lovely late nineteenth-century house: wooden beams, red walls, a turret, bay windows, dormers. We live on the upper ground floor in a spacious flat with rather imposing high ceilings, stucco mouldings and private access to the garden. Above our flat is a second storey, and there are flats in the attic and basement too—four households in all.

  When I opened the door and saw my father standing there, I wondered where he had put his gun. He usually wore it in a holster under his left arm, but it might also have been in his overnight bag. In the past he had often carried a little leather pouch with him, such as pipe smokers like to use for a small assortment of pipes and tampers and tobacco, but in his there was a Walther PPK—or a Glock or a Colt. We had given him the pouch one Christmas, my mother, my sister, my little brother and I, though I’ve forgotten the precise year. He had used it for a while, presumably to make us feel our present was appreciated, but he soon went back to using his holster. From his point of view, it made more sense to carry the gun under his arm where he could get at it more quickly. The pouch needed unzipping, wasting precious seconds that could have cost him his life. I assume that was his logic.