Fear Page 12

  Thus my day-to-day life, my normality, became a performance. I acted out harmlessness, I acted out not-being-a-child-abuser. But this conscious not-being is also a form of being, so that consciously not-being-a-child-abuser is a form of being-a-child-abuser. That’s my logic. It’s the way it felt to me. In the process of affirming what I wasn’t, images popped up in my head that had never been there before. I saw things I did not do to my children, never had done, never would do. I was no longer myself: I was my own negative, my own opposite. Until then I had fought Dieter Tiberius, if you can call it fighting, as a stranger: the man downstairs, the madman in the basement, and, in moments of anger, the bastard. That was over now. He had wormed his way inside me. I was fighting myself, fighting the thoughts and images that haunted me. I didn’t even tell my wife, I was so ashamed.

  It has taken me a great deal of time and effort to feel that I belong to the middle class. There is nothing middle class about guns, and I grew up in a house full of them. Shooting as a sport is of course traditionally associated with the aristocracy, but at the other end of the social scale the possession of a weapon often denotes involvement in criminal activity. The stolidly middle-class German Bürger sets too much store by his good name to get mixed up in anything so dubious. Our reputation is an all-enveloping cloak, but it can soon fall into tatters. This is why the bourgeoisie are so anxious: we rely upon the good faith of others. It is not enough to be upright and decent—you must be seen to be upright and decent. A rumour, even an unfounded one, can be enough to destroy you.

  I saw myself as a headline in the newspapers I don’t read, the newspapers that shout at me from the station kiosk with their violent headlines, telling me things I don’t want to know. Is Star Architect a Child Abuser? One such question is all it takes. It practically answers itself. You’re done for. I’m not a star architect—far from it. I have my strengths and a certain standing, but I am not Calatrava or Herzog. I am not Kollhoff. The headline writers, however, like to use the word ‘star’ to arouse interest. If I read a headline at the station kiosk telling me that a football star has hit his trainer, I know the culprit plays in the second league. If it were Bastian Schweinsteiger, the headline would read: Schweinsteiger Hits Trainer. A star is called by his name; a non-star is a star. That’s the way it works. I would be a star architect, and as a result fall even lower in the eyes of the readers. From star to child abuser, ah ha, very bad.

  ‘You and your middle-class values,’ my brother sometimes says with a laugh. He was there when I happened to say at one of our soirees that I considered it a duty of the middle class to vote.

  ‘What do you mean by middle class?’ a woman asked, a journalist, and her tone was so sharp that I knew at once what she was driving at: that I wasn’t middle class.

  There were nine of us that evening: the journalist and her husband, who is an investment banker; a theatre director and his partner, who calls himself a gallerist but has no gallery at present; a specialist in lung diseases and his new girlfriend, who’s in PR, mainly at the ministry for family affairs—and my little brother, partnerless as usual. We’d had a good evening until then. We ate wild boar ragout because my father had shot a wild boar and brought us a shank and a piece of saddle, and we drank the excellent Black Print, a cuvee so dark that it stains your gums blue. I started off the main course with a little anecdote about my father, saying that there had been sides of wild boar, haunches of venison and hares hanging in the garage at home—a source of distress to my sister, who felt sorry for the animals. She never touched the meat, to the delight of my brother and me—all the more for us to dig into.

  The lung specialist’s new girlfriend, whom we had never met before, was immediately curious about my father when she heard this. I told her about the guns and a bit about what my father was like; my little brother chipped in every now and then, and the PR woman kept staring at the tattoo on his neck. It is the shimmering blue face of some sinister creature; my brother, who designed it himself, says that it’s Klingsor. We talked for some time. My father always makes for a good story and everyone listened spellbound. Guns are no longer part of a normal life these days, and what is more interesting than hearing about aberrations?

  When we had finished, the gallerist-without-a-gallery pointed out that I had said ‘at home’ when I was talking about my parents’ house.

  ‘Really?’ I asked, rather incredulously, but the investment banker had also heard it, and my brother said with a grin: ‘Those were your words.’

  ‘This is my home,’ I said, glancing at Rebecca, and soon everyone at the table was deep in discussion about when you stopped saying ‘home’ to refer to your parents’ house. The journalist said never: she still said she was going home when she went to her parents’ in Regensburg. The specialist in lung diseases said when you had children. My wife said when you stopped going to your parents’ for Christmas and had them round to yours.

  I opened the sixth bottle of Black Print, although there was still half a bottle on the table and another open bottle waiting. It is essential to give Black Print time to breathe, and over the years I have developed a good feeling for the pace of a dinner party. This one was medium-fast: two hearty drinkers, one sipper and everyone else doing brisk justice to the wine. Most people underestimate the punch of that 14.5 per cent.

  Then talk turned to politics, and that was when I spoke the words that provoked the journalist’s sharp reaction. Now I had to provide a definition of ‘middle class’, but that wasn’t a problem. It was a subject I had given a great deal of thought.

  ‘The desire for education is definitely part of it,’ I said, ‘and that includes working on your own education. Keeping your cool is also important,’ I continued. ‘The middle classes don’t get excited or hysterical.’

  Money was part of it, but didn’t dominate everything. People who were genuinely middle class considered it unreasonable to live their lives at the mercy of figures—share prices, dividends, interest rates. Family was essential—but by family, I said, I meant any kind of permanent ties. On the one hand a respectable lifestyle, but at the same time a few secrets—or least the possibility of them—which must be scrupulously guarded. The middle classes also showed an interest in what was going on in the world, especially politics, because they knew it was politics that shaped the course of their lives. And a sensitivity to questions of freedom—that was my final point, deliberately kept until last and pronounced casually but emphatically.

  As soon as I had finished, silence fell on the dining room. I took a gulp of Black Print. My little brother, who had looked at me attentively but somewhat pityingly throughout, raised his glass in a mock toast.

  Now the journalist said, ‘For me, being middle class is mainly to do with tradition.’ I knew that her father had taken over a small clothes shop from his father and enlarged it into a medium-sized clothes shop. What was I to say? The journalist’s definition excluded me, and after hearing my story about our father, she knew it. I was too wounded to give a quick-witted response.

  ‘Doesn’t that sound rather feudal?’ said my wife, rushing to my help. ‘Aren’t middle-class values acquired and aristocratic ones inherited?’ This grabbed the interest of everyone at table except the PR woman, who was engrossed in reading and writing texts on her phone. They debated the question at some length, but I was too annoyed to follow the discussion properly.

  The last of the guests left at two; they had all thanked us for an enjoyable evening.

  ‘Why can’t you just drop it?’ my little brother asked when we were sitting in the kitchen, rather light-headed, less from the wine than from the scent of the flowers our guests had brought my wife, which were spread out among four vases on the kitchen table. ‘You know what it was like at Mum and Dad’s,’ said my little brother.

  ‘But we’ve all moved on,’ I said, ‘or at least I have.’

  ‘It’s not that easy,’ he said. ‘How old will you be before you realise that there’s no escaping your roots?
’ He was grinning. My little brother can grin in a terribly demonic way. This isn’t so much to do with his face, which is friendly and perpetually boyish; it comes about in the interplay with that sinister figure on his neck, who seems to take up my brother’s grin and yoke it to his own.

  I looked at my little brother. The mood was just right for a fight. He called me pretentious, conformist, cynical, uptight, pathetic. I called him irresponsible, fake, childish, freeloading, crazy. This was jealousy, of course—I envied my brother’s freedom and spontaneity, and he wished, at least some of the time, that he was settled and stable like me—but the real nastiness began when we started accusing each other of treating our parents badly.

  I said: ‘You exploit them.’

  He said: ‘You could make it up with Dad.’

  We had always fought like this: it was a way of clearing the air, venting our anger and frustration. Afterwards, we would say how lucky we were to have each other, and that neither of us knew what we’d do if we didn’t. This time, however, my wife intervened, coming to take me off to bed. Hugs all round. My wife and my brother. My brother and I. ‘Mate,’ he said.

  Rebecca and I weren’t having sex at that time. Dieter Tiberius in his basement had cramped our style, I suppose. On one of my patrols I had found a ladder in the bushes beneath our bedroom window. So he had been watching us. He had seen me losing myself, seen my wife’s nakedness, the lovely, elegant way she came; maybe he had even heard the vulgar things I said. He had seen us having sex, and the disgust he aroused in us contaminated the act, our desire poisoned by his greedy looks.

  Other than that, we were getting along well, drawn together by the threat we faced. I no longer avoided Rebecca: we held one another, consoled one another, talked about our common purpose, about the fight we had on our hands. Our marriage seemed whole again. We simply absorbed Dieter Tiberius into our Anyway World. Apart from that, nothing changed. But then something happened that still distresses me when I think of it.

  One evening, maybe three or four weeks after Rebecca’s return from her mother’s, I found myself—I can’t put it any other way—back in Luna. Dieter Tiberius had been quiet for a while, and we had started wondering if he might have given up, if we no longer had reason to be afraid of him. Our fight was not over: as long as we were living under the same roof, Dieter Tiberius remained a threat to Rebecca and the children. All the same, I went to Luna that evening.

  I don’t think I thought about it at all: it was as if I were on autopilot, and then there I was, in a kind of reverie, sketching drafts, eating my way through six courses. It was only between courses four and five, between ox cheeks braised in brown ale with chestnuts and chicory, and Mont d’Or fondue with walnut bread, pear and celery, that it occurred to me that I was exposing my wife and children to danger, but I took solace in the thought that Dieter Tiberius was hardly going to attack my family in our flat.

  I tore a sheet off my roll of drafting paper, always an ugly noise; it makes the people at the nearby tables interrupt their tete-a-tetes to look round at me—the man sitting so strangely alone in front of his semolina flambé with date and ginger marmalade and brown butter ice-cream. It was more embarrassing to me than usual, and it suddenly occurred to me to wonder if I weren’t perhaps hoping that Dieter Tiberius would put an end to my marital troubles for me.

  I laid down my spoon; I had gone off the date and ginger marmalade. I reassured myself that you sometimes think preposterous things for which there is no basis, but I didn’t know if this was a scientifically proven fact or merely a convenient theory I had come up with in a desperate attempt to convince myself. I pushed the thought aside, but didn’t finish my dessert or order a digestif or an espresso. I drove home, my heart pounding.

  Dieter Tiberius was watching television; that reassured me, because I didn’t consider him cold-blooded enough to sit and watch a film after committing a triple murder. My children lay breathing in bed, and my wife was gently snoring, no blood anywhere. I cleaned my teeth and swore never to abandon my family again.

  22

  IN THE DAYS THAT FOLLOWED I went back to the crime office and to the lawyer. Nothing happened; we were getting nowhere. On 2 June, my wife rang me in the office, her voice even higher than usual. Our daughter had invited her friend Olga round to play. They had played together for a while and then Rebecca had been going to take them for a drive in the country. As she was leaving the house, Dieter Tiberius came out from the basement and told my wife that he had heard her sexually abusing Fay and Olga. She must stay right where she was; the police would be there any minute.

  ‘You are a child abuser,’ he said to Rebecca. Those were his very words. She was still screaming and shouting at him when the police car drew up—Sergeant Leidinger and his colleague. Dieter Tiberius reported Rebecca to the police while she and the girls stood there beside them. If someone calls the police and voices suspicions of child abuse, the police have to come and take a report, whether or not they believe the allegations. Afterwards, the two policemen drove off. My wife had gone back into our flat and called me.

  ‘I’ll be right with you,’ I said, and took a taxi home.

  When I got there I stormed straight down to the basement flat, rang the bell, pounded on the door and did a lot of shouting. I don’t know exactly what I shouted; I was so upset that I have forgotten the precise words. Something about beating Dieter Tiberius up, but also that he was sick and needed help. I certainly didn’t shout that I’d kill him, which is what he claimed to the police when he reported me.

  The same police who had responded to his report of child abuse came to our flat an hour later and confronted me with Dieter Tiberius’s assertion that I had threatened him with murder. I have no memory of it; I denied it at the time and I stick to that. The policemen were friendly and I gathered from the looks they gave that they were on our side, not Dieter Tiberius’s. I asked them what I ought to do next, and they shrugged.

  ‘What would you do?’ I asked.

  Sergeant Leidinger shrugged again; the other man grinned and put a hand to the holster on his hip. Maybe it was a chance gesture, but at the time I took it to mean that he would settle the matter with his gun.

  My dismay knew no bounds. If a policeman believed the only solution was to take matters into our own hands, we could hope for nothing from the law. When I confided this to Rebecca after the policemen had left, she agreed.

  As soon as my son got back from visiting a friend, we sat down with the children at the kitchen table and explained to them what Dieter Tiberius accused their parents of having done. We had no choice, now that Fay had heard her mother being called a child abuser. We hadn’t even taught our daughter the facts of life, so I had to go back a long way, but soon noticed from Fay’s giggles that she already had a vague idea of what sex was about.

  I cleared my throat. ‘Dieter Tiberius,’ I said, ‘claims that Mama and Dada do those things to you.’

  Of all the sentences I have uttered in my life, that was the most awful. Fay looked at me in bewilderment. Paul grinned.

  ‘That’s not true,’ said Fay.

  ‘No,’ said Paul.

  Although I knew those were the only answers they could give, I was relieved.

  ‘Why does he say that?’ asked Paul.

  ‘He’s a horrid person,’ said my wife. ‘We haven’t done anything to him, but he’s horrid to us.’

  We tried to reassure them, saying that he couldn’t do anything to us—that we would be very careful, and they were quite safe.

  ‘Otherwise Uncle Bruno will come,’ said Paul, ‘and then he’ll be sorry.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘Uncle Bruno will beat him up good and proper if he tries anything else.’ The children laughed and clapped. ‘And so will I,’ I said.

  Rebecca laid a hand on my arm and gave me a supportive smile. She knew what I was wondering. Why did the children depend on my little brother to protect them rather than their father? It made sense, of course: when Bruno came to
see us, he charged around the flat and garden with them for hours on end; he was wild, he had that tattoo on his neck and he could tell them stories of his adventures in South America and Africa. They loved and admired him. Of course they loved me too, no doubt about it, but they knew me as a gentle father who built with them and played with them, but was in no way wild. For that, they had Uncle Bruno. I had always been fine with that, but now it pained me.

  After we had put the children to bed, my wife and I sat at the kitchen table again and discussed what we should do. We no longer pinned any hopes on the authorities; there would be no rescue from that quarter.

  ‘Should we move?’ I asked. We had discussed that particular solution once before, but rejected it. It was so obvious—a clean break, ridding ourselves of the monster by leaving it behind. But we had agreed that we didn’t want to be driven away; we were in the right and had no intention of yielding to wrong. We loved our flat: it was our home, our middle-class stronghold, provision for our old age. We’d had that conversation two weeks ago. Now we were more desperate. I would have left, but my wife still refused.

  ‘No way,’ she said. ‘If anyone here leaves, it’s our Untermensch.’ She got up and left the room, and a moment later I heard her brushing her teeth.

  I was a little startled at Rebecca’s choice of words, though I don’t think she meant it in any Nazi sense. She wasn’t imputing inferiority to Dieter Tiberius; she meant it architecturally, topographically. The fact that she said he was our Untermensch underscores this meaning: she was specifically referring to him living under us, in the flat below.

  In the next two weeks nothing happened. We lived our Anyway Life and, one evening, in spite of my vow, I went to Beluga, the only starred restaurant in town I hadn’t yet tried. I was eating tataki of young venison on oak-wood charcoal with quince, ginger and liquorice, and talking to the sommelier about the wine, which I thought too overpowering for the tender young venison, when he suddenly gave me a funny look, shocked and slightly disgusted. At the same moment, I felt a tickle beneath my left nostril.