Fear Read online

  My father was wearing a checked jacket, grey cloth trousers and comfortable shoes of the kind that provide a firm and secure footing. I think he wanted to look respectable when he was arrested—not like a thug who had stumbled into a crime, but like a mature man who had thought through what he had done. A man who had, what is more, done the right thing, even if others might not see it that way.

  When we said hello we were, as so often, uncertain whether to shake hands or hug. My father held out his right hand, hesitantly, and I was about to take it but changed my mind, and at the same time my father changed his mind too, and we withdrew our hands and hugged each other in an almost disembodied embrace, without squeezing, without touching cheeks, looking hastily away when it was over. That was all we were capable of at the time. He came in and I made him an espresso while he unpacked homemade jam from his bag—cherry and quince. I wondered at the way my mother had taken even this opportunity to send us jars of the jam she produced so tirelessly, but that’s my mother for you. We sat at the kitchen table and I told him the latest about the children. That was a safe topic between us—we didn’t have many. In the evening we watched a football match: Bayern versus Bremen. We drank half a bottle of red wine and then went to bed. Neither of us mentioned Dieter Tiberius.

  The next day my father sat on the sofa reading Auto Motor and Sport. As always when he came to visit, he had brought a pile of magazines with him. He could make them last all day; I think he reads every article. Before I go to see him now, I buy up half a newsagent’s, mainly magazines about cars and guns, but also political magazines. My father is very interested in politics. Maybe they’re not such unhappy hours for him, sitting in his cell reading, with no one to disturb him and no need to feel guilty about frittering away time that others would have liked to spend with him—his wife, for example, and, once upon a time, his children.

  That day, the second day of his visit, nothing happened. Dieter Tiberius was lying low in the basement. I couldn’t hear him moving around, but his toilet was flushed now and again, so he must have been in. In fact, he was always in. Over supper that night my father told me about developments in cylinder-head technology, or maybe it was carburettor technology—I can’t remember—and then about new Israeli settlements on the West Bank. That took him far back into the history of the Middle East; my father likes reading history books. We drank the rest of the red wine, and then, when it was nearly midnight and my father had said all he had to say on the subject of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, we went to bed. I was surprised. What was he waiting for? We hadn’t talked anything over, but it was perfectly clear why he was here. Our family had come to a tacit understanding. Surely I couldn’t be mistaken?

  The next morning I got up early and went out in the garden. It hadn’t rained for a few days and I put the sprinkler on, making water rain down on the grass, flowerbeds and shrubs. I think I was hoping to hear a shot, so that it would be over at last, but I heard only the birds and the occasional rumbling of a car on the cobblestones. I walked round the outside of the house, passing the basement windows. There are four altogether: on the left, Dieter Tiberius had his bedroom, in the middle was the kitchen, and on the right, the living room, which had two windows, one at the front of the house and one at the side. The windows are small and low, just above the ground. Dieter Tiberius lived in gloom. I didn’t see him on my way round; I would have had to stoop, which I didn’t, of course. Maybe he saw my feet; I don’t know. At that point he had about ten minutes to live.

  When I got back to our flat, my father was sitting at the kitchen table. In front of him lay a pistol—a Walther PPK, calibre 7.65 mm Browning, but I only learnt that later, from the indictment. The prosecutor was keen to demonstrate his own knowledge of firearms—knowledge that, despite having the father I had, I didn’t possess. I knew nothing about pistols and had no desire to.

  I asked my father whether he wanted an espresso, and he did. I had switched on the machine, a beautiful Domita from Italy, soon after getting out of bed, to give it time to warm up. I unscrewed the filter holder and swapped the small filter for the big one, because I wanted an espresso too. Then I pushed the filter holder against the mill, setting it grinding and roaring. The ground coffee trickled into the filter until it was full to the brim. I took the tamper—heavy-duty metal with a rosewood handle—and pressed the coffee firm. I screwed the filter holder into the machine, placed two cups under the spouts and pressed the start button. The machine growled and the coffee ran brown and oily into the cups—always a glorious sight. You and your espresso fetish, my wife says, sometimes mockingly. People like me have to make a fetish out of everything, which doesn’t just get on other people’s nerves—it gets on mine too. We sipped our coffee in silence, the pistol on the table like a metal question mark. Should we really?

  What happened next is best related in the words of the indictment: At about 8.40 am, the accused, Hermann Tiefenthaler (my father, that is), left the flat of his son, Randolph Tiefenthaler, with the Walther PPK, then in his lawful possession, and descended to the basement, where he induced the tenant, Dieter Tiberius, to open the door to his flat, either by knocking or ringing the bell, and then killed Tiberius with a close-range shot to the head. Tiberius died instantly.

  I rang the police. My father had asked me to, but it was in any case clear that this was the line we would take: no crazy getaway, no cover-up. We stood by the act. We still do—I can say that without reservation.

  The policeman who picked up the phone, Sergeant Leidinger, greeted me almost affably. He knew me well, and he knew the house—he’d been here a lot over the past few months and sometimes found our case cause for amusement, but he immediately grew serious when he heard that I had a death to report. I used those exact words, quite deliberately: ‘I have a death to report.’

  ‘Your wife?’ Sergeant Leidinger asked, and I could hear his alarm, which gave me, I must admit, a certain satisfaction, after all the doubts the authorities had about the gravity of our situation.

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘not my wife, thank goodness—it’s Dieter Tiberius.’

  For a few seconds there was silence, and I’d love to know what Leidinger was thinking then.

  ‘We’ll be right with you,’ he said.

  My father packed his bag and put on his checked jacket. Then he sat down at the kitchen table again, the Walther PPK in front of him. I made him another espresso. We had sometimes sat there like that in the past, before he set off for home—usually with my mother, because he never came without her—and funnily enough, I now said some of the things I always said: ‘Have you got everything? Sure you haven’t forgotten anything?’

  My father went to have a last look in the bathroom and found his shaving foam.

  ‘You can’t check too often,’ I said.

  ‘Who knows when I’d have got any,’ he said.

  It had just occurred to me that you might not be allowed a wet shave in prison because of the razor blades—I knew nothing about life in prison—when the doorbell rang. Sergeant Leidinger and his colleague Rippschaft, who was also well known to me, were the first to arrive. Later, others came: policemen in uniform, plain-clothes detectives, a doctor, forensic investigators, pathologists.

  My father told Sergeant Leidinger that he had shot the basement tenant. He said nothing else and was quiet throughout the proceedings. They didn’t put handcuffs on him, perhaps because of his age, and for that I was thankful. We hugged when he left, properly this time. It was a long, loving embrace, the first of our life. We clung to one another and he said something that may sound strange to outsiders. ‘I’m so proud of you,’ he said—a statement that can only be understood as a kind of closing summary, a father’s attempt to take stock of his relationship with his son before disappearing into prison. He had never said it before—or, indeed, anything like it. Maybe he wanted to make clear to me that, up until the appearance of Dieter Tiberius, he had considered my life a success, an absolute success, and that Dieter Tiberius was a
mere episode in that life and no more—an episode which, thanks to a well-placed shot, was now over. He wanted to make clear to me that, in spite of the long silence between us, he was aware of that success—and he wanted to encourage me to continue along the path I had taken. I think that’s why he said what he did.

  3

  ARE THERE TEARS IN MY EYES? I don’t think so. It felt like it for a moment, as I was writing those last sentences, but I was mistaken. A little moisture, perhaps, a film over the eyes—normal, entirely normal. I am sitting at my desk in my study. It is just past eleven in the evening and the children have, of course, been in bed for quite some time. Rebecca came in a few minutes ago and said goodnight, kissing me, her hand on my cheek. ‘Enjoy your writing,’ she said, standing in the doorway looking back—rather a trite remark for her. Perhaps she is a little uneasy because she doesn’t know exactly why I’m writing this account or what will be in it.

  All I’ve told her is that I need to get this off my chest. ‘This’ for us is the Tiberius case. I was telling my wife the truth when I said that, but maybe not the whole truth. I didn’t mention that all has not yet been said—that something is missing. We have, of course, talked about it a lot, an awful lot, and we have heaped our grief and anger and fears on one another. Our marriage, which also had a rough ride, could and did stand the test. Still, there are some things I can’t bring myself to say out loud.

  I was never a great talker. It would not be wrong to maintain the opposite—at any rate, I wouldn’t blame anyone who did. I listen for a long time before I speak, and talking in front of large groups doesn’t come easy to me, but I can do it. It’s not as bad as all that. I’m not uncommunicative. All I’m saying is that I’m not one for chatting, not the kind whose words roll off his tongue. Talking doesn’t come as a matter of course to me, like walking—it is an effort, but an effort I accept without too much difficulty and sometimes even with pleasure. Perhaps that’s why I’m writing this. Or perhaps it has something to do with the fact that Rebecca is still missing a few details from me.

  It is nice, sitting here. It is quiet in our street now, nothing rumbling over the cobblestones. My neighbours’ cars—massive cars, gargantuan, some of them—are parked at the kerb like the little brothers and sisters of the houses. Why have cars grown so large in recent years? Why are they as tall as men or as long as trucks, or both? When will people leave their houses because these four-wheel drives make such wonderful places to live? These are the dejected thoughts of a man whose livelihood depends on the building of houses. I am an architect. Perhaps they are also drunken thoughts, although I have resolved never to drink more than half a bottle of the glorious Black Print when I’m working on this report. One small glass is all I’ve had this evening, but a wine that is 14.5 per cent alcohol is not to be sneezed at.

  Nonsense, I’m not drunk. I look out of the window at the street lamp, a gas lamp—a straight green pole, not overly ornate; a glass top; a little metal roof; warm, mellow light. There is a proposal to take these street lamps away from us, because gaslight is, apparently, more detrimental to the environment than electric light. Perhaps it is. But we fight the proposal. We haven’t founded a civic action group—we’re not that given to drama on this street—but the man opposite, a radiologist, collected signatures, and of course I signed. The way I see it, the point of the street lamps is not only to provide light, but also to give warmth. That, if I am not mistaken, is how it has always been, ever since people first sat around a fire. Light should make us feel cosy, not chilly. But electric light, especially from the new light bulbs, makes you shudder with cold.

  Now I hear a ticking sound—it’s the claws of our dog on the parquet. He’s jumped down from one of the children’s beds and is going into the kitchen to have a drink—our Benno, a Rhodesian ridgeback, a big, strong dog. He isn’t trained to attack, but he has made us feel safe again. Even after the death of our downstairs neighbour, we remained a nervous family. Now we aren’t. We wouldn’t have Benno, if it hadn’t been for Dieter Tiberius.

  I am, then, writing this account because I hope writing will come easier to me than talking. But before I can fill in the missing details for my wife, I must get the backstory out of the way. A crime was committed, a crime we wanted, and, as with every crime, there was a chain of events leading up to it. I want to tell the whole story, not just the missing part, so that the missing part can be understood, put in perspective. It is good to sit here writing, looking out at the gas lamp, at the warm light it casts over the large cars parked outside my neighbours’ houses. The street looks so serene at night, in the glow of the lamp. From the radiologist’s living room comes the flickering grey light of a television.

  I too am fond of reading history books, like my father, and I am, of course, familiar with the simplest trap a historian can fall into. You look back at a major event—a world war, for example—and everything that happened before it seems to bear its imprint. You are almost certain to come across a great many events leading up to that war that make it appear inevitable. I, Randolph Tiefenthaler, forty-five years old, architect, married man, father of two, and determined to become the historian of my own life, do not want to fall into that trap. On the other hand, a major event does not come out of nowhere—it has to have causes. It has to have a history, and that history often begins decades before. It is always both, I think: chance and inevitability. If we had seen Dieter Tiberius before buying the flat, we wouldn’t have bought it—no doubt about it. That we didn’t see him was chance. That he ended up having to die has something to do with my own history, I suppose. I can’t deny that.

  4

  I HARDLY DARE WRITE THIS, because it sounds so terribly banal, but my life began with the fear of a war, with the fear of weapons. In October 1962, while my mother was heavily pregnant with me, my father bought several boxes of tinned food and crates of bottled water and stacked them in the cellar, because they wanted to be prepared for a nuclear war. The Cuban missile crisis had just begun, and my parents had the naive, almost touching hope that they would be able to survive a nuclear attack in their cellar. They planned to wait there a few days until the fires had gone out and the radioactivity had subsided, and then live on in a ravaged world with their daughter—my sister, who was a year old at the time—and their son, who would have been born in that cellar.

  It was the cellar of a Berlin tower block, a dingy hole behind a gate of wooden bars, where my parents kept their bikes and the things they didn’t have room for in their flat, but which were too precious to part with, not so much from a material point of view as a sentimental one. Among these things was a basic encyclopaedia, whose most recent volume arrived in the post every month. This encyclopaedia stood out less for its dependable knowledge than for its lavish binding, which supposedly warranted the high price. My grandma had let someone at the door talk her into a subscription, and had given it to her daughter-in-law, but my mother, in spite of her mere nine years’ schooling, was not taken in by the encyclopaedia’s handsome livery, and stacked it in the cellar, where it could be dug out for consultation should it ever be needed. Potatoes were also stored in this cellar, I believe. But it was not to be the place where I made my way into the world—that was a hospital. When I left my mother’s womb on 30 October, the crisis was over. Khrushchev had announced two days before that he would withdraw his missiles from Cuba. Kennedy’s persistence had paid off.

  Did these events seal my fate? Was I a child destined to live a life of fear? No, my parents saw things differently. For them, I was a peace baby, a symbol of hope. Khrushchev had backed down so that I might live a happy, peaceful life, my mother said, when she told me about those times—jokingly, of course, as mothers will say such things jokingly. The idea that Khrushchev had, in some deeper sense, withdrawn for her benefit and that of her family did not seem abstruse to my mother.

  It is chance that I was in my mother’s womb at the time of the Cuban missile crisis, when the entire world was preoccupied with i
ts imminent destruction. The question is whether that fact isn’t of crucial relevance to my life all the same. There is no doubt that my mother was frightened as the crisis ran its course—she was living in Berlin, the city on the front line of the Cold War. If the Russians didn’t destroy Berlin to spare East Germany, then the Americans would do it to eliminate East Germany. It made no difference whether the missiles came from the east or the west—my parents were expecting to end up as war victims.

  A pregnant woman is afraid twice over, I suppose—afraid for herself and afraid for her child, whom she wants to protect, but cannot protect well. She is particularly vulnerable because she is particularly immobile. That was my mother’s situation when I was living in her womb. I don’t know what effect a mother’s fears have on her foetus—I haven’t read anything on the subject—but one suspects they cannot be entirely without consequence. To be honest, I’d never thought about it until recently. It is only since meeting Dieter Tiberius, only since toying with the idea of my life as a war story, that I have begun to grapple with such things. Were we too scared of him? And where did our fear come from? Was my own fear born of my mother’s fear, all those years ago? But come on—that would make all babies born in the last months of 1962 babies of fear, and I’m sure that’s not the case.