Fear Read online

  I turned around and saw the remains of the wedding party. I saw the empty bottles, the half-empty bags of crisps, the pool, the sleepy people in deckchairs—among them the woman who knew Aung San Suu Kyi—and Putu, who had woken up and was smiling at me. Stefan came over and asked what had happened. I told him and said I would get myself a return flight immediately. He understood, of course, and asked if he could help in any way.

  ‘Can you make sure the girl gets home?’ I asked.

  ‘Sure,’ he said.

  We hugged, and I glanced at Putu, who looked back questioningly. Then I went to find my moped and drove it through the waking town, down to the hotel.

  I rang my wife as soon as I arrived, but she said the police were still there and she’d be in touch later. I packed my things, checked out and got someone to take me to the airport.

  Rebecca rang and told me that the police had cautioned Dieter Tiberius.

  ‘Cautioned?’ I asked. ‘Is that all?’

  ‘Yes, that’s all,’ she said.

  ‘Isn’t it trespassing, at least?’ I wanted to know.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘He didn’t try to get into our flat.’

  I didn’t understand. As I saw it, he had besieged our house; surely that was a punishable offence.

  ‘How about stalking?’ I asked. ‘He’s a stalker—surely there are procedures for dealing with them?’

  I heard our doorbell again and my wife said Mathilde had arrived, her best friend. Mathilde was going to spend the rest of the night with her, she said, as there was no way she could stay alone in the flat with the children. I thought she put a strange emphasis on the word ‘alone’, but I wasn’t sure.

  I told her I would try to get a quick flight back. I was going to say a whole lot more, but she had already pressed the buzzer that opened the front door and I could hear her friend’s voice.

  ‘Bye,’ said my wife and hung up.

  I booked flights back to Berlin via Singapore and Paris, mainly with Singapore Airlines. There was only one seat left in business class. Take-off was at 6.05 pm—not for another eight hours. I sat in Starbucks in the departure lounge, drinking espresso after espresso, regretting everything I had done over the past two months, and above all what I had not done: put Dieter Tiberius in his place, been with my family. I regretted the trip to Bali, and bringing Putu back with me from the bar. What had I been thinking? But nothing had actually happened—that was something.

  I thought about what I would do now: consult our lawyer, go and see Tiberius’s landlord, approach the police. He had to move out of the basement. There was no other way—no question of reconciliation, of coming to an agreement. We couldn’t live under the same roof as that man. I googled ‘stalking’ on my phone and read my way through a number of websites. The problem, it seemed, was that you couldn’t do anything about it unless the stalker became violent. I was despondent at first, then cautiously optimistic again, telling myself that there was no way Tiberius could get away with it, not in a country where the rule of law prevailed.

  In the early afternoon I rang my wife, and she cried. She hadn’t slept. I told her everything I was going to do and that we’d soon be rid of that bastard. My wife said she was taking the children to stay the night at her friend’s. Then I talked to Paul and Fay and said what I always said when I was away: that I missed them and that I’d soon be back and we’d go to the zoo. My voice cracked, and I had tears in my eyes.

  On the short flight from Denpasar to Singapore, I slept.

  When we landed, I immediately switched my phone on and waited impatiently for it to find a network. There were two voicemail messages from my wife. Call me urgently, and then: Why haven’t you called?

  I called her straight away, and she told me that Dieter Tiberius had left a letter on the doormat, three pages, handwritten. It said he had suspected for some time now that we were sexually abusing our children, so he had started to watch us from the garden at night and was in possession of evidence that he would be handing over to the police.

  I laughed. ‘Now we’ve got him,’ I said. ‘If he’s spouting that sort of filth, we’ll soon have him out of the house.’

  ‘But what if the police believe him?’ said my wife.

  ‘They won’t believe him,’ I said. ‘That’s absurd.’ Then my phone died.

  I had a two-hour wait before my flight to Paris and spent the first part of it looking for a shop that sold adaptors for the electrical sockets in Singapore. I had a universal adaptor that fitted pretty much every socket in the world but had stupidly packed it in my suitcase—so much for my status as a global traveller.

  I hurried along the rows of shops—perfume, clothes, electrical appliances, alcohol, all the big brand names—and at last I found an adaptor, but then I couldn’t find anywhere to plug it in. Finally I went into the men’s toilets and plugged my phone into a shaving socket to charge. Men came and went. I heard them urinate, some of them with a sigh. They washed their hands beside me, their tired eyes in the mirrors. One man gave me a surprised look. What did he see? A child abuser?

  My relief had evaporated. ‘What if the police believe him?’ my wife had asked. It was not impossible—they were highly sensitive to the possibility of child abuse these days, and rightly so. Then a film unspooled in my head, a film I have seen a thousand times since, as sharp and vibrant as on the big screen. Only it wasn’t on the big screen—it was all in my mind.

  It began with a tracking shot of a suburb—strangely, or perhaps not so strangely, an American suburb, because almost all the films we see are American, so when we think of ourselves as characters in a film, we always imagine ourselves in American towns and landscapes. It was one of those clean suburbs where all the houses look the same: tidy, with well-kept lawns, and middle-of-the-range cars parked in the drive. The terrible thing about suburbs like that is that in the midst of all this sameness, any deviation sticks out like a sore thumb. Decent people live there, and anyone less than decent stands out.

  The camera comes to a halt outside one of the houses, peeps in at the window and sees cheerful everyday life, wholesome and intact. A family is sitting having breakfast: a beautiful woman, a respectable, hardworking man, two delightful children. It is us. The stalker appears. He slinks around the house, a sinister fellow: ugly, down at heel, an evil villain, bent on the destruction of all that is good and pure. To begin with, the family appears inviolable, but there is a twist in the plot: an overzealous social worker, a corrupt lawyer, a disreputable journalist, a malevolent public. At the end, the children are in state care, their father is in prison, and their mother is walking the streets in order to survive.

  The last shot is of the house at dusk, a sign on the lawn: For Sale. The lie in this film was ‘wholesome and intact’. My family was not neither wholesome nor intact.

  My mobile had some juice again—it could, at least, be switched on—and I rang my wife and told her we weren’t child abusers, that everybody knew that and that we had nothing to be afraid of.

  ‘Where are you?’ my wife asked.

  ‘In the men’s toilets,’ I said.

  ‘Why are you ringing me from the men’s toilets?’ Rebecca asked. I explained that my phone’s battery was flat and I couldn’t use it without a power connection.

  ‘Don’t be scared,’ I implored her, and a man looked at me, probably a German. ‘I’ll ring again in ten minutes,’ I said.

  I hung up, and waited and waited until the phone was slightly recharged again. I pulled out the plug, stowed everything away in my bag, rushed out and rang my wife. She didn’t pick up the landline at home, and I couldn’t get hold of her on her mobile either. I walked around the airport and back past the luxury shops as if in a trance, listening to the loudspeaker announcements: flights to Kuala Lumpur, Bangalore, Melbourne, Los Angeles, Phnom Penh.

  I had been to Singapore once, three years ago, when Stefan was working there. We had been to a big dinner at Raffles Hotel, and before long I had felt disgruntled at th
e way all the Europeans, all the citizens of western democracies gathered there, seemed to feel so very much at home in Singapore. The family of Lee Kuan Yew had ruled with a rod of iron for decades, and those who broke the law faced draconian punishments—canings and executions—but throughout the main course I heard nothing but praise for the city’s order and security. Now, waiting in the departure lounge for the Singapore Airlines flight to Paris, I thought: If this has to happen to me, why can’t it happen in Singapore? They’d know how to deal with Tiberius here. The death penalty. This thought was, if I remember rightly, my next step towards barbarism.

  I didn’t sleep on the flight to Paris. I went to the toilet three times to listen to my voicemail, because I was afraid I might have had a phone call from the child welfare office. But there was nothing. I watched three films without sound—a Woody Allen film, a Clint Eastwood and one of the Harry Potters; I forget which—and I kept an eye on the little aeroplane that was making its way across the screen towards Paris. In my head, my American film unspooled, interspersed with desolate thoughts of what I would do to Dieter Tiberius as soon as I laid hands on him: fractured nose, massive bruising everywhere. A moment later, I was once again the model citizen of a model state where the rule of law prevailed. We had acted lawfully and we would continue to act lawfully, so the law would protect us. Dieter Tiberius could start to pack his bags.

  Charles de Gaulle, yet another airport—more loathing of airports, more disconsolate waiting. Then Berlin. My wife was there with Paul and Fay at the arrivals gate—big hugs such as we hadn’t given each other for a long time, hugs that had no history, that knew nothing of the last years of our marriage. Desperate hugs. In the car on the way home I told the children about the sky ships with the black sails, and the dogs on the beach. Our house stood white in the morning sun, quiet and peaceful. Nothing stirred. It was the house I knew and yet it was utterly different.

  13

  I THINK I’M UNLUCKY WITH HOUSES, with property. When we were tenants in a sixth-floor flat on the estate, all was well with me. My troubles only began when we moved into our own place—although even then they didn’t begin immediately.

  We moved early in 1973, when I had just turned ten. I remember hardly anything of the next few years—nothing personal at any rate. Of course I know where I watched the ’74 World Cup final—at the Wacker 04 clubhouse, with meatballs and lemonade to celebrate Germany’s victory. I also remember Willy Brandt resigning as chancellor after one of his closest aides was exposed as a Stasi intelligence agent. My father said the aide should be put up against the wall, and it made sense to me: he was a spy, and the spies in my books often met just such an end.

  My father’s guns were not something we talked about. They were simply there, and we accepted that as normal. All the same, I was aware that other fathers did not leave the house with guns tucked beneath their armpits. At first, I supposed that my father was in charge of security at the dealership, as well as selling cars. But they didn’t have large quantities of cash on the premises—it couldn’t be that. And so I hit on the notion that he led a second, secret life: he was a killer, or the head of a mafia-type organisation and we, his family, were his cover. Or else he was actually an agent.

  Berlin was a city of agents, and the role of my home town in the Cold War had become increasingly clear to me. We were the centre of it all: it was here that the systems came crashing together, ours good and theirs bad. And wasn’t Ford an American company that might well provide cover for government agents?

  I began to observe my father more closely, but saw nothing to confirm my suspicions. On workdays he left the house at a quarter to eight and was back at a quarter past seven without fail. We would have dinner, and after dinner we sat in the living room, talking and playing games with my mother, while he read on the sofa or cleaned his guns. I shall never forget the smell of Ballistol. On Saturdays he drove to the firing range, but my sister was with him, and on Sundays we walked in the woods.

  I paid surprise visits to the dealership to see if he really was always there. He always was, and I never caught him hurriedly seeing off some shady character, or hastily hanging up the phone when he saw me. There had, though, been a change over the years. Potential customers no longer came and marvelled; they came as experts now. They knew all about cars and were not going to let it slip my father’s attention. He was no longer king of the Ford dealership—I was aware of that—but that didn’t matter if he was an agent, and for a time I had no doubt of that at all. I would have loved to tell my friends that we were not the family they thought we were, not a family like any other—more like a family on TV. But I couldn’t mention it. We’d had it drummed into us not to talk about my father’s guns, not under any circumstances.

  I didn’t even tell Klaus Karmoll about the guns—Klaus Karmoll who was older than me, and stronger, and sometimes lay in wait for me on the way to school. I had no means of defending myself and would have loved to tell him we had a Colt at home, a few shotguns and some pistols, including a Walther PPK that I was quite capable of handling. But I said nothing and put up with the beatings, so firm was my belief that disaster would strike if anyone found out about my father’s guns. I never had the feeling that weapons made me safer—in fact my father was always afraid that our house would be broken into, or that he himself would be mugged, by gang members in need of guns.

  One occasion I do remember from our time in the new house—which is to say, my teenage years—is a Saturday when my father did not drive to the firing range. I was maybe thirteen. I no longer believed my father was an agent—he was, I thought, simply a gun enthusiast. That Saturday he came home in the afternoon laden with bags and parcels, which he put down in the living room, telling us not to touch them. Of course we tiptoed around the enormous pile and soon figured out what he’d bought: a tent, together with a whole host of other things to guarantee survival at six thousand metres. I was thrilled—we were going to set off, at last, my father and I, his travelling companion. The adventures could begin.

  At the same time, I was surprised, because my father and I were no longer as close as we had been. In those quiet years between 1973 and 1975, I had somehow lost him. I don’t know what happened. We drifted apart so gradually that I can hardly remember it happening. I only know that around 1975, things were no longer right between us. I can’t recall any conversations, anything we did together. He hadn’t been to any of my football games for years, although I wasn’t a bad goalie, nothing for a father to be ashamed of. But he didn’t come, not even when Wacker 04 played against Hertha Zehlendorf or Hertha BSC—and those were matches worth watching.

  After I turned thirteen he had no further opportunity, because I quit the team. Over time I had developed a strange fear of being alone in the goal. In those days, boys weren’t as well trained in tactics as they are today; chances to score were often the result of what I called ‘attacks’. My defence would be a long way down the field because they all wanted to play at the front, and then they’d lose the ball and suddenly three players from the opposing team were charging in my direction and there was no one to help me, no purple shirt anywhere near. I couldn’t take it anymore and asked to play in another position, but I wasn’t talented enough, so I stopped playing at the club altogether.

  When I think about it now, I don’t remember my father ever coming to see me in a match, though I expect he came along now and again when I was little. With no shared interests, we had lost touch with each other—but the mound of camping equipment in the living room seemed to announce a renewed effort on his part. He had bought the gear for the journeys we had once planned, and I was pleased. It would have been even nicer if he had taken me with him to choose the things, but perhaps it was supposed to be a surprise.

  I had been asked round to a friend’s house that afternoon, and when I got back in the evening, the tent was in the garden. I went up to it, pulled open the zip and saw one sleeping bag and one thermal mat. My things must be in my room, I tho
ught, but when I checked upstairs there was nothing there.

  I went back down to the living room and found my mother playing board games with my brother and sister. My father was there too, reading—a quick hello and he went back to his magazine. I played a round of Chinese chequers, but as nothing was said, I soon took myself off upstairs again, where I ran a bath and then sat in it, brooding. I had no idea what was going on.

  When I returned to my room after my soak, wrapped in a towel, I looked into the garden and saw light in the Himalaya-proof tent. Now I was furious, and stormed up the spiral staircase to my sister’s room in the attic. She asked in an unfriendly way what I wanted. We didn’t get on well.

  ‘Nothing,’ I said curtly and went back down.

  ‘Don’t come up here again,’ she yelled after me.

  Cornelia has been dead for several years and today these memories are painful to me. I have a photo of the two of us on my bookcase—my mother gave it to me for my last birthday. The photo is in a gold frame, perhaps twelve by twelve centimetres, and mounted on purple card with a gold-coloured floral pattern. The photo is small—a miniature. My sister is maybe four years old, so I’d be three. She has plaits and is wearing a short dress. I have close-cropped hair and am wearing short trousers. We’re holding hands. My sister is half a pace ahead of me, looking cheerful and determined as she leads me through life. I follow, turned in on myself.

  ‘That is the sister I never had,’ I said to my wife, as I looked at the photo.

  ‘Maybe it’s the sister you had then,’ she said.

  Her words stunned me. I had never seen it like that. I remembered my sister as the beast I fought for supremacy. We hurt each other so badly that it was years before we finally started to get on—not until we were twenty or twenty-one, and then we liked each other up to a point, but never got properly close, not even just before her death.

  I was relieved that my sister wasn’t sitting in the tent with my father, that she wasn’t going to be his companion—and I was sorry the same was true of me. I couldn’t sleep for a long time. I kept getting up, going over to the window and looking down into the garden. I could see the tent lit up from the inside. I could see my father’s shadow as he sat there, probably reading Auto Motor and Sport, in the light of a high-power torch bright enough to help you find your way to the top of Mount Everest at night in a snowstorm at seven thousand five hundred metres. Later, it was dark down there.