One More River, page 19
Trying to look historically, even inside two generations it’s only a coincidence made possible by the timing of pre- and post-war. John’s mother married an Englishman, a banal happening. This marriage breaks up or got broken. Early thirties, she was a young woman and John a small child. It follows naturally that when she found an opportunity to remarry she took it.
So John was English and Sibylle was German. Nobody would think twice about this, either. Only this absurd behaviour as though one were white and the other black.
For myself, I can’t speak for poor Jo, it’s no more than saying ‘Oh, bad luck.’ It happens often enough in football, player puts it through his own goal. I don’t find it more than a small, quite a narrow coincidence that John should be sent here by the Army. This was the British Sector. How many young soldiers got dumped here, and how many slept with German girls? Nothing untoward about Gunther marrying Barbara to give her child a home and a father. The only exceptional, extraordinary thing is that it was John’s child.
Bits of driftwood come down with the current. One sticks on a stone in the brook, sets up an eddy, into which others fall. And they glue together. On a big scale they’d call it a logjam. Sometimes they couldn’t break it up, they would have to dynamite it. These things in history, some people see them as a conspiracy, it couldn’t have happened by accident, it’s too neat, happening just at that spot, it must have been planned by malevolence. My brother, Joachim, was like that, he used to get into rages thinking it was done on purpose with malice aimed at himself. Paranoia? He began to think that somehow he’d been deprived of his human rights, his very identity, and it was through the fault of the English, of his English grandfather. He came to see life as a battle between himself and all the world. He was brilliant, a much better student than myself. Those pills, when one has been eating speed for any length of time, I think a court would accept the notion of an induced insanity. You have to see his point of view. I’ve been talking too much about myself.
What I believe, Cathy thinks too it must have been so, the police accept. John asked, suggested, the form doesn’t matter, Sibylle to go to bed with him. We can’t tell, the incest idea came up and suddenly choked her. We think she ran away, panicked off blindly. And didn’t bolt the door because it wasn’t forced.
John escaped. We don’t know any details. On impulse, since he left, or plain forgot, his clothes, his washing things. Took only his bag, the things a man always carries. And the notebook. One imagines that he didn’t ‘think’, any more than Sibylle ‘thought’. Escaping was instinct. A soldier’s duty. Anything like ‘crept out’ is speculation, nor does it matter. They can’t have noticed. Busy quarrelling? As they did, a lot. Jo loved her, as I did and more, and perhaps too much. He would try to—I don’t know the word—settle, console. But not ‘reason with’. John might have wished or tried for that. Not with Joachim there.
Probably the first thing they heard was the car. Jo hadn’t done anything with it at all but put it away in the old cart shed. Even the key was still in the ignition. John escaping had never been part of any scenario. Oldish, perfectly good car. The motor might well have roared a bit with his accelerating it, nervous. That would have brought them running out. Nobody knows, but for the marks on the ground.
Jo had one of those Japanese things, four-wheel-drive, high, square and full of gadgets. Stupid thing I thought it, and told him so, but it was the apple of his eye. Powerful, macho, people get out of the way, as I dare say you know. Big brutish bars fore and aft, lots of lamps hung on them. I wish to say that my brother was not like this. I am tall and strong. He outdid me two centimetres both ways, and he didn’t have to show off his maleness. I have to say the thing amused me, too, and I borrowed it sometimes. My girl hated it.
The road needs some explaining. Around us is a maze of twisty little country roads, but the Autobahn is only five kilometres off, and the access is well signalled. This John would have followed naturally, and driving pretty fast.
The detail interested the police. Jo drove that thing like God’s wrath, and of course knew the roads blindfold. Whereas John, an old man, and shaky, might not have been totally prudent but wasn’t intending to kill himself. So we think that Sibylle argued, and held Jo back as much as she could. She would have wanted John to get away? Everything is arguable, and none of it matters. Sibylle was in the truck. And they didn’t catch him up before the autobahn entrance.
Witnesses said Jo passed them doing anything up to a hundred-and-eighty and rough with it, flashing lights and breathing down their neck. We have a lot of accidents on our fast roads, and virtually all of them from sheer brutal egoism. Going too fast, getting too close and not giving a damn for others. Once more, my brother was not like this in his real nature. The speed-pills were explanation enough for the police.
The Kripo officer, at his desk, with the Highway patrol’s report in front of him, and two cans of no-alcohol beer, pushed one over to me with the medical, sheets of it, but the paragraph about traces-of-amphetamines scored through with a yellow marker-pen. If I had tried to tell him about Jo’s character he wouldn’t have listened. Why should he?
I wasn’t feeling ‘shocked’ by then. It was two days later. Just bitterly hurt, myself smashed-up. I know I wanted to ask about the clowns one sees, you will have them too, doing one-seventy while chatting on their mobile phones, eating their vanity-pills. What’s the use? He’d have said, impatiently, I-know-I-know. There are people who jeer. Yaa-ah, moralising. This is their crushing insult, that one is being Angelic. I don’t have any quotes from writers, the way John did, but I do remember a line from an English poem, and I think it’s Doctor Johnson. Here something-something tumbles on your head (a roof tile maybe?) ‘And there a female atheist talks you dead.’ It’s about London but we’ve plenty too.
I suppose I hardly need tell you about motorways. Maybe the half of ours are three-lane, and these roughly are okay. The big trucks swing out very suddenly into the middle doing around one-twenty, but at least you still have an overtaking lane. But if there are only two, and often six-seven trucks nose to tail, you haven’t much margin. The fast-brothers are up behind you every moment, the big Mercedes, not to speak of some tin-can samba-wagon with his foot to the floor. There was nothing wrong with John’s driving. He was nipping in and out, a good rhythm, around one-thirty they said, which is just right. My brother came up and crowded him, pinching him in towards the emergency lane, to force him to stop. Lights flashing, klaxon going. Dangerous, reckless, use any word you like.
Beyond the emergency-lane is the ditch, right? Has to be, for drainage. I need not spell it out. They were all three killed. Even for us, a bad one. I have seen the photos. Later they called me, to identify the bodies. The patrol blocked the slow lane, for some three hours, to measure. Reckless Jo was, and it’s unforgiveable anyhow. Except by me. Technically he was an excellent driver, extremely quick reaction times. Yes, the pills. Yes, plainly, he was in a highly overexcited state. I still didn’t believe that left to himself this would have happened. The patrolmen say this too. She wrenched at his arm, or maybe the wheel, in an effort to hold clear, and he over-corrected? The patrol—and the Kripo—have raised a suicide hypothesis. I’ve said, I’m not accepting any of that. It isn’t our business to raise theories or to hold opinions. Nor homicide neither. Judge Not, said Jesus maybe, or Plato. Say I.
My conscience is not clear. I’ll come back to this. I have committed crimes, for which a court would condemn me to prison, lacking any better means of punishing me. If they knew. That is one reason for writing this letter. I’m not a shy violet. I’m a man, and I want to be able to stand up.
There are books, one doesn’t have to read them, and there are movies, and television serials, one doesn’t have to look at, to know. These are full up with every sort of violence the imagination can dream up. They do well, have a lot of success. The more ingeniously base, then the more success. We are a dirty crowd. An accident on the Autobahn, a car upside down in the ditch, all the people hang out of the window, gawking. So fascinated, they’ve been known to cause a further accident. The same with a fire, the more if inside a burning house there are people, trapped. The professionals learn to block their emotions, or they couldn’t do their job. The police and the firemen, who see things we cannot cope with. The Medical Examiner, and the woman in the State Pathology office, who get the small children, raped, burned, tortured. The nurses, who look after lunatics. And the plain good, kindly, who wash and feed and talk to the old men, who sit there senile, farting all the time.
John said, somewhere, whatever the imagination can picture, the human being will go beyond. The unimaginable.
I am the only one left, three generations of us. Not true, there’s my aunt, Cathy, more like a sister. In case it came into your mind, no, we don’t sleep together. For fear of incest? No, it just doesn’t occur to either of us. Now Alan is of course my uncle and it’s as though he belonged to a different family.
I still have to go back, to the beginning of John’s notebook, to say what I did. Not Why. I don’t know why.
I had better make it quite clear that Sibylle had nothing to do with our persecution of John. I can’t tell just what she knew about all this. She was good at getting to know things, and at keeping quiet about what she knew. She had an uncanny trick of telling what was in one’s mind. She didn’t know about this. We saw to that. She wouldn’t have harmed a hair on his head. She wouldn’t have admitted any damage to things belonging to him. I’d say allowed. We were grown-up, but she had a lot of authority. We were a bit frightened of her, I think more than if she’d been our real mother. Very loving, and could be icy, disapproving. We got into the habit of keeping things secret. I have a bit of explaining to do.
We were still children, when our father killed himself. Gunther rescued us. As you know by now this was his nature. You’d almost say habit. Around this time, it’s vague in my mind because we didn’t know or understand, Sibylle came back to live with us. Barbara was already ill. Sibylle took on the responsibility of being mother to us so naturally that we hardly noticed. We were happy, where before we hadn’t been happy. Finding things out, and getting them wrong, in fragments, this was one of our first ideas about ‘John’. We hated him because we thought he’d been cruel to Sibylle.
After Gunther’s brother Rudi died, who had the farm, we were rich. Gunther understood the law, knew all the ways of the Administration, succession rights or tax devices, and he knew how not to be hassled. He fixed things so that Sibylle, and ourselves, should never be in want. As students we were pretty comfortable, and if we took time off it was no problem. And we had plenty of ready money.
I need to be careful here. It’s too easy to blame everything on Joachim, who is dead. It’s true that he was the older and the brighter, and the more decisive, and that I tagged along and I admired, but I mustn’t minimise what I did, nor try to excuse it.
We had built up a lot of idiot fixed ideas by then, about John. We blamed him just for existing. We thought he’d abandoned his child by Barbara, our father, and was somehow answerable for all the calamities when we were small. He was ‘the Englishman’, ‘the enemy’. We thought he hated us. And that he’d brought nothing but evil to our much-loved Sibylle. I don’t know what we didn’t get in our heads. The more, because she never complained, never said anything spiteful. We brooded.
Bit by bit we thought of a lot of dirty tricks. Threats, pressured to cause anguish. Clever words. Legal terms exist. Bringing people into fear, or disrepute, endangering by suggestion. We thought ourselves justified, and we thought ourselves very funny.
There is a lot of crime nowadays of this sort. Not covered by statute, provision in the penal code. Even if proved a court doesn’t much sanction many of these things. Misdemeanour. Phoning late at night and breathing down the line. Spreading scandal by insinuation, leaving dead cats on the doorstep. Mean-minded petty stuff. We thought we could do better than that. This word is used a lot—’destabilise’.
We knew where John lived. We wormed, seeming innocent, a lot of stuff out of Sibylle about the house, how it was fixed, where the Peartrees lived. We went up there for a weekend, scouting about thinking ourselves very tough and crafty.
It was my idea shooting at him to ‘just miss’. Ignoble and we thought ourselves immensely funny. See him skip. Creeping down the road with the big pistol—hilarious. Once the idea of scaring him witless took hold we got excited. Knock him loose, make him run for it We had two cars. Shepherd him along. Schoolboy spy-novel stuff. It was so easy. I can’t put words to my shame. Wandering there through France, the three of us. We had no idea of causing him real harm at that stage. To think now, that this would bring about his death, I am still dodging this.
Joachim got increasingly skilful at guessing his mind. It was Jo who got ahead of him over that ferry port in Brittany which looked like a bolt hole and had that way out to England.
There’s very little I can find to exonerate that. Yes, that was Jo. We were both strung up, short of sleep, we had got quite exhausted over the tracking act. I see now that Jo was taking more and more of those pills he had, to stay ahead. I don’t know enough about tolerances acquired to speak with certainty about an overdose. I think that Jo got the horrible idea that frightening him wasn’t enough, we wouldn’t be able to pursue him in England and we’d gone to all this trouble for no real result. I don’t know. I feel sure that Jo did not mean to kill him, but that a real bullet, a real wound, would be success, and satisfaction.
I was down at the harbour, to see whether John would get on the ferry. Joachim really must have been insane at that moment. And to get the wrong man—that was infinitely worse than any fiasco we could either of us imagine.
Our one idea was to get out of that hole before the police caught up with us. A blind panic. Jo kept saying the fellow wasn’t badly hurt. I think in fact he did recover all right, but we weren’t to know that. We quarrelled, furiously. I’d been taking some of those pills myself. I feel ill just thinking about this time. I have to try to be honest with myself. I think I was off my own trolley but there is no excuse, none whatsoever. No extenuating circumstances, nothing to cover the evil we had done. And what had we achieved? Grievous injury, to a harmless innocent bystander.
What I find now especially horrible is that this wasn’t at all the way of it at that moment. Not shame but humiliation, that we’d made monkeys of ourselves. I daresay you know about our gangs. The skinheads in big boots. The bare arms with tattoos. The yobs who parade with flags, bawling nazi slogans. Well of course you do, because they get us a lot of bad publicity—and that is just what they like. People say, look at these awful bloody Germans, they don’t alter. The idiots love that, they want to be ba-ad and it gives them a big lift to be thought bad and mad and dangerous. They’re full of beer and that helps them feel important. When they do something bad, like fire-raising, and women and children are killed, then they get astonished and say they never meant it. You’ve noticed—when cemeteries get profaned, tombstones broken? Not always Jewish, either. The police have learned to look for small children. Maybe only ten years old. They’ll say they were only playing. And it’s true.
It is shattering to see and to know that we were exactly on this level. And we are students. We are supposed to be the pick of the bunch. We are not mentally retarded. We’ve had the best education the country can give us. We have good housing, good homes, lots of everything we could want. No mother could have been more loving than was Sibylle.
I split up with Joachim. I never even knew he had a pistol. You can buy them easily enough on the black market but what would the idiot want with a pistol? Like some scrawny little boy you see in Africa, with a steel helmet much too big for him. He’s got an assault rifle, it’s all he has to be proud of.
So Jo was not with me when I burned the house. I alone am answerable.
I was mad. Mad too in the American sense, mad at everything. Mad too still at John, totally childish, we had prepared this most elaborate intimidation thing and it had fizzled into this fiasco, I stampeded off, exactly like the hooligan, saying let’s give the Turks a jump then, let’s make a bang. There were we running away with the police after us and John gets off with a bit of a fright. No satisfaction in that and less still thinking of the poor fellow in hospital. Pills. One half of my mind was saying, childish foolish frolic ended badly. And the other half still saying, but we wanted to punish John. There’s the yob mentality for you, punish the Turks for taking away the job we haven’t got, that’s their idea of logic.
I thought myself clever. No petrol of course or anything that would look criminal. I wanted it to be Mysterious. All that dry wood, bit of old hay, toss in a fag-end like any careless passer-by. There was a bit of a wind, make a merry blaze. Just to set the woodpile alight, I think that was all I wanted. Or am I lying again? That there was too much wind, and inevitably the house would catch—obvious, but I don’t think this was in my mind. I was in too much of a hurry because I was frightened, damned scared of Peartree and his dogs. Did I want, subliminally, to burn the house? I quite honestly don’t know.
I went straight home. I had no more speed pills left, either. You think you can catch up on sleep, after, but you don’t, really, and this helps keep you hooked, it’s a classic example of ‘Flucht nach voren’, I don’t think you can say that in English, can you?
I was sour with Jo. He didn’t get back for several days. John seemed to think we followed him to Amsterdam but in that state of mind one sees things behind every window. The trick in Budapest was all Jo’s. How he got on to that I do not know, because we didn’t talk to each other for a while. I have to admit it was brilliant, much more what we had originally thought up, but the opportunity has to present itself. I still think it harmless and much more typical of what my brother was really like. Afterwards, when we were friends again, it became a giggle. ‘I was really foxy,’ was all he would say. What I now know I got from Kollo. Yes, I went to see him. Got on well with him. He’s a now-you-see-him, now-you-don’t. A mix, which I don’t pretend to understand, and certainly I’m no judge. He’s genuine in this much anyhow, that he truly does refuse child-abuse. At least I think he does. John would have known and it’s hard to see how they would be friendly if … I’m not a theologian.
