The Valley of Unknowing

by Sington, Philip

  The story leapfrogged forward effortlessly, taking in years, decades. A new world was being made and Alex was in the vanguard of those who were making it. He grows older, more powerful, more ruthless. He falls in love with a girl called Tania, but will love be his undoing or his redemption?

  I read on, page after page. Every run-of-the-mill sentence, every glimpse of awkwardness brought new hope that his novel would fail, that I would not be finally and decisively eclipsed, as Richter surely intended. But these promises of mediocrity were never fulfilled. Reading late into the night, I found humanity, truthfully and tenderly drawn. I found passion and anger and hope against all odds, such as I hadn’t felt in years. I had no way of knowing how anyone else would react, but for me the experience was strangely moving – the way a rediscovered memory can be moving, when it shows us in sudden, vivid colours how we used to be.

  And then, about halfway through, it dawned on me why this book, of all books, gave rise to such nostalgic feelings. Alex, the protagonist, was none other than Thomas Schwitzer, my protagonist, grown older, if no wiser. His was the same mixture of grit, resourcefulness and naivety, the same moral emptiness. His beloved Tania was none other than my Sonja Bruyn. She was no longer a true believer. Her hopes for a better world had turned to dust. Her dreams were now only of escape. But still I knew her. I knew her gestures, her voice, her heart. It was not an imaginary future world she and Thomas inhabited; it was Neustadt, my Neustadt, its uncertain destiny now realised in full.

  I couldn’t read any more. I got up from my chair, letting the pages fall to the floor. Whether Schilling knew it or not – but of course he knew it! – what Wolfgang Richter had written, what he had presumed to write, was nothing less than a coded sequel to my most famous work. What had become of Thomas and Sonja? It seemed Wolfgang Richter had taken it upon himself finally to answer that question.

  4

  If I could illustrate this story with two photographs, they would both be of women, the first being of my mother. Unfortunately I have no picture of her, nor of the other woman either, for different but related reasons. It is the lot of those who flee to leave such inessentials behind. The main requirement of the refugee is to travel light.

  The day after I read Richter’s manuscript was my mother’s birthday. It was an occasion I always marked with a visit to the Neumarkt, at the heart of the city. Since Eva Krug had no grave and no resting place that I knew of, I went to where I had last seen her, namely by the ruins of the Frauenkirche. These lay still in a scorched heap where they had fallen forty years before, the main addition besides an unkempt hedge being a smudge of weeds, which topped the mounds of shattered masonry like an ill-fitting hairpiece. Once at the spot, I did what I had always done, which was to walk round the ruins, first one way, then the other, just as I had done on the morning my mother disappeared.

  My memories are sketchy, but they offer a better account of the event than has often appeared in prefaces and introductions to The Orphans of Neustadt. I was eight years old. It was February or March in the last year of the war. My mother and I were fleeing westwards from a part of Germany that was soon to be a part of Poland. By the time we reached the city there were half a dozen of us, the others being neighbours and an old woman called Dora whom we had met on the road. We had only been there a day, and had gone into the centre because we’d heard they were handing out supplies. It was windy, and I remember how the dust and ash from the bombed-out buildings would blow up in great clouds, stinging my eyes. I had expected the Neumarkt to be bustling – like a market, in fact – but I was disappointed to find it almost deserted, except for boy soldiers in baggy fatigues and a few old men with shovels. Most of the debris from the bombing had been gathered into heaps, heaps far taller than I was, leaving cobbled pathways from one side of the square to the other. We were close to the ruins of the Frauenkirche, distinguishable by the two surviving fragments of wall, which jutted, black and jagged, fifty feet into the air. My mother must have seen something, or someone, up ahead. She told me to stay where I was and wait for her. She would be back in a little while. Then she walked away, still carrying her suitcase. The last image I have is of her stepping over a beam of charred wood that lay across her path. I think she glanced back over her shoulder, to make sure I was still there. Then another cloud of dust enveloped us and she was gone.

  After a while two of the others in our party went looking for her.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Dora said. ‘She’ll come back for you.’

  I ran round and round the ruins, anxious to search as far and wide as possible, but afraid to stray too far, in case my mother returned and found me gone. Eventually we were all moved on by some men in uniform. We spent several nights in a warehouse near the railway station (since demolished), but I kept running back to the Neumarkt, because I felt sure that whatever had happened to my mother, she would reappear sooner or later, or at least send word. This went on for a week or two – how well I got to know those ruins, the landscape of debris; charred timbers, broken columns, the fragments of carved stone – until one day I woke up in the back of a moving truck without any idea how I got there.

  I was taken to a field hospital and treated for chronic dehydration, pneumonia, a urinary tract infection and head lice. I stayed there for almost a month until my great-uncle Kristof came from Halle to collect me. Somehow Dora had managed to get word to him. How much my great-uncle knew about my mother’s (to me, utterly inexplicable) disappearance I cannot say. I expect he had suspicions. But they were not suspicions he shared with me.

  ‘All we can do is wait,’ he would tell me. ‘Everything will become clear in time.’

  Uncle Kristof, as I called him, had been a schoolteacher. In decades past he had taught English and French in the local high school. He lived alone on the northern side of the city, with a view of an old half-beamed water tower that, in the best neo-Gothic tradition, resembled the turret of an enchanted castle. His apartment was full of books – beautiful books, many illustrated, the plates lying veiled behind sheets of translucent paper. In other circumstances I might have been happy there, but I knew my duty lay somewhere else. I had to get back to where my mother was waiting. I had to get back to the ruins of the Frauenkirche, a hundred miles away.

  After my third attempt at escape – I was twice apprehended at the train station and once while hitchhiking on the road – Uncle Kristof decided it was time I faced facts.

  ‘Your mother is not coming back,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry, but that’s the way it is.’ I remember how he put his hand on my cheek, by way of consolation. It felt cold and callous. ‘You must think of your mother as a casualty of war. One among millions.’

  He was right. Mine was a common fate. We were a nation of orphans, the nature of whose orphaning was frequently obscure and rarely, if ever, investigated. But I could not think of my mother in statistical terms. I demanded to know if she was dead and, if so, who had killed her. Perhaps surprised at my vehemence, my great-uncle admitted that he did not know for certain if she was dead or not. He knew only that she had disappeared.

  ‘It’s possible that she just couldn’t cope, Bruno,’ he said.

  If this was supposed to make me feel happier about never seeing my mother again, it did not have the desired effect. It simply added another horrifying possibility to those that already haunted me: that I had been taken to the Neumarkt for the express purpose of being abandoned.

  Either way, my great-uncle was adamant that I should put the whole episode behind me. ‘A lot of people disappear,’ he said. ‘They vanish off the face of the earth. It’s no good asking who’s to blame, over and over. It won’t bring them back.’

  There were tears in his eyes as he said this, but even these were not enough to convince me that what he said was true. It was many years before I could accept that my mother was really gone; and many more years after that before I was prepared to give up all hope of learning her fate. Even then, on my regular returns to the Neumarkt, I often caught
sight of her – or rather of women who fleetingly, magically, resembled her. I would always take off after them. In those brief moments of pursuit my elation, my conviction, obliterated all reason and all doubt. I can’t say that I ever really gave up hope. Hardly a day went by when I didn’t picture the moment when I would turn a corner and find her standing before me, for real.

  On this occasion, perhaps because of the mist and the rain, I saw no ghosts, no women with suitcases vanishing into the mist. What I saw mostly were lines of parked buses, that and young people in bulky jackets, smoking cigarettes and talking at the tops of their voices. Bratwurst was being sold from a trailer, filling the square with a smell of cabbage and boiled meat. Synthesised pop music, blaring from a loudspeaker, obscured the hammering of the generator. I took my usual bouquet of dried flowers from inside my coat and, when I felt sure no one was looking, threw it high up on to the tallest heap of debris – high enough, I hoped, to be invisible to passers-by. This was necessary because the authorities did not encourage unofficial acts of remembrance where wars of fascist aggression were concerned and any flowers placed at or near the ruins of the Frauenkirche were always quickly removed.

  5

  Who is the other woman whose photograph I do not have? If my mother was the first in my life, she was the last: my lover and my downfall, my hope and my despair. Her photographs I burned in an ashtray, one at a time – some might say to be rid of the evidence. Her name was Theresa Aden: Theresa like the saint; Aden like Eden, complete with snake.

  I first laid eyes on her a few days after reading Richter’s novel. It happened at a cultural event organised by the regional committee of the Cultural Association, at which I was to be awarded the title ‘People’s Champion of Art and Culture’. Originally, according to the notification I had received that summer, the title was to have been People’s Hero of Art and Culture (my italics). Although ‘champion’, to my mind, carried pugilistic and mercenary connotations, the change didn’t bother me. I assumed the reason for it was arbitrary and trivial, even if it was not simply a bureaucratic error. It never occurred to me that it might be a harbinger of disaster.

  The venue was a large civic building, which had been burned to the ground in 1945 and recently rebuilt. The outside, colonnaded, monumental and sooty, looked much as it must have done before the war. But the interior was devoid of classical splendour. The walls were blank, the light fittings modern; where once there was marble, now there was flecked linoleum. Even the door handles, L-shaped in galvanised steel, would not have looked out of place in a prefabricated office. I arrived with ten minutes to spare, was briefly greeted by the secretary of the Cultural Association and took my seat in the front row. Behind me sat row upon row of prominent citizens: men sweating in their bulky suits, women shiny beneath voluminous perms. Finally the house lights went down and the stage lights went up. It was then that I saw her.

  At first, all I could make out was the top of her head. She was playing the violin in an orchestral ensemble situated below the stage and partially hidden behind a curtain. I saw blonde hair, parted down the centre and tied behind. As she swayed gently back and forth, the tip of her bow dipping in and out of sight, I glimpsed large brown eyes, wide with concentration, and high cheekbones, slightly flushed. I straightened up to get a better view. Even with her chin clamped to her instrument, I could appreciate her slender, graceful neck. (Would it, I wondered, carry the violinist’s signature pressure bruise, so like a love bite?) She was dressed in black, her arms pale, the neckline just stiff enough and low enough to hint at the swell of her breasts. But it was not until the piece was finished and she put down her violin that I got a clear view of her face.

  In the preceding minutes my imagination had completed the picture, one in which she appeared as a beauty of neoclassical perfection. In profile she was divine. Face on, she turned out to be human: her jaw strong, almost masculine; a dimple in her chin; even a faint, but discernible depression on one side of her temple. In short, she was not classically beautiful, merely pretty (that complex, double-edged adjective, so close to petty, and which, when the English first coined it, meant deceitful). Still, she had those eyes: clear, brown, blameless eyes that narrowed when she laughed, hinting for an instant at the exotic, the erotic and the forbidden.

  The event got under way, starting with a showcase of Saxon cultural talent. There was music, dance (ballet and folk), gymnastics and a reading of awful poetry. I watched the violinist through it all, becoming aware only as I mounted the rostrum, the applause ringing in my ears, that she had not been playing a violin at all, but a viola. I was surprised. The viola is the Cinderella of the string section, the butt of cruel jokes. It is always in a supporting role, never centre stage, being blessed with neither repertoire nor romantic connotations. But she had chosen it. She had chosen the shadows over the limelight, the toil over the triumph. It was, I thought, a very good sign.

  She looked up as I passed, noticing me for the first time. The next few seconds, when I felt her gaze follow me across the platform, the sweet, intoxicating weightlessness, are all I remember of the ceremony: the speech given by comrade President Pischner, the handshakes, the solemn presentation of the medal, which was hung round my neck, these things I cannot even picture. My mind was elsewhere.

  What I remember next was standing with a glass of sparkling wine in my hand, talking to Frau Jaeger, whose husband was something in the Ministry of Trade. Drinks were being served to performers and guests, the company forming a crush below the stage. The orchestral ensemble, now in plain view, was playing in the background – or at least they had been. For when I looked round I saw that they had stopped. Several seats were empty. The viola player had gone.

  I wanted to go in search of her at once, but Frau Jaeger, whose name was Barbara, was someone I preferred to keep on side. Her husband was widely believed to be a member of the HVA, the elite foreign espionage department of the Ministry of State Security. Certainly he went away a great deal, leaving Barbara, a languorous redhead with a taste for entertaining, to her own devices. I was invited regularly to soirées at their spacious apartment in Loschwitz, where foreign alcohol, olives and superior charcuterie were usually on offer. The guest list consisted of university professors, musicians and artists (what Barbara called her ‘cultural circle’), mixed with a sprinkling of Party people. To oblige Barbara, I would wear my velvet jacket and a black roll-neck sweater, in an attempt to look writerly. But the occasions were always marred by her incorrigible flirting, which grew more and more audacious as the evening wore drunkenly on. I had the impression her husband didn’t care what she got up to. I expect he had a mistress in Berlin or Moscow or Beirut. But without written permission, duly notarised by the appropriate ministerial officials, I was not about to lay a finger on her.

  ‘I’m a little disappointed, you know, Bruno,’ she said, as I stood scanning the hall. ‘I was looking forward to calling you My Hero.’ Barbara took hold of the medal that was still hanging round my neck. ‘Champion makes you sound like a boxer.’

  ‘I feel the same way,’ I said. ‘But it would be churlish to complain.’

  ‘And pointless. Heroes are off the menu, indefinitely.’

  I refocused on Barbara’s wintry grey eyes. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Haven’t you heard? But I keep forgetting, you’re a writer.’

  I had no idea what she meant by that.

  ‘Heard what?’

  Barbara lowered her voice. ‘About Manfred Dressler.’

  ‘The sculptor?’

  ‘The last People’s Hero of Art and Culture. They let him have an exhibition in Yugoslavia.’ Barbara let go of my medal. It clinked cheaply against the button on my jacket. ‘Big mistake.’

  Manfred Dressler worked in bronze. He was the man behind many of our most politically inspirational – not to say heroic – public monuments. An exciting new talent, it seemed he had run away to the non-socialist abroad, as it was officially known. I hadn’t heard about it, bu
t then again, it wasn’t the kind of news they carried on the front page of Neues Deutschland. The story might have been broadcast on Western television – Dressler was famous enough for that – but the city where I lived was out of reach of their transmitters, lying as it did deep in the valley of the Elbe.

  Barbara drained her glass and waved it in front of me. ‘Drink up,’ she said. ‘We’re supposed to be celebrating.’

  I elbowed my way towards the makeshift bar, once more searching the room for the pretty musician. But there was no sign of her. Earlier that evening I had contemplated various ways of approaching her. I had even considered the desperate ploy of spilling a drink over her, as a way of starting the conversation. Even so, when someone else’s beverage splattered over my shoes, wetting my socks and several inches of trouser leg, it never occurred to me that it might be a ploy.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ said a female voice.

  It was the musician herself. She was on her way back from the bar, carrying two full glasses in each hand. For a moment I was speechless. I had been looking in the wrong place, yet here she was. I had been searching for an entrée, and here was an entrée served up for me. Perhaps the ease with which one step followed the other, without any effort on my part, planted in my mind the seeds of entitlement.

  ‘So clumsy of me. What must you think?’ The musician bit her lip, her cheeks flushing.

  ‘I think you’re carrying too many glasses. Let me help.’

  I stole a tray from the bar and together we loaded it down with glasses of sparkling wine. Then, with a smile on my face, I carried it shoulder high to where the other musicians were packing up. People in the crowd laughed amiably as I went by. The People’s Champion was not too grand for proletarian toil, even on the night when he was honoured – that, at least, was the inference with which I veiled my less public-spirited intention.