Perhaps, I thought, having an absent twin was not so very different from having a vanished mother, a woman who sets out to raise you and then is lost without explanation, leaving the job, like the child, incomplete.
18
The first time I took Theresa back to my apartment she wandered around the place as if it were a museum, her hands clasped together in front of her, in case she should inadvertently touch something. It was there that events took a fateful turn. ‘So this is it: the writer’s lair,’ she said.
The building, once a private villa of brazenly plutocratic proportions, was now a labyrinth of subdivided flats. Mine was larger than most, with many of its original details in evidence, although not all in an ideal state of preservation: moulded ceilings, panelled doors, a parquet floor that I myself had repaired, bartering replacement blocks where necessary for all manner of hydrodynamical services. I even enjoyed the benefit of a turntable and a passable hi-fi system, the loudspeakers being Japanese.
‘Where do you work?’ Theresa asked. ‘Where do you sit when you write?’
The desk and the typewriter, the only permanent accoutrements of my official occupation, were strategically situated in the bedroom. I had some days earlier dressed the surroundings so as to lend them an unmistakable air of ongoing artistic endeavour, the leading props being a copy of The Magic Mountain lying open and face down, a small stack of leather-bound notebooks, carefully disordered, a pewter mug full of freshly sharpened pencils, a photograph of Ernest Hemingway in a cable-knit sweater, two items of fan mail, dates necessarily obscured, a map of Budapest and an edition of The Orphans of Neustadt in Portuguese (which I had stopped short of annotating, for fear of tactical overreach). I let Theresa discover this cockpit of creativity on her own, busying myself in the kitchen making coffee and humming. I was pleased – in fact, relieved – that she seemed to take her time exploring it. I pictured her fingertips tentatively tracing the outlines of the landscape, checking the intentful sharpness of the pencils, flipping through a notebook, turning over the Thomas Mann to see for herself what I had supposedly just read: ‘The ocean of time, rolling onwards in monotonous rhythm, bore the Easter-tide on its billows . . .’
I was not simply showing off. This piece of theatre was a precaution. If Theresa’s friends said she had ‘a thing’ about writers, that didn’t mean they were wrong. Richter had been a writer. I was a writer. Viewed statistically, the case was cut and dried. But to qualify as a writer, was it enough to have written? Didn’t you have to be writing: productive, fertile, creatively priapic? Where previous female conquests were concerned, this had not been an issue. They had been interested in the fruits of my labours (the modest perks and privileges my foreign royalties afforded me), not the labours themselves. But Theresa was different. She was an artist. Besides, she had no reason to be impressed by my Intershop lifestyle, having access to similar retail Elysia every time she went home. For all these reasons I preferred not to take any chances.
‘So is this the work-in-progress?’ Theresa called from the bedroom, after what must have been several minutes of silence.
I was in the kitchen by this time, waiting for the kettle to boil and contemplating which of my Russian LPs would put her most in the mood for sexual intercourse. ‘Is what the work-in-progress?’
‘This thing on the chair,’ Theresa said. She sounded excited. ‘Is it finished?’
With a jolt I understood what she was talking about. A few days earlier, tired of having it clog up the sitting room, I had moved Wolfgang Richter’s manuscript to the one place where it would not be in the way: the chair in front of my desk. There it had stayed, unnoticed, even as I was carefully arranging my writerly camouflage around the desk itself.
I hurried towards the bedroom, scenes from a nightmare cascading through my mind like the visions of a drowning man: me telling Theresa about Richter’s book; her asking why I’d kept quiet about it all this time; me making up some unconvincing excuse about it being a big secret (as if I couldn’t trust her) or not wanting to upset her; her demanding to read the manuscript and discovering that it was very good; her discerning my jealousy and falling out of love with me even before she was in it.
I stopped in the doorway. Theresa was sitting on the end of the bed (clean sheets, new goose-down duvet) and was already glued to the manuscript. They kept always to the edge of the road, where their shuffling, silent progress was hidden among the shadows of the trees. I didn’t know what to say. Deceit was dangerous, but the truth was suicidal.
Theresa looked up at me and smiled. If only she had known how that smile made my heart sink. ‘So this is it,’ she said. ‘The book they’ve all been waiting for. For twenty years.’
At first, I didn’t understand what she meant. Then it came to me: she still thought the manuscript was mine. And why not? The first page was blank, revealing no author, no title. The relief left me momentarily unsteady.
‘You know, I was starting to think . . .’ Theresa said. ‘I mean, you never talk about your work.’
‘Starting to think what?’ I sat beside her.
‘That you weren’t writing any more, that you’d given it up.’
‘Like your friends said.’
Apparently the Factory Gate Fables didn’t even count as writing.
Theresa put her head on my shoulder. I slid my arm round her waist. For the first time it felt awkward.
‘But you were just being modest. I should have known.’ She reached up and touched my face. ‘That’s one of the things I love about you, Bruno. You’ve got nothing to prove.’
To my knowledge, that was the first time she ever used the words ‘love’ and ‘you’ in the same sentence – an occurrence I would have liked to savour, had Richter’s manuscript not been sitting there in her lap. I took it away from her and dumped it on the desk.
‘You’re going to let me read it, aren’t you?’ she said.
‘Maybe. Some time. It isn’t finished.’
‘It looks wonderful.’
‘It needs work.’
‘Well, the opening’s wonderful. You’ve just got to know what’s round that corner.’
‘Openings are easy. It’s middles that are difficult.’
‘I won’t tell anyone about it, not if you don’t want me to.’
‘You can read it when it’s ready, maybe. Some of it needs a complete rewrite.’
I tried to shove the manuscript in a drawer, but the drawer was already half full and refused to close. I had to take half the manuscript out again and find another drawer. Even then, I could feel the top sheets crumple as I rammed it home. All this Theresa watched in silence. When I turned back to her, I could see her cheeks burning.
I sat down. She stood up.
‘I’m thirsty,’ she said and went back to the sitting room.
It was the first time Theresa had been upset with me. Not that she didn’t try to hide it. Over coffee (she declined the vodka) we conversed on a variety of neutral subjects, but I could see that it was an effort for her, that underneath she was disappointed. This was about more than missing a good read. I suppose she felt I had shut her out, that the openness we had shown towards each other was to be temporary and limited. I wanted to reassure her on that point, but that would have meant reopening the subject of the Richter manuscript, a book that confirmed not only the brilliance of the man she had lost, but also the creative sterility of the man who had replaced him. So I let the matter drop, hoping it would simply go away and never come up again. Years in the future, perhaps, Theresa would ask me what happened to that story of the people on the road and the boy with the revolver in his pocket; and I would say that I had thrown it away, because I simply couldn’t make it work. ‘It was just a genre piece anyway,’ would be my final dismissive comment.
But that still left this evening: Theresa’s first evening under my roof, our first night in a double bed (so I’d hoped) where, at last, sexual congress might be enjoyed without the accompanying hours of sleeplessness
and cramp. When Theresa yawned – another first in my presence – I gave up on conversation and opted for abject service. Moving behind her, I started to massage her shoulders, which I declared (without evidence or authority) were terribly tense. Half an hour later my hands and fingers were pulsing with fatigue while Theresa lay sprawled out across the sofa in her underwear, sighing gratefully. It was then, at last, that she accepted the vodka, drinking it with her eyes shut and shivering as it went down.
‘You know, Wolfgang was working on a book,’ she said, out of nowhere.
‘How do you know?’
‘He told me. I was surprised, actually. I’d have thought movies were much more fun. Everyone likes movies. Books . . .’
‘It’s a question of creative freedom,’ I said, from a seated position on the floor. ‘The scriptwriter’s not in control. Other people make the decisions. If you want to call the shots you write a book – even if they’re shots that hardly anyone ever hears. What was Wolfgang’s book about?’
‘He didn’t say. I’m not sure I asked him.’
‘Or you don’t remember the answer.’
‘Either way . . .’
‘Either way what?’
‘Either way it doesn’t matter, since he never got a chance to finish it.’
She rolled on to her front and wriggled her shoulder blades to indicate that more massage was required. I decided it would be best to comply, but not before I had put matters on a sexual basis by taking off the rest of her clothes.
‘How long am I going to have to wait?’ she said, as I slipped my thumbs into the elastic of her plain white knickers.
I hesitated. ‘Wait?’
‘To find out about Alex.’
She lifted her hips a fraction, enough to allow the undressing to be completed.
‘Who’s Alex?’
She looked back at me, frowning. ‘The boy with the gun. In your book.’
I had taken care never to say it was my book. I had simply declined to correct Theresa’s assumption that it was. I was reluctant to surrender that shred of deniability.
‘Not long,’ I said and slid both hands up her legs, forcefully kneading the muscles of her thighs so that she gasped with something between pleasure and pain.
The penis, I have discovered, presents particular difficulties of nomenclature to creators of English literature. The masters of previous eras, like their Continental counterparts, were prohibited by the mores of the day from mentioning its existence. Even when, between the world wars, indicative words began creeping on to the pages of respectable fiction, they were often placed in flashes of reported speech: vulgar slang placed in the mouths of vulgar characters. The modern artist felt at liberty to record this argot in the interests of verisimilitude. But coming up with a term that was not loaded with coarse or satirical connotations, that was merely honest without seeming technical, proved persistently problematic. In lovemaking scenes, one by one, organs began to rear their ugly heads; tumescences, limbs and members (some honourable, others not) soon followed in their wake – even the occasional manhood. Penis itself was too clinical for most writers; cock and dick smacked of smutty seaside postcards and bar-room jokes. The sex, long since discarded in the concrete nounal form, enjoyed a brief heyday during the 1930s, but eventually fell out of favour, being vague as well as inaccurate (would a man urinate with his sex?). The pecker and the wang made occasional post-war appearances in satirical Americana. My particular Anglo-Saxon favourite – useless for literary purposes – has always been willy. It seems familiar and affectionate, as well as being the name of choice for Saxon monarchs throughout history.
In any case these concerns, which apply as much to the female as to the male, merely betray a more fundamental ambivalence. Human genitals, most particularly our own, are a source of embarrassment and fear. We do not know what to call them (outside the bar room or the doctor’s surgery) because we do not know how to feel about them. Will our genitals, with their strange shapes and their regrettable but structurally unavoidable tendency to wrinkle, be aesthetically pleasing to our sexual partners? Granted, they are necessary, both for reproduction and for pleasure, but what reassurance is that? When the thrill of the new has faded, will the only genitals our bed mates want to dwell upon be the imaginary genitals of imaginary lovers? We hope not. We hope our hirsute and swarthy privates will be objects of fascination and erotic delight, and remain so through the years. But few of us are naive enough to expect it. We expect to be turning the bedroom lights off sooner rather than later, even assuming we had them on in the first place, so that the imagination can sustain what reality would only weaken and destroy.
So that night in bed, when Theresa took hold of me without warning and started pumping with all the vigour of a milkmaid at an agricultural competition, I regarded it as a welcome sign. My attentions had been assiduous, by design. When it came to foreplay, I was determined that there should be no unfavourable comparisons between me and Richter. Theresa and I were, I thought, moments from a long-delayed and explosive coupling. My hands were already on the insides of her thighs, making ready to part them. But Theresa, moved to a new pitch of desire, it seemed, wanted something else, something more immediate. She wanted to see. I didn’t protest. That she was interested in the appearance as well as the function, I took to be indicative of a deepening physical connection. I felt my anxieties melt away in this novel display of appetite and fascination.
It was only long afterwards, when Theresa lay asleep in my arms, that a different interpretation occurred to me: that she simply hadn’t wanted to make love. Rather than expressing her reluctance, she had taken the necessary steps to defuse my desire, as quickly as possible. All my efforts at arousing her – my aching fingers, my swollen lips – had been for nothing.
I thought back to the moment that evening when it had all gone wrong: Theresa bright-eyed and beaming, clutching Richter’s manuscript to her bosom. I should have let her read it, I thought. That was my mistake. I should have told her to help herself.
19
About a week later Theresa was gone. There was no explanation, no declaration, no note; only silence. She told me she had to spend the Wednesday practising and rehearsing. We were supposed to meet on Thursday, the time and place to be determined by telephone, she calling me from the phone booth in the hall of the college. In the event, no call came: neither on the Wednesday, as I’d expected, nor on Thursday. I didn’t leap to conclusions. Student telephones were unreliable and Theresa was busy preparing for exams. Still, as the hours came and went without word, I couldn’t exclude from my thoughts the possibility that I had, as the English euphemism has it, been ‘let go’.
How well did I know Theresa Aden by this time? I was familiar with her bearing and her manner, and her sense of humour. Mentally I could map her body quite precisely in three dimensions, with the additional dimensions of texture, scent and temperature (her belly and breasts were always warm, her feet and earlobes always cool). I could recreate her voice in my head, her laughter, her smile, the scholarly way she tucked her hair behind her ears when she was paying special attention. But the desires and judgements that directed Theresa from within, how developed was my sense of them? When I imagined the world through her eyes, was my vision sharp and accurate? Or was my knowledge of my fugitive twin limited to how she made me feel?
It was the intensity of my fear, the fear of losing her, that brought the uncomfortable truth home to me. There was no point in denying it: I was in love. Not a steady, comforting love born of deep familiarity and shared experience, a love appropriate for middle age. I loved Theresa with all the blindness and ferocity of youth, though I was not young. I loved her in the here-and-now, without regard for my future needs or convenience. I loved her without calculation and in defiance of the dangers. If that was a mistake, it is a mistake I cannot bring myself to regret, even now.
In the face of impending disaster I did my best to keep busy and to carry on as normal. I refused to wait by the teleph
one like a lovelorn teenager. Writing was out of the question, since writing required reflection. Instead I decided it was time to free up some storage space in my cupboards, a job I had been putting off for years. This task took up all of Thursday, during which time the telephone was never actually out of earshot. I even emptied my bladder with the bathroom door open, in case I should fail to hear it ring. Still, I didn’t mope. I wanted quite badly to drink, but the faint possibility that Theresa might show up unexpectedly to find me reeking and incoherent, kept me from the bottle (such are the tortures of hope). When someone finally did ring – it was Michael Schilling, sounding more anxious than ever, wanting me to come in again as soon as possible – I concluded the conversation quickly so as not to tie up the line. I ate from tins and jars rather than risk going out for fresh provisions. I looked out of the window a great deal, like a prisoner, hoping against hope for reprieve.
Finally there was nothing to do but get out, to walk and keep walking. A man who walks is occupied, even if it is only with putting one foot in front of the other. He has purpose and with purpose comes self-respect. I needed to walk until my feet hurt; so that I could then concentrate on dealing with the pain.
I had no particular route in mind. I found myself drawn towards the river. The river led me west into the Altstadt, and from there I turned south again towards the Volkspark and the building on Blochmannstrasse where Theresa had her lessons. It wasn’t raining, so I circled the place a few times, on the off chance that Theresa might spot me and come running out. But that didn’t happen. Instead I found myself face to face with Claudia Witt, the accompanist.
The Valley of Unknowing Page 11