The Valley of Unknowing

by Sington, Philip

  Hartl turned the lock and went inside. Stale kitchen smells greeted my nostrils, mingled with touches of old leather and old feet. Hartl flipped on a light switch. Nothing happened.

  ‘We must have lost the power. I’ve a torch here somewhere.’

  My heart sank. ‘Does this happen often?’

  ‘Just now and again. Not usually for long. An hour at the most. Ah, here we are.’

  A sallow beam of light looped through the gloom and came to rest on a staircase at the far end of a tiled hallway. Along the left-hand side of the wall, beside the entrance to the downstairs apartment, was a line of creased and flattened footwear. I wondered if Hartl’s neighbours – an old couple who allegedly put most of their remaining life force into growing vegetables and poisoning slugs – had gone to bed early, or if they were sitting there in the darkness, listening to us pass.

  We crept upstairs, silenced by the enveloping darkness, the staircase creaking beneath us like an old hulk. I felt something stir above us, an almost imperceptible shift of weight. Perhaps Hartl heard it too, because he called out his wife’s name.

  Nobody answered.

  ‘At her mother’s,’ he said again, as if repetition would make it true.

  Beyond the door of the apartment was a tiny hallway where we left our shoes.

  ‘Wait here,’ Hartl said. ‘We’ve some candles in the kitchen.’

  Then I heard it: a squeak, like a stopper in a bottle, followed by a sigh of escaping air. It had come from the living room. I edged forward and pushed back the glass-panelled door, which squeaked on unoiled hinges. It was then that the lights came on.

  ‘Surprise!’

  I was staring at a room full of faces, none familiar, with the single exception of Vera’s. A groan went up.

  ‘Where’s the birthday boy?’

  Hartl appeared at my side, beaming and feigning a heart attack. The guests burst into a toneless rendition of ‘Happy Birthday’. Glasses of punch were thrust into our hands. Someone put on a crackly Ina Martell record.

  Hartl, still grinning, wagged a finger at me. ‘I knew you were up to something, Bruno. All that nonsense about your plum schnapps. I knew there was something else on your agenda – like making sure I didn’t get here too soon.’

  ‘Guilty as charged,’ I said. ‘Happy birthday, Rudi.’

  We drank a toast. The punch tasted like liniment. Still, I had the impression that many people present were already on their third or fourth glass. Hartl set off on a tour of the room, accepting from his wife a basket of sweets and Halloren chocolate wrapped in yellow cellophane. I wasted no time in locating the television: it stood in the corner by the window with a large doily draped over the top of it and a plate of meatballs on top of that. I looked at my watch: it was already after eight o’clock.

  As a youth I was often frustrated by the collective nature of my encounters with the opposite sex. Such was the regimented nature of my existence – at the orphanage, in the army, at the Berufsschule where I was drilled in my ablutionary trade – that the only way of meeting girls was in large numbers: at rallies, sporting events or formal social gatherings. Females my age had visibility but not tangibility. In other words from an educational point of view, the typical experience had breadth, but not depth. And it was depth I craved, emotionally and physically. I wanted unfettered access, a free hand in every sense. I knew that only a complete demystification of the female sex and the female form would free me from destructive longing, leaving me to live as I wished. But for that I needed to escape the crowd and be alone with my chosen one, a requirement that proved hard to satisfy, private spaces and private time being hard to come by in the Workers’ and Peasants’ State.

  Standing in the Hartls’ dingy living room, my second empty glass in hand, listening to turgid conversation and atrocious music, I experienced a similar frustration. Once again I wished the crowd would disappear, so that I could be alone with my object of desire. All that had changed was the scale of my ambition. Instead of a woman, what I sought now was merely the image of a woman, electronically projected on to a cathode-ray tube; and whereas in the past my aim had been to demystify all women, now I was content to demystify one. It struck me how little I had learned since those boyhood days, in spite of the seductions and conquests and affairs that had followed. To know one woman – or even a hundred – no matter how intimately, was not, in fact, to know them all. The goal was unattainable and always would be. This reflection might have filled me with doubt, with a sense of time wasted and opportunities lost, had I not been so determined to see that night on Rudi Hartl’s television the girl I was sure I had been waiting for all my life.

  It was thanks to Rudi that I hit upon my disastrous plan, the consequences of which were long to outlast the night.

  ‘Are you still keen to see the studio?’ he asked me when everyone else had been greeted and thanked. ‘I’d so value your opinion.’

  I had just noticed that his television had wheels and that the cable connecting it to the rooftop aerial ran out through the window.

  ‘Lead on,’ I said.

  We returned to the main landing. In one corner a flight of steps led up to a trapdoor. The attic above, though sizeable, was hopelessly unsuited to painting, having only two small circular windows, one at either end. Hartl had made up for this deficiency with a trio of neon lights fixed to the central beam and by painting everything white: the roof, the beams, the brickwork, the floorboards. The only things not white were Hartl’s paintings: lurid, splashy creations, like the outpourings of a paint factory slewed over canvas, with here and there the suggestion of an eye socket or a mouthful of bared teeth.

  ‘Remarkable,’ I said, standing before one especially gruesome oeuvre. ‘Brings to mind Edvard Munch.’

  ‘Do you really think so?’ Hartl said eagerly.

  ‘Very much so. But never mind what I think. Let’s consult the people.’

  ‘The people?’

  ‘The people downstairs.’

  Hartl shook his head. ‘Oh, no, I don’t think they’d . . . My wife’s friends . . . I don’t think it’s their thing at all.’

  ‘Their thing being strictly figurative painting, I suppose.’

  ‘I’m afraid so.’

  I declared this to be an elitist and unproletarian sentiment (as only a Champion of the People can) and told Hartl to stay put. Before he could object further I went back down the stairs and into the apartment. There I turned off the music and made an announcement: Herr Hartl’s latest creations – which, in my opinion, were extraordinary – were now on display in his studio. It would be the making of his birthday if the assembled company were to go and view them right away.

  With some hesitation the assembled company did as it was told, taking its drinks with it. I followed as far as the landing, a schnapps bottle in each hand, topping up glasses as I went. To Frau Hartl (more flushed than usual and sweating through an excess of make-up), I bowed low before administering a triple shot and complimenting her extravagantly on her coiffure. Visibly flattered, she vanished up the steps, coyly pulling at the hem of her frock in a faux attempt to avoid showing me her underwear.

  Alone at last, I checked my watch. Freizeit-Forum was due to start in two minutes. Heart pounding, caution blunted by alcohol, I disconnected the television and wheeled it into the bedroom, where a bedside light revealed an unsanitary landscape of crumpled bedding and discarded clothes. I never took Vera Hartl for a fastidious hausfrau, but these were the sleeping quarters of a sloven. Obscured behind a ball of used tissue, upon which a vision of her small mouth was imprinted in lipstick, I found the power socket. All that remained was to capture the end of the aerial cable, which now swung unattached from the edge of the roof. I found a wire coat hanger in the wardrobe, but that proved too short. I had better luck with a broom, which I found in the kitchen. I was leaning out of the window at a precarious angle, fishing in the darkness for my elusive catch, when it came to me – the realisation as striking as it was use
less – that I had not seen fireflies on the drive up the hill, but the red and orange reflectors of motor cars and bicycles. Hartl’s friends had left them out of sight among the trees, so as to maintain the element of surprise. A motorcycle was labouring its way up the hill now, its importunate roar muffled only by the surrounding foliage.

  At the third or fourth attempt, I managed to snag the cable round the end of the broom head and pull it in. When everything was reconnected I turned on the set and sat down on a corner of the double bed, clearing the minimum space necessary of Frau Hartl’s voluminous underthings. With a whump and a crackle of static a black-and-white picture bloomed on to the screen. Two cowboys were arguing in a saloon. They were smooth shaven and strangely clean. This was definitely not Freizeit-Forum.

  I turned the dial.

  A female newsreader was sitting in the middle of a snowstorm. Behind her was a photograph of a missile launcher in a forest. The signal strengthened. The newsreader wore sensible glasses and spoke like a recorded announcement.

  I turned the dial

  An image ghosted across the screen: a blonde girl, running across a meadow in slow motion, hair backlit by the sun. A shampoo bottle appeared in the corner.

  I turned the dial.

  Another newsreader, another missile launcher, this time with the missile captured mid-launch, the word PROTEST stamped diagonally across the screen. The newsreader wore a smart suit and looked grave.

  I turned the dial. Nothing but white noise. Could it be the ZDF transmitter was out of range? Claudia had said she was going out of town. Maybe you had to go out of town – further than Elbersdorf – to pick up Freizeit-Forum. I turned the dial more slowly, trying to squeeze a signal out of the electro-magnetic storm. I caught hints of forms and faces, warped and muffled voices that seemed to emanate from a different world – and then one face, a face I knew. But it was not Theresa’s.

  I jumped, retreating across the bed. It was Wolfgang Richter. He drifted into focus and then out again, dissolving into white noise. I know I saw him on that screen. I can still recollect the image precisely: his long black coat, the tall windows of the Tolkewitz Crematorium behind him. Most clearly I remember his stare: neither reproachful nor accusing, but empty, as if he were simply observing me and waiting (for what I couldn’t guess). At the same time I know I could not have seen him. No such image of Wolfgang Richter exists in the real world and, even if it does, why would anyone have been broadcasting it that night? I record the incident only as being indicative of my state of mind. For the truth is the memory of that vision, of Richter’s terrible, hollow stare, came back to me often in the months that followed. I can picture it still.

  Blaming the hallucinogenic powers of industrial alcohol and the hypnotic effects of television, I gathered myself and reached for the dial again. Before I could touch it, I found myself looking at Theresa – or rather at two Theresas. I was on the point of giving the set a thump when I realised there was nothing wrong with the picture.

  The first Theresa was sitting on a sofa in a television studio. The second covered most of the back wall, where she appeared surrounded by the same smoking ruins that decorated the cover of Survivors. The creature in the studio I hardly recognised. She wore a shimmering dress that left her shoulders bare, the unsupported curve of her breasts discernable through the fabric. She sat with her legs folded under her, her golden hair partially woven into plaits, one plait circling the crown of her head. With black pearl earrings and a necklace made up of many fine strands – gold or silver, I supposed – she brought to mind a priestess or a sacrificial virgin. Here was my fantasy Theresa come to life. Here was the vision I had dreamed up that first night, while I waited to receive my medal. Even the little dent in her forehead, the subtle flaw left by her twin, was invisible. It seemed Eva Aden, novelist, had no twin.

  The interviewer, a middle-aged man with a high forehead and an aquiline gaze, sat canted forward on his swivel chair.

  ‘Since then, Eva, you’ve been called the most important new voice in German literature since Günter Grass. Others have described you as a feminist visionary. Is that how you would characterise your work, as essentially feminist in outlook?’

  The director cut to a close-up. Theresa frowned. ‘I made a promise that I wouldn’t look at any reviews for Survivors. And so far I’ve kept that promise.’

  ‘You don’t agree with the critics?’

  ‘I haven’t read them.’

  The interviewer leaned even closer, as if preparing to launch himself on to the sofa. I dug my fingers into the pungent bedding, amazed at Theresa’s cool.

  ‘That’s extraordinary. Can you tell us your reasons?’

  ‘I suppose you could say it’s because I don’t want anything to change. I want the next book to come about in the same way, in the same circumstances, as the last.’

  ‘Do you mean in isolation?’

  ‘I wouldn’t call it isolation. Being a little apart, perhaps, yes. But maybe that’s necessary for a sense of independence. And for perspective.’

  For a moment the picture concertinaed, voices giving way to hiss. I smacked the top of the set.

  ‘Chekhov once said that critics were like horseflies: they only prevented the horse from ploughing. Is that how you see them, as a distraction?’

  Theresa shook her head. ‘I find critics very useful when I’m trying to decide what to read. But as far as Survivors goes, and any other books that follow, I don’t think my reading reviews would serve any useful purpose.’

  It was a good answer; only she and I knew how good. And in that moment, in the confidence and cleverness of that answer – an answer that could never come back to haunt her when the truth was out, the way any other answer would have – it struck me: Theresa had done more than grow into the role. She had become the role. She was flourishing as she had never flourished with a viola in her hand, even under the glare of the lights, even with millions watching. This was the freedom she had talked of, the freedom that came with not being herself. For the first time in her life she was free from the ghost of her dead twin, free from the dread of self-celebration: because Eva Aden didn’t have a twin. Her triumph was not a triumph over anyone, let alone a blameless infant sister.

  ‘Some people,’ – the interviewer’s unctuous tone made it clear he was not among them – ‘might say yours was an arrogant attitude for a newcomer.’

  ‘I hope not. I don’t think the purpose of reviews is to educate writers, to show them where they’ve gone wrong or gone right. Their purpose is to inform the public.’

  ‘And what do you see as your purpose?’

  Theresa looked down at her hands, as if not sure what they were doing there. I knew that gesture. It was the first thing in her whole performance I recognised.

  ‘My purpose is to bring these stories into the world, so that they can be shared by whoever wants to share them.’

  ‘You talk almost as if they weren’t yours, as if you’re no more than a midwife.’

  Theresa smiled. ‘Midwives are important people. Without them many of us wouldn’t be here.’

  The interviewer chose this moment to strike an especially pretentious pose, leaning far back in his chair with both index fingers tapping thoughtfully against his lips. ‘You strike me as remarkably detached from your work – detached from its fate, at least. Is it that, for you, it’s the act of writing that’s important? Are you answering an inner need?’

  Theresa took a moment to answer. The camera had her in close-up again, and profile, but now it zoomed out slowly, revealing throat, shoulders, lightly veiled breasts. At that moment, I felt certain, thousands of cultured men up and down the German Länder would be experiencing an involuntary rush of blood to their loins. No doubt some of them would find a way to reach her. No doubt some of them would call. Theresa had told me she was often lonely. She wasn’t going to be lonely much longer.

  ‘I’m doing what I want to do,’ Theresa said. ‘And yes, for me it is about need. Definitely
. There are some stories that have to be told, whatever the consequences.’

  From above my head came a loud thump and a peel of raucous laughter. Footsteps clunked down the steps from the attic, shaking the whole apartment.

  ‘It looks like the consequences will be fame for you, perhaps enduring fame. Isn’t that something you want?’

  Theresa looked away from the interviewer, her mouth pinched as if unimpressed by the question. ‘It’s not something I can control,’ she said. ‘It’s not in my hands.’

  The interviewer moved on to the thorny issue of the sequel. What was next for Alex and Old Tilmann? What more was there to learn? Behind me a floorboard creaked. I turned to see Michael Schilling standing in the doorway of the bedroom, his raincoat draped over his arm, staring at the television. I guessed from his stunned expression that he had been there for some time.

  I stood up. ‘Michael, there are some things I need to tell you.’

  ‘So, a sequel, is it?’ he said, eyes still fixed on the flickering screen. ‘The master follows the pupil follows the master. Very nice. Very incestuous.’

  It was too late. He knew everything.

  ‘Michael, you don’t understand.’

  ‘You’re right, I don’t.’

  I tried to explain: how I’d had to publish under a false name, otherwise the whole project would have been traced back to its point of origin, to me and to him. Even dead East German writers needed help to be published in the West. It was an explanation I’d been rehearsing for months.

  Schilling just stared at me, shaking his head.

  ‘I was protecting Richter’s family, too,’ I said. ‘They’re still here.’

  ‘So they know about this?’

  ‘They will.’

  ‘You’re incredible.’

  ‘It was either this or burn the manuscript. Which would you have done?’

  The Hartl party had grown tired of the attic and were filing back into the apartment in search of further inebriation. I turned back to the television and flipped the dial back to DFF-1, where the General Secretary of the Central Committee was being applauded by a large roomful of people. By the time I turned back again Schilling had gone.