Claudia puts on a brave face, but she knows things have changed. This isn’t the Theresa she knew in the East. Back in her element, Theresa is a very different creature. She detects a brittleness, a forced jollity that conceals – she sees it, finally – a sense of obligation. It comes to Claudia that their friendship is already a thing of the past. In the East they had been united by music; but here in the West such cultural adhesives cannot be counted on. In the West there are other considerations, social and material; and those considerations divide them just as The Wall divides their country.
Claudia produces the letter. ‘I’ve news,’ she says.
As she watches her friend read, she wonders if the lover will fare better with this new Theresa when the roles of native and visitor, guest and host, are reversed. Will their bonds prove more durable? For all the ensuing excitement, the breathless interrogation – When is he coming? Where will he cross? When was this all arranged? – she senses that the answer is no. In Theresa’s excitement there is the same brittleness, punctuated by moments of anxious cogitation. At one point she sits down suddenly with her fingers pressed to her mouth.
‘Aren’t you pleased?’ Claudia asks.
‘Of course I am,’ Theresa says. ‘I’m just worried. In case something goes wrong.’
‘Nothing will go wrong,’ Claudia says. ‘It’s all been worked out. Less than a week from now he’ll be here. Or in Munich.’
‘Munich?’
‘I think he said something about Munich.’
Munich means Bernheim Media, means Konrad Falkner, means everything unravelling to the point of no return: no chance for Theresa to shape events, to manage this dangerous unmasking. Eva Aden’s death sentence is to be a fait accompli. Her point of view, her interests are surplus to requirements. Is this the reason Bruno is coming: not for her at all, but to reassert control of the enterprise, an enterprise in which she’s already invested much more than time?
She gives Claudia some notes from her purse, says goodbye quickly, sends her back to the hostel where she’s got herself a bed. No sooner is the door shut than she’s on the telephone to Switzerland, tearful, contrite, more than a little scared. Her name is on all these contracts. A lot of the money has been spent. How is she going to protect herself? What should she do? Klaus understands her reasons for secrecy – secrecy maintained for the author’s sake above all – but with regard to her immediate predicament he is less than reassuring. The matter needs to be handled carefully, he says. In fact, it needs nothing less than complete orchestration. As things stand, Bruno Krug is no one’s idea of a dissident; nor is Survivors an obvious example of dissident literature. The Workers’ and Peasants’ State hasn’t been mentioned in the press releases or on the packaging; and so far the reviewers have made little of the allusion or missed it altogether. If they aren’t careful, Theresa’s fronting of the book could end up looking like a scam, a marketing ploy aimed at maximising exposure and international sales. If that were to happen, they could really be in trouble. Bernheim Media would seek to distance themselves from the whole affair, for fear of being seen as a co-conspirator. Other publishers would follow. Law suits and ruin lie in wait.
‘I thought he’d at least consult me,’ Theresa says, the tears welling. ‘I thought we were partners. I suppose I should have seen this coming.’
‘No,’ Klaus says, manful and protective instincts getting the better of him. ‘I should have seen it coming. For what it’s worth, it sounds like we’ve both been used.’
‘Do you really think so?’
‘It would be as well to assume the worst.’
Then they’re on to the details: the when, where and how of the imminent migration.
Klaus has always felt the presence of a significant other in Theresa’s life. He sensed it in her reticence on matters of the heart. Now he has a name and a face to go with it. ‘Try not to worry,’ he says, already anticipating how this crisis will bring them closer together. ‘I’ll make some calls. See how the land lies.’
He means Bernheim and certain trusted contacts in New York (Americans being litigious and unsentimental in matters of business), but as he thumbs through his Rolodex it comes to him that there are other parties he could contact, another call he could make – a call that would put an end to their problem once and for all; an anonymous call, one that could never be traced to him. Will he have to tell Theresa? Will he have to lie to her? Probably not. Because she will never ask him about it. It will be something they deliberately never discuss. Upon reflection, he is quite certain about this. There are some things it is better not to know and, as far as Theresa is concerned, this will be one of them. He isn’t even sure, as he ponders the means of execution, if the idea wasn’t really hers in the first place, if he hasn’t merely reached the conclusion she wanted him to reach.
The next morning – a beautiful, clear morning, the sunshine sparkling on the frosted trees, the mountains snow-capped and magnificent on the skyline – Martin Klaus drives into the middle of Erlenbach. Within sight of the elegant baroque church he steps into a phone box and makes an international call to the Ministry of State Security on the far side of the inner German border.
He is completely unaware that the prowess of the Ministry’s technicians is such that his call will subsequently be traced to the local exchange.
56
My interrogation turned out to be the first of several, the others being lengthier by far. This was not because my interrogators repeated many of their questions in an attempt, perhaps, to winkle out inconsistencies, but because there were no inconsistencies, or very few. I had no reason to withhold information on my attempted defection; and so, with a bitter, purgative relish, I chronicled the affair in the fullest detail, such that my interrogators (working in shifts) often struggled to keep up with me.
I told them how I had met a young music student from the West and fallen in love with her; how I had grown jealous of Wolfgang Richter, a younger and more talented artist; how, little by little, I had sacrificed everything to the Theresian cause: my honour, my loyalties, my self-respect and finally my way of life. And how, in the end, I had been betrayed, as a man without honour deserves to be betrayed – and must be, if his story is to serve any purpose or make any sense. I did occasionally edit, embellish and, where necessary, expurgate the tale, and not only for reasons of economy or style. I did not, for instance, reveal my theft of Richter’s medical file, nor how Michael Schilling had helped procure my photograph. Nor did I reveal that Theresa had believed Survivors to be my work, rather than Richter’s. From such a piece of information it might be inferred that I had been planning to go West for years. Otherwise, my aim was to concentrate blame upon myself and to avoid implicating others.
This part of my task turned out to be quite easy, if only because my interrogators were almost completely in the dark. They appeared to know nothing of my scheming, of Richter and his book, of the literary phenomenon that was Eva Aden, or of the money that had been made. So when I told them of the hard currency piling up in the West they seemed quite ready to accept that this was the driving force behind everything that had happened. Richter’s book had been smuggled out of the country to make money (because a Western girl could not be kept happy without it); the alluring persona of Eva Aden had been created in order to maximise the take; I had been tempted to abandon my country on account of the resulting fortune, at least partly; I had been betrayed so that Theresa would not be obliged to give it up. Successfully shorn of all ideological and ethical dimensions, my story emerged as one of vanity, corruption and greed; merely squalid. This, I expect, was what saved me.
Self-evidently, I was not disposed of. I was not put on trial, or held on permanent remand, as so many were. I did not disappear. After less than three days in my not incommodious rooms, I was ushered into a large, airy office with a flag beside the window. My first interrogator was present, but standing. Behind a desk sat a plump, moustachioed man in a civilian suit. He did not introduce himsel
f, which I understood to be the custom among officials in this branch of the government service, but – most unusually – addressed me by name. He told me that I had taken a very serious ‘wrong turn’, but that the state was capable of recognising human frailty and believed in giving valued citizens a second chance, provided they were able to demonstrate a renewed commitment to the founding principles of the Workers’ and Peasants’ State. Then he looked me in the eye and asked me if I would seize such a chance if it were offered me, to which I dared not answer in the negative.
There then followed quite a lengthy discourse on the progress of socialism and the difficulties necessarily encountered along the way (to wherever it was going). I do not remember the details. I was too busy at the time wondering how a renewed commitment to the founding principles of the Workers’ and Peasants’ State would be demonstrated in my case. A lengthy period of manual labour was sure to be involved, in a cement works or a mine or – more likely still – on a collective farm, the kind of place where, in Richter’s imagination, unpretentious peasants wiped their backsides on my prose. It was often said of intellectuals that their alienation from proletarian labour led to alienation from proletarian values, and that the best way to restore the correct perspective was to hand them a spade or a pickaxe and set them to work. But I was wrong. What was demanded of me was only that I write – not a eulogy to the Party Secretary on the occasion of his sixty-fifth birthday, nor a hymn to the soldier guardians of the inner German border, but something even less appealing and even more difficult – the latest instalment of the Factory Gate Fables.
I should not, in the meantime, make any application for foreign travel, not even to other socialist countries, no matter who proposed it. Invitations to conferences or symposia were to be turned down. At the same time the facts of my transgression and detention were not to be disclosed to anyone. I had taken care to keep my departure a secret; I should continue indefinitely in the same vein. If it became apparent that I had not observed this condition of secrecy, if word got out that I had attempted to defect, my exceptional pardon would be revoked and the appropriate sentence imposed. I agreed to all this readily and not just out of fear. My betrayal had left me strangely numb; two competing emotions (rage at Theresa, fury at myself) enforcing a tenuous, unnatural calm that left me indifferent to the finer points of my release.
‘Everything will continue as if nothing has happened,’ the moustachioed man declared, looking at me over the tips of his fingers. ‘You will put the whole unfortunate episode behind you. You will go home and return to work. Only work – work for the common good – can redeem you, comrade.’
From a distance I see now that my detention was not deemed to be in the interests of the state. In the dwindling artistic firmament of the Workers’ and Peasants’ State, mine was still a star that would be missed. In my character and my motives a chance had been seen to smooth over the whole affair without embarrassment. The authorities – at what level I do not know – had decided to take it. Yet this was not how I saw things at the time. Sitting in the middle of that stately office, I perceived my treatment as an act of indulgence, such as might be extended to a mischievous child, a confused adolescent, or a harmless clown. I felt simultaneously slighted, patronised and grateful.
‘As a token of the state’s faith in you, you will be allowed to retain your titles and awards,’ the moustachioed man declared. ‘You will remain a People’s Hero of Art and Culture. But you must strive anew to deserve that honour.’
I said I would. I didn’t correct him on the nomenclature.
The interview was concluded. The door opened. I got to my feet.
‘Should I take a train today?’ I asked, because I had momentarily lost the power of decision-making and because it was already beginning to get dark.
‘Today, tomorrow, it’s up to you.’ The moustachioed man looked at his watch. ‘You’re a free man, Herr Krug,’ he added, without a touch of irony.
57
Everything was different. Everything was the same. On what turned out to be Christmas Eve, I returned to the valley, without my vodka and my English raincoat, but in all other respects unharmed. I went back to my old apartment with its futile camouflage of tinsel and lights. I went back to my old routines and my old horizons, to a life I thought I had left behind for ever. If the events of the preceding year could have been torn up and thrown away, like an unrewarding storyline, it might have been easy to carry on. By objective standards my life was not so terrible, or so lonely. But this particular narrative had been written in stone. I could not erase or redraft it, or tack on a happy ending; and the weight of it bore down on me, sapping my strength and my will, diminishing the significance of the present. It is a dangerous thing to put your happiness at the mercy of external events, but that was what I had done – a fact I saw plainly as I stepped off the train, still wearing my Western garb, by now grimy and rank. On the platform before me I had once spent a whole day waiting for Theresa’s return, clutching a wilting bunch of chrysanthemums – a wasted day, a day without value. It was days such as this that now lay ahead of me in an endless procession.
This was not quite the ending to the story that I had expected and which, I’d come to believe, justice demanded. Mine was supposed to be a story of sin and redemption in the best Western traditions. I had sinned against Wolfgang Richter, delivering him carelessly into the hands of his enemies. The path to forgiveness and inner peace was one requiring bravery and sacrifice – the redemptive arc, incarnate. The material goal was to expose the truth of Richter’s death and the lies told to hide it. Object achieved, arc completed, the pot of gold awaiting me at the end of my journey should have been Theresa’s love, love which I was worthy of at last. It hadn’t turned out that way. Instead of love I’d been met with betrayal – and not even betrayal as retribution, as a deliberate act of revenge. My betrayal had no significance outside itself, outside Theresa’s preference for her new incarnation and my inability to see it. The redemptive arc did not exist. At best, it dangled uselessly in space, like a bridge that ends midstream. The only thing left to do was get off.
For a long time I heard nothing more from my one-time lover, either through conventional means or via the covert delivery network she had used in the past. (It was possible the authorities were confiscating her letters and blocking her phone calls, but I saw no particular reason why they should go to the trouble.) She did not return to her studies in East Berlin – enquiries at her previous lodgings established that. As far as I was aware, she never attempted to cross the inner German border again. It was possible she assumed I was in prison and didn’t try to contact me for that reason. More likely, I thought, she couldn’t face the prospect of maintaining the lover’s charade: of feigning concern and disappointment and continued devotion. That would have been too much pretence, even for her. Instead, she had left me to draw my own conclusions, knowing that for as long as the death strip remained in place I would never have the opportunity to act on them. Even the authorities in the East were in no position to point the finger. How could they support a claim that she had not written Survivors? They had no proof, no material evidence whatsoever. In any case, to make trouble would only draw international attention to its real author (in her eyes myself) and his motives for seeking to publish abroad.
For Theresa, the one inconvenience in our changed circumstances was that she would not now have the sequel I had promised her and which she had promised the world. But hadn’t the profile in Stern revealed that she was backing away from that idea already? Besides, was that really a problem now that Martin Klaus was in on the game (perhaps he had been in on it from the beginning)? A sequel, after all, is a mere extrapolation; the characters, the setting, the style, all these were already in place. She and Klaus could write it together, working as a team. And if that didn’t work, they could always call in a ghost, some bright young wordsmith in need of money.
Did all this lead me to hate her? Did I rage at the injustice of my be
trayal? Was my head filled with thoughts of revenge? The answer to these questions is no. I did hate her periodically in the months that followed my arrest. I burned her photographs, while mentally rehearsing a variety of exotic counter-strikes, usually involving an ambush at a public event, the vanquished Krug appearing before the literary usurper like Banquo’s ghost. It pleased me to imagine her tortured by conscience and the inescapable knowledge of her own selfishness, but these indignant fits soon gave way to simple regret. I still loved her, you see. To be more precise, I loved the Theresa Aden I had known in the first months of our affair, the viola player with the shy smile and the tangled hair; the diffident, clever girl who so clearly didn’t know what to ask of life, or what to take; the girl who was, above all, afraid to shine. And if that particular lover had been a dream, a fantasy corresponding to my desires and my tastes, it was a fantasy I had hastened to an unnecessary end with my scheming. For who but me had given birth to Eva Aden, literary sensation? The old Theresa might have lived on if I had only let events take their natural course, instead of trying to prolong an affair whose season could not have been other than brief.
As for the cash – the Deutschmarks and dollars accumulating, I assumed, in Switzerland – I wasn’t sorry to find it beyond my reach. Perhaps this is hard to believe (scrupulous honesty, I have observed, is common when it comes to small sums, but much rarer when it comes to large ones), but as far as I was concerned it was blood money. Knowing what I knew about its origins, I couldn’t have spent a pfennig of it without deepening my complicity in Wolfgang Richter’s fate. His mother and father were entitled to profit from the success of Survivors, if anyone was. In ideal circumstances the money would have gone to them. Still, my regrets over that were tempered by the undeniable fact that their son had planned to abandon them, most likely without saying goodbye. Was this proof of indifference? Certainly not. But neither did it suggest devotion.
The Valley of Unknowing Page 33