by James Lasdun
‘That, I think, is something you will regret breaking, Otto,’ she said quietly, ‘but go ahead, break it, if that’s what you want to do. As I say, I assume you know where this is leading.’
Otto smiled and hurled the wireless to the floor, where the coffeemaking part of it broke into thick glass chunks. Then he charged out of the apartment, slamming the door behind him.
LATER THAT EVENING he was brought home by two cops in grey-green uniforms –Volkspolizei. My mother invited them into the living room. One of them hung in the doorway, overawed, it seemed to me, by the cultured atmosphere of the room – the book-lined shelves, the piano laden with scores, the mass of troubled but ‘hopeful’ semi-abstracts that had by now spread across the walls like some lurid fungal growth. The other officer came right in, however, his hand still proprietorially on Otto’s arm, and sat down with Otto beside him, taking the measure of the place with a look of keen interest. His name was Porst. He had shining dark eyes, black hair, and a thin face that sagged here and there in little pouches.
From my point of view, the episode seemed to be occurring not so much in the physical space of the living room as in some lower depth of my own psyche. I felt it unfolding within me, but I felt nothing else – only a deepening of the numbness that had been with me since I had arrived home that afternoon.
It appeared that Otto had gone from our apartment to Mulackstrasse, a seedy part of town, where he had been able to buy a bottle of cheap vodka and drink himself into a stupor. The police had literally picked him up from the gutter. He would have been thrown into jail had Porst’s compassion not been aroused. For one thing, Otto’s papers showed that he was only fifteen. For another, he was carrying his membership card for the Free German Youth, the junior wing of the ruling Socialist Unity Party. I knew that Otto had joined them purely on account of the reputation of their mixed-sex summer camp, which he was hoping to attend this year, but Porst had taken it as evidence that Otto was at least not a complete degenerate, might even turn out to be fundamentally a ‘sound lad’, who perhaps, he suggested, would benefit more from some sharp discipline on the home front than a criminal charge of disorderliness.
‘So what do you intend to do, Herr Vogel?’ he asked my father.
‘I – I don’t know,’ my father said helplessly. ‘What do you suggest?’
‘I think in a case of this seriousness, some physical element would be appropriate.’
My father looked stunned.
‘You want me to beat him?’
Porst shrugged. ‘It’s up to you. We can take him back to the station if you prefer.’
‘No, no,’ my father said. ‘Well . . . as you say, some physical element might not be inappropriate. Not now, of course, the boy’s in no condition. Tomorrow morning, though, Otto. First thing.’ He gave Otto a look intended to convey stern resolution. Otto gazed blankly back.
‘Oh, I think now,’ Porst said quietly. ‘These things are best dealt with in the heat of the moment. Don’t you agree, Frau Vogel?’
‘I agree with you entirely,’ my mother said. ‘In fact, I was just telling my husband if he didn’t take Otto in hand, we’d soon have a child with a criminal record. I must say, we’re very lucky he ran into someone like you, though of course I know our police to be generally rather open-minded. My brother works in the Office of the Chief of the People’s Police. Perhaps you know him? He’s senior counsel there. Heinrich Riesen.’
‘Yes, of course,’ Porst said, visibly taken aback. There was a silence, during which the question of who was most at risk of ‘receiving disadvantage’ from the situation – now that my mother had unexpectedly dropped her brother’s name in Otto’s defence – seemed to debate itself almost audibly. It was Porst who finally backed down. With a sudden affable grin he turned to his colleague:
‘Perhaps on second thought it’s better for families to deal with these matters in private.’
The other man nodded with alacrity.
As they left, Porst pointed to the naked bronze lady in the corner of the room.
‘That’s a Kurt Teske, isn’t it?’
‘Yes, it is,’ my mother replied. ‘You know his work?’
‘Oh, yes. I’ve been trying to get the department to buy one of his pieces for years. Well, goodnight.’
*
IN HER practical-minded way, my mother saw that she had pushed things too far with Otto, and that since there was probably nothing to be gained from further interference in his life, she might as well leave him to his own devices. She did this with an abruptness that left him at first disoriented, even upset, until he discovered he could survive very well without her intimate surveillance of his life.
Meanwhile, I became more than ever the apple of her eye. Into me she poured all her hopes and ambitions, her pride and her apparently insatiable appetite for glory. I became her knight-errant in the realm of artistic and intellectual endeavour, from which I was destined, we both believed, to bring back prize after prize. I am not sure what shape my ultimate success was to take – perhaps some lofty combined position at the Writers’ Union, the Academy of Arts and various other of those spiritual crematoria in which the inner life of our republic was steadily being turned to ashes. Whatever it was, her hopes for me were so overwhelming that the lie on which they were founded often seemed to me merely a minor and really quite negligible detail.
It did, however, require maintenance. The young god had to show himself. He had to make his monthly appearance, his theophany, with a new token of his powers for his worshippers each time. For that he needed access to the trunk, and for that he had to have a bribe for Herr Brandt. The aquavit had been locked away, as I had known it would be the moment I heard my mother accuse Otto of stealing it. Throughout Otto’s ordeal I had been wondering at the back of my mind what I was going to bring with me the next time I went down to the basement. I didn’t have money to give Brandt, and I somehow didn’t feel I would be able to secure his co-operation with a can of Cuban pineapple.
I went down empty-handed.
Far from feeling defiant, I remember a kind of looseness about me, as though I were in the process of surrendering to some large, dismantling power that had had designs on me for some time.
Brandt was in his glass-walled cubicle. He himself was asleep in his chair, but his scar, glittering crimson in the peculiar, poisonous-looking light that flickered between the neon ceiling halo and the green-painted walls, seemed wide awake. I had the impression that it was expecting me. The keys dangled from their ring, asprawl on Brandt’s thigh, bobbing there as he breathed. A tight bud of anxiety was pushing up through my stomach. Yes, yes, come in, the bilious walls and the roil of glittering flesh seemed to whisper as I silently opened the door. Yes, yes, very quietly, now. But even as I crept towards Brandt, I knew that they had every intention of betraying me. I understood that what I was doing, as I ever so gently placed my fingers on the keys, was merely a kind of ceremonial formality, so that though it was physically a shock, it was in fact no great surprise when Brandt’s heavy hand came down suddenly on mine. He held it first to the bunch of keys, then, sliding it with deliberately slow forcefulness (as if to demonstrate to me that we had now arrived in a realm where his power over me was absolute), he locked it onto his bulging groin. Barely deigning to open his eyes, he said, ‘No more aquavit, eh?’
I nodded, and he, rousing himself from his chair, his hand still gripping mine, said, ‘Come on, then,’ and as if we had long ago agreed to this contingency, we went down together to the storage area, locking the door behind us.
*
I HAVE little graphic recollection of what I or Brandt actually did that afternoon or the afternoons that followed at monthly intervals. What survives in me more vividly than the physical details was the sense, already familiar to me at that age, that the harm being done to me had in some mysterious fashion already been done. It had already happened. Not literally, perhaps, but in a manner that made this manifestation of it little more than a
kind of hieroglyphic record of an earlier, vaster event, as, say, a particular rock formation, made visible by a mudslide, records a seismic upheaval that took place in the earth’s tectonic plates aeons ago. If there was any element of surprise, it was simply in the discovery that my blightedness was not by some miracle going to turn out to exclude this particular area of my being. But then I had had no reason to suppose that it would.
The other thing I remember is that Brandt never seemed to experience anything resembling pleasure during our encounters. The vacant look on his large, round face (the face of a baby left to bloat in a jar of formaldehyde) would turn actively gloomy when I arrived at his booth for the key now. As we walked in silence down the service stairway, I had the sense that he was moving there through the same miasma of dimly apprehended horror as I was, and as we groped and grappled lugubriously together in the near-blackness of the storage room, a pair of lobsters in a murky tank, he had the weary air of someone undergoing a peculiarly burdensome penance. I think of the paintings of Bosch – the demons as tormented-looking as their victims, the two at times barely distinguishable as they reach down into each other with the blunt instrument of themselves, entering and breaking. When it was over he would leave me to the privacy of my mother’s trunk, limping off in a private cloud of muttered imprecations directed as much at the world in general as at me personally.
This state of affairs continued for perhaps a year. I was aware that it was unhealthy, to say the least, but at the same time it seemed inconceivable that it could be otherwise. It had come about by a process of invincible logic, one that I myself was complicit in, even if I hadn’t initiated it, and for all its unwholesomeness, I recognised in its textures, its particular twists and turns, something that felt peculiarly me-like. I had created this strange, convoluted existence, as a sea creature creates the shell peculiar to itself. The distinguishing feature of this particular shell – to pursue the analogy – turned out to be its steady strangulation of its inhabitant. By the time I was freed from it, I was more dead than alive.
CHAPTER 4
Already largely absent from us in spirit, my father began to absent himself physically at this time. He let it be known at work that he was available for the least desired assignments, and began spending weeks at a time at convocations of minor functionaries in Sofia and Bucharest. My mother appeared not to notice, or at least not to mind, continuing indefatigably along the path she had chosen for herself. And then one day, when my father was away on one of his trips, she announced to us over dinner that he would not be coming back to live with us. He had fallen in love with another woman, she informed us drily, a colleague in his department. When he returned to Berlin he and my mother would be divorced, she told us, and he would be moving in with his colleague.
None of us had had any inkling of this, and we pressed my mother for more details, but she appeared to have taken the position that the event was nothing more than a minor annoyance, and the less said about it the better. Unsentimentality over matters of the heart was a point of pride among the educated classes in the former GDR, and my mother’s behaviour was doubtless an attempt to prove herself a superior adherent to this code. It must have cost her something, though: when Kitty suddenly burst into tears at the table, my mother told her extremely sharply to stop. There was a moment’s silence. Then her own eyes – to her apparent astonishment – filled with tears (the first and last time any of us beheld such a phenomenon), and she abruptly left the room. A stoical dryness was soon restored, however, and after that she contrived to give a characteristically lofty appearance of being above such commonplace emotions as wounded pride, petty vengefulness, or plain sorrow.
For the most part life continued unaltered after my father’s departure, but there was one significant change. Although she may have considered it beneath her to display any personal response to the event, my mother seemed to feel that some kind of ‘official’ response was called for, just as a government is sometimes obliged to respond to some event its individual ministers are personally indifferent to, for the sake of the public’s sense of balance. The response she settled on was a temporary suspension of her soirées. In this, as in all matters, there was no doubt a strategic motive: namely that their resumption, whenever it came, would be seen as a triumph over adversity. But whatever the case, I was abruptly liberated from my treadmill. No more fraught recitals, no more forgery, no more furtive dalliances with Brandt in the dark basement with its little mice and moths and beetles writhing and blinking on their glue traps all around us.
Suddenly, effortlessly, it was over. Almost too effortlessly, perhaps. With the feeling of a prisoner let out of his dungeon only to be told that the door had never in fact been locked, I drifted back up to the surface of my life, utterly bewildered.
Here, I discovered, things had been proceeding in quite momentous ways, apparently without need of my active participation. At school in particular, where I had been coasting for some time in a state of almost narcoleptic dreaminess, my life really did seem to have taken on a life of its own.
Ours was one of the elite high schools of Berlin, reserved for children of party officials. We had the best technical and athletic equipment, as well as the most highly qualified teachers, at our disposal, and it was expected that we would follow in the footsteps of our devout, industrious parents. Foreign and domestic dignitaries were constantly being wheeled into our morning assembly to impress on us the heroic nature of our destiny. Abrassimov, the Soviet ambassador, pinned Red Star badges on our chests one morning, carrying himself with the fantastical frostiness he was famous for, and that he evidently thought appropriate to his viceregal status in our republic. Alexander Schalck-Golodowski came to talk to us about so-called ‘German–German’ relations. Erich Mielke, Politburo Member for Security, led us in our Pioneer Greeting one morning, before going on to address us on the joys of a career in counterintelligence. Guenter Mittag came to us from Economic Affairs . . . Illustrious names once; names to conjure with, their mere utterance sufficient to induce that sensation of awe reserved for remote, solemn powers – all gone now, disgraced, ridiculed, forgotten.
My mother’s visit to my class at the time of our abortive move to New York turned out to have had one lasting effect: it had seriously compromised my position among my classmates. Although I hadn’t been actively shunned, I had been put into a kind of social quarantine, a limbo-like condition where I was under close scrutiny pending the appearance of further symptoms that would indicate a full-blown case of unpopularity.
Unpopularity, as any schoolchild knows, is a highly specific spiritual sickness which can strike almost anybody at any given moment. It is as irrefutably real as the measles, and in its own way almost as contagious. Once a person has been diagnosed with it there is nothing he can do except wait patiently for it to run its course. Attempts to deny it or overcome it by ingratiating oneself with the uncontaminated will only result in ever crueller forms of rejection.
My fall from grace came about almost casually. One afternoon in summer, during our annual Hans Beimler athletic and paramilitary contests, I saw a group of my classmates sitting together on the grass of one of the playing fields. I had just won my quarterfinal in the two-hundred-metre dash, qualifying me for the next round, and I was feeling buoyant enough to join the group without being invited. They had been laughing, but by the time I joined them they had fallen quiet.
‘Let’s try it on Stefan,’ somebody said. They had evidently been playing some game. I looked about cheerfully, always ready to offer myself as a source of entertainment.
A girl called Katje Boeden spoke. Katje was the daughter of a high-ranking official in Hermann Axen’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and I had a private connection to her. A short time before my father’s debacle in New York, her family had made a friendly overture to mine, and we had visited them at their house in the Wandlitz compound outside the city. It was a warm home, full of games and toys, and decorated with tribal art from Zanzibar, which
gave it an almost bohemian flavour. Katje had been wearing a smocked green dress. On her blossoming body it had seemed to gather up all the innocent wonder of childhood and draw it surreptitiously into a strange new context – that of imminent sexual awakening. The effect on me had been powerful. While Otto went off with her older brother Paul, she took me into the garden where she had a tree house in a half-dead beech tree. We sat talking for what seemed hours – about what, I have no recollection, but I was bewitched by her. Unfortunately, my father lost his job soon after, and our visit was neither returned nor repeated.
Over the next two or three years, Katje had grown extremely pretty – petite, with sharp, delicate features, sparkling blue eyes and fair hair which she wore in a tight, gleaming crown of braids. Though she never made any reference to our meeting at her home, she was always friendly towards me.
‘Name the first three animals to come into your head, Stefan,’ she said.
I forget the first two animals I named, but the third was the three-toed sloth. After a pause there was a titter of laughter: gentle enough at first. Conscious of being a good sport, I sat with my smile, waiting for an explanation. But as the merriment seemed about to subside, a peal of louder, more fulsome and somehow more ominous-sounding laughter broke from Katje. For several seconds it sounded out alone; clear and pure, like the clarion call announcing the arrival of a new force into the field. Then one by one the others joined in, and suddenly they were all doubled up with the kind of wild, hysterical, self-perpetuating laughter that teenagers everywhere so enjoy being overcome by. I continued smiling, telling myself there was nothing to be dismayed about, and yet feeling a faint ache in my throat, and sensing, distantly, the advent of something momentous and catastrophic.