Seven Lies

by James Lasdun

  ‘The first animal is how you see yourself,’ a boy told me when the group had begun to calm down, ‘the second is how others see you. And the third is what you really are.’

  ‘A three-toed sloth,’ Katje shrieked, and once again they were shaking their sides and rolling on the grass, helpless with laughter.

  A day or two later, during a geography class, where we were giving presentations on the tropical zone, a boy stood up and announced with a sly grin that he was going to talk about the three-toed sloth. I would say that my heart sank, except that ‘sank’ implies a depth of plummeting that wasn’t quite what I experienced. Rather, my heart slid down a little, then seemed to move more in a sideways direction, so that as I heard the boy inform us that a sloth stays so still that mould grows in its hair, that its maximum speed – that of a mother sloth hurrying to protect her child – is five metres per hour, that they aren’t hunted because even when shot dead they continue clinging to their branch, not dropping until they reach an advanced state of decomposition, and so on, while smiles danced about the room like little sunbeams, what I felt was not some ever-blackening descent into misery, but more a kind of anaesthetising removal, as if I were travelling out beyond the walls and windows towards some point of absolute detachment and indifference. I saw that I had fallen from favour, and I accepted this without protest – inward or outward. After all, I told myself, feeling my familiar sense of déjà vu, this had already happened. It had happened long ago: what had just occurred was no more than a case of fallible human judgement belatedly recognising the verdict handed down against me long ago by some impassive agency of reality itself.

  The last athletic qualifying rounds were held on a sweltering, overcast afternoon. The acrid smell from the chimneys of the nearby foundries and breweries was particularly heavy in the air. I sat on a bench alone, waiting for the semifinals of the two hundred metres. Though I wasn’t what you would call an athlete, I had always been able to cover short distances at above-average speed. I relate this faculty directly to my ability to think up ingenious falsehoods at short notice. Both have to do with the instinct for evasion, which has always been more highly developed in me than that of confrontation. As I sat on the bench I fantasised about winning my round and then going on to win the final itself the following week. In my vision, my face remained stern as I crossed the finishing line, as though to convey that I scorned any hope that this victory might alter my status as an outcast. But as I left the field I would catch Katje’s eye, and although she would say nothing, the brief stalling of her attention would tell me that a secret connection had been opened up, linking her in her realm of light to me in my darkness.

  In reality what happened was this: As soon as the starter pistol was fired and I leaped forward with my rivals, I became aware of something that at first presented itself as a kind of abstract sense of obstruction. Normally when I ran this race I would have the pleasurable sensation that it was somehow tailor-made for my own particular combination of skills, stamina and ambitions. But now I felt unexpectedly at sea. My body didn’t seem to know what to do. Instead of obediently turning itself into an instrument for the expression of speed, it seemed to want to express some new idea of doubt or faltering. I felt that I wasn’t so much running as flailing. After a moment I realised that among the shouts coming from the spectators lining the track were cries of unmistakably hostile intent. ‘Five metres per hour,’ I heard, ‘There’s mould growing on your fur,’ and ‘You’re decomposing, Vogel.’ It was these cries that were thickening the air about me. If ever I wanted proof of the communist idea of the individual as a social unit, even to his physiological functions, I had it here: the sense of my comrades actively willing me not to win the race was indeed slowing me down, their words dragging on my limbs like lead weights. I caught sight of Katje up ahead of me, thronged by her companions. As I drew level with her, I heard her cry out, her delicate-featured head tilted back in an attitude of ecstatic contempt, ‘Here comes the three-toed sloth.’ The space about me felt almost viscous, the sour-ochre smell of burnt malt and coal dust mingling and merging with the hatred radiating towards me, each somehow amplifying the other, until I felt suffocated and nauseous. As I moved slowly across the finishing line, several metres behind the slowest of my rivals, I found myself panting for air and strangely dizzy. Suddenly the ground swung up towards my face and I blacked out.

  When I came round (I had fainted, apparently from heat exhaustion), I understood that my long quarantine was over. The worst had been confirmed and I was now officially unpopular.

  From this time forth I was referred to as ‘Sloth’ or ‘Threetoed Sloth’, and I was considered fair game for all the ambient spite and aggression that gusted about the school to vent itself on. My life became highly unpredictable. For days on end I might be totally ignored. And then suddenly, out of nowhere, a storm of the most violent hostility would erupt about me. I would find myself being shoved and kicked, my books being torn from me and thrown all over the place, my nickname being chanted with the peculiar gleeful derisiveness (like the ecstasy I had noted on Katje’s face) that appeared to be one of the distinguishing features of my persecution. After a few weeks, as though the virulence of my case weren’t sufficiently expressed by these manifestations, there was a further development. It took the form of a sign: an oval paw shape, with three clawlike protruberances. It appeared first on the toilet doors, then spread rapidly throughout the school, showing up on chalkboards, official notice boards, desktops, even the classroom walls themselves. At first I attempted to erase these sloth paws whenever I saw them, but for every one I removed, another dozen would appear, and I realised this was futile. Besides, there was a sense in which I regarded them as having emanated from myself, rather than my comrades. They were the proliferant, bitter fruit of a tree that had its roots in my own being. For not only was it I who had delivered into my comrades’ hands the fateful image of the sloth in the first place, but it was also my own compromised condition as a human being that had made them so ready to seize on it and use it as a weapon against me.

  At that time of collective sexual burgeoning, it was clear to me that I had allowed something poisonous to enter into this most sensitive part of myself, and in doing so to canker it. I awoke from my wet dreams feeling more anxious than gratified, my head suffused with a sickly afterglow left behind by apparitions whose superficial femininity could never quite conceal some underlying nuance or redolence of Herr Brandt. In those unenlightened times, the obtrusion of such a figure into one’s erotic dream life was alarming, to say the least.

  My daytime fantasies were similarly contaminated. At first these invariably featured Katje, with whom I continued to imagine, pathetically but ardently, situations in which a ‘secret connection’ would suddenly be revealed between us. In absolute silence we would withdraw from the outer world where she was obliged to keep up the appearance of my tormentor, into a private realm of sharply enhanced intimacy in which her true feelings for me spilled out in waves of intense, radiant warmth. There, we would hold hands, looking tenderly into each other’s eyes. I would kiss her lips, feel her small mouth yield beneath mine, and taste the sweetness of her tongue. Drawing back a moment, she would look at me almost pleadingly, as though begging my forgiveness for all the spitefulness she was obliged to heap on me in the outer world. Shyly she would remove her blouse, offering me her girlish breasts with their budlike nipples. As I kissed them, I would reach a pitch of arousal. And then suddenly Brandt would appear in my mind, a ponderously scoffing presence, his face wearing that old knowing sneer, as though to say, Who do you think you’re fooling? And with an inward slump, I would feel the burden of my contagion, my brokenness, reassert itself inside me, and my brief, celestial vision would dissolve.

  Given its physical effects, it was not surprising that this burden should assume a physical form in my imagination. The image that would come into my mind was Brandt’s scar. I began to feel as though that snail trail of glistening scarle
t tissue had migrated from him to me, and that although it might not be visible to the eye, its presence upon me was nevertheless clear as day. This was why people had begun to recoil from me, and it seemed to me entirely natural that they should do so. I remember that whenever I was attacked, whether verbally or physically, a part of me was always firmly on the side of my attackers. If it had been possible to divide myself in two, I would probably have joined them in their assaults on me.

  I had already tasted the paralysing effects of this antagonism during my two-hundred-metre semifinal. What happened to me over the next few years, as my unpopularity ran its course, was essentially an enormously drawn-out version of precisely that experience.

  A deep lethargy settled on my spirit. My mind grew dull and my body felt permanently torpid. I began to see the requirements of my life in terms of immeasurable distances that had to be crossed, but never could be, so infinitely slow had I become, so that it was better not to embark on them at all. At home I spent hours at a time horizontal on my bed. I would like to say that I became self-scrutinising and studious, that I read copiously, read ‘everything’, but in truth I spent most of the time staring at the ceiling. If I did develop any form of connoisseurship, it was a connoisseurship of vacancy. I retain from that period the sense of a mysterious relationship between rooms and time. At a certain depth of immobility one forgets the ostensible function of a room as a shelter or area boxed off for some specific activity, and begins to experience it in its purer nature, as a ship transporting one across the ocean of time. The more motionless I became, the more apparent was this function. At times it seemed to me I could almost feel the slight swell and surge of that invisible element beneath me, and this was a strangely pleasurable sensation – a feeling of naked contact with a mighty power intent on annihilating everything and fully capable of doing so. I told myself that I need only lie there and let myself be carried forward for every vexing thing that surrounded me to fall away and crumble into dust. That I myself would be a part of this slow-motion Armageddon was merely an added bonus.

  My lethargy thus fed on itself, growing thicker and heavier, until I reached the point where even the simplest, most basic tasks, such as opening a window or closing a door, would have to assert their demands on me with an irresistible urgency, before I could stir myself to perform them.

  During this period I formed the idea that every phenomenon that comes into being represents a victory in a struggle against a force willing it not to come into being. I pictured this opposing force as a kind of Chinese Dragon, a Dragon of Stability, jealously guarding the status quo. It patrolled the borders between occupied and unoccupied space, and it lay curled and scowling at the threshold of every possible action. In order to open a window one must first slay the dragon posted to ensure that the closed window remain for ever closed. The fire these dragons breathed took the form of waves of paralysing intertia, a breath of which was enough to overcome you unless you had extraordinary vitality as well as unshakeable belief in the importance of what you wanted to do. More and more I found myself defeated before I could even move. Was it worth the almighty struggle, the expenditure of limited energy, to open that window, when after all nothing material would be changed by doing so, and when, even if I succeeded, another dragon would immediately be posted to ensure that the now-open window would now remain for ever open? Increasingly, it seemed not.

  In this way the dragons grew steadily bolder and more numerous, crowding into the most intimate corners of my existence, until I could almost see them, massed about me like iguanas I had seen in pictures of the rocks of the Galapagos Islands, fatly luxuriating in the near-perfect stultification they had finally procured.

  The only thing that punctuated my inertia was an occasional bout of yearning. Yearning is the passive form of protest: instead of trying to change things by a concrete attack on what exists in the here and now, it puts its faith in what lies beyond. The objects that triggered this feeling varied, but they had in common a mixture of enchantment and a kind of shyness, an inclination to retreat or disappear from view.

  I became susceptible to certain aspects of the natural world for the first time. Nature impinged very little on our life in Berlin, but that made the occasions when it did all the more piercing. A group of slender trees, greyish with a dim, pewter-like gleam and fine raised lines shoaling horizontally around the smooth skin of their trunks, rose from the rubble of a derelict public garden near our apartment. They were grouped closely, in a way that stressed their kinship and gave them the appearance of conversing with each other, in a language known only to themselves. That and the slight glimmering sheen of their barks gave them a mysterious glamour in my eyes. They seemed to be concealing a vivid, secret life of their own. I would stop and look at them, mesmerised by the vague suggestion they gave out, of a realm of existence contiguous with mine, yet utterly unlike it. I yearned to cross the threshold into this realm, to reconfigure myself within its matrix of sap, fibre and sunlight, and there were times, stilling myself to the utmost, when I felt on the point of doing so, whereupon, as though suddenly aware of being encroached on, the trees would abruptly withdraw into themselves, becoming mute, inert, wooden. Likewise with the sky. Mostly it was grey, but sometimes on winter afternoons, as the sun went down behind the great apartment blocks that marched to the farthest horizon in every direction, it would turn a clear amethyst colour, and things that were not noticeable before were briefly inscribed in fire: strange runes, hairpins, chunks of frozen drapery, cat’s paws of dispersing jet vapour; suggestive of the traffic of other empires, parallel with and utterly unlike our own; infinitely beguiling and absolutely elusive.

  That which withholds itself came to form my definition of the desirable. Most of the girls at my school came into this category. Katje’s successor in my imagination was a Russian girl named Masha, the daughter of a visiting physicist. She had dark, glistening hair and a smooth, dark-complexioned face with narrow green eyes that turned delicately upwards at the outer corners, giving her a look at once feline and oriental. She was extremely reserved; probably just shy among her new companions, but I chose to attribute it to an innate sense of superiority over us benighted locals. Our German tongue in her Soviet mouth became strangely transformed, the vaunted exactnesses of its agglomerate noun phrases melting back from pure, harsh meaning to something almost music-like as she blithely softened every vowel and liquefied each consonant. On the rare occasions when she condescended to speak in class, I would listen to her with a feeling of anguished desire. Like the trees and the sunset-lit clouds, she gave the impression of being merely the outermost flourish of some immense, hidden universe, and her voice, making sounds that were simultaneously familiar and alien, seemed the point of entry. We never exchanged a word or even a look, but unknown to her she and I conducted a prolonged, passionate love affair. In the private theatre of my psyche, I took her on long walks through the city, glutting myself on the erotic melancholy of her presence, kissing her fervently in the drizzle under budding linden trees, taking her invisibly home to my bed and murmuring her name over and over until I had worked myself into a state of rapture. She disappeared from our midst as unexpectedly as she had arrived. But such was the perverse premium I now put on unattainability that the effect was merely to intensify our relationship, enshrining her in my imagination with the solid gold burnish of an icon from her native land.

  And then finally there were the things my father had brought back from America – my Slinky, my diver’s watch, my skyscraper pens. Having neglected them for a while, I once again found myself gratefully appreciating these objects. I pored over them, feeling them dilate in my mind until the world they connoted – snatches of imagined music, imagined flavours and textures, intimations of freer, larger human types – was more vividly present to me than my own surroundings.

  One of the advantages of living on our side of the Wall was our ability to believe that happiness did actually exist somewhere on earth, namely in the West. Ha
ppiness had a home. For most of my compatriots the name of that home was West Germany, and its furnishings were the products they saw advertised on the West German shows they tuned in to nightly on their TVs – the laundry soaps and detergents whose accompanying celestial and erotic imagery brought home so forcibly the terminal shittiness of our own Spree and Dega. But I seemed to have inherited my mother’s instinct for the deeper hierarchies – either that or my father’s aborted career had made more of an impact on me than I had realised: for me the name of that home was always America. In an obscure, private, but crucial sense, the trees I stared at were American trees, the clouds in the amethyst sky were American clouds, Masha was as American, despite her ostensible Russianness, as my father’s souvenirs. Although I wasn’t conscious of harbouring a wish to ‘go to America’, it strikes me that these acts of passive contemplation, of yearning, were perhaps not so different from the rituals of primitive hunters, who feel it necessary to take possession of their quarry in their imaginations before they can hope to do so in the flesh.

  CHAPTER 5

  ‘The rib’s OK – just badly bruised. But do you see this?’

  The emergency room doctor looked at me with a mixture of concern and professional excitement. He had clipped the X-ray to a light box on the wall, giving me a monochrome view of my own rib cage and cloudy interior.

  ‘This whiter spot here . . .’ Pointing between two spectral ribs. ‘I can’t say for sure, but I think we may be looking at an early stage of pulmonary tuberculosis.’

  I followed the finger to what did seem a solider brightness in the blurred milky webbing to the right of my spine.

  ‘The bacillus leaves calcium in the tissue, which shows up harder than other kinds of scarring. This is hard, though it’s small still. My guess would be that you haven’t felt any symptoms yet. Any blood in your spit?’