by James Lasdun
She lost some of her spark after that. Her ebullient curiosity gave way to an indifference that might have been merely protective at first, but eventually seemed to enter the actual pigment of her personality. She stopped reading, and spent her evenings watching West German soap operas on the TV instead. Her eyes began to look a little sunken in their sockets. My mother got her a clerical job at the Demokratischer Frauenbund Deutschlands – the women’s organisation where my mother herself now held an advisory position. She cleaned our apartment assiduously every morning before work, and every weekend drank herself to sleep in her little bedroom.
This was a period in which our whole household seemed to be in decline. As predicted, my mother had revived her soirées, on cue to garner the maximum admiration for her pluck without risking disapproval for an unseemly lack of grief over her misfortune. Uncle Heinrich still came, so most of the former habitués still thought it worthwhile to put in an appearance. But there was little pretence, now, of it being anything other than an act of calculated sycophancy. The atmosphere was that of a morgue – a morgue presided over by the king and queen of the underworld, in the shape of Heinrich in his dapper suit, gold party pin in his lapel, and my mother in her ice-blotched crown. I learned somewhere that the Japanese language used to have a particular verb form, the ‘play form’, reserved for addressing the nobility. Decorum required one to suppose that everything these privileged beings did was motivated by pleasure alone. Instead of saying, You’re building a new palace, one would say, You play building a new palace. It seems to me that life at home during this period was qualified by a similarly attenuating form: not the play form but the posthumous form. Posthumously, people stood about at our soirées making glacial conversation. They nibbled posthumously on little underworld nuggets served by Kitty, who drifted posthumously among them like a pallid wraith. To the relief, no doubt, of everybody, no mention was made of my poetry, though I might well have posthumously gone through that rigmarole again if anyone had suggested it, so passive had I become.
The lines of force that had once seemed to plunge from the very source of meaning directly into our lives, shaping and patterning everything we did, had somehow been torn from us. We were unmoored. Events of a freakish, arbitrary nature had begun to occur, though in our posthumous condition we barely even registered their oddness. My father, for instance, began reappearing in the apartment, turning up unannounced, and staying for longer and longer intervals. My mother neither welcomed nor objected to his presence. She tolerated it, sometimes sitting with him in the living room as he silently reclined in his old armchair, sometimes ignoring him. He never stayed the night, and he avoided the soirées, but he was a fixture again, and though nothing was ever said, it was soon evident that he and my mother had re-established their marriage on a posthumous basis, him diminished beyond his already enfeebled stature, her in a position of unassailable yet entirely futile dominance.
Meanwhile, posthumously, my mother and I maintained the fiction that I was the family poet-intellectual. I stayed on at school past tenth grade to prepare for my Abitur. Posthumously, I sat through my classes, did my homework and took the exam. I was in bed with terrible flu when the results arrived. Through the bleary glaze of my fever I was aware of a subdued commotion in the apartment. I realised my mother was frantically making phone calls. Snatches of her conversation drifted into my throbbing head: do something for Stefan? . . . too sensitive to perform well under that kind of pressure . . . Gradually I understood that I had done poorly. In a dim, remote way, I felt my mother’s anguish – another humiliation for our friends to enjoy – but I myself was indifferent. I burrowed back down into my fever, luxuriating in the oblivion, wishing it could last for ever. By the time I emerged from it, my mother, true to form, had warded off the calamity by sheer force of will, securing me a place to study philosophy at Humboldt University.
I had never shown the slightest interest in philosophy, but the subject was undersubscribed at that time, owing to a crack-down in the department. The notorious Professor Havemann had been ousted for introducing heretical texts into the syllabus, and a forbidding Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy now prevailed, putting off all but the most dedicated or desperate young men and women. In this way my mother found herself permitted to mention, casually, whenever the opportunity arose, her son ‘the philosophy student, yes, at Humboldt.’
But Kitty.
One summer my mother took us off for a vacation on the island of Rügen. It was just the three of us: herself, me and Kitty. Otto had decided to pursue a career in the military – another turn of events that at one time would have stunned us; would have had to be discussed, analysed, cocooned in acceptable phrases, until it could be honourably accommodated into the grain of our identity as a family, but which we now, in our benumbed, posthumous fashion, accepted with a shrug as part of the general unexpectedness of things – and he was away on manoeuvres.
The weather was good. The Baltic waves seemed to relax from their solemn and exclusive duty as the concealers of Soviet submarines, and emitted an occasional gratuitous sparkle.
We stayed in a concrete beach hut rented out by a state hotel in Kühlungsborn. It was peaceful enough that we could each settle into our own rhythms, and a characteristically posthumous, atomised little holiday seemed set to ensue. My mother had taken up oil painting, and spent the days on a sand dune painting seascapes. Kitty lay on the beach listening to the radio and sunning herself. I stayed in the little house most of the time, smoking cigarettes in luxurious defiance of Dr Serkin’s orders, and reading about Joseph Stalin. As a student at Humboldt I had access to books that were otherwise unavailable, including a large trove of both pre- and post-1956 (the year Khrushchev denounced him) tomes on the illustrious tyrant, in whom I had developed perhaps the only genuine intellectual interest I have ever known. I was reading about the years before the revolution, when his personality was just beginning to declare itself. In 1913 he was exiled to a remote region of Arctic Siberia. The temperature fell to minus forty in the winter, and swarms of mosquitoes made life almost as unbearable in the summer. An occasional care package arrived from the Alliluyev family in the Caucasus. Once, in a letter thanking them, Stalin asked for postcards with scenes of nature on them. ‘I have a stupid longing to look at some landscape,’ he wrote, ‘if only on a piece of paper.’ I was struck by the unexpectedly plangent tone of this. That this ‘grey and colourless mediocrity’, as Trotsky called him, could have possessed anything so poetic as a capacity for yearning; that the man in whom, later, a casual whim of displeasure could result in fifty thousand political prisoners in Bamlag being wired together like logs, trucked into the wilderness and shot, could ever have experienced feelings of longing for the natural world, was fascinating to me. I was lying on my bed reflecting on it – not in an analytic spirit so much as an aesthetic one – idly revolving it as one might a scene one has been unexpectedly struck by in a film or novel, when Kitty came into the room in her swimsuit.
My room led to the shower, and that appeared to be where she was heading. But before she got to the bathroom door, she came to a halt, slowed involuntarily, it seemed, by some thickness in the air. She stood rather vacantly for a moment, then peered at me.
‘It’s dark in here.’
I could tell from her voice that she was in an odd mood. It was early for her to be returning from the beach, and I wondered if she had had too much sun. She blinked in a bewildered, sunstruck way. I could smell the sea on her, and the oily sweetness of her tanning lotion. Her cheeks were a hectic crimson. She smiled distractedly, then moved on towards the bathroom. As she opened the door, she turned back.
‘Where’s your mother?’
Again something quizzical and involuntary in her stance, as though she had been struck like a bell, and these words were what chimed out. Where’s your mother?
I shrugged. ‘Out.’
As I said this, my eye met hers and something unexpected and momentous travelled between us.
/> I barely noticed Kitty in those days. She was just a part of the neutral human furniture of my life, as I assume I was of hers. It was a shock, then, to find myself staring into the grey depths of her eyes, which stared back in a manner both startled and intrepid, as if daring me not to look away and pretend that what had just happened had not. And as though some barrier between us had just been removed, I was suddenly physically aware of her as a woman.
It was she who broke off the look, moving on into the bathroom to take her shower. I returned to my book. It didn’t reveal whether the Alliluyevs ever sent Stalin the postcards he asked for. I knew that he later married the daughter, Nadezhda, and that after they quarrelled at a party in the Kremlin, she went home and killed herself, though rapidly, as the effect of Kitty’s look kept expanding inside me, all of this started to seem quite far away, and I found myself in a strange state comprised equally of arousal and anxiety. It occurred to me that Kitty’s innocent question about my mother must have touched on some latent veto lodged in each of us, setting it flashing like an alarm light, and that it was this that had given our look its peculiar intensity. I saw her eyes again – the transparent grey like heat shadows on a wall – and a great jolt of desire went through me. I tried to read on about Stalin. Even in that godforsaken place, he chose to cultivate aloofness rather than sociability, pressing his granite-like ego against the fellow Bolshevik who shared his hut, till the man moved out. I remembered how Otto had once admitted to me that he fantasised about Kitty when he jerked off. He was always very frank about sex; said he liked to imagine doing it to her from behind, one hand over each of her breasts. The image of him sneaking up on the ‘upward-aspiring’ Kurt Teske bronze in our living room and groping her billowy breasts came back to me on a strange, rippling current of hilarity. I exchanged the Kurt Teske for Kitty in my mind’s eye, then Otto for myself, half consciously donning his free and easy personality over mine – a psychic mask. At once I felt startlingly alive; full of odd, crackling powers. Kitty came out of the shower wrapped in a towel, her darkened, steel-coloured hair straggling over her cheeks. I looked at her with a brazenness that stalled her and seemed to confuse her for a moment. Then, to my amazement, she giggled and ran out of the room. Without thinking, I got up and went after her. She ran into the dining room, looking back at me with bursts of high, breathless laughter, and before I knew it I was chasing her around the furniture like some priapic satyr pursuing a scantily clad nymph, until I caught her and we fell together on the sticky plastic of the living room sofa. As I held her there, my hands on the soft muscles of her arms, she looked up at me with an expression of calm and – to my eye – somewhat sceptical curiosity, as if to say, So? And now what are you proposing to do? I was more or less inexperienced in these matters. I had exempted myself from the sexual fray at Humboldt, in the belief that, damaged as I was, entering it would only result in pain and humiliation. Now, as Kitty looked at me, I could feel a multitude of blurry uncertainties beginning to teem. I found myself picturing Otto in the raindrop camouflage of his NVA Felddienstuniform and thinking of how I had been rejected from military service because of my TB, and had served instead with the Construction Brigade – the Bausoldaten – clearing woodland for army barracks, in the plain grey uniform of the noncombatant, my ignominious little shovel-insignia gleaming at my shoulder. For an anxious moment these images threatened to pry away the Otto-self with which I had armoured my own, but then – such was my peculiar cast of mind at that time – I was fortified by the sudden, reassuring memory that Stalin too had been turned down for military service, because of a childhood injury to his left arm, and with a feeling of cold, brutal lust, I tore the towel off Kitty and began ineptly mauling her naked body. She lay observing me dispassionately for a few moments, then sat up, putting her hands over mine with soft firmness.
‘No, Stefan,’ she said without rancour. ‘Not like that. Here . . .’
She put her hands on either side of my head and, gently bringing my lips to hers, began pouring her soft, wounded, passionate being into mine with a tenderness so entirely novel to me it was a source almost as much of bewilderment as of pleasure. Still kissing me, she placed my hands on her breasts, which were considerably softer than those of Kurt Teske’s bronze nude, a fact that didn’t exactly surprise me, but clashed distantly against some unconscious preconception I must have held concerning the pliability of female breasts, and, murmuring, ‘Gently, Stefan; gently, gently,’ proceeded to initiate me into her own peculiarly sweet-natured brand of love.
An unaccustomed warmth filled me in the aftermath. When my mother came home, I smiled at her affectionately, and found myself lavishing praises on the new canvas she was carrying. She glanced at me, a brief wariness stirring in her eyes, but seeing that I was sincere, she softened, growing almost bashful.
‘Oh, it’s just a mess, don’t you think?’
‘Not at all, it’s gorgeous. They all are.’
‘Really? Do you mean that, Stefan?’
A feeling of tenderness brimmed in me – it had been years since I had glimpsed this childlike, vulnerable creature she guarded under her formidable exterior.
‘I do.’
‘You don’t think they’re horribly amateurish?’
‘I think they’re wonderful.’
I looked from her to the paintings leaning against the living room wall – a series of semi-abstract seascapes, each one favouring a different shade of blue.
‘Hmm. Well, perhaps I’ll donate one or two of them to the local DFD,’ she said. ‘These branch offices never have anything interesting on the walls. Or perhaps I should just burn them. What do you think, Kitty?’
‘No, don’t burn them,’ Kitty said with a dutiful look of alarm.
‘You think they’re worth holding on to?’
‘Yes! They’re pretty.’
‘Pretty!’ my mother scoffed. ‘Well, if that’s all they are, I certainly shall burn them.’
‘Oh, no! I didn’t mean – I just – I don’t know anything about art . . .’
This brought a more forgiving look from my mother. ‘Ah, but there’s nothing you need to know,’ she said, ‘all you need is to be able to look with your eyes and feel. Look at this one here. I’ve tried to make the ocean express a sort of mood – do you see? Something a little sombre, even sad.’
‘Oh, yes. It is sad! It’s very sad –’
‘Sad but –’
‘I feel sad just looking at it now.’
‘Ah, but wait,’ my mother said patiently, ‘it’s not as simple as that. Look up in this corner, here. See?’
‘These blobs of yellow?’
‘Well, think of them as a tonality, relative to the rest; a modifier.’
Kitty looked lost. A bewildered, innocent expression settled on her.
‘It’s lighter here, isn’t it?’ my mother persisted. ‘Lighter than the rest. Like a little, subtle suggestion of –’
‘You mean a ray of hope!’ Kitty exclaimed.
‘Well, that’s putting it more crudely than I would hope was the case, but yes.’
‘A picture of sadness with a sort of gleam of hope. I see now. That’s so beautiful. Isn’t that beautiful, Stefan?’
I nodded, smiling rapturously at her. It was all I could do to stop myself from kissing her, right there in front of my mother.
As it turned out, she had enough wisdom, or instinct for self-preservation, to bring our affair to a firm end before we got back to Berlin. On our last night in Rügen I crept quietly into her room. Instead of letting me into her bed as she had the previous nights, she frowned.
‘No, Stefan, no,’ she whispered. ‘This isn’t sensible at all. Go back to your room.’
‘What? Let me in!’
‘Ssh! Your mother . . .’
‘I’ll make it creak even louder if you don’t –’
With a look of reproach, she moved to the side of her narrow bed. I climbed in beside her, enveloping myself in the still-intoxicating stale sweetn
ess of her sheets.
She wore a ruffled white nightgown. I started to kiss her cream-moistened face. She pulled away.
‘What’s the matter?’ I whispered.
She switched on a reading light and thrust her face close to mine.
‘Look at me, Stefan.’
‘I’m looking.’
‘I’m twelve years older than you. Look at these dark circles under my eyes. They don’t go away, you know. Not any more. And these little furrows around my mouth. Soon they’re going to start bunching up like there’s a drawstring under them. Find someone your own age.’
I planted a kiss on the offending mouth, then slid my hand over her nightgown. She threw back the covers and yanked up the cotton shift, baring herself. Grabbing my hand, she squeezed it onto the flesh of her inner thigh.
‘Feel how loose that is?’ she hissed. ‘It’s about to start really sagging. Same with these.’ She moved my hand to a gravity-shallowed breast. ‘See? I’m like a piece of melting cheese. Is that what you want in a woman? I’m too old for you. That’s what the matter is.’
She eyed me resentfully. I felt obscurely flattered. A sensation of manly protectiveness swelled inside me. I kissed her again; felt her take pleasure in it in spite of herself. Her fatigued, careworn prettiness touched me to the quick. The room, lit by her reading lamp, was neat and absolutely bare – herself its single ornament. I felt as though I were embracing a bouquet of fragile, frailly tinctured flowers. I could see nothing beyond my need to prove myself as a man capable of taking full possession of his woman. The more she resisted, the more imperative this need became. I ran my hand down over her waist.