by James Lasdun
‘No, Stefan, really . . .’
‘Why not?’
She sat up, covering herself again. ‘You’re practically my brother, Stefan. Doesn’t that disturb you?’
‘No.’
‘Well, it should. This is – it’s incest!’
She gave a little winsome laugh as she said this. I smiled, pulling her back down to the pillow and bringing her mouth to mine, emboldened by a thin, metallic confidence that had been steadily awakening in me since we first made love. She yielded a little: confused, warily responsive. I was beginning to understand the mechanisms within her that had set the patterns of her life; the little cogs and levers of self-doubt, kindness, irrational passion.
‘Please, Stefan, please.’
‘But why?’
Her pale cheeks were flushed, her eyes wild. ‘I’m a vulnerable person. I’m very emotional. If we go on now, I’ll get attached to you. That’s the way I am.’
‘So?’
‘You don’t want that.’
‘I do, Kitty. That’s exactly what I want.’
‘Why? So you can feel how powerful you are when it comes time to move on to the next woman?’
‘Kitty, don’t be ridiculous . . .’ However accurate the image of wrinkles and melting cheese she seemed intent on evoking may have been, this feeling of imminently triumphant possession was the more powerful reality, gilding her physical body with a layer of pure erotic substance that sent waves of desire through me at every touch. It was inconceivable to me that I might ever not want this.
‘I don’t want any other woman,’ I said, surprising myself at how nobly sentimental the words made me feel.
But it was apparently these words that gave her the strength she was looking for. She drew away from me, gently but decisively, pulling her nightgown back down around her.
‘Go to bed now, Stefan,’ she said, smiling calmly at me. ‘We’ll be friends this way. Go on.’
And as effortlessly as she had set the current flowing between us, she made it stop. It was as though some very simple problem had been resolved. The desire sluiced out of me. Without further protest, with even a certain feeling of relief, I went back to my room. Neither of us ever alluded to the matter again.
But for some time afterwards, I was in an exalted state. That such intensities of joy as I had just experienced had all these years been lying in wait for me, hidden inside those days like a purse of gold lying on a traveller’s path in some folktale, violently contradicted my sense of what life could possibly hold in store for me. It seemed after all that there was every reason to hope for happiness in this world.
CHAPTER 7
After I left Humboldt, I worked for a government organisation creating posters promoting ‘Peace, Friendship and Anti-Imperialist Solidarity’. The posters were put up in schools, offices, hospitals and other public places. Sometimes they solicited donations for Account 444, a public fund set up to support developing countries, but their main intent was to foster an image of the GDR as a beacon of conscience in a cynical and dangerous world. Given the historic idealism of my countrymen, who enjoy nothing better than the sensation of exclusive occupancy of the high ground in any landscape, moral or otherwise, this was not a difficult task. Even the dissident types I was soon to meet approved of our campaign. It takes a dubious sophistication to object to a poster condemning apartheid, on the grounds that the body condemning it isn’t exactly a picture of health itself. At any rate we didn’t trouble ourselves with such scruples, and other than the faint background suspicion that everything one could do in that land was inherently tainted with futility and fraudulence (our equivalent, perhaps, of the so-called ‘hum of life’, the G-sharp that whines when all other noises stop), the work was free of the more obvious kinds of stress.
Liaising between a state committee – the Solidaritätskomitee der DDR – and the Academy of Arts (whose president was a close friend of Uncle Heinrich’s), we commissioned and produced posters in support of the ANC, the Palestinians, the Laotians, the socialist opposition in Nicaragua, Chile and El Salvador and so forth. Our formula was simple: a compassion-arousing image of suffering in the third world, combined with an allusion to US imperialist culpability. A naively rendered Tree of Life, for instance, filled with delicate fruits in Sandinista colours, would stand with an air of tender pathos, about to be crushed by Uncle Sam’s boot. A small African child would sit stoically, bound in huge chains embossed with the words ‘US Steel’.
After a few months I was assigned to a group working on a series of purely anti-American posters – no pretext of supporting some other country. We showed the Statue of Liberty setting off a nuclear explosion with her torch; we had the stripes of the American flag rendered as the bars of a prison encompassing the entire planet. Anything we could think of that might stir up feelings of hatred for America was considered fair game. Hatred occupied a more reputable position in the spectrum of emotions back in the GDR than it does here in the States. I remember that among the sentiments chiselled on the walls of our assembly room at school were the words of Dr Lange, minister of education in the Soviet Zone after the war: ‘Youth must be filled with hatred for the enemies of our peaceful constructive work.’ There was nothing strange to any of us, therefore, about the idea of devoting ourselves to the arousal of this emotion in our compatriots. Our medium was the substance of righteousness itself. Handling it filled us with an almost luminous moral glow, like some benign form of radioactivity. I myself was no exception in this. I was entirely fulfilled in this job. I found I had a gift for propaganda – the triangulating of powerful images with latent phobias, to create a precisely targeted impulse of aggression – and I enjoyed exercising it. It also amused me to swap ideas with the skilful artists we summoned to our spruce-panelled offices on Lichtenberger-Strasse, and furthermore to find my suggestions being listened to with respect.
Best of all, the work brought me once again into a relationship with America. A treacherous relationship, of course, but as I have since found to be the case in so many circumstances, my private feelings of devotion not only survived within that outward form of hostility, but flourished. The more ingenious my contributions to our campaign of defamation, the more intense my feeling of secret connection to the US became. I have often wondered, in fact, whether betrayal and renunciation, far from negating people’s attachments, might in fact be the means by which they make them indestructible.
IT WAS AT this time that I met Inge. At one of my mother’s gatherings, a young composer named Walter Meyer was talking about new plays. He and his wife Clara, a television editor, were voracious consumers of contemporary culture, so abreast of the latest developments in all the arts that even my mother claimed to find them daunting. Walter mentioned a play by an avant-garde group that had just opened in Prenzlauer Berg.
‘Clara and I were thinking of seeing it,’ he said to me. ‘Perhaps you’d like to come with us?’
I thanked him and said that I would. We arranged to meet the following weekend.
Prenzlauer Berg in those days was something like the East Village was when Inge and I first arrived in New York: a mixture of the decrepit and the bohemian. Most of the workers’ families who used to live there had moved out of the crumbling old Wilhelmine tenement houses to Marzahn or one of the other new satellite cities. In their place all sorts of misfits, outcasts and dubious artistic types (the kind my father had been afraid my mother might be introducing to our house all those years ago) had moved in, lacing the dark backyards and factory halls of the greenless quarter between Schönhauser and Prenzlauer Allee with a network of galleries, bars and performance spaces. I’d never spent much time there myself, but its vaguely disreputable aura had impressed itself on my imagination, and I set off to meet Walter and his wife that Friday evening with a feeling of adventurousness.
Walter and Clara were waiting for me outside the theatre, an old warehouse with tiny barred windows.
I was wearing a sports jacket and pressed pants
from the Jumo department store. I remember becoming rapidly self-conscious about my over-formal appearance as we filed into the black-painted auditorium. Most of the other members of the audience were casually dressed, the men in faded jeans (real ones), the women in exotic, trinket-spangled garments I couldn’t even name. Even Walter and Clara, though not exactly scruffy, knew enough to blend in.
With this petty but curiously upsetting matter on my mind, I found it hard to pay attention to what was happening onstage, at least until the main actress appeared. And when she did, far from making me concentrate on the play itself, the effect she had was simply one of bewilderment; bewilderment tinged with outrage. Here’s something else you’ll never be able to have, was the idea her presence aroused in me.
Undemonstrative to the point of seeming almost drugged, she gave an appearance of immense, stilled, almost angry concentration, like some powerful and potentially dangerous machine. Physically she seemed imposingly tall and very slender (in reality she turned out to be of average height and weight). Her deep-set, blond-lashed eyes, high cheekbones, and excessively pale skin gave her a wraith-like look, further abetted by the blades of utterly straight white-blond hair falling either side of her face, and the curt slash of fringe across her forehead.
The interval came and I turned to Walter, intending to make some complimentary remark about the production and thank him for bringing me, when he said tersely:
‘Let’s get out of here, shall we?’
I gaped at him, startled.
‘I mean, it’s banal beyond words, no?’
Afraid of seeming naive, I converted my gape into a little indulgent grin, as if to say, But of course, that goes without saying.
‘Come on, then. We’ll get a drink somewhere instead.’
I followed him and Clara out. They seemed in a strange hurry to get away from the place.
That night, the image of the actress appeared in my mind with startling vividness. It was there when I woke in the morning too: a gleaming intrusion. And all day at work, it hovered like the persistent afterglow of a too-bright light over everything I said and did.
I would say the word for what I felt at that point was ‘fascination’, rather than ‘infatuation’. She was out of my orbit – I was well aware of that; as remote from me as a distant star, and about as likely to be capable of returning my interest.
Nevertheless, I found myself going back to the theatre a few days later, alone.
This time I got the outfit right – a lumpy old coat that had belonged to my father, over a white T-shirt I’d bought from a Polish street vendor and then carefully stained with ink. I also tried to pay a little more attention to the play itself. It was called Macbrecht, and it was a weird mixture of satire, horror and surreal farce, about an ambitious playwright whose even more ambitious wife eggs him on to murder all his rivals until no plays but his own can be put on anywhere in the land. It was full of witches, phantom knives, blood-spattered ghosts and strange, mad incantations. Most of the jokes went over my head. I missed the allusion to William Shakespeare’s Macbeth, didn’t know enough about what I later heard described as ‘Brecht Fatigue’ to understand why our national cultural icon was being caricatured as a crazed megalomaniac, and was far too politically unaware to realise that the real object of satire wasn’t Brecht at all, but the state that had enshrined him and decreed from on high all the other elements of our spiritual and political diet. All this I picked up later: at the time I was soon content to let it wash over me again, while I devoted my attention to the actress: Inge Leibus.
Again that double sense of an opening and a closing: of being given a glimpse of some new galaxy of sensations, and of simultaneously understanding that they could never be mine to experience. Anguish, then, though masked in the immediate moment by the simple rapture of beholding this otherworldly woman casting her lunar radiance over the obscure goings-on around her.
She didn’t ‘act’ in any sense I was accustomed to: throwing away her lines, and making no attempt to match the nimble comic gestures of the other actors. No apparent effort of ‘impersonation’ to persuade one of the reality of the macabre creature she was playing; and yet that creature was conjured very palpably into existence.
I was aware that in addition to that quality of remoteness, her allure for me had something to do with the suggestion of a violently destructive power at her disposal. Hearing her calling on the spirits to fill her with cruelty, I was taken back to the time of my adolescence, when I used to fantasise about a force powerful enough to obliterate the entire universe, or at least the part of it I myself had been born into. It seemed to me that just such a force was contained within the tall, palely incandescent frame of this woman.
To the small extent that I was able to follow the plot, I understood that a coalition of victims’ relatives and sympathisers was gradually forming against the murderous couple. In contrast to the Macbrechts’ stiffly formal costumes, the actors playing these parts were dressed like the audience, in jeans and tattered jackets, with the odd flourish of punk ornamentation – dyed bristles, silver chains – such as one had begun to see occasionally in TV footage of street demonstrations and rock concerts.
At the climax of the play they converged on the theatre (now fortified) where the Macbrechts were holed up, some of them carrying leafy branches, like banners of a battalion from the Green Movement. Just as this motley army was about to defeat Macbrecht and his cohorts, there was a sudden commotion in the real theatre. Several men in dark clothing ran onto the stage from the auditorium. In a swift, violent convergence, they grabbed hold of certain of the actors and began yanking them off the stage by their hair and clothes, twisting their arms behind their backs and roughly dragging them down the aisles towards the exit.
For a moment I thought this was part of the play, and was tremendously excited by the unexpected sense of mayhem it unleashed into the air. But even when I realised this wasn’t the case, I didn’t fully grasp what was going on until someone beside me pointed at the actors who were just then being frog-marched right past us, and said, ‘Schwerter zu Pflugscharen’, and I saw for the first time that each of these actors was wearing a badge with the swords-to-ploughshares insignia on it.
This insignia, depicting a blacksmith hammering a large sword into a ploughshare, was the emblem of the unofficial peace movement. It had recently been outlawed as part of a crackdown on unsanctioned anti-nuclear activity, and you could get arrested for wearing it.
With their odd, almost squeamish punctiliousness, the authorities appeared to have decided to restrict their actions against the play to clear violations of the law, singling out only those actors sporting the offending emblem, and studiously ignoring everyone else.
It was all over very quickly, and there was something haughtily impartial about it, as though one had been witnessing a natural, nonhuman phenomenon. From outside we heard the slam of car doors and the roar of engines as the prisoners were driven off.
I could hear my mother’s voice very clearly in my head, advising me to leave at once or risk ‘receiving disadvantage’. I realised that Walter and Clara must have spotted the badges early on in the play the other evening and smelled trouble. That, rather than some lofty aesthetic scruple, had been the cause of their hasty departure. Not that I thought any the worse of them for having left: I probably would have scuttled off myself now if some absurd, entirely unwarranted sense of opportunity hadn’t proved even stronger than my natural caution, and compelled me to linger.
The reaction in the theatre, after the first shock, was oddly muted. Some people did scuttle off. Others stood whispering in small groups, sneaking nervous looks around them. But still others seemed completely blasé, acting as if nothing at all unusual or significant had taken place.
Some of these now wandered onto the stage, where they stood smoking and talking with the remaining members of the cast. A tall, intelligent-looking young man in silver-framed glasses was chatting with the actor who had played Mac
brecht, exchanging what I took to be wryly amusing comments about what had just occurred. After a moment, they were joined by the actress, Inge Leibus, still in costume.
I watched them standing there together in the glare of the stage lights. Something in their gestures, their facial expressions, their laconic, almost disdainful way of carrying themselves caused a wave of envious longing to travel through me. I stared at them from the relative darkness of my seat, mesmerised.
The auditorium was emptying out. Reluctantly, I made my way to the exit.
A woman with a bush of wiry curls came out of the theatre after me.
‘Menzer’s place,’ she said to a group of people dawdling outside. At once they grew more animated. One of them called out to another group that had gone on ahead towards Kollwitzplatz:
‘Hey – Menzer’s place!’
The group turned back towards the theatre, picking up stragglers on the way, and then all of them began to move off. I stood there, wishing that I too could be a part of this cheerful expedition, but too shy, too close still to the days of my contagious unpopularity, to dare risking a snub by inviting myself along. Rain was falling, sour on the tongue and eyelids. I was about to cross the street to the U-Bahn when the curly-haired woman turned back to me. She gave me a brisk once-over, appraising me from top to toe. To my great joy, she appeared to judge me acceptable.
‘Coming?’ she asked, almost impatiently.
‘Well, I – I haven’t been invited.’
She tossed her head with a little scornful grimace. ‘Don’t have to be invited. It’s open house at Menzer’s. Everyone’s welcome.’
I joined her.
‘Margarete,’ she said, shaking my hand as we set off together down the wet sidewalk of Saarbrücker Strasse.