Seven Lies

by James Lasdun

  ‘Yes . . . I think she would. I’m sure she would . . .’

  It didn’t seem the right moment to mention that Inge and Lowenthal had ceased to be on speaking terms many years ago.

  ‘What about the money side?’ Menzer continued, casting off another of his disconcerting half smiles into the darkening room. ‘Do you think she would be able to put me in touch with investors?’

  ‘Inge?’

  ‘Yes, Inge.’

  ‘Well . . . possibly . . . I mean, I . . .’

  As I was blustering, he yawned suddenly and looked at his watch:

  ‘Just a moment.’

  Then, to my surprise, he called out towards an alcove at the far end of the room:

  ‘Lilian, it’s four o’clock.’

  A woman emerged from the alcove. A lover, I supposed. A pang went through me. Had disgrace taken nothing from him? His old arrogant manner still intact, this choice piece of Manhattan real estate at his disposal and now, to cap it all, some girl, no doubt adoring as they always were, with nothing better to do than wait around in his bedroom in the middle of the afternoon? She came towards us in the dark room, picking her way through the bric-a-brac like a deer through trees; moving on past the freestanding kitchen. Just before her features came into the light of our chrome lamp, I realised, with the body’s quicker apprehension than the mind’s, who she was.

  She came to a halt at Menzer’s shoulder, looking at me with an empty expression.

  Without her pearls, without the glamorous atmosphere of Gloria’s party, without the sting of Harold Gedney’s snub still reverberating inside me, she seemed a less imposing figure than my memory had made her. Even so, I felt stunned, caught badly off my guard. And as though she had just thrown her glass of wine at me again I felt a burning sensation spreading down across my face and chest.

  ‘This is Lilian,’ Menzer said, ‘she’s studying design at Parsons. She has to go to class now. Right, honey?’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘See you later. Be good.’

  He squeezed her hand and she left, smiling as she passed me by.

  A silence ensued after she closed the door. Menzer seemed to be lost in a reverie of private delight at his little coup de théâtre, while for my own part I was so shaken I didn’t trust myself to speak. I wonder now how I could have failed to see beforehand that my drenching at Gloria’s party was connected to Menzer’s reappearance out of the blue by more than just the vague fatefulness to which I had attributed both things. Not that it makes much difference what form or combination of forms one’s designated Furies assume when they awaken. All that matters is that one recognise them, and even I was capable of that.

  It was Menzer who finally broke the silence.

  ‘I thought you’d appreciate the allusion,’ he said, smiling, ‘as a fellow poet.’

  I managed to muster a more or less dignified terseness:

  ‘I missed it.’

  ‘Ascalaphus. The dead man splashed by Proserpine for informing on her. You a Sinn und Form poet too!’

  ‘How did you know I’d be at that party?’

  ‘At the museum? Lilian’s old roommate told us. She’s a friend of Gloria Danilov’s social secretary. She –’

  But I suddenly didn’t care:

  ‘What do you want?’

  He feigned bafflement at the question. I rephrased it:

  ‘How much money do you want?’

  ‘Oh, you mean for my movie?’

  ‘Whatever.’

  ‘Well, let’s see, I was thinking of offering individual shares to potential investors at five thousand dollars apiece. How does that sound?’

  I absorbed this, struck by the realisation that what I was encountering here was one of the abiding motifs of my existence: that act of predation I had been thinking about earlier; the actual naked plundering motion in which a human being becomes for a moment demon-like. I looked at Menzer; peered into his face, into the light-dashed lenses over his eyes, half expecting, hoping even, to catch some outward sign of transfiguration, if only to see how I myself had appeared when I had put the demon mask over my own face.

  There was no visible change, of course.

  ‘It’s sort of fascinatingly expensive, isn’t it, New York?’ he was saying, evidently immensely pleased with the way things had gone. ‘I have this fantasy –’

  ‘How about fifteen thousand?’ I interrupted him again. An idea had come to me. It had just seemed to spring up fully formed out of that fast-moving, dubiously inventive region of my mind, my sprinter’s imagination – absurd, outrageous, unconscionable, and yet in its very preposterousness, irresistible.

  Menzer looked as if he were trying very hard not to show surprise.

  ‘Five thousand when I get home,’ I said, ‘then another ten if you do something for me.’

  A mirthful gleam came into his eye, as though the thought that I should have things in my humble life of such apparent momentousness entertained him greatly.

  ‘Do what?’ he asked.

  I told him. He listened in silence, and made no comment when I had finished.

  ‘Take it or leave it,’ I said, and got up to go. He remained seated, grey and gaunt in the surreptitious light of the chrome lamp.

  ‘Let me think about it,’ he said as I opened the door.

  ‘I’ll call in a few days,’ I told him as I let myself out.

  ‘Inge has a lover,’ he called out suddenly. ‘Is that what we’re talking about here?’

  I turned to him, struck by the inadvertant poignancy of this.

  ‘Yes, as a matter of fact it is.’

  CHAPTER 16

  It’s two o’clock, a clear day with particles of ice glinting in the air all the way across the valley. I’m sitting on the stone bench at the quarry in a grey wool coat and fawn-coloured hat with the flaps down over my ears. Lena is in the house; I didn’t want her with me. On my lap is a new notebook. The ones I have already filled are in an envelope on the kitchen table with Inge’s name on it. At five thirty Inge will come home from her shift at the health food store. If she starts reading right away, she should finish around seven. By that time it will be dark.

  The trees are mostly bare now. Everywhere a greyness and a puffiness. Woolly spoor-heads of coltsfoot. Dead goldenrod, the yellow burrs dusty and whitish, stalks black-spotted, mildewy.

  Am I afraid? Yes: but in a narrow, purely physical way; the fear concentrated in the back of my neck, from which gossamer-like feelers seem to have stretched all the way up to the clifftop behind me, sending little shock waves back down at every rustle or breath of wind.

  I remember when we first came here. Lowenthal’s film had ended in fiasco. Shooting had been delayed twice, and by the time it finally started, Inge’s brief moment of unalloyed happiness in our exile had passed. Already she had embarked on her melancholy rebellion against our new life, and this, alas, included the film.

  From the start she was ill at ease on the set: distracted, withdrawn, her performance erratic. She seemed under a strange compulsion to fail, spectacularly and in public; almost as if to turn herself into a living reproach against the whole enterprise. It didn’t help that this period coincided with the time of her ‘mercy missions’ around the city. Aside from making her frequently late, these expeditions left her too shattered to reimmerse herself in her role with any conviction. Having been dressed in her house-cleaning outfit and made up and brought onto the set, she would stand with her mop or vacuum cleaner in front of the rolling camera looking utterly lost, as if she really were some hapless Polish cleaning lady who had wandered accidentally onto a film set, then turn apologetically to Lowenthal, who, patient to a fault, would cut, give her time to collect herself and call for another take, only for the same thing to happen again, and then again . . . To watch someone sabotage herself is painful under any circumstances; in the concentrated glare and scrutiny of a film set it was unbearable.

  I wanted to help, naturally. At Lowenthal’s request I came every
day to the location. He stationed me beside him at the black and white video monitor, and between shots he would ask me in private what I thought was going on in Inge’s mind. I was mesmerised by the grainy, dream-like images of my wife on the little screen, though what I saw in them had little to do with her acting. Like Dr Serkin’s X-rays, they seemed to illuminate a state of affairs I had so far managed to conceal from myself. The depth of uncomprehending anguish in them caught me off my guard. It seemed to me my own marriage, and the actions that had brought it about, were being revealed to me with a stark, accusing brilliance. And like those slender trees I used to gaze at in the derelict garden near our apartment in Berlin, they brought back all my old feelings of longing and exclusion: that sense of another universe, bordering intimately on my own, yet impenetrable, and all the more painfully so for the fact that it was now officially in my possession.

  None of which would have been any use to Lowenthal, even if I could have summoned the candour to tell him.

  The shoot went grimly on, the economics of such enterprises apparently making it impossible to abort them and put everyone concerned out of their misery. By the end the producer was openly predicting the film would go straight to video without a theatrical release. He was right.

  And meanwhile I had problems of my own. Those two words that had started popping up everywhere like a pair of fashionable Russian performance artists – ‘glasnost’ and ‘perestroika’ – had turned out to be more like harbingers of the apocalypse. The world I had grown up in had started collapsing before my eyes. My gathering, dream-like horror as one state after another fell: Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania . . . That sense of some monumental dam – solid as a mountain range, one had assumed – suddenly spouting leaks here, bursting out in torrents there, crumbling, exploding; the pent-up waters spilling out in a year-long jubilant frenzy of rebellion, cascading week after week over TV screens and magazine covers . . . The ghastly comedy of being the one person in the Western world unable to rejoice. Being obliged – in my capacity as one of Gloria Danilov’s ‘dissi-dents’ – to feign the triumphal delight of a man whose solemn principles had been vindicated, when all I could think of was that this was nothing but some cruel cosmic joke directed at me, me personally: that the very freedom for which I had paid so dearly was all along destined to have been given to me, gratis . . . Not to mention the creeping realisation that with every day’s opening up of secret archives and locked files, the ‘pledge’ I had written out and signed – that little devil’s bargain I had made on the presumption that it was to be kept in utter darkness for ever – was steadily being approached by this tide of light, that it was merely a matter of time before my black hour was made incandescently public . . .

  So that I was suddenly eager to go and bury myself somewhere out of sight of prying eyes.

  Inge had never cared for the city, and at this point needed no persuading to leave. We bought an old car and drove up here. It was winter; two feet of snow on the ground. We found the house through an ad in the Aurelia Gazette. Our landlord lent us snowshoes and took us up into the woods – my first excursion into the American wilderness.

  The sky above the trees was a dark fluorescent blue. Where the sun came through, the melted and refrozen snow crust gleamed like marble. Fallen trees raised its surface in long, smooth veins. A huge icicle fell from the quarry cliff as we passed, hitting the frozen pool with a wondrous tinkling crash. Then the staggering immensity of this view across the valley. Not a road or dwelling or any other construction visible beyond the transmission tower directly below us (and even that in its lace of frost-flowers more like some outcropping of the rocks than anything man-made), so that you had the sense of gazing back into some prehuman world utterly unconnected to this one.

  Astounding, humanless purity of it all! The suspicion I had that what I had been hungering for all my life; what, with my limited terms of reference, I had named ‘America’ – that concentration of unbounded delight and freedom – was something perhaps not human at all, was possibly even incompatible with the condition of being human, and that entering into it might in fact require precisely this: the annihilation of oneself.

  Self-destruction: ‘the beginning of all philosophy’. Some other Denker I had to read at Humboldt. My obscure sense, whenever contemplating this particular act, that far from being a gesture of despair, it is actually one of extreme optimism. I think of Dr Serkin’s reversed tarot cards. My life force – my élan vital, as he called it – passing, for tactical reasons, as its opposite . . . Not a desire to be dead, but to be differently alive: to be rid of a parasitical second self that has so encumbered one’s spirit only the most radical surgery can remove it. One knows, rationally, that such surgery must result in the death of the patient, but that isn’t the point of it at all, and the bulk of one’s mind persists in regarding the extinction as a side effect; regrettable, of course, but not to be confused with the real goal: the smashing through into a new, clear, unburdened state of being. The dead man’s grab at life!

  TWO THIRTY-FIVE. Clouds filling up with yellow light, their underbellies grey. A smell of fermenting apples on the breeze. No reason to hold anything back at this point, and yet I still feel myself resisting. My old habits of silence and secrecy. Smash them!

  ‘. . . Stefan, dear boy. Good of you to come . . .’

  Uncle Heinrich, rising with a warm smile from his desk at the Office of the Chief of the People’s Police. January 1986.

  The room comes back to me in vivid detail – the oak cabinets, the rows of law books, the tin globe, the old-fashioned typewriter that looked like the offspring of a church organ and a halved artichoke – preserving itself in memory as if it knew I should be compelled to revisit it constantly over the years, as I have.

  ‘Look at what I have here!’ my uncle says joyously. ‘It arrived this morning. It’s an advance copy. I knew you’d be terribly eager to see it.’

  He hands me the new issue of Sinn und Form.

  ‘Isn’t that thrilling?’

  Inside the magazine are two new ‘poems’ of mine. Aside from not wanting to lose face after my stupid boast, I had sensed that having work published in a prestigious magazine might help me in my pursuit of Inge. Not that I thought she herself would be impressed by such a coup, or even very interested in it (I was right; she couldn’t have cared less), but I felt that it would give me a certain confidence I was lacking; a basis from which to promote myself. It would be a one-off relapse into my old habits, I had vowed, and from the vague nausea filling me there in my uncle’s office as I opened the magazine and went through the motions of gazing with grateful pride at my illegitimate offspring on their crisp white sheets, I knew that I was not even going to be tempted to repeat the experiment. With luck it would give me the credibility I needed in the eyes of my new acquaintances in Prenzlauer Berg, but beyond that, the sooner the whole matter disappeared back into the past, the better.

  After making polite conversation with my uncle for a few more minutes, I stood up to leave.

  ‘Incidentally,’ he said, ‘I’d like you to meet a fellow I know, a colleague of sorts. He thinks you could be of some service to him. I told him I was sure you’d be more than willing to help. May I introduce you to him when you have a moment?’

  No hint of shame or awkwardness as he asked. Even in hindsight, I find it hard to say for sure that he was aware of any leverage he might have acquired over me from the favour he had just done, let alone that he was deliberately exploiting it. If there was any notion of reciprocity operating in his mind, it was simply what was fully permitted by social convention: a harmless favour done, a harmless (in his eyes) favour asked in return. If I had refused him outright he might have been a little taken aback, but perhaps that would have been the end of the matter. Anyway, I myself was still too ignorant of these affairs to grasp fully what he was asking me, and other than the usual instinctive reluctance I felt whenever anybody asked anything of me, I had no particular reason for ref
using him.

  So, from that little leather-upholstered antechamber to hell I found myself proceeding, a few days later, to the living room of an apartment in the quiet suburb of Hohenschonhausen. It belonged to a Lieutenant Hager, case officer in the Operational Group of Main Department XX, responsible for monitoring and penetrating cultural life and political Aussteiger activity in the GDR. A sandy-haired man of forty: red eyelashes, thin-bridged nose, austere mouth; pale, freckled complexion indicative of a certain constitutional delicacy, against which the hair-fine lines under his eyes and at the corners of his lips suggested an opposing effort of disciplined self-fortification. He was married, with a child, a boy of six, who was occasionally present when we met. Our first meeting was to establish that I would be willing, in principle, to work as an Inoffizieller Mitarbeiter, an ‘unofficial collaborator’, and for him to outline the plan of action he had devised for me if I should accept. He made no overt effort to coerce me into accepting, and in fact went out of his way to stress the purely voluntary nature of this service:

  ‘Any time you want to stop working for us, Stefan, all you have to do is say that you categorically refuse. That’s the official rule. Not all case officers lay it out as clearly as they might. For me it’s an essential part of our agreement. Do you understand?’

  I nodded. He seemed to be telling me the truth, and yet I had so little sense of there being any choice in the matter that I experienced my acquiescence in it not as something that might or might not happen but as something that had, once again, already happened. Still unclear to me whether this feeling was the result simply of an accurate reading of the forces implicit in the situation, or whether it came from some aberrant warp in my own psyche: a willingness to please, manifesting itself inside me as a feeling of irresistible pressure.